InfoInnovation

OnCopyright 2008

Copyright Clearance Center is to be congratulated for creating a neutral and very well organized forum for discussing the future of copyright, and the issues of art, technology, society, and law that will help shape it.  Last week's OnCopyright 2008 symposium was excellent, and was covered by John Blossom with his usual insight and exhaustiveness.   As I've just commented to Information Today, one of the most useful aspects was the placement of copyright issues affecting information content in the larger context of music, television, and other media with major roles in shaping the legal environment, and user expectations.  The panel discussions occasionally lacked focus, but more than compensated by producing some rare insights from some of the most original and influential thinkers about intellectual property and society’s often competing values.  Most of the attendees with whom I spoke agreed that it should become an annual event.

Using Social Media to Increase [B2B] Revenues

 

If you’re interested in social media in a business and professional context (and you must be since you’re reading this blog) then it’s probably worth your time to watch this recorded video of last week’s SIIA Brown Bag session on the business drivers of social networking. 

A good cross-section of perspectives was represented,: AOL’s Platform A, incorporating social media into a broad online advertising mix; IT Toolbox, an established and profitable B2B social media provider recently by Corporate Executive Board (as noted here); Spiceworks, a new company serving IT needs in small and medium businesses; and McGraw-Hill’s Construction Information Group, experimenting successfully with social media as an extension of its traditional industry publishing roles.

While all of the panelists had valuable things to say, to me the most interesting remarks were those of Jay Hallberg, co-founder of Spiceworks.  Originally launched in 2006, Spiceworks IT Desktop and Community is a free, advertising supported set of tools for managing IT assets (What do I have? Is it working? How do I fix it?”) and a robust content-generating community (much like IT Toolbox but for smaller shops) that started out as a “feature” and has become a core element (“Which tools? Who is an expert? What information do I need and where can I find it?  What products should I buy?”).  

Spiceworks seems to be evolving as a network management dog that is increasingly wagged by its B2B social media tail. And it is already partnering globally with some of the biggest names in IT media.  This can serve as an inspiration to B2B and professional publishers, but also a warning: content providers are not the only players who can aggregate and foster valuable online communities.  With the applications software industry (including Google Apps and much more to come from Microsoft and many others) showing that SaaS can work on an advertising model, the business media and information space is going to become a lot more crowded.

2007 results validate first step in FT's new online pricing strategy

Today, The Financial Times owner Pearson PLC released preliminary 2007 results, indicating that an innovative new online pricing strategy is succeeding - even though it hasn’t yet made a direct impact on subscription revenues.

Last October, around the time that the New York Times dropped Times Select - and amid speculation that the WSJ.com paywall would be dismantled in favor a pure media model - the Financial Times announced it would pursue a “third way.” Rather than going all-free (or all-paid) – or continuing to offer a defined subset of content free, with additional “premium” content behind the firewall - it would adopt a more novel approach: a combination of free and paid, with the paid model determined on the fly according to actual usage.

Initial access to FT.com online content would be free. Once 10 articles had been selected, users would be asked to register with the site - and gain access to email alerts, an online portfolio, and a 5- (vs. 3-) year archive of company financials. Then, when (and if) 30 articles had been requested, they would be asked to subscribe (at US$109 / year, or $299 for the premium version which, in a variation on Times Select, os required for access to the important Lex column read by three-quarters of print subscribers).

Between the introduction of the new pricing model and the end of 2007, ft.com attracted 150,000 new registered users, and according to the earnings release , strong growth has continued into 2008. For the year, monthly unique users are up 30% to 5.7M, and page views are up 33% to 48.2M/mo. However, although online subscriptions rose 13% for the year, they finished at the same level as in October: just over 100,000.

Thus, while the FT is already enjoying the financial benefits of being more open to search engines (i.e. broadening its online ad inventory), the impact on subscription revenues probably won’t be seen until the next half-year’s financial results, as the new volume of registered users works its way through the subscription funnel.

New enterprise model, too

The next earnings period will also be the first time that the FT will be able to report on the impact of the other key component of the new pricing strategy. As Caspar de Bono, the FT’s managing director of B2B, described in his presentation at last week’s NFAIS conference, the enterprise model is also being fundamentally renovated.

As of April 2008, the FT will handle all unlimited usage enterprise subscriptions (except Academic) directly, rather than participate in the bundled packages of some 15 different aggregators. He noted that six of them have agreed to carry FT content under the new arrangement (they will no longer have a license to redistribute). Some enterprise customers don’t like having to deal with another, unique supplier – but they are learning that the FT is willing to grant more elaborate rights (across all delivery channels – online, print, and mobile) when there is a direct relationship with the customer.

Such innovation in pricing models is relatively rare in the online information industry. Part of the reason is evident from de Bono’s response to my question from the audience: how internally disruptive were the changes in access, billing, and accounting systems required to implement the new strategy? Was the burden greater in technology or marketing operations?

He replied that the impact on both has been significant. A new access and billing platform was developed internally – “we just couldn’t find what we needed elsewhere.” And the new enterprise strategy requires a big investment in a direct sales force - a critical and unavoidable requirement of the new enterprise model that suggests strongly that the FT expects to add significant value to its content once it can control directly its pricing and distribution.

In contrast, the internal technology investment signals an unfilled need, common to many “premium content” providers, for more open and flexible third-party back-office platforms – and unrealized opportunities to use pricing as a strategic driver of competitive positioning and revenue growth.

Thomson Scientific on Second Life

In an NFAIS session on “Emerging Business Practices,” Marisa Westcott, vice president of marketing for Thomson Scientific, described that company’s experimentation with Second Life. Queries to the audience revealed that many had tried Second Life, but most were still skeptical of its value, and very few were using it in their own organizations. Westcott’s presentation, while not delivering an open and shut case, may have convinced a few more would-be experimenters. She noted to begin with that 12 million people have registered with Second Life since its launch in 2003, and 500,000 were active within the last 7 days. The average age is 33; 10% have logged in for 40 hours or more, according to operator Linden Labs.

The interest of Thomson Scientific (TS), which serves a largely academic market, is understandable: over 60 universities are conducting classes on Second Life; Linden Labs even provides an official resource site for educators. A New Media Consortium survey of educators using Second Life found that 54% were involved there with education-related activity, 58% expanded their professional networks, and 13% collaborated with local or regional colleagues.

The TS presence (which takes the form of an island with different structures connected by monorail) offers a variety of applications, from traffic and usage inducements like hourly fireworks, Easter egg hunts, T-shirt sales, and squirrels, to more substantive aspects such as RSS feeds, a guided tour of drug development, essays on topics such ISI impact factors, and job postings at the reception desk. Efforts at online training have had mixed results, but interactions with visitors have led to interesting dialogue, survey opportunities, and other ways of interacting with users in a more casual than usual environment.  One of the more interesting aspects of Thomson’s experience has been degree of internal interest and enthusiasm. Most of the Second Life work has been done by team members on their own time; even individuals from other parts of the organization have volunteered to join in.

It’s unlikely that many of the skeptics in the audience were convinced, and Westcott acknowledged that one must “look beyond metrics” to find ways that this activity makes business sense: e.g.,providing a different kind of user experience, and learning curve benefits when and if virtual worlds become a commonplace element of Internet usage. Asked if the level of effort would have been justified if the bulk of the activity had not been done on people’s own time, Westcott unhesitatingly said that it would not. Still, it’s good to see established publishers experimenting with new ways to engage in dialog with the marketplace.

A librarian of the future

One of the best presentations at the NFAIS conference was given by Aaron Schmidt, a young librarian and director of the North Plains Public Library in Portland.  The theme was breaking down the barriers to bringing users in as participants in library activities, whether collectively answering reference-desk-type questions, contributing to cataloging, or adding their own profiles to library community resources.  Those who want a sense of where librarianship could/should go in the post Web 2.0 world will do well to check out his blog here. 

Robert Massie: What if you are the authority?

The first full day of the NFAIS meeting concluded with the traditional Miles Conrad Lecture, this year delivered by honoree Robert J. Massie, president of the American Chemical Society’s Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) since 1992.  Massie provided a low-key counterweight to some of the “new information order” rhetoric of many of the previous speakers, addressing the key question for many of the conference participants: What do you do if YOU are the authority?

He began by individually addressing some of the core attributes of the “new order”:

Global. Noting that CAS’ mission has always been to foster the global exchange of chemical information, and that it has operations and partnerships in Germany, China, India, Japan, and the Philippines, Massie pointed out that Chinese is now the second-largest language represented in its databases.  He also pointedly commented that, although it has a global footprint, CAS nonetheless is “not chasing low labor rates.”

User centric. Massie quoted with considerable irony a comment made in 1994 by a previous CAS executive and Miles Conrad lecturer, Ron Dunn: that the “frustrating pursuit of the elusive end user” might never result in a profitable business for most NFAIS members.  Since then, however, CAS’ end user service, SciFinder, has been very successful (as a complement to the information-professional-oriented STN International).  The key to SciFinder’s success: it follows pathways that mirror the ways that chemical researchers work.  Thus (a theme to which Massie repeatedly returned), “it is possible to be closed / authoritative and still be surpassingly useful to a relevant market.”

Tech-driven, featuring virtual communities of techno-literate inhabitants. CAS, as a pioneer in the application of technology to publishing, has historically developed most of its own technology.  Does that make sense today? Massie commented ruefully that “customization can be a trap,” witness the pain experienced in adapting SAP to the CAS business.  “In the Web environment, it is essential to know the right level of investment in technology, and it is sector/content/market specific.”

Collaborative, open standards-driven, creating new content.  It turns out that from its beginnings in the 19^th century until 1966, CAS’ abstracts were written by volunteer abstractors – a robust early example of user-generated content.  True, Massie noted, today new standards for chemical information exchange are developing; open access repositories are growing; collaborative websites are emerging; and political/social pressures for more free access characterize the age.  “But do [these trends] have to be opposed? Or assimilated?” Massie noted in particular an article that appeared this month in Nature – “Chemistry for Everyone.”  In it, noted research Peter Murray-rust argues that CAS is “incompatible with the requirements of Web 2.0”; that “closed publications, binary software and toll-access databases are being swept away by emerging philosophies and approaches.”  But, Massie noted, universities are the Web 2.0 homeland, and SciFinder Scholar now serves over 1500 schools.  Not only that – many sites in  China have sprung up to provide information on how to break into the computer systems of major US universities in order to gain access to SciFinder.  So, clearly, “young people in China like SciFinder a lot.”

Massie asserted that the question of Web 2.0 vs. traditional publications is “not a binary problem.”   Rhetorically asking the conference attendees “can communities build content in your space?” he answered “It depends: How important is internal consistency?  Timeliness? What are the risks and costs associated with errors?  Can community add value that closed systems do not generate?”  The key for CAS is in balancing automation, authoritative expertise, AND social action.

He closed by noting some of mega-trends in chemical information.  The identification of chemical substances is still growing rapidly (there are now 33 million).  The number of published abstracts is growing apace, in linear fashion.  And the number of new chemical reactions identified, and chemical patents, is accelerating.  It may be that known chemistry still represents only about 1% of possible molecules.  Complicating the challenge of chemical information exchange is the trend toward patenting new compounds: since 1976 the percentage of new compounds in the CAS registry has increase from 14% to 63%.  “Someone has to do the job of systematizing that patent information.  Can it be done in a communitarian way?” Massie, a former McKinsey consultant, is too savvy to answer definitively.  But, while recognizing the importance of the “new order,” his message to conference attendees was not to underestimate the strength and persistent criticality of authoritative, systematically produced, and user-workflow-aligned content products and services.

Search design challenges / best practices and futures

Monday afternoon at the NFAIS conference: a session on the Future of Information Discovery focused on search – best practices and futures. The first speaker was Ben Schneiderman, professor of Computer Science and founding director of the Human Computer Interaction Laboratory at the University of Maryland.  More than 25 years ago, when I was a green online information industry analyst at IDC/LINK Resources, I quickly learned of Prof. Schneiderman’s pre-eminence in his field. His presentation resoundingly suggested that he maintains that position today (and I was expecting a much older man!).

He began by noting that while some queries work perfectly well on Google, others don’t: specific examples being queries involving: exploration of availability, extended fact finding, open-ended browsing and problem analysis (hidden assumptions), and anything requiring exhaustive research. The meat of the presentation was a taxonomic overview of today’s challenges for designers of search products.  Although it doesn’t make for compelling blog reading, it is well worth capturing here:

Enrich query formulation

Previous and similar

Structured input

Spell check

Query previews (faceted indexing – ability to preview result sets for each term)

Finding aids (e.g., terminology, snippets, content overviews)

Ability to limit:

Time

Geography

Language

Sources

Media

…

Expand result management

 Ranking (ideally with user control of ranking criteria)

 Snippets (and document surrogates)

 Highlighting

 Clustering

 Dynamic generation

 Meaningful & stable

 Visualization

 By attributes

 Summarizing

e.g. of first 200 results (where are they from, what are they, compact visual or textual summaries)

Enable long-term effort

Save & Replay

Edit and Grab

Mark and Annotate

Compare

Notebooks

History-keeping

Systematic yet flexible strategies

e.g., 8 tabs of things you should include in a process, any order

Enhance collaboration

 Send email

Announce, publish…

Export: web, slides…

Record video

Comment, blog…

Wiki

Share screen

Tagging & voting

Feedback to search (i.e., social search)

Scheiderman also showed examples of approaches to visualization of search results; a Digg overview created by the Hive Group; the heat map developed for smartmoney.com; Newsmap; PhotoMesa; Punchstock; Vivisimo; Exalead; Grokker; and Combinformation (Ecologylab.cs.tamu.edu/combinformation/). His closing advice to search product developers: conduct controlled experiments; log usage patterns; if possible, perform multi-dimensional, in-depth, long-term case studies; watch domain experts doing their work over periods of weeks and months. 

Randy Marcinko, president and CEO of Groxis, emphasized the value of combining search with clustering, visualization and analysis, and showed how real estate valuation site zillow.com does each of these in a way that is easy to understand and delivers value to the user that exceeds the sum of its parts.  He also showed some of the ways that Groxxis’ Grokker product adds value by clustering across multiple databases, and drawing on rich taxonomies where available.  He noted that predictability of search results will be important going forward, and offered the recently introduced Collexis product as an example, in the way that it draws upon the extraction of facetted data, and enables grouping of search results based on individual facets.

Susan Dumais, senior researcher at Microsoft Research discussed research prototypes that emphasized user contexts for the search process.  For example, a unified index of “stuff I’ve seen,” encompassing many information types, and drawing on indexes of content and metadata, supports users in “re-finding” and personalization.  Another example was the tight linking of searching and browsing, the ability readily to add faceted document types to a search argument, and “sideways search” – the ability to pivot on individual metadata types to enable specific kinds of “more like this” search extensions.

All in all, the session reinforced how much that is of value to searchers – professional and casual alike – is not currently being offered by Google; and how much value can be added via the processing and manipulation of search results.  As Dumais noted, “search is not an end in itself.”

Scientific/engineering and cultural content moving toward the Semantic Web

Monday morning at the NFAIS conference: the first session presented three fascinating examples of next-generation content enhancement approaches. Call them Semantic Web, Web 3.0 or what have you, each offered signposts for broader trends in the coming information content environment.

Most striking (and commercially significant) was today’s announcement (and the presentation by Rafael Sidi, vice president of product development for Elsevier's Engineering and
Technology Division/Corporate Markets) of illumin8, the result of a partnership between Elsevier and NetBase, Inc. From the press release:

illumin8 combines search and semantic indexing technologies to distill deep meaning, purpose and insight from…Elsevier’s full-text content, scientific abstracts from 4,000 publishers, patents and billions of web pages. This research tool extracts and analyzes solutions, which are then categorized under organizations, products, technologies, approaches, and experts. illumin8 is designed to go beyond simple keyword search, quickly finding and extracting crisp summarized answers and interrelationships that are semantically related to the context of the search query.

Krista Mantsch, senior research librarian at the National Geographic Society, provided an impressive overview of the many ways in which her organization is applying Web 2.0 technologies to the extension of the library’s services across the Society and its partners.  Most interesting to this blogger was the one externally-focused project she discussed, called Metalens. The result of another technology partnership, with Clear Path Labs, it is a beta initiative that uses semantic techniques to tie media and metadata to maps - connecting the “where” to the “what” and the “when,” to create a "bigger picture" (such as the travel narratives that NGS staff are beginning to create) from small, related media assets.

Finally, Martin Kalfatovic, head of the new media office and preservation services at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, described the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) project, created to support the Encyclopedia of Life inspired by E.O. Wilson and launched last May. The BHL is a collaboration among several major research libraries and museums involved with biology and botany. It is developing a corpus of some 300 million pages of relevant literature being scanned with the help of the Internet Archive. Of particular interest is a focus on creating “taxonomic intelligence,” using automated structural markup, semantic markup with geographic and taxonomic tags, and a variety of persistent identifiers. The BHL is seeking to work with publishers of copyrighted content, offering the advantages of scanning, structuring and managing their content, exposing it more widely, and imbedding it in related knowledge. To date, though, only a few small publishers are participating.

Bryan Alexander and Jean-Claude Bradley: Humanities and Science 2.0

The final two speakers on day one of the NFAIS conference, wrapping up the panel on the “merging culture of the new information order,” were Bryan Alexander, research director at the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, and Dr. Jean-Claude Bradley, associate professor of chemistry at Drexel University.  Each described a variety of initiatives to bring a more open, collaborative, participatory approach to communications in their respective disciplines.

Alexander how liberal arts academia, despite the closed technology environments of most course management systems, and Web 2.0’s perceived lack of seriousness, is beginning to adapt some of its models and approaches.  He estimated that 2-4% of liberal arts professors are now using blogs, and described  new media academic takes on old media (e.g. XKCD, “a web comic of romance, sarcasm, math and language”), shared media, distance learning (profcasting), and student media.

Bradley described how both research and teaching in science are evolving from closed to collaborative environments.  He described in detail his own approach to “open notebook science,” publishing all research work in real time to blogs, wikis, Second Life, and other online media.  Noting that finding collaborators has been the most beneficial impact of maximizing transparency in his own research activities, he looked ahead to the day when scientific research includes machine-to-machine collaborations in forming hypotheses, executing experiments, and analyzing the results.

Chris Willis (Footnote.com): We need to start thinking like anthropologists

Chris Willis, the co-author of the influential We Media report, and currently vice president of social media for Footnote.com (a site focusing on history-related materials) led off a session on "The Emerging Culture of the New Information Order." He stressed the importance of metaphors in organizing social media, and provided a powerful example.  Noticing that visitors to the Vietnam War Memorial often leave behind comments, dog tags, flowers, etc. which are then removed, Footnote created an image of the entire wall, and is inviting its community to use it as a platform for comments, questions, and other forms of participation and interaction.

"€œWe need to understand what it means to be human and to interact with others."  He presented (slides will be posted on the nfais.org site) an adaptation of Maslow’s hierarchy relating each stage to the related requirements for social media ("when people feel safe they start doing things"€).  Challenges include: how to manage the tension between individual and group?  How do you produce meaning from the miscellaneous?

His advice (not as simple as it sounds):

"Design to help people make your stuff better."

"Be interesting"