Ray Ozzie of Microsoft on Newspapers
May 2, 2009
PaidContent.org ran a story based on Ray Ozzie statements. You can read Joseph Tartakoff’s “Microsoft’s Ozzie on His Company’s Web Strategy” here. What I found interesting was this statement attributed to Mr. Ozzie who was commenting about the future of newspapers:
There is a new business model with anything that can be delivered digitally,” Ozzie said. “Look what’s happening with news. I’m not certain what the new business model really is but certainly the old business model is impacted … It’s not clear that as these new models come into play whether revenue or profit pool in a given industry is equivalent in the new world as in the old world. Could very well be that the business model is sound in that there is a business but not the size of the business. If journalism is something we care about we’re going to have to find new ways to subsidize that.”
Is Microsoft advocating the newspapers, like GM and Chrysler, be supported by the government via subsidies? Is he underscoring the hopelessness of the present newspaper companies?
The reference to business models interests me because Microsoft’s own business models seem to be sputtering. I wonder if Microsoft will jump into the news business and provide the much-needed cash infusion needed to keep traditional news operations heated in the winter and air conditioned in the summer.
Stephen Arnold, May 2, 2009
Google Microsoft and a Thickening Plot
May 2, 2009
I don’t know if this Web log post on Wired.com is accurate. First, click here to read “Who’s Messing with the Google Book Settlement? Hint: They’re in Redmond, Washington”. Second, think about these issues:
- A $65 billion company using its clout to stir up animosity toward a $20 billion company. This is almost like the Wild West movies that feature a rancher against a sheep herder.
- Are those in publishing pawns or thought leaders in a struggle for their intellectual property and, of course, money?
- Are lawyers willing to take action as long as they are compensated? (I think I know the answer to this question.)
For me, the most interesting comment in the write up was:
It may be a good investment on Microsoft’s part, but doesn’t the Microsoft money taint New York Law School’s efforts? “I’m sure there’s a danger in being perceived as compromised,” says Grimmelmann. “But I know it’s not affecting our work. Microsoft is willing to send us money to do good work with our students and we’re happy to take it.” (Grimmelmann’s own stance on the Google Settlement, first expressed in a blog posting last November, is rather nuanced. He thinks it’s a positive development, but wants significant change — generally, ones that restrain Google. He also says that at various times, his positions on issues have been anti-Microsoft as well as anti-Google.)
More to come whether this story is spot on or off center.
Stephen Arnold, May 2, 2009
AP Google Spat
May 2, 2009
Forbes.com’s Dirk Smillie wrote “AP’s Curley Has Fighting Words for Google” at a time when dead tree outfits (my way of describing traditional publishing companies) experience a surge in blood pressure. The GOOG and the AP had a deal for content. Money changed hands. According to Mr. Smillie, presumably in the know with regard to discussions between the information giant of the past (AP) and the information giant of the future (Google), the two are having difficulty communication. Mr. Smillie wrote:
The AP and Google ( GOOG – news – people ) have been debating content and compensation issues for months. In an interview with Forbes on Wednesday, Curley warned that if Google doesn’t strike the right deal with the AP soon, “They will not get our copy going forward.” The threat follows Rupert Murdoch’s accusation earlier this month that Google is committing copyright thievery when it borrows material from news stories to assemble search rankings. A few days later, the AP weighed in with a similar charge–though it did not mention Google–announcing a content protection initiative and threatening legal and legislative action against news aggregators.
I am thrilled to be an addled goose paddling on a pond filled with mine draining run off in rural Kentucky. This battle could be Dickensian. The ghost of information past rails at the ghost of information yet to come. We know the outcome, don’t we?
Google wins.
Now let’s think about why this is, in my opinion, the trajectory of this dispute.
First, the financial ground on which the AP (Associated Press) stands is crumbling. The erosion is not caused by Google. The erosion is a consequence of the flow of bits that are tunneling worm holes in the once solid foundations of the newspaper business. Whatever actions AP takes will be similar to the hapless home owners who use sand to shore up shaky foundations. Wrong material. Wrong action.
Second, the Google is an information platform. If the folks with news want to get their information in front of people, Google is a major distribution channel. But, as described in my new monograph Google: The Digital Gutenberg, the GOOG can make it easy for those with content to monetize that information. One of Google’s disclosed inventions allows a partner to use the Google platform to perform many information functions, including monetization. Should Google wish, in a blink (I wanted to use the word nonce but a reader said it carried negative connotations), Google becomes a Swiss Army knife of news. If Google doesn’t take this step, another online upstart will. AP can’t be that upstart. AP can’t stop the trajectory of online information.
Third, it is too late. The AP inked a deal, thought it knew the ropes, realized it didn’t know the ropes were located in a Costco, and now is trying to advantage itself. In my opinion, Google is not too fond of second chances. As a result, the AP is negotiating from a position of weakness. Maybe the copyright lawyers will have an answer, but I think the children of the AP executives and the copyright attorneys will be the generation that decides in favor of the GOOG or a similar service. Let me repeat: Too late. No more flights to Cleveland today.
Do I agree with Mr. Smillie? He’s an objective reporter. I am writing a Web log, and I think that it’s game over for the AP.
NetBase and Content Intelligence
April 30, 2009
Vertical search is alive and well. Technology Review described NetBase’s Content Intelligence here. The story, written by Erica Naone, was “A Smarter Search for What Ails You”. Ms. Naone wrote:
organizes searchable content by analyzing sentence structure in a novel way. The company created a demonstration of the platform that searches through health-related information. When a user enters the name of a disease, he or she is most interested in common causes, symptoms, and treatments, and in finding doctors who specialize in treating it, says Netbase CEO and cofounder Jonathan Spier. So the company’s new software doesn’t simply return a list of documents that reference the disease, as most search engines would. Instead, it presents the user with answers to common questions. For example, it shows a list of treatments and excerpts from documents that discuss those treatments. The Content Intelligence platform is not intended as a stand-alone search engine, Spier explains. Instead, Netbase hopes to sell it to companies that want to enhance the quality of their results.
NetBase (formerly Accelovation) has developed a natural language processing system.Ms. Naone reported:
NetBase’s software focuses on recognizing phrases that describe the connections between important words. For example, when the system looks for treatments, it might search for phrases such as “reduce the risk of” instead of the name of a particular drug. Tellefson notes that this isn’t a matter of simply listing instances of this phrase, rather catching phrases with an equivalent meaning. Netbase’s system uses these phrases to understand the relationship between parts of the sentence.
At this point in the write up, I heard echoes of other vendors with NLP, semantics, bound phrase identification, etc. Elsevier has embraced the system for its illumin8 service. You can obtain more information about this Elsevier service here. Illumin8 asked me, “What if you could become an expert in any topic in a few minutes?” Wow!
The NetBase explanation of content intelligence is:
… understanding the actual “meaning” of sentences independent of custom lexicons. It is designed to handle myriads of syntactical sentence structures – even ungrammatical ones – and convert them to logical form. Content Intelligence creates structured semantic indexes from massive volumes of content (billions of web-pages and documents) used to power question-and-answer type of search experiences.
NetBase asserts:
Because NetBase doesn’t rely on custom taxonomies, manual annotations or coding, the solutions are fully automated, massively scalable and able to be rolled-out in weeks with a minimal amount of effort. NetBase’s semantic index is easy to keep up-to-date since no human editing or updates to controlled vocabulary are needed to capture and index new information – even when it includes new technical terms.
Let me offer several observations:
- The application of NLP to content is not new and it imposes some computational burdens on the search system. To minimize those loads, NLP is often constrained to content that contains a restricted terminology; for example, medicine, engineering, etc. Even with a narrow focus, NLP remains interesting.
- “Loose” NLP can squirm around some of the brute force challenges, but it is not yet clear if NLP methods are ready for center stage. Sophisticated content processing often works best out of sight, delivering to the user delightful, useful ways to obtain needed information.
- A number of NLP systems are available today; for example, Hakia. Microsoft snapped up PowerSet. One can argue that some of the Inxight technology acquired first by Business Objects then by the software giant SAP are NLP systems. To my knowledge, none of these has scored a hat trick in revenue, customer uptake, and high volume content processing.
You can get more information about NetBase here. You can find demonstrations and screenshots. A good place to start is here. According to TechCrunch:
NetBase has been around for a while. Originally called Accelovation, it has raised $9 million in two rounds of venture funding over the past four years, has 30 employees…
In my files, I had noted that the funding sources included Altos Ventures and ThomVest, but these data may be stale or just plain wrong. I don’t have enough information about Netbase to offer substantive comments. NLP requires significant computing horsepower. I need to know more about the plumbing. Technology Review provided the sizzle. Now we need to know about the cow from which the prime rib comes.
Stephen Arnold, April 30, 2009
Google Books Gets Slammed
April 28, 2009
After a wonder United Airlines (oops, typo, Untied Airlines flight, I checked the goodies in my newsreader. Tess and Tyson wanted to go to the park, but I spotted an interesting post and wanted to pass it along. The story’s title was designed to stop me: “Google Faces Antitrust Investigation over $125m Book Deal” here. The author of the story was Bobbie Johnson and the publisher was Google’s old pal, The Guardian, a dead tree outfit in the UK. The story is straightforward. Bobbie Johnson wrote:
not everybody inside the administration has such warm feelings towards the Californian internet powerhouse. Christine Varney – Obama’s nominee to run the Department of Justice’s antitrust division – has already voiced concerns about Google’s power, saying she could “see a problem, potentially, with Google”. Varney, who was part of the team who fought a long-running antitrust case against Microsoft in the 1990s, told a meeting in Washington last year that “Microsoft is so last century”, but that Google could pose a threat because it “has acquired a monopoly in internet online advertising”.
You may find CNet’s take on this useful as well. Click here for Stephen Shankland’s story.
My hunch is that The Guardian will be like Tess and Tyson when each gets a new rawhide chew bone. Excitement shall ensue. I wonder, “Will The Guardian start a regular feature to track Google as it wanders in the legal thickets?” My hunch is that the book operation will continue to chug along. Law moves less quickly than the Google.
Stephen Arnold, April 28, 2009
Google and the News News
April 28, 2009
I did not know about Google’s old plan for the news. I learned about the “old” plan and the “new” plan by reading “Eric Schmidt on Google’s New Plan for the News” in The Wrap here. The Wrap reported:
I asked if the rumors I’d heard, that Google was changing its mind about getting involved with creating original content, were true. No, he responded, quite convincingly, they’re not. Google is not a content company, and is not going in that direction, he explained. But Google does have plans for a solution. In about six months, the company will roll out a system that will bring high-quality news content to users without them actively looking for it. Under this latest iteration of advanced search, users will be automatically served the kind of news that interests them just by calling up Google’s page. The latest algorithms apply ever more sophisticated filtering – based on search words, user choices, purchases, a whole host of cues – to determine what the reader is looking for without knowing they’re looking for it.
The old plan was to index the world’s information. The new plan is to index the world’s information. I like the new plan.
Stephen Arnold, April 28, 2009
As Print Fades, Online Readership Grows, Asserts Research Guru Nielsen
April 26, 2009
Leo LaPorte, a radio personality and one-man podcast network, popped into my crawler as the author of “Online Audience3 Grows for Newspapers” here. I did some clicking and discovered the attribution here on The Long Tail, a Web log by the author of the book by the same name. Another link aimed me at http://www.techfuga.com. I found a version of the story on MSNBC here, but to my dismay the source was the deeply litigious Associated Press. No Leo LaPorte in sight, but his name drew me into a festival of clicking.
And what was the story?
Oh, people are reading more news online. The ultimate source of the data is the stats giant Nielsen. You can read the data, but my thought was, “If newspapers kill off their print editions or make them too expensive, maybe online is the alternative.”
The problem which the mathematics whizzes at Nielsen don’t address is that the online business models in use by the dead tree crowd don’t pay the bills.
I wonder if Leo LaPorte knows he is the attributed author of what strikes me as a somewhat obvious study? Maybe he linked to the story? Pretty darned confusing provenance. At least the free Web news search systems worked. I could find the MSNBC story easily.
Stephen Arnold, April 26, 2009
An Howl of Hyperbole Induced Pain
April 26, 2009
PCAdvisor.co.uk is a Web site that complements a consumer computer magazine in the UK. I recall buying a copy and getting a DVD stuffed full of “editor picks” in shareware, code snippets, and articles from back issues. I saw a reference to the article “10 Things We Hate about Technology Now”. You can read the story here. This is the second “we can’t take it any more” write up in the last 24 hours. Dan Sullivan pointed to the public relations blitz that accompanies a new search engine. My take on his article is here. Now the journalists at PCAdvisor.co.uk are showing signs of stress. I can’t recite the entire list of 10 pain points, but I can point to three items and offer a brief comment about each.
First, the magazine objects to the buzz about Twitter. I don’t agree. Twitter is the poster child for real time search. RTS is novel and not well understood. The outrage makes clear to me that no one on the PCAdvisor.co.uk team thinks about the Twitter messages from the point of view of a person involved in police or intelligence work. Twitter is important. A failure to understand is a problem of analytic intelligence, not Twitter. RTS is not likely to go away quickly.
Second, news releases. Last time I checked PCAdvisor.co.uk it seemed to have its share of recycled news releases in its “news” section. Companies generate news spam and publications gobble up the bits and bytes. Story ideas are often hard to get when a publisher pays low wages and rationalizes staff. Recycling is a big part of the profession of computer journalism. Remember. I worked for one of the big guns in the industry.
Third, Apple and Microsoft. I am combining two items because each illustrates a characteristic of news. High profile companies are high profile because people want their products, need information about the companies, or enjoy keeping pace with the buzz about something that has ubiquity. No company is perfect. Publications have to cover the high profile companies in order to attract eyeballs. A niche publication covers more specialized topics and attracts a smaller, more specialized audience. Writing positive or negative articles about high profile companies is a requirement.
I think the marketing bandwagon has been pimped by West Coast Customs. Marketing is now a Hummer, not a Mini Cooper. The change says more about the nature of unchecked capitalism, the desperation some publishers feel when trying to turn red ink into black ink, and journalists who are short on copy ideas.
Stephen Arnold, April 26, 2009
Google Local Push in Australia
April 24, 2009
I don’t care too much for print directories. The Google has a formidable directory initiative. I found the story in The Standard here interesting. Kathryn Edwards’ “Google to Boost Local Businesses with AdWords Offer” here wrote:
Google Australia Wednesday announced it will offer a free A$75 (US$53) search marketing campaign to help more than one million Australian small and medium businesses. According to the search engine giant, more Australians than ever before are researching products and services online, before venturing into a shop, with Monash University research showing that this trend makes up 50 per cent of Australian shoppers.
Google is offering a helping hand to get businesses to shift into a higher gear for online marketing. Will this type of booster program find its way elsewhere. If the Australian program takes off, the Google may become the de facto online information source for small and mid sized businesses. Bad news for print directory businesses.
Stephen Arnold, April 23, 2009
Asking a Question to Which the Answer Is Obvious
April 24, 2009
The Guardian took time out from Google whacking to ask a question that I found embarrassing. The Guardian’s article title is the question; namely, “Why Did Google Create News Timeline and Not Newspapers?” I interpreted the query as ambiguous. The Guardian gives Google a pat on its predator’s scales for its ability to innovate. The question of why seems to mean, “Why can’t the dead tree crowd do Googley things?” The Guardian said:
What’s holding back news organisations from creating these types of features on their own? Mathew said that “antiquated and inflexible content-management systems” are partly to blame, but he also said that newsroom culture also is part of the problem. News organisations will have to become more innovative in creating new features that showcase their content and build services that they can sell to end their over-reliance on advertising as a source of revenue. What do you think it will take for news organisations to become more innovative.
I think the Guardian knows that time has passed by the newspaper industry. The reality now dawning on those in the news business is scary. Without the mental programming to react effectively under attack, the newspaper industry falls back on a combination of grudging admiration for Google and direct assaults on the company because it is adapting to an evolving environment. Think Darwin. Think extinction. The answer to the3 Guardian’s question is in my opinion, “Newspapers don’t know what game changing actions to take.” The result? Marginalization and likely disappearance in a stream of zeros and ones.
Stephen Arnold, April 24, 2009
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