When Google Scholar launched five years ago on the Web, its aggregation of freely available scientific literature and citations launched some sizable seismic activity in publishing circles. All of a sudden, content that had been aggregated only via expensive subscription database services was available for [...] 
It seems as if there's hardly a week that goes by lately without some major announcement from Google, Microsoft and other technology providers that has major repercussions for the content industry. In the past week, we've had not just a major announcement but a major rumor' [...] 
I have to chuckle a bit at the recent Poynter Online email interview with Wikimedia Foundation's Jimmy Wales, in which he discusses an internal memo gleaned from Associated Press (PDF) by Nieman Journalism Lab. The AP memo, entitled "Protect, Point, Pay - An" [...] 
While business information remains a robust market segment in the content industry, it has not been without its challenges in recent years. Increasingly rapid changes in organizations and careers trigger demand for ever-fresher information on companies, people and products, making services that can help it to [...] 
In a move that shocked many B2B media insiders - including Incisive Media CEO Tim Weller - global information provider Reed Elsevier has announced the resignation of their CEO Ian Smith, to be replaced by Erik Engstrom, CEO of their Elsevier division. While [...] 
I've been suggesting to my friends at Dow Jones for more than five years that they needed to consider how to use their Factiva content more aggressively on the Web as a source for virtual aggregation of news and business information. Well, five years isn't that [...] 
These are not the rosiest of times for financial information services, with fewer people using their services in the face of large-scale financial industry cutbacks, but out of adversity sometimes comes opportunity. While there are fewer professionals generating and consuming market analysis and opinion at investment [...] 
A recent press release from Autonomy hailed an IDC report that gave them the leading market share for the search and discovery technology market. While congratulations are no doubt in order for Autonomy, which has thrived as other major competitors have struggled to gain momentum [...] 
You are reading a blog post that started as a comment. That in and of itself is hardly unusual for people who decide to leave detailed comments on one blog and then expand on them in their own blog, but the way that I did it [...]
On-demand book publishing has been a quiet reality behind the scenes for several years, now, with outlets such as Amazon and a handful of major universities and bookstores generating some books on an on-demand basis rather than shelving inventory. On the retail side of the equation, [...] 
I had the pleasure to hear two presentations recently by executives from the American Institute of Physics, the first by AIP Executive Director and CEO Fred Dylla at the recent ALPSP International Conference in Oxford, UK. Fred's presentation was an eloquent evaluation of the' [...] 
With many forecasts beginning to predict a bottom of sorts in the ad-supported content market, can an ad recovery be too far behind? It's a question that is probably harder to answer than ever, given the rise of social media tools as an increasingly important platform' [...] 
The word "semantic" is bandied about quite a bit these days in online publishing, a term that is used to label everything from systems that automatically categorize content based on the presence of key terms in its body to more human-assisted forms of content organization. Whatever [...] 
After a day or so of tweaking, software downloading and restoring files from my JungleDisk network backup drive, Ariel has come to life in full. The fourth of a series of Dell Latitude laptop PCs that I have used (we'll forget that Compaq that I' [...] 
With a webinar for MIT coming up at the end of September, I finally accepted that my aging laptop was overdue for an upgrade to keep up with the increasing need to be video-literate online. In the process of ordering up my new unit, I had [...] 
At first it might appear as if some people in the magazine industry are in dire need of searching for their sanity when you first read FOLIO:'s article on a spate of new magazine launches in recent weeks. Certainly print media has its fair share' [...] 
In my Wall Street days, one of the first uses for real-time information feeds into PCs devised by investment banks was to pump them into spreadsheets, which would in turn calculate information that could be republished out to the investment community. It was a very cost-effective [...] 
I had an interesting exchange on Twitter today with Rafat Ali, founder of paidContent.org and a person who I respect and admire greatly for his insights into the content industry (not to mention for having blown the socks off of many a trade pub over [...] 
I've been making the rounds lately amongst many of the major enterprise publishers, and while there are some bright spots here and there in their outlook and aggressiveness in challenging markets, I am afraid that the challenges to their earnings in a tough economy are taking' [...] 
While there's been enormous buzz about Kindle eBook readers from Amazon and, now, the new eBook platform offering from Barnes & Noble and an updated eBook reader from Sony, the broader truth is that eBooks represent just a sliver of the book industry as' [...] 
If I had a dollar for every opportunity over the past few years to blog about the ins and outs of Yahoo's present and future, I could take you out for a pretty good dinner. The soap-operatic saga of how the leading but beleaguered Web portal' [...] 
Scholarly publishing is faced with as broad an array of challenges as any other segment of the traditionally print-oriented publishing industry, with push-back from traditional sources of purchasing such as academic and corporate libraries, a dip in ad revenues as well as a rising array of [...] 
I am at a customer site today as part of our team that is delivering the results of a project based our new narrative research techniques that we're using as the basis of our new subscription study, "New Rules of Engagement: Re-Tooling Information Sales and'" [...] 
There have been any number of content aggregation services surfacing in recent years that have helped publishers to expand the richness of their Web sites. APIs, feeds and other tools are helping publishers to power up new online presences that offer new opportunities for ad revenues [...] 
You may have noticed that the Web site for Shore is looking a little fresher these days, thanks in part to some overdue updating of our widget technologies and thanks in larger part to the expansion of our team which is dedicated to offering you the [...] 
I have been using Google Chrome as my Web browser for several months, now, after giving up on Microsoft Internet Explorer years ago and then suffering from Firefox's add-ons and crashes bogging down what little memory was left on my PC. The Chrome browser fires off' [...] 
There has been a virtual tsunami of new product announcements coming out of Google lately, a wave of innovation that makes you wonder at times why private investors were so intent on putting money into in media companies with inflated multiples recently while content companies like [...] 
It's a tough market out there for startup companies, much less enterprise-oriented content startups, but LaunchBox Digital is an efficiency-oriented funder of startups that is helping good ideas to get off the ground on a shoestring. One of LaunchBox's newer properties is Legal River, [...] 
BookExpo America is one of the premier U.S. trade events, encompassing more than a few Wal-Marts of display space wherever it sets down. This year's event in New York was no exception, but more than ever there was a pall in the air of its' [...] 
There was some scuttlebutt buzzing around last week's duel between the Google I/O developer's conference and the All Things D conference to the effect that perhaps Google had some intelligence about the Ballmer announcement of the Bing-flavored preview of Microsoft's new Live Search search engine' [...] 
It's been a busy week for attention-getting events in content technologies, with the Google I/O developer's conference in San Francisco vying for mindshare with the All Things D conference in San Diego. Both were important events in their own right, with Steve Ballmer's announcement' [...] 
You may have noticed that Shore is beginning to build up its team of content industry experts, expanding our ability to help companies targeting media and enterprise content markets. Our mission is to help organizations to know their markets for content and technology products and services [...] 
I've had the privilege to have moderated many great SIIA panels over the years, but the 24 June Brown Bag Lunch mid-day event at the McGraw Hill building in New York City (online video available) certainly ranks among the most important topics that I've had the [...] 
While the tsunami of buzz surrounding the Wolfram|Alpha reference service (by their own claim not a search engine) seems to indicate a desire for novelty at least as much as interest in its actual merits, the service is one of a few major announcements this [...] 
The landscape of Europe is dotted with the ruins of hundreds of castles and city walls dating from the Medieval era of feudal rule, when local kings, dukes and other land-owners defended their claims to farms and forests through their ability to repel invaders from behind [...] 
When Gordon Crovitz left Dow Jones several months ago, I knew that his experiences in helping to build the most successful premium online news brand would be likely to result in good things somewhere. Gordon’s insights into the value of traditional journalism and his online savvy [...] 
In my recent trip to San Francisco to speak about Content Nation I headed down U.S. Highway 101 from San Francisco with Shore's John Buckman to a string of appointments that moved towards the bottom of San Francisco Bay in Santa Clara and worked up' [...] 
Cloud computing is an increasingly popular concept for enterprises trying to control their content and technology acquisition and distribution costs, enabling them to get more "bang for the buck" by turning many I.T. and publishing functions that used to be managed in-house over to third party [...] 
There's been a whirlwind of announcements, commentary and downright bad blood beginning to steam up around the Associated Press' moves to position news content from its own reporters and its member organizations more effectively in the online environment. [...] 
As CNET reports along with others the launch of voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone services via an iPhone application from Skype the world does not seem to be shifting on its axis, yet it's a significant step towards a new' [...] 
With newspapers and magazines folding virtually every week now in the face of a global economic crisis Clay Shirky is comparing the scope of change being experienced by the rise of online publishing's challenge to newspapers to the tumultuous change sparked by the rise of' [...] 
A fundamental problem that the publishing industry faces in getting revenues from online content is that most of the value that can be created from their content lies beyond their own Web sites and portals. With billions of Web publications vying to get people's attention and' [...] 
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberger and other prominent lights are weighing in on the launch of an application on Apple's iPhone that enables reading e-books [...] 
Last week's Social Media Club meeting was great for any number of reasons that I covered in my Content Nation blog post, but it was capped by one of those moments of serendipity that come' [...] 
As the financial industry has writhed and wrinkled under the pressures of a wilting market for securities, financial content vendors have squirmed along with them, trying to define value propositions that will enable them to help both traditional clients and any and all possible new ones [...] 
As you may recall David Carr triggered a firestorm of discussion in the media industry about micropayments with his 11 January column in The New York Times when he suggested that newspaper publishers should think about how Apple's iTunes platform does quite handily charging consumers' [...] 
I enjoyed this year's SIIA Information Industry Summit and Previews events very much; there were great presentations and great discussions throughout the two-plus days in New York. However, I was a bit disturbed by some of the gossip I heard percolating in the background about the' [...] 
After a challenging drive in to Manhattan with boxes of "Content Nation" in the back seat, Marjorie Scardino, Chief Executive of Pearson, was starting her keynote as I was plugging in to blog. What I heard was a good presentation of the typical promises and challenges [...] The 2009 edition of the SIIA Previews is playing to a gloomy investment environment this year, as highlighted in data presented in the beginning of the afternoon's session by hosts PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Kate Bluvol, Audit Partner for PWC, noted that 4Q08 saw a 26 percent drop in' [...] 
I have looked sometimes with a certain amount of envy at friends who thumb around on their Blackberries, iPhones and other high-power PDAs, but given that Shore uses Google Apps as its core technology for our distributed teamwork it never seemed to make sense to power [...] 
My trip to this year's excellent Infovision 2009 conference brought me to Bangalore, a still-booming city that enjoys great weather this time of year. Like most places in India Bangalore is a study in contrasts between the ancient and the modern, but perhaps more accentuated' [...] 
The very mention of the word "metadata" is enough to make some weary eyes in the content industry gloss over, perhaps triggering memories of conference speakers who droned on endlessly about precision, recall and taxonomies. Metadata is extremely important stuff, though, the "under the bonnet" information [...] 
For years major media companies have tried to finesse their transition into online markets. They've made investments in portals and ad-serving systems. They've built up online communities and search engine optimization schemes to maximize revenues from engaged audiences. In fact, publishers have done a lot of [...] 
Well, along with launching a book, tweaking our Web site and keeping a business a going concern, why not redesign the blog? Hey, it's a living. ContentBlogger has had a couple of minor redesigns through the years, and more is slated for the future, but' [...] 
Good news about the newspaper industry has been an oxymoron at best in a sinking global economy, and today is no exception. TheStreet.com confirms the buzz that The New York Times is taking out a USD 225 million loan against its new office building off [...] 
I am looking forward to moderating a panel for the SIIA on the 19th that will focus on cloud computing and its impact on publishing. I am particularly pleased that we have a balance of publishers and technology companies that will be able to address [...] 
As our nation looks at the election results this evening - and now this early morning - there are many statements about who won and why. There are many answers to this questions - certainly from a social media perspective I noted on Content Nation [...] 
There now, that wasn't so hard, was it...?
The announcement of Oracle's deal with content connector specialists MuseGlobal, Inc. to deploy their EverConnect technology for Oracle's Secure Enterprise Search platform may appear like a passing note in enterprise search at first pass, but it's worth more than a casual glance if' [...] 
Editor & Publisher notes along with many others the announcement by the Tribune Company that it has given its two-year notice to discontinue receiving content from the Associated Press. The E&P article cites the recent rate hikes from AP as a key factor [...] 
I am going to be moderating a panel on the opportunities for publishing in cloud computing on November 19th - more to come on that - so needless to say my head is in the cloud (computing) to some degree already. But when Microsoft announces a [...] 
AP notes along with others the announcement that Google plans to extend its print archives scanning program to include the print archives of any newspaper that would like to participate in their program. This new effort builds upon Google's existing scanning efforts to capture' [...] 
Amongst other things that I was checking out during my book-writing sabbatical was Amazon's Kindle portable reading device, courtesy of the Westport Public Library's lending desk. I checked out the unit for a few days, which actually turned into about two weeks due to [...] 
On a personal note I couldn't be more happy that after pioneering serious blog journalism on the business of media Rafat Ali's ContentNext is being acquired by the Guardian Media Group for north of USD 3o million, according to Dow Jones' All Things [...] 
It seems like only a few weeks ago that I was blogging about semantic search startup Powerset's soft-launch beta. In fact, it WAS only six weeks ago that we were covering Poweret's soft launch of new semantic search technology. But in that six weeks [...] 
The New York Stock Exchange has been careful through the years to keep feeds of trading data released to public media outlets hobbled with a fifteen-minute delay - in part to protect its revenues from financial institutions being charged for real-time data and in part [...] 
The mobile phone world was a-twitter with word that Nokia has purchased mobile software maker Symbian and will make the core of its software an open source resource some time later this year via a new Symbian Foundation, with other open-source assets to [...] 
A day that highlights world financial giant Citigroup's layoff of about ten percent of its workforce is a somewhat odd time to be running a profile of Thomson Reuters, but The New York Times has done just that. The article is entitled "The New [...] 
I've tried to remain low-key about the Associated Press action against the Drudge Retort, a parody of the famous Drudge Report political Web site, but given the furor out there I think that a post on the topic is worthwhile. The AP has raised [...] 
In what promises (for now) to be the end of the Silicon Valley soap opera known as the future of Yahoo, AP reports that Yahoo opted to seal a deal with Google for both the use of Google's ad network and enabling the interoperability of [...] 
Building on Wednesday's launch of free individual and bulk company data from Jigsaw there's an announcement from business information provider Hoover's on its addition of more than a million new contacts for mid-level executives in major companies from an unnamed third party [...] 
I was telemarketed by a polling company the other night, one of those occasional attempts to figure out what adults listen to on the radio these days. Given my profile the questions were rather quaint. What New York music station do I listen to? (None.) How [...] 
The shameless self-promotion division of Shore is proud to announce that I'll be amongst the speakers at next week's SIIA Brown Bag Lunch panel presentation on Wednesday, 11 June focusing on how to attract, monetize and retain audiences and clients through search technologies. The panel will [...] 
This year's BookExpo America in Los Angeles featured much of the usual multi-story ballyhoo of years past, with a thinner crowd and thinning expectations for the book industry in general, though with a few bright exceptions. One of these exceptions has been Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, [...] 
The launch of the beta for Google Health
At the SIIA NetGain conference in San Francisco George Hu, EVP of SalesForce.com Products and Marketing, gave both a great summary of their product philosophy and a demonstration of their Force.com integration with Google Apps. Nothing terribly new in all of this, but what struck me more [...] 
The CBS Corporation Web site features photos of their television news staff, most of whom are well into their sixties, or well further in some instances, interspersed with shots of the young stars of some of their entertainment shows. Both motifs show some of the [...] 
In years past one could visit the head office of Bloomberg, L.P. and peer into the newsroom right off of the main lobby. Mike Bloomberg's office was right off of that news floor, with a glass partition that segregated him about as much as a [...] 
There's the usual spate of moans and groans about print profits coming out of the Argyle Executive Forum on Leadership in Media, according to Red Herring, which featured insights from many key figures in today's news media markets. This negative outlook is underscored by [...] 
The announcement of Adhere Solution's partnership with MuseGlobal to launch the "All Access Connector," a federated content integration solution for the Google Search Appliance, is one of those situations where an event is both obvious and profound in its potential impact on the [...] 
Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang adds to his signature in his weblog posts the moniker "Chief Yahoo," a label that seems to be more of an epithet in the mouths of some shareholders and dealmakers disappointed by Yahoo's recent and apparently final rejection of a potential Microsoft [...]
