The Courier Journal and Winning Horse Races
May 2, 2010
Post-Derby day. Sunday newspaper day. Depressing, and it is only 9 am.
A near miss in New York City excited the NPR news team this morning (May 2, 2010). Nary a word about Greece, Spain, and Portugal, however. To get the details, I had to fire up my laptop and check out online news sources.
I walked to the end of my driveway to retrieve the Courier-Journal, where I used to work. I also picked up my home delivery copy of the New York Times. The NYT was wet because the blue plastic bag was not closed, so water happily nestled in the newsprint. I could tell at a glance that the NYT closed before the problem in Times Square was news. I tossed the paper aside to dry.
The C-J was the ad section and the soft features. No front page. What was delivered dripped water on the kitchen floor. My wife told me to sort the newspaper in the garage. Fun. The Derby was yesterday and I was curious about the coverage of the event. Despite the nose dive in the original content in the C-J over the last 20 years, reporters do hoof and gallop around the Derby in search of “stories”. Well, mostly it is “who got rich,” “who showed up”, and “who got in trouble”. No joy. A call to the C-J’s hotline triggered a recording that told me there were production problems with the Sunday paper. No big deal. There’s online, Twitter, and Facebook. The story was online here “Production Problems Prevent Delivery of Full Sunday Courier Journal.” I wonder if there were cutbacks and efficiencies applied that made one of the highest circulation editions of the year fail? Like aircraft maintenance, no one knows what shifts have been made until the toilets don’t work, the flights can’t leave the gate, or the pilot reports a “slight issue and some paperwork”.
The one section of the C-J that showed up is called “Forum”, and what do you know? The front page of section H for Sunday, May 2, 2010, ran a story with this headline: “Rethink: Newspapers are better off than you may think.” The author is a fellow named Arnold Garson, whom I don’t know. His picture shows a kindly visage in dark suit with red tie and the slug: “The Courier Journal remains a strong and credible local news provider and a profitable business today.”
Since my Sunday paper was missing the front page, the sports section, and some other bits, I am not on board with the assertion about “a strong and credible local news provider.” I think the “profitable business” part is really the point.
I read the article, which purports to be the text of a speed delivered on April 7, 2010, to the Downtown Kiwanis Club meeting. The article is a long piece, running about 80 column inches. If Mr. Garson read this speech, I am delighted I was not in attendance.
Summarizing the talk is easy: C-J makes money, reaches more than 85 percent of the readers, and makes money. Oh, I repeated myself. Sorry, but that point jumps out a couple of times in the text of the talk.
I noted some other highlights as well:
- The C-J is performing better than other newspapers; that is, “less bad” is “good”
- Delivery of the hard copy to “outlying areas” has been trimmed
- Ad rates and subscription prices are going up
- TV news viewers are older than C-J newspaper readers
- A 100 million people read newspapers.
You get the idea.
The C-J’s local Web site attracts 1.3 million unique users per month and generates 16 million page views. The C-J has achieved 380,000 mobile impressions per month. That’s good. The questions I had were:
- What’s a “unique”? What’s a page view” What’s a mobile impression?
- How does this compare with Facebook’s 400 million users in early 2010, up from 150 million in early 2009?
- What’s the relationship between circulation decline and uptake of the C-J’s Web site?
I could crank out more questions, but I want to jump to the wrap up of the talk. This is the assertion I find most interesting:
Ninety-nine percent of the nation’s newspapers, including The Courier-Journal will survive this recession based on our own core strengths, our determination to transform our business model and through the lift we will get from the recovery itself.
I am not sure how to make the leap from 99 percent survivability to “our own core strengths”. The core strengths seem to be advertising. I am not convinced the C-J does much local news. I understand determination. The assertion about the recovery seems to be a “maybe” argument. But it is tough to get coverage of the European financial crisis based on my reading the C-J every day. I have to turn elsewhere for that information.
Why do I think the talk is baloney? First, I fund the Seed2020 meet ups for women- and minority-owned businesses. I know that none of the more than 20 companies featured in the meet ups since November 2009 have been covered in the C-J. A couple of these businesses are real stories with solid news value. Nope. No coverage. One can argue that the weakening Business First, American Cities Business Journal publication is taking up the slack. Nope. The Seed2020 events show that there are solid news stories that are just not covered. I find the C-J argument on ground as muddy as the race track yesterday.
Second, without the C-J’s front page or the coverage of the NYT event in Times Square, I question the value of the newspaper as a timely source of information. Traditional deadlines and production problems underscore the irrelevance of the “business model” that will keep 99 percent of the newspapers in business. Mr. Garson does not provide any reference points for the number of newspapers in business in 1900, the number in 2000, and the number today. I do touch on this issue in Google: The Digital Gutenberg and won’t repeat the decline, consolidation, and homogeneity referenced in my monograph.
Third, the folks I know who are 55 and younger are not into newspapers. I watched how my son’s friends, now in their 30s, looked at the sports pages and their iPads and Macbooks. They talked to one another, chatted on their mobile devices, and sent text messages. This behavior took place as we sat at the kitchen table. The newspaper was marginalized.
Bottom-line: Timeliness, medium, and business model are intermingling with the DNA of people who don’t find the hard copy newspaper relevant. The C-J’s Arnold Garson is putting a positive spin on a reality that does not exist in our household.
Of course, I live in one of those outlying areas in Kentucky. I can log on to Newsnow.co.uk and learn about Europe. I can check Craigslist.com for ads. I can scan my Twitter stream to learn about the horrific accident that took place at Highway 42 and Highway 841 at 6 45 am.
No C-J needed for that. And I used to work there. Big changes to which the C-J and papers like the NYT are struggling to adapt. Like the long shots in the Derby yesterday, only one horse won. In my opinion, the C-J and the NYT are both entering the media race next year with long odds. Just my opinion and it is as valuable as a tip at the track.
Stephen E Arnold, May 2, 2010
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Yahoo and Search Models
April 30, 2010
I received an email this morning pointing to the strong showing of Google at the recent Web conference in Raleigh, North Carolina. I responded that Yahoo continues to push forward with what seem to me academic-type initiatives. In terms of traffic and revenue growth, I am waiting for some real action to take place.
After writing the email to the person who pinged me about Yahoo, I read “Yahoo’s Search Model Developing a New Face.” Suddenly this morning it is a Yahoo renascence, at least for a few minutes. The SFGate story recycles the conference presentations. The idea in the write up struck me as a variant of publish or perish or publicity or perish.
The passage that caught my attention was:
[The Yahoo report] … found that people only spend about one-sixth of their online time performing searches. That compares with half of their time for browsing and one-third for communicating, according to aggregated data pulled from the Yahoo Toolbar, a downloadable browser feature that provides quick links to a user’s favorite content.
The research shows that people are “doing” things to find information. Yep, that’s search. The problem is that the word “search” is pretty much without meaning in my opinion. The reality is that the yammer about social networks is missing the obvious point; that is, some users prefer to rely on what those in their so-called network tell them, not what an ad choked, power besotted, marketing injected public Web search system tells them.
Search vendors and their research papers are in the ivery tower world. Interesting stuff, but it is not as relevant as traffic and money. Source: http://www.ivorytowerframes.com/3765/IVORYTOWERIMAGE11.jpg
How do I know?
First, look at the sudden shift from Web search to services like Facebook. Even Caterina Fake’s Hunch.com service is about finding information. True, it combines smart software with inputs from humans but it indicates the boundary condition for the phase change that is taking place.
American Style Management and Search
April 22, 2010
At lunch today (April 13, 2010), there was a brief discussion about the article “Will France Outlaw American-Style Macho-Management?” The main idea is that a French executive implemented some “American style” management tactics. The result was employee dissatisfaction and alleged suicides as a result of work pressure. The Europeans with whom I spoke were uniformly critical of American MBAs and their management styles. I have worked with managers from different countries. Some of these individuals were American trained executives and others were graduates of the school of hard knocks.
After lunch, I did some thinking about the search companies’ management styles. In general, I find that the most hard charging professionals are in the sales and marketing departments. The staff at these companies is usually lean with much of the work outsourced. My exchanges with senior managers has been pretty much in line with my dealings with senior executives in government agencies in the US and elsewhere and in non profit and charity organizations. Most of these professionals have a deep concern for the customer and staff. Knowledge of products and their underlying technologies may be a bit of a challenge for some senior managers, particularly those who must chase funds and sales. Keeping the lights on takes precedence over the nitty gritty details. When I hear the phrase “lost in the weeds”, my radar registers an intruder.
Most of the potholes that I identify as weaknesses in search come not from top management but from the methods of implementing certain technical functions. I also find that outsourcing causes a fair share of disruption as well. Toss in the excitement needed to make sales, squirt marketing juice into the gears, and upselling services, and I find a volatile mix. There is also quite a bit of confusion generated by consultants who describe many different vendors in glowing terms because these happy words sell reports and consulting work but not necessarily search or content processing systems.
Search management survival. Source: http://www.hhmi.org/images/bulletin/feb2009/survival_image.jpg
Several observations:
- The pressure to generate revenue leads to some of the issues that I encounter. One small company did not get its funding and the pressure on the executives is palpable. There are quite a few vendors competing for search contracts, and I think that the advantage will remain with the companies that have a high profile and benefits that make sense to the client. I don’t think it is possible to advertise, Twitter, and blog oneself into the big time in search. Clients don’t have the time to verify that a newcomer’s system works. Most deals go to companies that have a track record. Companies that don’t need to generate revenue from a search license may have an advantage because “price” drops out of the procurement equation in some cases.
- The PR firms handling search have a great pitch, but most of these outfits crash and burn in their approach to the subject of search. Examples range from copy that literally sounds like other vendors’ promotional material to muddling Intranet search, Web site search, and Web search. I receive email begging me to view a demo and to interview a CEO. I am not a journalist. If I took time to participate in each of these demos, I would have no time to write my Google monographs and support my handful of clients. I think I have made two PR people cry and earned the wrath of dozens of others because I tell them no, leave me alone, or do your homework. Sadly the appeals to me are increasing.
- The potential licensees of a search system are increasingly confused. When I wrote the first edition of the Enterprise Search Report in 2003, I had a tough time explaining the differences between a couple of dozen vendors. If I were to tackle that type of project in 2010, I am not sure I could do the job as effectively as I did six or seven years ago. The reason is that some of the major vendors are increasingly alike. This gravitation to a common set of functions is partly the result of some leading firms buying other companies and partly because traditional search is becoming a commodity. The specialized systems steer clear of enterprise search and sell directly to the executive who needs this function. Examples range from a customer support system to a warranty analysis system to an eDiscovery system. In each case, a specific unit of an organization has a content problem to solve. Search is part of a broader solution.
- The new frontier in my opinion merges finding information, using it in a business process, and making specialized functions available to users. Examples include business intelligence, report generation, email alerts and notifications, and other features that may not look like search at first glance.
The Seven Forms of Mass Media
April 21, 2010
Last evening on a pleasant boat ride on the Adriatic, a number of young computer scientists to be were asking about my Google lecture. A few challenged me, but most seemed to agree with my assertion that Google has a large number of balls in the air. A talented juggler, of course, can deal with five or six balls. The average juggler may struggle to keep two or three in sync.
One of the students shifted the subject to search and “findability.” As you know, I floated the idea that search and content processing is morphing into operational intelligence, preferably real-time operational intelligence, not the somewhat stuffy method of banging two or three words into a search box and taking the most likely hit as the answer.
The question put to me was, “Search has not kept up with printed text, which has been around since the 1500s, maybe earlier. What are we going to do about mobile media?”
The idea is that we still have a difficult time locating the precise segment of text or datum. With mobile devices placing restraints on interface, fostering new types of content like short text messages, and producing an increasing flow of pictures and video, finding is harder not easier.
I remembered reading “Cell Phones: The Seventh Mass Media” and had a copy of this document on my laptop. I did not give the assertion that mobile derives were a mass medium, but I thought the insight had relevance. Mobile information comes with some interesting characteristics. These include:
- The potential for metadata derived from the user’s mobile number, location, call history, etc
- The index terms in content, if the system can parse information objects or unwrap text in an image or video such as converting an image to ASCII and then indexing the name of a restaurant or other message in an object
- Contextual information, if available, related to content, identified entities, recipients of messages, etc.
- Log file processing for any other cues about the user, recipient(s), and information objects.
What this line of thinking indicates is that a shift to mobile devices has the potential for increasing the amount of metadata about information objects. A “tweet”, for instance, may be brief but one could given the right processing system impart considerable richness to the information object in the form of metadata of one sort or another.
The previous six forms of media—[I] print (books, magazines, and newspapers), [II] recordings; [III] cinema; [IV] radio; [V] television; and [VI] Internet—fit neatly under the umbrella of [VII] mobile. The idea is mobile embraces the other six. This type of reasoning is quite useful because it gathers some disparate items and adds some handles and knobs to the otherwise unwieldy assortment in the collection.
In the write up referenced above, I found this passage interesting: “Mobile is as different from the Internet as TV is from the radio.”
The challenge that is kicked to the side of the information highway is, “How does one find needed information in this seventh mass media?” Not very well in my experience. In fact, finding and accessing information is clumsy for textual information. After 500 years, the basic approach of hunting, Easter egg style, has been facilitated by information retrieval systems. But I think most people who look for information can point out some obvious deficiencies. For example, most retrieval systems ignore content in various languages. Real time information is more of a marketing ploy than a useful means of figuring out the pulse count for a particular concept. A comprehensive search remains a job for a specialist who would be recognized by an archivist who worked in Ephesus’ library 2500 years ago.
Are you able to locate this video on Ustream or any other video search system? I could not, but I know the video exists. Here is a screen capture. Finding mobile content can be next to impossible in my opinion.
When I toss in the radio and other rich media content, finding and accessing pose enormous challenges to a researcher and a casual user alike. In my keynote speech on April 15, 2010, I referenced some Google patent documents. The clutch of disclosures provide some evidence that Google wants to apply smart software to the editorial job of creating personalized rich media program guides. The approach strikes me as an extension of other personalization approaches, and I am not convinced that explicit personalization is a method that will crack the problem of finding information in the seventh medium or any other for that matter.
Here’s my reasoning:
- Search and retrieval methods for text don’t solve problems. The more information processed means longer results lists and an increase in the work required to figure out where the answer is.
- Smart systems like Google’s or the Cuil Cpedia project are in their infancy. An expert may find fault with smart software that is actually quite stupid from the informed user’s point of view.
- Making use of context is a challenging problem for research scientists but asking one’s “friends” may be the simplest, most economical, and widely used method. Facebook’s utility as a finding system or Twitter’s vibrating mesh may be the killer app for finding content from mobile devices.
- As impressive as Google’s achievements have been in the last 11 years, the approach remains largely a modernization of search systems from the 1970s. A new direction may be needed.
The bright young PhDs have the job of figuring out if mobile is indeed the seventh medium. The group with which I was talking or similar engineers elsewhere have the job of cracking the findability problem for the seventh medium. My hope is that on the road to solving the problem of the new seventh medium’s search challenge, a solution to finding information in the other six is discovered as well.
The interest in my use of the phrase “operational intelligence” tells me one thing. Search is a devalued and somewhat tired bit of jargon. Unfortunately substituting operational intelligence for the word search does not address the problem of delivering the right information when it is needed in a form that the user can easily apprehend and use.
There’s work to be done. A lot of work in my opinion.
Stephen E Arnold, April 20, 2010
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Google and Disruption: Will It Work Tomorrow?
April 15, 2010
Editor’s Note: The text in this article is derived from the notes prepared by Stephen E Arnold’s keynote talk on April 15, 2010. He delivered this speech as part of Slovenian Information Days in Portoroz, Slovenia.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am most grateful for the opportunity to address this group and offer some observations about Google and its disruptive tactics.
I started tracking Google’s technical inventions in 2002. A client, now out of business, asked me to indicate if “Google really had something solid.”
My analysis showed a platform diagram and a list of markets that Google was likely to disrupt. I captured three ideas in my 2005 monograph “The Google Legacy“, which is still timely and available from Infonortics Ltd. in Tetbury, Glos.
The three ideas were:
First, Google had figured out how to add computing capacity, including storage, using mostly commodity hardware. I estimated the cost in 2002 dollars as about one-third what companies like Excite, Lycos, Microsoft, and Yahoo and were paying.
Second, Google had solved the problem of text search for content on Web pages. Google’s engineers were using that infrastructure to deliver other types of services. In 2002, there were rumors that Google was experimenting with services that ranged from email to an online community / messaging system. One person, whose name I have forgotten, pointed out that Google’s internal network MOMA was the test bed for this type of service.
Third, Google was not an invention company. Google was an applied research company. The firm’s engineers, some of whom came from Sun Microsystems and AltaVista.com, were adepts at plucking discoveries from university research computing tests and hooking them into systems that were improvements on what most companies used for their applications. The genius was focus and selection and integration.
Google is an information factory, a digital Rouge River construct. Raw materials enter at one end and higher value information products and services come out at the other end of the process.
In my second Google monograph, funded funded in part by another client, I built upon my research into technology and summarized Google’s patent activities between 2004 and mid 2007. Google Version 2.0: The Calculating Predator, also published by Infonortics Ltd., disclosed several interesting facts about the company.
Mindbreeze Goes Mobile
April 2, 2010
Fabasoft has rolled out a new add-on to allow licensed users to search via a smartphone or other mobile device.
I spoke with Michael Hadrian, the managing director of Fabasoft Distribution in Linz, Austria. Fabasoft is the holding company of Mindbreeze enterprise search system. In that conversation, I picked up two interesting insights into the Fabasoft Mindbreeze push into the market for enterprise search.
Mindbreeze Enterprise Mobile result list.
First, the Mindbreeze search technology, recently profiled in a consultant’s report, is now available as a cloud-based service. The idea is to shift from an on-premises installation to one that Fabasoft / Mindbreeze can provision and operate from the cloud. Mr. Hadrian told me, “The major benefits are achieving business related results faster and reducing the burden on an organization’s internal information technology resources.”
Second, a Mindbreeze licensee gains access to the company’s mobile interface. The idea is that a worker, regardless of his / her location, can use the Fabasoft Mindbreeze products to locate information in a wide range of sources processed by the Fabasoft Mindbreeze Enterprise system. These range from the standard Microsoft Office file types to more proprietary repositories such as those used by Lotus Domino / Notes customers.
A mobile search metadata display.
Dominoes Circa 2010
March 24, 2010
I was a college student when the “domino theory” was the firewood for many heated conversations. My memory is dim, but I recall that the idea was that if one country fell to a non-democratic, non-market based system, then other adjacent countries would go the same way.
Source: http://community.middlebury.edu/~scs/maps/oilnames.gif
The metaphor is that a line of dominos can be converted into a brief, but somewhat entertaining, event. I never played dominos so I did not relate to the metaphor.
But when I read “Remaining Google Units Exposed: Analysts”, I had a flashback, saw an image of Robert McNamara (Ford executive and strategist par excellence), and a row of dominos set up by a bright 10 year old on the kitchen table. Weird how the mind makes associations that defy time and logic.
The article appeared in The Globe and Mail, which is a pretty good newspaper but not available in hard copy in Louisville. Online reading is hard on my 65 year old eyes but I worked through this article. The most important segment in my opinion was:
Other stakeholders exposed to Google’s actions include cell phone makers like Dell and Lenovo, which are both developing Android-based phones for China, as well as the hundreds of people who independently sell ads and develop software for Google’s products. Spokeswomen at Lenovo and China Mobile, which is planning to offer the Dell Android phones on its network, had no immediate comment. Meantime, other search sites operators stand ready to benefit most form Google’s withdrawal, most notably Baidu – which has 60 per cent of China’s search market – and others such as fast-growing Tencent, analysts said.
What happens if other and unanticipated interactions among Google, China, its partners, its suppliers, and its customers take place?
Source: http://www.insidesocal.com/clippers/dominoeffect.jpg
The Discovery Hoax: Commercial Databases Make Big Promises
March 8, 2010
I was given a box lunch and a can of Pepsi as compensation for my one hour talk at a conference last week. I had an interesting conversation with a former big wheel in commercial database publishing. I thought the wizard was a retired poobah. I was wrong. The fellow had his shoulder pads on, a sweatband, and Gucci cleats. He’s back on a commercial company’s publishing team. I am an old, cowardly goose, and it is with trepidation that I get too close to big people garbed for quasi-military re-enactments related to electronic information.
I asked the industry titan what his new gig involved. I recall one word, which he repeated several times to me, the addled goose. The word? “Discovery.” I thought I was having a The Graduate moment. In 2010, plastic was a loser. The winner? Discovery.
Yep, the lingo of the search and content processing market has reached the world of professional publishing and for-fee database access.
The idea, as I understood it, is that this commercial company will allow a user to enter a keyword; for example, employee stock ownership. The system will crunch away and present:
- Results from the firm’s for fee databases. Not just anyone can run a search. The user has to have access to an institutional account or sign up and pay. There is some free stuff, but this is a real, live make-money-or-die operation.
- The system will also “discover” possibly related content and list that information in the form of links. I think the idea the titan was communicating is what Endeca calls “Guided Navigation” in 1999! Not exactly yesterday! To see the Endeca system in action just go to OfficeFurniture.com.
- Content from the public Web.
The idea is that a person using a commercial system will enter a search string and then see links to related content. This works for buying office furniture. I am not sure how a computational chemist would react to a suggestion she read a blog post about a meth lab that blows up.
Yep, our professional grade service needs those custom chrome wheels. Image source: http://www.up.ac.za/organizations/movup/images/minefun/indian_haul_truck.jpg
I asked what happened if I used one of the company’s business databases and entered the search term “management.” I got a bit of double talk and the titan backed up, trying to get away from me. The reason I asked about this type of search is that I know from hands-on experience that the use of a general controlled term in his firm’s databases does not generate a usable results list. Thus, any “discovered” information is likely to be wide of the mark. Broad queries don’t often work too well in the for-fee, quite specific content in certain commercial systems. A single word like “management” in a Google search box generates what is highly ranked by clueless millions like a link to the Wikipedia entry.
When Domains Collide
March 1, 2010
Editors’s Note: This is a modified version of the lecture that Stephen E Arnold, ArnoldIT.com delivered in Philadelphia, March 1, 2010. The actual presentation was an extemporaneous talk based on this preliminary set of notes.
I want to thank NFAIS for inviting me to address the members of this professional organization. The world of bibliography, abstracting, indexing, professional publishing and academic research has been shaken to its foundations in the last three or four years. The Richter scale measuring the waves pulsing through the bedrock of information access is being stretched. I find that talking about what is happening and what information professionals can do about those pulses difficult.
This morning I want to put the pulses into a context. I am cautiously optimistic about a finding my research has revealed. Specifically, the shocks are coming from the integration of formerly separate disciplines into new services. In short, the traditional methods are being put into software and hardware modules and used to build new, more efficient, and more flexible services. Complete information businesses are now a commodity component that a clever engineer can use like a building block. Good news for engineers skilled in integration. Not such good news for experts in a hand-craft like Linotype operation. By snapping together modules, domains collide and are reinvented.
That’s today’s world of information.
Where We Are
Today we live in a world of a number of global, possibly monopolistic online research services stands and literally a hundred million or more citizen journalists creating blogs and tweets.
Until recently, say about 1979 or 1980, a scholar transported from the 11th century scriptorium would have become familiar quickly with the hard copy research books painstakingly documented by Constance Winchell. But move that person to today’s world and the mental shift would be more difficult, perhaps impossible.
Bring that 11th century researcher to today’s world, and I think adjustment would be difficult. Since the advent of online (anyone remember NLS?), information is just “out there”. Today information is “here” when it appears on a screen. The display of information is evanescent until it is “written”—that is, copied—to a storage device which may be located “out there”. It is possible to print an item of information, but the digital instance is the “real information.” This is a significant conceptual shift since online became our common information currency.
In fact, I cannot begin work until I “find” the particular electronic instance on which I am to work. Without search and retrieval, I am a cooked goose.
And just finding a particular document can be difficult even with the many search systems available. If our time traveling 11th century research can print a document, the information needed may surrounded by unwanted images and advertisements. Without the ability to recognize the “real” information our 11th century scholar would be hard pressed to use today’s information retrieval systems. The monk comes from another time, and that time has its own domain of information. The domain includes ways to create information, way to access information, and ways to reference other information. The monk might be squashed when his domain collided with the domain of 2010 information access. When domains collide, methods are crushed, recycled, and remade. This is deeply disturbing to people who cling to specific ways of doing such things as research.
The implications of domain collision are important in my opinion. Economics, human behavior, work processes, and speed are defined by domains. Let’s run down a handful of the challenges domain collisions ignite. The good news is that domains that touch create a boundary condition in which opportunities can flourish.
Challenges of Domain Collisions
If you have a business school degree, you have studied the touchstone buggy whip reference in Theodore Levitt’s “Marketing Myopia” that appeared in the Harvard Business Journal in 1960. The idea is that a buggy whip manufacturer who anticipated the advent of the automobile could have expanded the product line to include a leather steering wheel wrap or automobile interiors.
Thus, the problem is that each domain has a certain way of perceiving phenomena. I won’t dwell on phenomenological existentialism, but I think it has quite a bit to teach us about what we can see when something “new” this way comes. We are, in the telling phrase of William James, stricken with “a certain blindness”. We simply cannot see beyond our domain. When domains collide, not only our vision is impaired we must deal with processes and methods that have been transformed by the forces involved.
Not surprising, the problems of apprehending have triggered a cascade of challenges. Vocabulary is an issue. One example is the use of abbreviated spelling and neologisms to communicate in Twitter “tweets” or short messages via a mobile device. Messages such as ru w/me grate on some. To those in the domain, the messages is clear and appropriate.
Other phenomena I have observed include:
- Work methods crafted for one domain such as copying a manuscript by hand on animal skin do not transfer to another domain such as copying information to a storage device. An entire lifetime of learning is irrelevant in the new domain.
- The time required to assemble a document is measured by manual tasks that are often organized in a sequential manner. The digital domain allows many tasks to be handled quickly and, in some cases, in parallel.
- The costs for manual, serialized work processes can be problematic. When software can be used to eliminate certain work previously done by humans, the economics change.
I think you can see from these examples that our time traveling researcher from Mont St Michel in the Middle Ages would have a steep learning curve.
I have given quite a bit of thought to the implications of this type of domain collision. I know when I look at banking, retail, manufacturing, and finding the right person to marry that domain collisions are one of the defining attributes of today’s world.
Publishing
I want to comment about publishing because most NFAIS members are involved in the creation, selection, and dissemination of information. The domain collision began with the advent of the online search systems for the NASA RECON project, the work of Dr. Gerald Salton (Cornell University), and the non-linear increase in the capabilities of hardware and software.
What is interesting to me is that since this revolution began, arguably in the 1970s, publishing has been eager to embrace certain technologies yet reluctant to get too close to other technologies.
Let me give you an example. When I worked at the Courier Journal & Louisville Times Co., we operated a rotogravure press and we printed the New York Times Sunday Magazine. We embraced traditional rotograveur printing technology and then we adopted technology that chopped the manual plate making process out of the work flow. We used computers, fancy software, and numerically-controlled presses as early as the early 1980s.
The Courier-Journal Board of Directors understood the importance of electronic information and created a separate separate business unit to build digital products. I was lucky to participate in the development a profitable online business with ABI/INFORM, Business Dateline, Pharmaceutical News Index, and the core technical databases that were the foundation of today’s Cambridge Scientific Abstracts. This work took place in the early 1980s and relied on traditional mainframes and timesharing businesses like Tymnet and Dialcom as service bureaus.
I know from first-hand experience that those who managed the technologies steeped in the domain of traditional newspaper production believed their unit of the company was in the thick of technological change. The electronic publishing technology was a radical and strange undertaking. The people running the state-of-the-art four color printing presses did not see how electronic information could be a viable business.
We know now that the electronic publishing technology has emerged as one of the key technologies for information companies today. In fact, the brutal struggles between Macmillan and Amazon, Apple and Sony, and Google and book publishers are anchored in the technology that was a second-class citizen in the 1980s.
What’s interesting is that within publishing the domain of the traditional products like books, music, motion pictures, and television programming is now colliding with the domain of the network computing infrastructure. Complete businesses and their nested processes are now a Web service. One can download a electronic publishing system as open source software. The key point is that anyone anywhere in the world can become a digital newsroom with a Web site, newsfeed, and a community.
What’s even more interesting is that the agents of change are the children of many publishing executives and in some cases, the former employees of established publishing and rich media companies.
Another interesting point is that the new domain of content production is surrounding the traditional information industry which Paul Zirkowski tried to capture in this diagram from the Information Industry Association in the mid-1980s, which, in my opinion, nicely summarizes what we now know as the Petri dish for Amazon, Apple, and Google, among other firms.
This is a diagram created by the “old” Information Industry Association. Created in the mid 1980s, it is an attempt to show how the information world at that was beginning to develop. What’s interesting is that the successes of Amazon, Apple, and Google, among other companies is dependent to some degree on combining several of these “old” segments in one service.
When I look at this diagram, I can see that the success of Amazon, Apple, and Google in information comes from taking the building blocks from this 20-year-old diagram and combining pieces into new constructions. Keep in mind that these firms are not in the strict sense traditional publishing companies. These are technology-centric companies whose engineering uses information as a catalyst to create new functions.
Is Content Management a Digital Titanic?
February 25, 2010
Content management is a moving target. Unlike search, CMS is supposed to generate a Web page or some other type of content product. The “leaders” in content management systems or CMS seem to disappearing into larger organizations. Surprising. If CMS were healthy, why aren’t these technology outfits growing like crazy and spinning off tons of cash?
I am no expert in CMS. In fact, I am not an expert in anything unlike the azure chip consultants, poobahs, and pundits who profess deep knowing at the press of a mouse button. In my experience, CMS emerged from people not having an easy way to produce HTML pages that could be displayed in a browser.
If HTML was too tough for some people, imagine the pickle barrel in which these folks find themselves today. In order to create a Web site, more than HTML is required. The crowd who relied on Microsoft’s Front Page find themselves struggling with the need to make Web pages work as applications or bundles of applications with some static brochureware thrown in for good measure.
To make a Web site today, technical know how is an absolute must. Even the very good point-and-click services from SquareSpace.com and Weebly.com can baffle some people.
The azure chip consultants, the mavens, and the poobahs want to be in the lifeboats. Women and children to the rear. Source: http://www.ronnestam.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/lifeboat_change_advertising_sinking.jpg
Move the need for a dynamic Web site into a big organization that is not good at technology, and you have a recipe for disaster. In fact, the wreckage created by some content management vendors, pundits, and integrators is of significant magnitude. There’s the big hassle in Australia over a blue chip CMS implementation that does not work. The US Senate went after the bluest of the blue chip integrators because a CMS could not generate a single Web page. Sigh.
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