Google and Publishing
October 13, 2008
Update, October 16, 2008.
Another view of Google’s content play on YouTube.com is here.
Original Post
My publisher Infonortics Ltd. called me Saturday, chiding me for not having the new “Google Publishing” monograph completed. I have been a busy little goose and the new study by Martin White and me took a bit longer than I anticipated. Nevertheless, the Google publishing monograph is moving forward. I have done a couple of posts on this Web log and on my Web site about Google and its publishing technology. I don’t want to rehash the “dossier” function I discussed at the Enterprise Search Summit in May 2008 nor will I rehash the technologies I described for the Buying and Selling eContent crowd in April 2008. What I want to do is define publishing because there seems to be almost as much confusion about my definition of the word “publishing” as there is about the word “search”.
Publishing to me means creating information and distributing it. This worked for Johannes Gutenberg, and it works today. Distributing is a little more slippery. In the dead tree age of publishin, distributing meant putting a paper instance in the hands of a reader. The Romans anticipated this by posting important information in public places on wax tablets, animal skins, and sometimes stone for lasting messages. Now the digital age allows distribution to occur via RSS feeds and other paper free mechanisms like Tweets.
The confusion arises because traditional publishing companies do not really create information. Most publishers get people to collect, synthesize, and write down information. The publisher is really a packaging and marketing operation. The author is roughly akin to a farmer. The publisher is the giant company that converts the raw material into Wheaties.
The digital age, citizen journalism, and other developments have disrupted the farmer-cereal company process. Now publishers can and are being disintermediated. The lousy reports of newspaper revenues make clear that publishers sell ads. The block buster dependence of book publishers illustrate the business model of push out lots of stuff and hope that one title hits. The sci tech publishing model of charging authors for page proofs and then hitting libraries for hefty subscription fees clarifies the business model.
I am confident that professional publishers will howl with my definition and the farmer-Wheaties metaphor. That’s okay. My real focus is Google.
Where does Google fit into publishing? Here’s a quick run down. For the sources, the patent documents, and the technical papers, you will have to hang on until the new monograph appears or dig these references out of the papers and articles I have already published.
First, Google is an end to end content engine. In its early days, Google was little more than a directory maker. It indexed and people looked up where to find information. The company’s additioin of ads and the system for advertisers to input their copy is publishing in my definition.
Second, Google’s acquisition of JotSpot gave it a more robust content intake system. When combined with Dr. Guha’s programmable search engine (described in the BearStearns’ report a year ago), Google has the plumbing to ingest information, metatag those data, and recombine those data to create a new construct. Mark Logic sells this type of system; Google has its own.
Third, Google has Web logs, the Google Base, and the intake systems visible as Google Docs.
Fourth, Google has traffic, monetization functions, and methods to match ads to queries. I don’t think I am too far off base when I suggest that Google can rejiggle these pieces to generate a link to a Google assembled output in response to a user’s query. In short, on demand assembly of content: that’s what commercial publishers do using human intermediated methods. Google uses algorithms.
If you want to argue that Google is not a publisher because Google’s Eric Schmidt asserts to publishers that Google is not a publisher, I’m not interested. If you have examples that refute these four points, let me receive a fact broadside in the comments section of this Web log.
One final point: Google may not think of itself as a publisher. Google follows the clicks, follows the money. There’s money in new assemblies of existing facts and opinion. Google may be in the publishing business blissfully unaware that it is the digital equivalent of Henry Ford’s River Rouge. Iron ore and coal went in one end and automobiles came out the other. History is repeating itself but today’s River Rouge is a digital factory built, owned, operated, and monetized by the GOOG.
Stephen Arnold, October 13, 2008
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