Google, Word Choice and Nexus One
January 25, 2010
Short honk: I don’t have a Nexus One and I don’t plan on buying the device. Mother Google has caught my attention with each of my Google monographs. I try to steer clear. I did read “How Google’s Nexus One Censors Cuss Words.” If accurate, the story suggests that Google sees a dirty word and scrubs it out of the message. Not even IBM in its salad days would make the IBM Selectric so it would prevent the user from typing certain words. What if Charles Bukowski were still alive, keying poems on his Nexus One? Would the output be vintage Bukowski?
drunk and writing poems
at 3 a.m.what counts now
is one more
tight ######before the light
tilts out
Yep, just what Mr. Bukowski wanted, according to Mother Google and its nannytron.
Google knows more than a creative person. How reassuring. What about the references to off color subjects in Shakespeare’s comedies? What about the humor in the works of Plautus and Terence? Google would have fixed their work as well.
What a nanny society is emerging! If someone buys a device, the person can do what he wants with it in my opinion. Thank goodness I am over 65 and heading for the data center in the sky. I suppose when the Googlers, the TSA, and other nannyites arrive, I will not be allowed to write my opinions using unapproved words.
Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2010
This is a freebie. I am expressing an opinion. I can envision a day when WordPress will delete any reference to nannies, wings, and guys like Charles Bukowski. Quite a world. I will report this to the National Archives.
Autonomy and Precise Team Up
January 24, 2010
Autonomy continues to sniff trends and move before other players in the enterprise search and content processing space. I saw a short announcement on Sharecast (a service with more weird pop ups than most Web sites I visit) that said:
Search software firm Autonomy is teaming up with UK-based media intelligence outfit Precise to develop and market next-generation media intelligence services to the public relations and communications sectors.
Autonomy is well known to readers of this Web log. Precise may not be. Here’s a quick run down on that outfit:
- The company is in the “media intelligence” business. This is somewhat similar to the old style Bacon’s clipping service put on steroids.
- The company has more than 5,000 customers and a big chunk of them are in the financial services and information sector. The idea is that media monitoring provides open source information that Precise converts into intelligence about what a company will or may do. This is the enterprise version of government intelligence agency operations.
- The chief information officer comes from the real time information side of the business. (This suggests to me that Autonomy is deep into the real time content processing spaghetti.)
- The company’s description of its services sounds almost Googley: “Our Media Portal allows our clients to view and evaluate the impact of coverage from every media source – print, broadcast, online. In addition they can access forward planning data at the touch of a button.”
My take on this is that Autonomy will be nosing into other real time information sectors as well. Some of the incumbents may find that Autonomy’s marketing and its corporate clout will push them out of their comfortable positions. Who will be affected by Autonomy if it moves in this direction? That’s a good question.
Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2010
A freebie. No one paid me to write about this tie up. I suppose I shall report this sad fact to MARAD, an outfit that knows about brown water tie ups.
Will Online Revenue Return the NYT to Wall Street Glory?
January 24, 2010
In my opinion, the NYT’s online charging plan may not return the NYT to Wall Street glory? My instincts were confirmed when I read the interesting article by Erick Schonfeld. The story “The New York Times’ Online Meter Will Hardly Move The Needle” works through some assumptions about online revenue for the NYT. The net net for the analysis is that the NYT may not make much headway in traffic or online revenue. I agree. But the addled goose has several observations to make about any online revenue projection. I am not disagreeing Mr. Schonfeld. I want to add some color to the challenge of generating revenue online.
Will the NYT’s plan for online fees create a triumphal moment for the company? Source: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_gcgZo60Vlvo/RtmLbS2ttmI/AAAAAAAAAPY/nnlQN2aQSG0/s400/Arc_De_Triumph_Flag.jpg
The Need for Big Money
First, the NYT has to generate more money from online than Mr. Schonfeld’s analysis outlines. The reason is that increasing costs in the NYT’s other businesses forces new revenue streams have to outperform expectations. If not, the NYT will continue to suffer revenue pressure. In my model of online pricing, I include such factors as the increase in G&A costs, rising costs for consumables, and increased sales and marketing costs. If online performs at a level consistent with Mr. Schonfeld’s analysis, the NYT will have no choice but find other revenue or just get much smaller. Drastic steps may be need to get the NYT back on the investors’ must-buy list. Will the 2011 target and the revenue from online make this happen? No in my opinion. Cost control will be the killer.
Second, an online product is different from a print product. The audience or customer typically reacts in a way unique to online. The result is that different products and services are needed. In my experience, the domain expertise of print and traditional audio or video programming cannot be quickly or economically repurposed. More that technology is a challenge. The “deep knowing” is different for print and online.The people right for print or traditional media may not be the ones for online. A core competency, it is producing content using a scheduled, serial method. Online and the new audio and video distribution channels require different methods and different “deep knowings”.
Third, the NYT’s online product– like that of the WSJ and the FT for that matter– is going to get some oomph or an “X” factor. Today I reviewed for a client the now defunct or at least non responsive FT Newssift.com (you may get a 404). The FT has not been able to leverage its global brand with its successive “reinventions” of its online service. Newssift.com was to be a new approach using nStein, Endeca, and Lexalytics. I don’t think it worked. The WSJ as well as the FT and NYT present news and information is a way shaped by their print siblings. Putting print online works to a degree but more is needed to make online generate the type of revenue the NYT needs. The NYT, like other newspapers containing more general interest information, my not be be “must have” content for a big chunk of Web users. The problems are the users and the Web medium. Where’s the hot service that makes NYT content the cat’s pajamas.
Here are some items from my notes about traditional publishing and online:
ITEM. Thomson Reuters jumped into for fee online by buying Dialog Information Services. Thomson Reuters jumped out of online by selling at a hefty discount the Dialog for fee online service to a unit of Cambridge Scientific Abstracts. Thomson Reuters is a canny outfit. Net net: online is a tough sector for experts like the Thomson Reuters’ management team which saw problems in traditional publishing a long time ago, tried online and did serious reengineering, and now is moving in new directions such as value added software and services plus information. Will the NYT follow in Thomson Reuters’ footsteps?
ITEM. Newsstands, book stores, and NBC face difficult market hurdles. Without a viable traditional distribution mechanism, the traditional business models don’t work very well. As a result, the traditional producers of content must raise prices, cut staff, and find new products to sell. The result is that both the buyers and the distribution channels for traditional products are constricting. In short, market realities are going to increase the financial pressure on traditional publishers, not reduce it.
ITEM. Individuals who used to work at traditional publishing companies now have to find a way to make money. The result is that there are some skilled journalists who write blogs, create content for outfits like Demand Media, or who go to work for a company and write white papers. The challenge is that as the volume of digital information goes up, algorithms not human editors can make sense of this information. With more humans writing and algorithms making decisions, what’s the money making niche for the traditional publisher?
Why do Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo focus on online advertising, fees, and other charging methods? My hunch is that these three companies focus on getting revenue, not applying traditional publishing business models to their information businesses.
Stephen E Arnold, January 23, 2010
Yep, another freebie. I was on the phone from Europe with a client on another continent. I was paid to talk, but not about traditional publishing. I will report this failure to bill for this write up to the closest US embassy.
Quote to Note: Traditional Media Companies Identify Change as an Issue
January 23, 2010
Last week a friend in the UK sent me a link to a Harvard Business Review comment about leadership and management. The addled goose is not much of a leader nor can he manage the goslings. The gist of this HBR write up is that certain skills are important; for example, pattern recognition.
I read that the outfit operating newspapers in San Jose and Denver was involved in one of those unpleasant financial dust ups. Sigh.
This morning I saw a great quote in today’s edition of the New York Times (January 18, 2010, page B 3). The quote—a headline as well:
It’s Not Jay and Conan Who Changed. We Did.
Right. Now click to the Wall Street Journal’s somewhat difficult to find table of newspapers with various financial challenges. You can find this “Pressure on the Presses” table and graphic that makes it easy to spot a pattern. (Validated at 9 30 am on January 18, 2010.)
Several observations:
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The pattern of demographic change is clear at least to the headline writer at the NYT
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The casual eye can discern the trend in the WSJ’s table “Pressure on the Presses”
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Traditional media has a voice saying to me, “Houston, we have a problem.”
More accurately, the children of the people who work in traditional media are among the reasons certain media are no longer getting traction. Heck, I am part of the problem because I am going to drop two of my four hard copy newspaper subscriptions. The news is old and an increasing number of stories come from third parties who write blogs or outfits set up to produce basic content chaff.
Stephen E Arnold, January 23, 2010
A freebie. I even threw away the bottle of shampoo that came in one of my newspapers the other day. I will report this to Health and Human Services. Clean readers are good readers I assume.
Magnetism and Online
January 19, 2010
I found the write up “Denver Post Owner Plans Bankruptcy Filing” somewhat sad. With middle tier newspapers struggling, I don’t think there will be an easy or quick fix to the collapse of [a] readership, [b] original news reporting, and [c] ad revenue. For me, the most interesting segment of the Washington Times’s story was:
It would be at least the 13th bankruptcy filing by a U.S. newspaper publisher in the past 13 months. The owners of dozens of newspapers have been pushed into bankruptcy protection as the recession and competition from the Internet have sapped advertising revenue. Affiliated Media’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing illustrates the uncertainty facing major newspapers publishers as their main source of income — print advertising — has plunged during the past four years. Since 2005, the industry’s annual ad sales have dropped by more than $20 billion, a decline of about 40 percent, based on figures from the Newspaper Association of America.
I also scanned the pride of stories about a big lion (New York Times) getting ready to charge for its content. You can read a summary of this likely step in New York Magazine’s “New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers”. The write up suggests that NYT execs were not sure about this bold step into charging for access. The passage that struck me as interesting was this one:
The Times has considered three types of pay strategies. One option was a more traditional pay wall along the lines of The Wall Street Journal, in which some parts of the site are free and some subscription-only. For example, editors and business-side executives discussed a premium version of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s DealBook section. Another option was the metered system. The third choice, an NPR-style membership model, was abandoned last fall, two sources explained. The thinking was that it would be too expensive and cumbersome to maintain because subscribers would have to receive privileges (think WNYC tote bags and travel mugs, access to Times events and seminars).
I can see that the thinking about options follows well worn ruts in the online world. The problem is that none of these models will work for a first tier newspaper.
I have written extensively about online for this blog in my Mysteries of Online series. I won’t repeat that information here. Instead I will make a couple of fresh observations and move today’s Sunday New York Times to the recycle bin. I have looked at it already, but I did not find too much to engage me.
Here’s why:
- Take a look at the Financial Times online site at www.ft.com. Now jump to Newssift, the next generation Financial Times’s site. Now navigate to Compete.com and get the usage data for each site. The FT.com site is going nowhere, and it has great content. The Newssift.com site is flat lined. It is not going anywhere ever. Run a query on Newssift and you will see why. I want news, not a logic puzzle. The NYT will be in the same pickle.
- A single title has a very tough time attracting enough traffic and pay the bills. The reason is that mass is needed. The online “mass” has two components. You need lots of content that people really want. And you need eyeballs. I don’t think the NYT can deliver on the “mass”.
- News is one of those information types that has one meaning in the print world and another in the online world. Traditional publishers are not in the real time business. Users of Facebook and Twitter, among other services, are. Governments generate news and don’t charge for it. Some individuals generate news and don’t charge for it. Some trade associations generate news and don’t charge for it. You get the idea. Why pay for the NYT value add which consists of opinions, less than real time turnaround, and the notion that an “editor” knows better than an algorithm? In today’s fast paced world, I trust the algorithm, not traditional newspaper methods.
The NYT demonstrated that it did not understand online when it broke its exclusive with LexisNexis decades ago. The NYT provided it could not sustain a for fee online business when it started on run by my friend and former NYT big wig Jeffrey Pemberton. It provided it could not think like a Web company with its dithering about how too leverage the NYT content over the last decade. Now you want me to believe the NYT has it figured out? The goose is addled, not stupid.
What happens when there is no magnetism? Nothing sticks. That is, quite to my dismay, what is happening to newspapers in general and what will happen to the NYT in particular.
Stephen E Arnold, January 18, 2010
Darn, a freebie. I will report this to the Government Printing Office, an outfit familiar with publishing.
Google and the Real Estate Squish
January 18, 2010
When I was putting the finishing touches on Google: The Digital Gutenberg, I did some testing of the “old” Google Base. That service, before it underwent a major overhaul, included job listings and real estate listing. You may have stumbled upon real estate information when you were searching Google Local. I found that for certain areas, the system would provide pictures of houses for sale and in some cases backlinks to more detailed listings. If you navigate to Google Local and run the query “condominium Baltimore Maryland” you could (at 9 24 am, January 17, 2009, see this result set:
I have written extensively about various Google technologies that make this type of service possible. These include the programmable search engine invention and the work of the dataspace team, among others.
I read in “Google to Scoop Up Real Estate Sites” that some talk about Google purchasing real estate services. My research indicates that acquisitions are an easy way for Google to acquire expertise. The potential of Google’s providing a meta service to organize and make coherent the patchwork of services related to real property has been on the Google radar for years. My recollection is that Google patent documents from the early 2000s reference these types of applications.
When thinking about real estate, it may be helpful to keep in mind the range of services that a real estate transaction requires. My hunch is that real estate is one exemplary application of Google’s approach to online services.
To sum up, if the publishing and telco sector thought that Google was disruptive, wait until the real estate food chain figures out what’s about to happen. Once again: when you see overt instances of a Google application, it is too late. This is the gap problem that befuddles a number of companies affected by the Google’s expanding technical domain. Visualize a hard copy publication containing houses for sale and rent. Visualize a Google real estate service on a mobile device. Yikes, bad news for the directory crowd do you think?
Stephen E Arnold, January 18, 2010
Ah, gentle reader, no one paid me to put this shameless plug for my Google monographs in this blog. I will report this to the US Department of Housing & Urban Development.
Amazon and Traditional Publishers Anger Some eBook Buyers
January 17, 2010
Let me point out that the hype about eBook readers is entertaining. But the existence of eBook readers will not create overnight more people who buy and read lots of books. I use an eBook reader because I don’t have to carry a bunch of books on a long international flight. I read most of the way, so eBook readers allow me to carry one printed book (usually a small one about math) and a Kindle jammed with many different things. The book stores used to love me. Now I don’t bother. I order traditional books online and steer clear of the gift card and book light shops that book stores have become.
The article “Kindle Fans Punish Publisher For Delaying Ebook Releases By Giving Books One-Star Reviews” points out one of those delicious unexpected consequences type anecdotes. Publishers want to put out a new book like I, Sniper in hard copy and then later release an eBook version. This is one of those great ideas the folks who don’t understand the excitement that online often triggers. Annoyed book buyers have been giving books lousy reviews on Amazon.
To me the most interesting comment in the article was:
HarperCollins — one of the leading supporters of these silly “windowed” releases — is discovering that its well-hyped book Game Change is filling up with one-star reviews. Going against what your consumers want is almost never a good idea.
Too bad I will be in Europe Monday. I will have to check and see what the traditional publishers and that fine outfit Amazon will do to get book buyers to lay on their side and pant. Is this a job for the Dog Whisperer? Probably.
Stephen E Arnold, January 17, 2010
A freebie. Because this is about publishing, I must report non payment to the GPO.
Paywalls and the Unthinkable
January 16, 2010
If you like surveys, you may find “Pay Walls Will Fail: Nobody Wants to Pay for Online Newspapers” interesting. If you work at a newspaper planning on making big bucks from for fee electronic editions, you may want to skip this blog post. The survey presents data that alleges lots of people will not pay for newspaper content offered on a for fee basis via the Web. Big surprise? Nope. Not many publications have sufficient content to pull enough online revenue to pay the bills. There were a couple of points in the write up of the survey data that I found notable.
First 10 percent of those in the sample of 2,000 people don’t read a newspaper. Yowza. I think that percentage will grow as oldster like me head to the big computer store in the sky. Second, a surprising 23 percent are willing to pay. That percentage struck me as high. In my experience, the pull of electronic content is a fraction of the audience for a traditional printed publication. The reason is that those who like paper and ink are not too keen on the online or electronic experience.
The unthinkable for newspapers and magazines spending big money on electronic publishing systems is that paywalls won’t work. So what’s plan B?
Stephen E Arnold, January 15, 2010
A freebie. I will report this to the Coast Guard. You know that is the outfit partially on call when ships and other constructs sink.
Search Merging with CMS
January 13, 2010
When you have a CMS “hammer”, you have the opportunity to see an information problem as something that can be pounded with CMS. Let me be upfront. Most organizations are not in the information business. The idea that Big O’s tires in Kentucky is an information company is not just silly; it’s a financially imprudent assertion. Big O’s is a retail operation that sells tires and services. The company’s Web site is a marketing is a marketing effort, but when you need tires for your Hummer with a gun mount, you have to haul on over to the closest Big O’s, pony up cash, and get your tires mounted, balanced, and bolted on. Sure, information is important to the Big O operation, but like many other businesses, Big O’s moves tires. Information is an enabler, sort of a digital lubricant. A person dressed up in a Daniel Boone outfit holding a sign that says, “50% off Tires. Today only.” is information. But the pointy end of the business is selling tires.
Just hop right into the CMS tanning bed. It will make you look and feel great. Oh, there may be some risks, but what’s more important? Looking great or becoming a human Blutwurst.
When I read CMS Wire’s short article “MySource Matrix” I was surprised that search is becoming part of CMS. Yikes. CMS, content management systems, refers to a bunch of software components that perform integrated content operations for Web sites. There are document management systems that help nuclear power plants keep track of engineering change orders. And there are really expensive enterprise publishing systems from Hewlett Packard and StreamServe that manage and output certain types of enterprise information. I grant that when you can’t find a document, you can’t do much with any of these systems. So, search is a utility. Search in any of these three types of content systems often is not particularly good. Vendors license “stubs” stick them in CMS and related systems so when more features are needed, the vendors can turn on the taxi meter. Software cannot put an editorial sense into an organization. Humans have to do that, and humans often are not able to perceive the problem or its optimal solution when basking in the vendor’s tanning salon.
Here’s the passage from Squiz that caught my attention:
They’ve [Squiz, Funnelback, and MySource Matrix] chosen this direction because they see the lines between CMS and search blurring, where some projects may need search-based vertical applications rather than starting with a separate CMS and search library. According to Morgan [Squiz executive], this approach will reduce integration costs and increase access to data across an organization.
Note: Squiz owns the Funnelback search system. You can see this in action on the Australian Resource Centre for Healthcare Innovation or ARCHI.
Most CMS, DMS, and enterprise publishing systems are complicated beasties, and each has a contribution to make to certain organizations, the path to a functioning, easy to maintain content system can be a long, difficult one. In my experience, CMS means managing a Web site. CMS has been stretched into DMS territory, and some of the vendors with the biggest marketing horn have floundered and ended up chum for the M&A crowd. The document management systems that focus on a specific content purpose like the aforementioned ECOs work well, but one needs to have an records management specialist handy. The enterprise publishing systems are not widely known outside of certain market sectors. These cost a lot of money and suffer from one fatal flaw in my opinion. Most lack an information infrastructure service or foundation. No foundation, the structure built on it is dicey.
This notion of having everything in one place so anyone can edit, repurpose, and search is a great idea. Today, the cost of achieving that utopia can be high, both in time and money.
I can see the direction this marketing angle will lead. Thank goodness I am old and won’t have to deal with the wackiness these big marketing ideas unleash on cash strapped organizations struggling to keep their systems from breaking the bank each time those systems crash. There’s a lot of opportunity in content, but fuzzy thinking may not be what Boards of Directors and CFOs want.
Stephen E Arnold, January 13, 2010
I want to disclose to the Office of Management and Budget that I was not paid to point out the financial issues of fuzzy thinking. I bet this article was a surprise to them. Don’t Federal content and document managements systems work like spinning tops?
Free Complex Products: Sign of Revenue Starvation?
January 12, 2010
Here is a hypothetical. You are sitting in the airport. A young woman sits next to you and examines the engineering diagram for a CPU with 1,000 cores. You ask her, “What’s that?” She says, “The basic building block of Google’s hyper grid architecture.” You look at her, glance at the diagram, and wonder what the heck she just explained to you.
That’s information without context. You don’t know what you looked at. You don’t know what a hyper grid is. You don’t know why Google needs an architecture. In short, you get a peek in Messrs Brin and Pages techno-think and its worth bupkis.
I learned from one of my two or three readers that Dialog Information Services, was giving away free online searching for a couple of months. That is big news to me. ProQuest, a commercial database publisher, bought Dialog from Thomson Reuters and aims to make it pay off big time.
The story “Dialog Offers Free Searching of Selected Cengage Files Through March 30th” appeared in a publication called the Resource Shelf. Aimed at info pros, the Resource Shelf covers some of the machinations in the world of former online superstars like LexisNexis and the aforementioned Dialog Information Services. (If you resonate with ss cc=7600 AND ESOP AND UD=9999, you know this service is not what it once was. Today’s online searcher has little interest in where data originates, editorial policies, and command line searching on systems written in part in PL/1 and running on big honking machines.
The reference to “Cengage” refers to a spin out of Thomson Reuters. Yep, the same Thomson Reuters that sold Dialog to Pro/Quest. If you are like me, it seems that Thomson Reuters got out of the commercial online business and now its former kissing cousins are teaming up to pump up usage of these commercial databases.
Most online users today don’t think too much about paying $0.25 to print a title while paying connect time to outfits like Tymnet. Lawyers, at least some lawyers, still do this. Patent researchers still fork over big money to look at special databases containing publicly accessible patent data. Certain chemists love—absolutely love—searching for chemical structures using the Chem Abs super service.
The key point in the Resource Shelf’s write up was, in my opinion, this segment:
“During this time all DialUnits, Connect Time, and Alert Profile charges will be waived to allow customers to search these files and create and run Alerts profiles at no charge. Output pricing such as full formats and Alert prints will be charged at current rates.”
What this means is that “free” applies to the part of the service that does not generate the big bucks. What makes money for commercial online services? Online types (looking at a record in electronic form) and offline prints (getting a hard copy of the search results). Note that if your query returns zero useful results, the traditional customer friendly approach is to charge for the privilege of finding out that there was no useful information in the database you query. Lawyers love this sort of zero results is good information. Most people don’t.
In fact, the commercial online services have to get out of their historical approach to online and find a way to attract new users and generate meaningful new revenue. Here’s why:
- Google is good enough and free.
- Commercial database publishers are in a market squeeze arguably more problematic than the mostly inept content management system vendors find themselves. (CMS doesn’t work too well either in my opinion.)
- Enterprise software vendors are putting code shims in place to provide certain high value information within other enterprise applications. Data.gov might be immature, but it sure suggestive.
- The costs of running an outdated infrastructure with data that change less frequently than I paint the log cabin in which I live don’t match the real time demands of 20 somethings
- The expense of creating a commercial database is creeping up. The mom and pop shops cannot compete with the more sophisticated operators like Ebsco, one of the big dogs in the high value information business.
Add this up and what do you get? Not too much. I think it is a marketing play that communicates that both Dialog and Cengage may be grasping at straws. Why? Go back to the hypothetical with which I started this write up. Most people won’t know what they are looking at when they run queries against these databases:
80 Aerospace/Defense Markets & Technology
13 Business & Management Practices
88 Business A.R.T.S.SM
479 Company Intelligence
275 Computer Database
18 F&S Index
583 Globalbase
149 Health & Wellness Database
150 Legal Resource Index™
47 Magazine Database
75 Management Contents
570 Marketing & Advertising Reference Service
111 National Newspaper Index
211 Newsearch
649 Newswire ASAP
160 PROMT (1972-1989)
148 Trade & Industry Database
93 TableBase
So what’s the number. That’s the Dialog number which you enter with the command “b 160”. See what I mean. Giving away free information without context means zero, maybe less than zero because a potential customer may be turned off when paying for outputs.
I don’t go to the real “library” any more. I use my own online files and free online resources. That’s the problem. When someone from the commercial database world does not use his own products, something has changed. Free won’t bring back the bad old days of traditional online services.
The field of battle has shifted. The free offer underscores how much of a gap exists between the former giants of online and the new services from other vendors. There’s no 1,000 processor architecture available that can alter a business model that worked 30 years ago.
Stephen E Arnold, January 12, 2010
I state that I was not paid to point out that free with a tiny footnote that explains the not free part of this Dialog offer. I shall report this pitiable excuse for a non-compensated write up to the US Postal Service, another traditional institution hit by new technology and changing user behavior. Where has all the junk mail gone?
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