World of Content

Wanted: New Management

2006-11-21T10:22:00.000-08:00

In the wake of the sale and break-up of media giant Knight Ridder, the recent auction and sales of Clear Channel Communications and Readers Digest to private equity groups, and a similar anticipated fate for the venerable Tribune Company, it is clear that investors are dissatisfied with the performance of many “old” media companies, and that they believe the valuable content assets of these companies can be managed better under new ownership. In a parallel universe, Brad Garlinghouse, Yahoo! Senior Vice President, expressed his frustrations with the management of the quintessential New Media company, for its lack of “a clear and focused vision” for the company.

The content business is starting to look like the airline business, where the largest players, in spite of having a highly valued product and well-established brands, have struggled to survive. In the case of the airlines, it took a small upstart (Southwest) to demonstrate that cost cutting and innovative management could change the game and create sustainable shareholder return. Like with the airlines, much of the immediate focus is on cutting costs. However, cost cutting alone is unlikely to be successful, unless these companies also figure out new ways to capture value from their most loyal users. Southwest did this in the airline industry by focusing on what was most important – like low prices, convenient schedules, and dependable performance – while jettisoning costly features that, in the end, customers did not consider so important.

Will the new owners and managers of content companies have the insight and understanding of their audiences that will enable them to make the right calls through the tough times ahead?

The New BoardReader Launches

2006-11-15T15:26:00.000-08:00

Ever wonder if anybody else has faced the same problem as you have, like how to get unstuck from level 4 in your favorite video game, or how to choose a sax mouthpiece that will help you sound like John Coltrane? Finding a forum with other people who share your interests, no matter how specialized or obscure those interests might be, just got a whole lot easier with the release of the new BoardReader.com site. BoardReader is the largest aggregator and indexer of message board data - monitoring and indexing tens of thousands of message boards, a number that is increasing by about 100 per day. They index millions of posts per day, equally distributed between English and non-English language items. The company has been doing this since 2001, so they have built up a significant expertise in parsing and normalizing content generated by the many different message board hosting platforms in use. [Fair disclosure: I have been working with BoardReader to help them develop new business lines and expand their market presence.] With the release of this new, free search tool, BoardReader has emerged as the essential complement to Google and Technorati for uncovering unique content in the “deep” or “hidden” web.

Along with the ability to find boards that you may want to join or monitor, the new site has some cool analytic tools that can help you discover trends in what the millions of message board enthusiasts are discussing. Want to know the most popular online videos that message boards are linking to? How about a graph showing what domains are influencing message board communities? There will soon be a tool that will show what news stories are being discussed, along with a graphical representation of the “buzz” around a particular story over time. Such sophisticated and powerful analytical tools – similar to those that are used on “surface web” content by expensive analytical applications or services – have never before been accessible for message board data.

Check it out, and let me know what you think by emailing me or posting a comment here.

“Web 3.0” Makes its Public Debut

2006-11-14T12:10:00.000-08:00

Don’t be misled by the title of this post: the quotation marks are the most important part. Sunday’s New York Times featured an article by John Markoff where he introduces the term “Web 3.0” for the first time in a mainstream media publication. Web 3.0 (no quotes this time) and its closely-related descriptor, “The Semantic Web,” have been discussed in geek circles and tech blogs for some time, but it appears that we have clearly reached a milestone with the NYT article.

Turning away from the terminology debate for a moment, it is worthwhile to take a look around at ways that this next-generation approach to finding information is already making its way into applications and venture capital portfolios. At its heart, the semantic web is another step in the evolution of content mark-up languages (XML) that enable computers to treat textual data (technically “unstructured” data, versus “structured” data that fits conveniently into rows and columns) in more intelligent ways. The enrichment of content – using free-form tags (or “folksonomies”) or structured categorization systems (taxonomies) has its roots in information science going back decades, and even further back to the beginning of the 20th century, with the introduction of the Dewey Decimal System in libraries. What is new and exciting about the budding Web 3.0 era is the convergence of text mining and artificial intelligence, which enables computers to glean the meanings of words in context, and new applications that enable the application of human intelligence (acting individually and in groups) to this process. Whether through collaborative applications, like Wikis, through “voting systems” like digg.com, or through self-defined communities of interest, like my former Biz360 boss You Mon Tsang’s new company, Boxxet – this combination of computing power and the inherent “wisdom of crowds” is already having an impact.

The company discussed in the Markoff article is a start-up called Radar Networks, founded by web visionary Nova Spivak, who founded EarthWeb and took it public in 1998. While his new company is still operating in stealth mode, the interview hints at the direction this is going. To get accurate results (i.e. results that would be plausible using average common sense) from any mathematical algorithms, you need masses of data. Text mining can “discover” concepts and trends from even a small corpus of data, but the results are often strange or laughable unless this process has been performed across hundreds or thousands of documents. The same thing is true about algorithms based on “crowd” data or behavior; witness how Google rankings can be manipulated or distorted by the intentional actions of a small minority of users. It will be interesting to see how Radar Networks and other companies looking to commercialize the semantic web will deal with this problem. The semantic web will inevitably become reality, however, enabled by the inexorable growth of computing power as more and more of us participate in the online world. Let’s stay tuned.

Digital Fish Wrap?

2006-11-13T13:29:00.000-08:00

Peter Scheer, Executive Director of the California First Amendment Coalition, authored a provocative opinion piece in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, suggesting that newspapers should raise the value of subscription services by enforcing an industry-wide 24-hour embargo on news content before it is made accessible through the free portals and search engines. Scheer says that even the most successful newspapers have trouble selling online advertising that covers even 10 percent of what they have lost in print advertising, concluding that only by cutting off the portals from their sources of traffic-driving fresh news can newspapers win over subscribers to their own sites. Even ignoring the remoteness of possibility that large and small news organizations could ever cooperate on the scale that would be necessary to make this effective, or the more likely scenario that an industry-wide collusion that forced consumers to spend more for news would be declared a violation of antitrust laws, it still sounds like a bad approach to the problem.

A major flaw in Mr. Scheer’s argument is his assumption of an online business environment that still follows the rules of the pre-dot bomb era, back when page views and banner ads ruled the day, and site owners only made money by being destinations for users. That vision of the Internet was no more than an attempt to simply duplicate print ads onto a web page instead of a paper one – it never took into account the dynamic nature of the web. It took Google to recognize the possibilities that could be created when every search could be turned into a new opportunity for serving highly targeted ads. He ignores the revenue-generating possibilities of newer technologies like RSS and mash-ups and social tools that create new opportunities for engagement with users outside of the subscription model. What we are seeing today is the concentration of these tools in the hands of large technology companies, so they are the ones who happen to be profiting at the moment. However, most of these are open source technologies, and there is no reason why news organizations, with their well-established brands and their built in, loyal, local audiences could not use some of these tools to turn themselves into successful portals. The great majority of web users will probably never become subscribers, but they will continue to use the Web in more ways, for information, entertainment, and community. Newspapers would be kidding themselves if they thought that they could truly turn that tide by erecting new walls around fresh content. They would be much better served to follow the tide, i.e. learn what this new generation of web users is doing, and keep coming up with ways to make all of their content more engaging and more valuable.

News Crowdsourcing Goes Mainstream: Caveat Emptor

2006-11-07T10:32:00.000-08:00

Gannett Corp. is restructuring the news-gathering organizations at their more than 90 papers, including flagship USA Today, in order to leverage the investigative reporting of readers. Wired News reported on Friday that Gannett has rechristened its newsrooms as “information centers” that will use its websites to solicit user-generated content, including whistleblower tips and investigative details from local readers. It’s a fascinating development that mirrors what’s going on in many other areas of media, like photography and music. It makes great sense to get the masses of readers with time on their hands to do some of the “heavy lifting” that is required for good investigative journalism. Of course, Gannett is already getting criticized by media professionals, who are saying they are just cutting expenses by substituting amateur for professional content. However, as one of the foremost promoters of “pop” news, Gannett is probably already immunized from criticism that their news coverage will now become less serious.

A more serious concern, however, should be over how this user-generated content will be managed. As recent election campaigns have shown, the web is full of false "news" perpetrated by unscrupulous partisans, and user-generated articles in Wikipedia are frequently manipulated for political purposes. A recent article in the New Yorker documents some of the “Dirty WikiTricks” that are now becoming a feature of partisan politics. While it’s unlikely that anyone will be successful in suing Wikipedia for defamation, the deep-pocket Gannett Corporation may not be so lucky. So Gannett would be well advised to not be so quick to lay off those investigative journalists. While their job descriptions may be changing, they will surely still be needed.

Another Corporate “Flogging” Revelation: PR Pros Continue to Struggle with Social Media

2006-11-06T12:37:00.000-08:00

Add McDonald’s to the list of corporate PR departments that have been exposed recently for using supposed consumer blogs as shills. The latest incident, described by Tom Siebert in today’s Online Media Daily, so soon on the heels of the Edelman/Walmart fiasco, further underlines the risks that PR pros take when they try to co-opt the blogging movement. Hiring professional journalists to ghostwrite supposedly amateur blogs, posting professionally produced (but made to look amateur) videos to YouTube - have all become standard practice in the “new PR”. Before investing in more bright ideas like these, it might just be a good idea for marketers to ask their friends at Walmart and McDonald’s, “How did that blog strategy work out for you?” No matter how cynical and jaded these marketing hacks may be, it’s hard to see how the exposure of these practices could have positively influenced the already-damaged public esteem and credibility of these huge consumer brands.

With every new technology or new idea that achieves popularity, there will always be people who will believe that the changes are so revolutionary that the old rules no longer apply. (Sort of like the investment community during the dot.com bubble years, when supposedly respectable analysts pumped up companies that they couldn’t understand and that had slim prospects of ever returning a profit.) If marketers mistake the rise of social media as an excuse to ignore the basic rules of journalistic integrity and transparency, such mistakes will not be forgotten or forgiven quickly. To coin a phrase, the public may be gullible, but they are not stupid.

Bottlenecks in the Blogosphere – “A” List Bloggers Under Siege by Marketers

2006-11-03T10:35:00.000-08:00

Top tech bloggers Robert Scoble and Michael Arrington got a little testy this week, reflecting some of the pressures that “A” list bloggers have come to bear. Michael, owner of the TechCrunch site, was reacting to criticism that his writings about start-up companies and industry gossip might be too self-serving. Robert complained about being overwhelmed with a flood of email pitches from tech PR people who are trying to get him to write about their companies. The common thread revealed here is the segmentation of the blogosphere which has created a very small elite class of bloggers who, whether they like it or not, are being treated more like mainstream media pundits. A major problem for these guys, and for the PR folks who are now diligently tracking and targeting them, is that they don’t have the infrastructure and staff resources of mainstream media to support them or act as a buffer between them and marketers. A Wall Street Journal profile of Arrington described the dilemma of the elite tech blogger. Even though he reports news and does product reviews, as a part-time journalist who is also an entrepreneur, there is no traditional (albeit usually mythical) “Chinese Wall” between editorial and marketing to fall back on. You get the impression that these guys are enjoying the spotlight (which they undoubtedly deserve) but they don't quite know how to deal with the responsibilities that go with it.

This phenomenon is just another example of how much PR professionals still have to figure out about social media. Like generals who are always fighting the last war, most PR pros are acting like the old rules are still in effect – assuming that most of the influence is still wielded by an elite few, and that the “wisdom of the crowd” is primarily the voice of just a few of its members. With the heavy influencers themselves saying, “Back off,” effective PR in the Web 2.0 world is going to require a lot more imagination than that.

Google Custom Search Turns Any Web Page Into a Portal

2006-10-27T14:53:00.000-07:00

I've been playing around a bit with Google's new Custom Search Engine and I am really impressed by what this capability can do for any publisher, large or small. Google has provided an elegant solution here for the most frustrating problem of web searching; the fact that search results are usually 99% garbage and less than 1% even close to what the user was actually looking for. In effect, Google is enlisting the human intelligence of web authors and publishers to improve the relevance of search results, while still maintaining the ability to serve ads on all those pages. It's a classic example of "doing well by doing good," like the missionary families in Michener's Hawaii who spread the Christian gospel to the "heathens" and, incidentally, got very rich at the same time.

Seriously, though, Google's Co-op technology is truly a service that gives as well as gets, and the big winners here are bound to be the wonks and enthusiasts who now have an incredibly powerful tool for building community and readership. Without having to learn JavaScript or waiting for someone at Google or Yahoo! to return your call for tech support, you can harness the Google search engine to power your portal with search as you define it - pulling content for your readers from the sites that you have screened and that you endorse. It's no small amount of work to build and maintain such lists of sites, but other than that the only limit is your own imagination. One of my favorites: Real Climate, provides access to information on global warming without all the noise, political bull, and spam sites that grow like maggots around such popular topics. Bravo, Google!

Dow Jones' Factiva Buy-out: It's Still All About the Content

2006-10-23T11:24:00.000-07:00

Last week’s announcement of Dow Jones’ buyout of Reuters’ 50% share of Factiva was not surprising, especially after Clare Hart’s promotion in January to President of the Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group. In a shrinking market for subscription-based information, focused leadership is required, and this is almost impossible for a company that is run by two parents. There are tough decisions to make – e.g. what new users to pursue, and what technologies and services to invest in. In the end, control would have to be ceded to one parent or the other, and in this case, as Rich Zanino pointed out during the DJ earnings call, “the bottom line is Factiva is much more strategic to Dow Jones than it is to Reuters.”

Keeping Factiva squarely within the strategic focus of Dow Jones is largely due to Clare Hart’s unfaltering vision and leadership. Clare recognized, probably better than anyone, that keeping Factiva a step ahead of competitors and the free Internet would require continually increasing the value of the content offering. Partnering with Reuters back in 1999 was all about leapfrogging US competitors Nexis and Dialog by building the largest collection of premium international content. To keep revenues growing, they have to continually up the ante.

The need to continually add more premium content was also underlined during the same analyst phone call: Factiva will soon begin to distribute real-time Dow Jones Newswires content for the first time, something that Factiva customers have been requesting for years. This would probably never have been possible under the former joint ownership structure, due to the fear that doing so would directly undermine the huge piece of DJ’s core business that competes directly with Reuters.

To those who have been predicting for some years the demise of premium content services, here is evidence that such predictions may have been premature. While content itself may no longer have the absolute power of a “king” any more, with a sound business strategy behind the throne, it still can wield a lot of power.

The Web 2.0 Debate

2006-10-16T17:51:00.000-07:00

Sunday's SF Chronicle featured a debate between Chris Anderson (The Long Tail) and British media entrepreneur Andrew Keen, who is writing The Cult of the Amateur, where he asserts that the rise of user-generated content is undermining the viability of professional media. Both sides of the argument – the wisdom of crowds versus the traditional role of the editor – are well represented. A great read.

It’s fascinating to see how our relationship with media has changed in recent years. Many of us grew up in the era when a few broadcast networks and a couple of major newspapers acted as the gatekeepers and arbiters of all news and popular culture. Today’s technology gives us the equivalent of direct control of what we want to watch or read. It also gives any of us unprecedented access to an audience for our own expression. In spite of all the substandard content that this has unleashed on the market, it’s hard to imagine that this is bad thing. It does mean that we all have to become more discriminating consumers of content, however, since for the same investment of time we now have unprecedented range of choices - from content that is deliciously fulfilling to that which should be considered garbage. As the old saying goes, it's not such a bad problem to have.

Will YouTube become Google's iPod?

2006-10-16T16:53:00.000-07:00

Much has been written about Google's acquisition last week of YouTube, but there are so many fascinating aspects to this that people will probably go on talking about it for months and years to come. Google's largest acquisition to date, and their strongest foray into the world of "social media" will be a game-changer, and consequently the $1.65 billion worth of Google stock required for the purchase should be viewed in the same context as the investment that Apple made in developing the iPod. In many ways, these two investments are similar to each other. Sure, there are other online video search engines available, like Blinkx, just as there were other devices for playing digital music before the iPod was introduced. However, there is now without question a dominant brand, and everyone else will be relegated to playing catch-up for the foreseeable future.

While much of the criticism of the deal has focused on Google’s legal exposure for copyright violations on the YouTube site, we shouldn’t forget that the same thing was said about Apple, when they jumped into the online music game at just about the same time that Napster was being shut down. The difference between success and disaster was 1) a superior marketing strategy, 2) a superior brand, and 3) a fearless willingness to take the initiative and change the game. Everything else falls into place from there.

Cultural Divergence

2006-10-09T17:27:00.000-07:00

I happened to catch an excellent To the Best of Our Knowledge program on our local NPR station last evening. It was an interview with Henry Jenkins, the founder and director of MIT's comparative media studies program, who has written a new book, Convergence Culture, in which he addresses from a scholarly perspective the fundamental cultural shift that underlies the whole new media phenomenon. While baby boomers like me still draw boundaries around “professional” media, and take for granted its traditionally assigned roles of author and reader, our kids are becoming more comfortable with story telling that makes the reader a participant in an ongoing, free-form game, one in which the player needs to collaborate with others to find clues outside of the original medium of the story. He uses the examples of "The Matrix" and the television series, "Lost", in which the many threads of a story may lead to multiple conclusions about what is actually going on. Followers of the story either stumble upon or learn from others how to find key clues to the story that are hidden on secret web pages, or (in the case of “Lost”) in what sometimes appear to be “commercials” planted in the shows.

This breakdown (or mash-up?) of media types has already extended beyond popular culture, and it is already changing the business of publishing and distributing content. More books are being released online and edited with the help of self-appointed contributors before ever making it into print, like Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and Daniel Pinkwater’s The Neddiad. Media professionals compete with amateur authors for mindshare, bandwidth, and even advertising dollars. It’s becoming more difficult to define what actually even constitutes a news article these days, since on many sites the author’s contribution serves merely to start the discussion, and the real interesting action is going on in the string of comments growing organically at the bottom of the screen. Many years ago, news publishers in every city in the US built impressive downtown buildings to symbolize the solid foundation of their prominent role within the civic discourse. The symbol for today’s media moguls should more appropriately be the surfboard.

Google Takes a Lesson from Spider Man

2006-09-29T09:12:00.000-07:00

As all fans of Spider-Man know, “With great power comes great responsibility.” In the midst of
headlines over Google’s battle with the Belgian court, the Publisher Relations folks at Google have come out with an official policy statement on how Google will exercise its great power over web content. As John Battelle commented, this was a very important statement by the most influential player in media today. He suggests that Google is trying to establish a framework for negotiating new business relationships with publishers, by clearly marking a line between the publisher’s assets and the search engine’s. Clearly, both Google and the publisher have much to gain from the pooling of these assets. However, the open question (and what should be the focus of negotiation) is how to share in the value created when Google indexes articles and surfaces headlines and snippets in search results. What rankles the European publishers especially is Google’s assumption of Fair Use rights before ever engaging in that negotiation. No doubt this is especially irritating to the Europeans, because this interpretation is based on US copyright law and practice, which is generally more liberal than international standards. Given the general antipathy within the European community toward other recent unilateral initiatives by Americans, it’s not hard to see why this might make European publishers uneasy.

In the context of everything else going on in the world these days, Google’s preemptory assumption of Fair Use rights risks the company being seen as just another example of American cowboy attitudes toward the rest of the world. However, by laying out a clear statement of policy on this issue, they are providing some much-needed transparency, and a potentially more friendly basis for business negotiations with publishers. Perhaps in so doing they will avoid the kind of mistakes recently made by another powerful American who ignored the lesson of Spider-Man.

Lessons from the Success of Times Select

2006-09-25T11:32:00.000-07:00

One year after the release of its subscription-based service, Times Select, the New York Times Co. reported continued strong results for its online strategies. As print advertising revenues continued to fall (4.2% year over year for the group as a whole)) online revenues, with the help of higher ad rates at About.com, rose by 27%. Times Select subscriptions were at 513,000 by the end of June, and generated over $6 million in revenue in its first 12 months. By comparison, Dow Jones reported 768,000 paid subscribers for the nearly 10-year old WSJ.com. For the top news brands, at least, the strategy of integrating some paid subscription content into the overall marketing mix seems to be working. Smaller news and industry trade publishers are following the numbers closely to see what might be learned and applied to their own content. Here are a few obvious take-aways:

1. Leverage your print subscriber base. Subscribers to the print NYT received free access to Times Select, and this group makes up about 2/3 of all Times select subscribers.
2. Combine free ad-supported content with subscriber-only content. There was a speculation when Times select was introduced that pulling any content behind a subscriber “wall” would alienate the world of web users, but this has not been the case.
3. Know what content your users are willing to pay for. It seems simple, but being able to segment content between what should be free and what should be paid is something the traditional premium aggregators have never been able to do. It costs the same per article, for instance, to buy a PR Newswire article from Factiva as a Wall Street Journal Article.
4. Make sure that Google indexes your premium pages. This is a no-brainer today, since anyone (not just the New York Times) can submit content to Google for indexing, even if that users who click on the links are required to pay for the content. NYT.com was one the first services to take advantage of this.
5. Get the pricing right. Of the online-only users, about 20,000 initial subscribers signed up at the pre-launch annual rate of $39.95, and the remaining 140,000 (not counting about 10,000 academic users who received additional discounts) felt it was worth up to $49.95 per year to have access to Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, and David Brooks.

So, to all publishers who are looking for ways to make up for those dwindling print ad revenues and declining royalties from the traditional aggregators, it’s time to develop new ways to monetize the online market. Services like indeXet are making this easier than ever.

Licensing emerging from the backwater?

2006-09-20T11:10:00.000-07:00

Browsing blog post titles recently, the phrase “Ajax is not a business plan” caught my eye. Since I was looking for something else at the time, I did not capture the link, and I’ve been unable to find it again. However, it has continued to reverberate, because it reminds me of the danger of building businesses around content technology without addressing the serious issues of content rights. Web scraping, text mining, peer-to-peer sharing, and other types of technologies that effectively repurpose content offer tantalizing opportunities, but unless the rights of content owners are taken into account, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists building businesses around these technologies are walking a risky path. Yesterday’s headlines about Napster’s decline in fortunes is a cautionary tale about how companies need to secure licensing rights before “betting the farm” on technologies that require other peoples’ content in order to work.

As a content licensing specialist, I have often had sales people show me competitor products that were built to systematically violate copyright, like ad hoc emailing or syndicating of articles or reports, and inevitably they ask, “If they are doing it, why can’t we?” The answer, which always disappoints the person looking for a quick “OK” is that it CAN be done, as long as the proprietary rights of the content owner are not violated. This requires licensing for the specific use to be made of the content. Why were iTunes and Rhapsody phenomenally successful while Napster ended up with lawsuits, bankruptcy, and shareholder losses? Because these successful technology companies made licensing a cornerstone of their business strategy! They put effort and investment in this key area, negotiated deals that provided win/win’s for both sides, and in so doing they created enormous value for themselves and for their content partners. “Rights & Permissions” may seem like an obscure field to most people; I’m used to the blank stares when I try to explain what I do for a living. However, maybe such clear cases where the right licensing strategy has meant the difference between success and disaster will help persuade the boards and executive managers of high-tech companies that there is real value in licensing.

A Few Thoughts from the ASIDIC Fall Meeting

2006-09-13T13:36:00.000-07:00

The Association of information and Dissemination Centers (ASIDIC) held its semiannual gathering this week in Newport Beach. This group of information industry professionals has been meeting for nearly 40 years, beginning with the days when electronic information lived on magnetic tape and was only accessible through mainframe computers. The career histories of many attendees could be case studies documenting the disruptive effects of new technologies – the emergence and disappearance of companies, the transformation of institutions and their people. Unlike many technology conferences (Web 2.0 comes to mind) there is plenty of vocal skepticism and an underlying drive to tie new applications to basic business value and things that scientists, librarians, and publishers have been trying to do all along; e.g. Is social tagging really a step forward in helping users get to the information they need? Is search engine optimization undermining our ability to get to the most valuable information? Will vertical search and vertical content aggregation keep the publishing business from going horizontal?

As might be expected, the “elephant in the room” was Google, since no discussion of the financial viability of any strategy could ignore the effect of the ubiquitous search box. The discussion among content and technology vendors has certainly evolved in the last few years - from asking how they can compete with Google to strategizing about how to maximize dollars derived from Google search and ads. Some companies are much further down this road of embracing Google than others. Paul Gerbino of Thomas Publishing had some very convincing numbers showing how Thomas was enabled earlier this year to completely do away with their venerable print catalogue in favor of their ad-supported online service. (Of course, unlike most publishers, with the exception of the PR wire services, Thomas receives money from businesses just to be included in their database.) Aggregation companies are having a much tougher time figuring out how to “play nice” with Google. A number of companies have gone “vertical” in order to try and exploit niches in the market that are underserved by Google, and syndicator/aggregator Yellowbrix has repositioned itself as a contextual analysis application, in order to find a deeper market for selling advertising. Rick Burke of Statewide California Electronic Library Consortium (SCELC) talked about how frustrating it is becoming for academic libraries to support standards of validity and authority in scholarly research when a generation of students is convinced that a Google search is all they need to do.

The “social web” got some attention, with a tantalizing preview of the soon-to-be released blog monitoring and analysis service from a new company, BuzzLogic, co founded by serial entrepreneur and author Mitch Ratcliffe. Sounds like BuzzLogic will soon be elbowing its way into the market next to Biz360, Umbria, Nielsen BuzzMetrics, and others. Another interesting play on the social web is a new search engine, Trexy, which offers searchers a way to share search paths among different users.

The ASIDIC group is a lively and stimulating forum, and I would highly recommend attending a future meeting to anyone interested in diving into the turbulent seas where content and technology meet.

Google Offers Historical News Archives

2006-09-06T09:26:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco Chronicle reported today that Google has added a historical news archive search capability, permitting visibility into premium services such as the Washington Post Archives, NewsBank Newspaper Archive, New York Times Archives, and Factiva. This has been a long-awaited development, ever since Yahoo! did similar deals with premium archive services last year. For information industry veterans, these arrangements represent the next step in convergence of the free web and premium databases, bringing virtually all online news content together through a single search box. Combined with the ability to pay for all articles through the new Google Checkout, this will probably be the best way of answering the old question of whether or not individual consumers are willing to pay for articles. Assuming users are willing to trust Google with their credit card information, they are making it about as convenient as possible to find and buy articles online.

Pricing is another issue, however. Considering that one can buy songs or TV shows on iTunes and other services for less than a dollar, and movies for less than $2.00, the average price of $2.95 per article is probably out of whack with what the public is willing to pay. Nevertheless, in the slow-moving publishing world this latest development should be considered a big step. Congratulations to Google on putting resources into negotiating the agreements that made this possible. If they want these deals to really be productive and long-lasting, however, the next step will be for Google’s publisher relations folks to gain the rights to set pricing. They should be able to do this, since once the premium services realize that searchers are no longer a captive audience, they just might see the light and realize they need to allow the market to set pricing, just like it does for any other industry.

The Real Value of "Citizen Journalism"

2006-08-25T15:16:00.000-07:00

Nicholas Lemann’s article Amateur Hour: Journalism without journalists in The New Yorker a few weeks ago set off a tempest in the blogosphere that anyone would dare to question the world-changing power of “citizen journalism”. I’m happy to leave the journalistic value judgements to others more qualified than me, but I think there is an important business issue here for media companies. At Biz360, we struggled for over a year with the question of whether blogs were important enough to our clients, and finally decided to simply take a leap of faith - launching our first blog measurement and analysis tools in a partnership with Feedster. We were a little late to the game, compared to Intelliseek (now BuzzMetrics), Cymfony, and Umbria, but it was clear that tracking consumer generated media was a phenomenon with “legs” and clearly something that PR and Corporate Communications professionals were interested in.

In spite of the disdain of professional journalists like Lemann for this “amateurism,” media companies are being driven by business realities to incorporate more elements of “social media” into their online offerings. Advertising is what pays the bills, and media business managers are well aware of the popularity of MySpace and Wikipedia. Interactivity with a user community creates stickiness and loyalty – in other words, the same things that make a print publication attractive to advertisers. Major media brands are in an excellent position to capitalize on the “social media” phenomenon, because as Lemann points out in his article, “Often the most journalistically impressive material on… citizen journalism sites has links to professional journalism.” Media properties with well-integrated social content create for themselves a virtuous circle that can grow their readership and brand value.

Bottom up, Top Down, and Sideways Categorization

2006-08-23T11:27:00.000-07:00

I’ve been having fun with the new My Yahoo! Feature, “Recommendations for You”, that recommends RSS feeds based on the current feeds you are monitoring – sort of a Tivo for RSS. You can accept the recommendation and add the feed to your page, reject it, or just go on to the next recommendation. The system seems to have a learning feature, because the new recommendations appear to be progressively more on target, although not without occasional surprises.

Consumer-generated media generally lacks “top down” categorization schemes like those painstakingly applied news and trade content in traditional online databases like ABI/Inform or PROMT. So, we rely on keyword matching, contextual search and text mining to help keep us aware of which blogs or boards are talking about the subjects we’re interested in. For consumers, such personalization features have come to be expected. In a B2B setting, the ability to “discover” new relevant content is emerging as a key requirement - critical for managing reputation, staying on top of new technologies and business opportunities, and competing in a global economy. Since it’s based on the most granular data of all, let’s call this the “bottom up” approach.

User-generated tags, as in Technorati, Digg.com, and del.icio.us might be thought of as the “sideways” approach to categorization, since it relies on peer networks sharing common taxonomies. While one can speculate on the broader implications of “social tagging” and “folksonomies”, one advantage to this approach is its sheer scalability. Purists may cringe at the sacrifice of standards, but if the success of other collaborative internet projects, like Wikipedia, are any indication, this form of categorization is here to stay. Expect to see new search and syndication technologies and new practices in professional media analysis and measurement that will help businesses to harness the power of these new directions in categorization.

Right-Sourcing Content Competency

2006-08-21T08:50:00.000-07:00

As Geoffrey Moore points out in his excellent new book, Dealing With Darwin, competing successfully in the global economy requires companies to regularly take a hard look at their businesses and figure out which parts of the operation are core competencies driving competitive advantage and what other parts are “context” – i.e. those functions that support the business but are not necessarily unique or proprietary. The rapidly changing electronic information industry contains many examples of companies where technology has made ubiquitous many processes where only large aggregators used to be competent. Examples of this revolutionary change over the last ten years, where readily available technologies have replaced formerly proprietary “core” capabilities, include print-to-digital conversion, data enrichment, text mining and data dissemination.

Publishers and other companies in content-intensive businesses like business intelligence, media analysis, and the myriad of new web-based end-user applications would do well to follow Moore’s advice and regularly review which technology and infrastructure investments are core sources of sustainable competitive advantage, and which are merely “context”. His key recommendation is that “context” functions (in this example perhaps print-to-digital data conversion or content acquisition via web-scraping) are those that might be outsourced at lower cost, without threatening competitive advantage.

This is obviously the rationale for the growing business process outsourcing movement, which has moved so many US companies to move basic operational functions to lower-cost providers in Asia. However, this is also a strategy to consider for fulfilling other functions where highly specialized knowledge or technical capabilities may be required that are still not necessarily “core” to the growth of a business. Some of these functions may include sales, marketing, finance, process design, licensing, IT and training. Enter a new type of company, made up of specialists with significant domain experience, who can offer a way to “right-source” those functions and permit their clients to invest in their core capabilities. One example is a new business, Unlimited Priorities, started by Iris Hanney, formerly President of Information Publishing Group, a division of Techbooks. Iris has assembled a team of veterans of the online information industry. The company will focus primarily on those evolving small and mid-size firms in need of senior managerial support and direction at all levels. A key difference between Unlimited Priorities and other consultancies that serve this market is that these specialists will do more than just advise – they will actually come in and do what is required to move the client company to the next step in its growth. This fills a significant gap in the market, and provides a solution where emerging businesses achieve the necessary focus that will allow them to bring their core innovations to market.

Mining the Deep Web: Message Board Content

2006-08-18T16:27:00.000-07:00

Effyis, Inc., aka BoardReader, monitors over 2.5 million English-language message board posts per day, and an equal number of non-English ones. This is what might be called the ”deep web”, since it is content that is not covered by most search engines. As marketers become more aware of the importance of consumer generated media, it's clear that some of the most actionable insights are coming from within the threads of message board conversations. A quick look at BoardReader search results regarding the recent Dell laptops/ Sony batteries recall reveals highly opinionated users weighing in on the issues from investor forums, Dell users groups, and computer game enthusiast boards. Compared to the posts you might find in a Technororati or BlogPulse search using the same keywords, you find more coherent opinions and many fewer splogs.

This breakthrough content aggregation solution has valuable applications in a number of areas:
• Brand Management: monitor and measure corporate reputation and brand value
• Product Management – receive highly focused opinion of the heaviest users of your products and services
• Competitive Intelligence – track the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors through the unsolicited comments of this “virtual focus group”
• Mainstream Media - enrich and freshen news sites with new message board postings that comment on your own content or on the most popular news topics of the day

BoardReader is also building an application to monitor product review sites, but more on that later. For more information, and a demo, email me: bert.carelli@comcast.net

- Bert

A New Solution for Publishers to Monetize their Content

2006-08-18T16:16:00.000-07:00

IndeXet is a new company that was started by a former Publisher Relations colleague of mine at Factiva, Samuel Leonel. Samuel and his team of engineers in Brazil developed this new service with the goal of turning around the traditional content aggregation model. Instead of an aggregator keeping sixty to eighty percent of the revenue from the sales of content, the publisher can retain the lion's share of revenue, while controlling the price at which articles or other digital media are sold, and the branding, look, and feel of the service.

indeXet is a hosted web ecommerce solution for large and small publishers who need a better way to distribute and monetize their content assets. Here are some of the features:

• Powerful search, content management, and distribution features that can be seamlessly integrated into a publisher’s own website, fully supporting the branding, look, and feel of the site.
• User collaboration and intelligent search features that will enable publishers to monetize not only their current audiences but also to conquer new ones.
• A unique business model that enables publishers to retain the lion’s share of revenues.
• Software-as-a-Service technology, like Salesforce.com, Webex, and Biz360, freeing the publisher from hardware and software investments, while enabling quick implemention of a customized, full-featured solution for distributing text, pictures, audio and video to their readers and web visitors.

Email me: bert.carelli@comcast.net to set up a demo. --Bert

From Company Man to Independent

2006-08-18T14:19:00.000-07:00

A lot has happened over the past month, and what better way to sort through it all than to start a blog? The company where I'd been working for the last two and a half years did a massive restructuring, laying off a third of the employees. Not totally unexpected, given the problems we'd been having, but upsetting nevertheless. I suddenly found myself with new choices, new opportunities - not a bad place to be, really, but full of uncertainty. I am fortunately blessed with a wonderful network of former colleagues in the information industry, and we have all weathered enough changes in our careers to know a lot about how to support each other. So there has been no shortage of ideas about what to do, and where to apply myself.

It does seem like there are a lot of companies hiring here right now, so it’s not such a bad thing to be on the market. It's also a great opportunity to learn a lot about what trends are hot in the market, what new technologies are emerging and getting VC money. It’s tricky, though – especially here in the Bay Area – since often it seems that start-up companies go on hiring frenzies just because their VC’s told them to hire up, and these are seldom good prospects for long-term employment. Business strategies tend to change quickly, especially in the area of licensing and partnerships.

While I have been looking for the right fit with the right company, I've been fortunate to get offers from a few of my friends to help with their entrepreneurial projects. This has opened whole new perspectives of the content technology market for me. As I work on these projects, I will try and share some of my observations and insights in this blog. I'll try to keep it interesting and informative.
--Bert