Category: Analysis

It appears that the press is confusing Microsoft’s Tablet PC strategy with its “ePeriodicals” strategy.The confusion is understandable. It appears that Microsoft is conflating production, display, hardware, and (probably) DRM.
Microsoft plans to release an “end-to-end electronic publishing solution, known as ePeriodicals, which it will introduce at its Tablet PC launch”, according to eWeek. One can only hope that “ePeriodicals” is a code name.
Publishers have always been enthusiastic about technologies that allow them to make computer screens look like print, prevent copying, and give them some hope of charging for content. But do they really want Microsoft as a partner? Besides, if eBooks have failed with a much simpler business model, I have to wonder whether consumers will buy the end products of this end-to-end “solution”.

The more I use RSS feeds, the more I like them. And I’m beginning to realize that this technology may have more depth than meets the eye.
Existing RSS aggregation sites such as Syndic8 and News is Free work pretty well, but are far from perfect. It’s hard to find feeds that interest you, their database of feeds is far from up to date, it’s confusing to set them up, and they’re not very flexible.
This could be a good-sized business and Yahoo has an opportunity to stake out a leadership position by offering:

• A comparatively complete and up-to-date directory of the best feeds integrated with Yahoo’s existing directory.
• Better tools for finding interesting feeds.
• Better tools for bloggers.
• The ability to integrate feeds with news from AP, Reuters, and Yahoo’s other sources.
• The ability to recommend feeds to like-minded readers.

RSS aggregation fits well with Yahoo’s current strategy because it can be automated and fits with their existing services technology. Furthermore, the RSS universe is very strong in tech news, and would help Yahoo bolster their existing news sources.

Lee Gomes at the WSJ has a great column on Open Spectrum–essentially the dynamic allocation of radio bandwidth among devices smart enough to share it efficiently.
I first heard of this idea in Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas. Part of Lessig’s thesis is that many industries make money by creating artificial scarcity. Call it the John D. Rockefeller strategy.
Spectrum scarcity may not be a problem much longer, but there are a lot of entrenched interests who want to keep it scarce.

AOL/TW’s Southern Progress makes lots of money by building ramps over the wall between editorial and advertising, according to the Journal.
For example, Southern Living has a sponsorship deal with Disney which includes an agreement to run “a happy story [about an aspect of Epcot] in line with their editorial policy”.
Apparently, Southern Living has one of the highest profit margins among AOL’s magazines.

Michael Kinsley’s article It’s Not Just the Internet: Almost no one pays for content in any medium. is as true today as it was in May of 2001. This is a truth that Kinsley knows from bitter experience.
Broadcast, cable, radio, newspapers, and magazines all give content away in hopes of making money on advertising. It’s the rare media company that makes money on its (non-entertainment) content.
As we traverse the long tail of the online advertising recession and wonder aloud if we could make money selling our content, it’s important to remember this point.

Dave Winer is right. I heard this same story on NPR about the University of Georgia attempting to blanket their neighborhood of Athens with WiFi to see what would happen. This is a totally cool idea. Then they went and spoiled it by focusing on creating lots of location-specific information.
This is another case of confusing distribution with content and thinking of the Internet as something that exists in a particular place.

The SF Chronicle reports that newspapers are moving beyond “shovelware”.
The truth is that newspapers have never liked shovelware and every online editor I’ve ever met was obsessed with creating fancy packages and special content to commemorate this or that. And virtually none of it sticks.
At this moment in the online publishing business, it probably makes more sense to focus on keeping overhead down and also on work that provides some kind of annuity in the form of a lasting business or creative benefit.
Instead of creating flash animations, custom audio, or slide shows, it might make more sense to sharpen your shovel. Convert your templates to use cascading style sheets. Or come up with some tools to encourage bloggers to link to stories on your site.

The Open Source Content Management Conference was excitig in a low-key, super-geeky sort of way. Although a lot of it was beyond my technical skills, I could begin to see the future taking shape. It was also interesting to see two open source wysiwyg XML editors, but no CSS editors.
There’s a great interview with EuroZope Foundation founder Paul Everitt and CMS guru Gregor Rothfuss on ZDNet Australia and additional daily coverage (Intro, Day1, Day 2) on Content Wire.
As the computer industry moves in the direction of selling services, instead of hardware and software, open source begins to look like a great way to improve the value you deliver to customers. Meanwhile the Web has created a tremendous demand for quality content management among the geeks themselves, who can’t afford to buy software, but can contribute to its development.

I’m blogging from the Open Source Content Management conference in Berkeley today. It’s clear that smart people are working hard to create the next generation of content management platforms–and publishers from bloggers to AOL/TW are going to benefit.
The speaker from Zope (an American based in Europe) raised the question: “Why is all the open source content management development based in Europe?”
A lot of people suggested it had to do with a more open-source-friendly environment or fear and loathing of Microsoft.
My own suggestion: There’s not a lot of venture capital to take these projects private. In the nineties, a lot of Europeans saw this as a detriment to the development of an IT or Internet industry. Now, the ability of VC’s to remove assets from the commons forever (even if the companies created ultimately fail) looks like a mixed blessing at best. Is our current intellectual property regime really the best way to foster innovation?

The Web has become the universal library that a lot of futurists have dreamed of, but one that is completely different from what they foresaw:

• Information can be added to the library without anyone’s permission.
• Its indexing system is networked, not hierarchical.
• A lot of the information is wrong, unsourced, out of date, incomplete, or misleading presented.
• The fundamental unit of organization is the page, not the book.
• The information is largely untagged for keywords, topics covered, taxonomy, bibliogrphy, ownership, or creation date.

This goes against the grain and the conventional wisdom of information theorists, librarians, academics, policy-makers, academics, futurists, censors, law enforcement officers, intellectual propery owners, technologists, anal retentives and other stake holders and authorities. It’s…anarchy.
This takes some getting used to. Efforts to create a semantic Web, sell content, impose digital rights management, control linking, limit access, and standardize markup each may be marginalized by the populism of dirt-simple HTML, crawled by spiders, and created by amateurs for their own entertainment and that of their current and future friends: A billion users, all typing (and linking) as fast as they can think.
The universal library is here today and it can answer most real questions faster than the fastest proprietary database or reference librarian or science fiction computer.
A lot of official sources obsess about the (staggering) amount of misinformation on the Web. I knew the tide was turning when the other day a journalist friend told me something he’d heard and then said to me, “I’m not sure if that’s true, I should verify it on the Internet.”
What makes this mountain of dross so astonishingly valuable is the links, the information in the spaces between the information. We all benefit from this network of links. Every site that points to you, every site that points to a site that points to you, increases the value of your information to you and to the Net as a whole. Everyone wins.
Anything that diminishes the value of these links (subscription-based sites, deep-linking policies, moving free information to paid databases after a couple of weeks, or simply allowing links to die with your old content management system) diminishes the value of the Web beyond the simple loss of the information removed from circulation.