Copyright: I Told You So Twice from Techdirt
April 17, 2009
Short honk: If you have been following the copyright guerilla skirmishes, you will want to read Techdirt’s “A Look Back At Some Prescient Predictions On Copyright” here via Michael Scott from Thomas O’Toole (a provenance chain that makes clear online is not the same as a high school term paper with footnotes). The article points to two documents that presaged the murky nature of copyright in a pervasive network and the difficult of getting money for digital content when copying is a basic system function. Worth reading. Download the referenced papers if you don’t have them in your repository now. The dead tree crowd may have a liquid lunch after revisiting these documents, one of which is almost 20 years young.
Stephen Arnold, April 17, 2009
YAGG: Twitter Aflame with Gmail Glitch
April 17, 2009
Short honk: Google does well in a lousy economy. Google sends a signal it would work with Twitter (even with its Amazon hook). Gmail goes down… for some. The big story for me is not the money or the Twitter air kiss. The news is YAGG, yet another Google glitch. You can read Steve Shankland’s “Gmail Outage Afflicts Some Users” here. No YAGG for the CNet take on the story. Beyond Search is not quite so hesitant to honk, “YAGG, YAGG.”
Stephen Arnold, April 17, 2009
Content Management: Modern Mastodon in a Tar Pit, Part One
April 17, 2009
Editor’s Note: This is a discussion of the reasons why CMS continues to thrive despite the lousy financial climate. The spark for this essay was the report of strong CMS vendor revenues written by an azure chip consulting firm; that is, a high profile outfit a step or two below the Bains, McKinseys, and BCGs of this world.
Part 1: The Tar Pit and Mastodon Metaphor or You Are Stuck
PCWorld reported “Web Content Management Staying Strong in Recession” here. The author, Chris Kanaracus, wrote:
While IT managers are looking to cut costs during the recession, most aren’t looking for savings in Web content management, according to a recent Forrester Research study. Seventy-two percent of the survey’s 261 respondents said they planned to increase WCM deployments or usage this year, even as many also expressed dissatisfaction with how their projects have turned out. Nineteen percent said their implementations would remain the same, and just 3 percent planned to cut back.
When consulting firms generate data, I try to think about the data in the context of my experience. In general, pondering the boundaries of “statistically valid data from a consulting firm” with the wounds and bruises this addled goose gets in client work is an enjoyable exercise.
These data sort of make sense, but I think there are other factors that make CMS one of the alleged bright spots in the otherwise murky financial heavens.
La Brea, Tar, and Stuck Trapped Creatures
I remember the first time I visited the La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles. I was surprised. I had seen well heads chugging away on the drive to a client meeting in Longbeach in the early 1970s, but I did not know there was a tar pit amidst the choked streets of the crown jewel in America’s golden west. It’s there, and I have an image of a big elephant (Mammut americanum for the detail oriented reader) stuck in the tar. Good news for those who study the bones of extinct animals. Bad news for the elephant.
Is this a CMS vendor snagged in litigation or the hapless CMS licensee after the installation of a CMS system?
I had two separate conversations about CMS, the breezy acronym for content management systems. I can’t recall the first time I discovered that species of mastodon software, but I was familiar with the tar pits of content in organizations. Let’s set the state, er, prep the tar pit.
Organizational Writing: An Oxymoron
Organizations produce quite a bit of information. The vast majority of this “stuff” (content objects for the detail oriented reader) is in a constant state of churn. Think of the memos, letters, voice mails, etc. like molecules in a fast-flowing river in New Jersey. The environment is fraught with pollutants, regulators, professional garbage collection managers, and the other elements of modern civilization.
The authors of these information payloads are writing with a purpose; that is, instrumental writing. I have not encountered too many sonnets, poems, or novels in the organizational information I have had the pleasure of indexing since 1971. In the studies I worked on first at Halliburton Nuclear Utility Services and then at Booz, Allen & Hamilton, I learned that most organizational writing is not read by very many people. A big fat report on nuclear power plants had many contributors and reviewers, but most of these people focused on a particular technical aspect of a nuclear power generation system, not the big fat book. I edited the proceedings of a nuclear conference in 1972, and discovered that papers often had six or more authors. When I followed up with the “lead author” about a missing figure or an error in a wild and crazy equation, I learnedthat the “lead author” had zero clue about the information in the particular paragraph to which I referred.
Flash forward. Same situation today just lots more digital content. Instrumental writing, not much accountability, and general cluelessness about the contents of a particular paragraph, figure, chart, whatever in a document.
Organizational writing is a hotch potch of individuals with different capabilities and methods of expressing themselves. Consider an engineer or mathematician. Writing is not usually a core competency, but there are exceptions. In technical fields, there will be a large number of people who are terse to the point of being incomprehensible and a couple of folks who crank out reams of information. In an organization, volume may not correlate with “right” or “important”. A variation of this situation crops up in sales. A sales report often is structured, particularly if the company has licensed a product to force each salesperson to provide a name, address, phone, number, and comments about a “contact”. The idea is that getting basic information is pretty helpful if the salesperson quits or simply refuses to fill in the blanks. Often the salesperson who won’t play ball is the guy or gal who nails a multi million dollar deal. The salesperson figures, “Someone will chase up the details.” The guy or gal is right. Distinct content challenges arise in the legal department. Customer support has its writing preferences, sometimes compressed to methods that make the customer quit calling.
Why CMS for Text?
The Web’s popularization as cheap marketing created a demand for software that would provide writing training wheels to those in an organization who had to contribute information to a Web site. The Web site has gained importance with each passing year since 1993 when hyperlinking poked its nose from the deep recesses of Standard Generalized Markup Language.
Customer relationship management systems really did not support authoring, editorial review, version control, and the other bits and pieces of content production. Enterprise resource planning systems manage back office and nitty gritty warehouse activities. Web content is not a core competency of these labyrinthine systems. Content systems mandated for regulatory compliance are designed to pinpoint which supplier delivered an Inconel pipe that cracked, what inspector looked at the installation, what quality assurance engineer checked the work, and what tech did the weld when the pipe was installed. Useful for compliance, but not what the Web marketing department ordered. Until recently, enterprise publishing systems were generally confined to the graphics department or the group that churned out proposals and specifications. The Web content was an aberrant content type.
Enter content management.
I recall the first system that I looked at closely was called NCompass. When I got a demo in late 1999, I recall vividly that it crashed in the brightly lit, very cheerful exhibition stand in San Jose. Reboot. Demo another function. Crash. Repeat. Microsoft acquired this puppy and integrated it into SharePoint. SharePoint has grown over time like a snowball. Here’s a diagram of the SharePoint system from www.JoiningDots.net:
SharePoint. Simplicity itself. Source: http://www.joiningdots.net/downloads/SharePoint_History.jpg
A Digital Oklahoma Land Rush
By 2001, CMS was a booming industry. In some ways, it reminded me of the case study I wrote for a client about the early days of the automobile industry. There were many small companies which over time would give way to a handful of major players. Today CMS has reached an interesting point. The auto style aggregation has not worked out exactly like the auto industry case I researched. Before the collapse of the US auto industry in 2008, automobile manufacturing had fractured and globalized. There were holding companies making more vehicles than the US population would buy from American firms. There were vast interconnected of supplier subsystems and below these huge pipelines into more fundamental industrial sectors like chemicals, steel, and rubber.
Rumor, Disinformation, or Reality – Google Twitter Tie Up
April 17, 2009
A happy quack to the reader who sent me a link to this remarkable story without sources. “Google to Announce Twitter Acquisition Tomorrow” here is amazing in its audacity. The addled goose does his best to get some chit chat going, but this is beyond our wingspan. The author is The Raw Feed, a young man with a radio telescope for entertainment. Who knows? My recollection is that the GOOG has no interest in Twitter. Ah, truth. Ah, beauty. That is all one needs to know.
Stephen Arnold, April 17, 2009
Reading News: Amazing Math Equals Falling Revenues
April 17, 2009
If you are an MBA looking for work, you may want to check out the fancy math here. The article sports a remarkable title: “Print Is Still King: Only 3 Percent of Newspaper Reading Happens Online”. The author is Martin Langeveld. If an MBA finds the assumptions acceptable, that person may want to apply for a job at the Nieman Journalism Lab. I did not feel comfortable with the assumptions, so I resisted the main thrust of the write up. In my opinion, the numbers indicate that print newspapers have more reach and other goodness that online news does not. I think that online news has some major flaws, but traditional newspapers are not setting the world on fire. The other thought that crossed my mind is that those younger than I are into digital info and don’t see paper documents quite as old geese like me.
One final comment: if those eyeballs had value, the local newspaper would not have had to double the forced time off for certain staff. Gannett and other newspaper companies would be cashing checks, not riffing staff. With MBAs somewhat discredited, their math skills might mesh with analyses for the newspaper industry. Who knows? Fancy math might work and the media giants will once again rule the information universe.
Stephen Arnold, April 16, 2009
Gatekeepers’ Last Gasp: Journalists Know Information
April 17, 2009
The Guardian (a UK dead tree publication) ran Seth Finkelstein’s “Shutdown of Wikia Search Proves Empty Rhetoric of Collaboration” here. I enjoyed the idea, the argument, and the writing. On the surface, the failure of the collaborative, people-fueled search system Wikia is a news story. In fact, in appropriate journalistic garb, the guts of the argument could be used in a first year writing class:
This strategy of mining user-generated discontent foundered in trying to monetise those sentiments. As anyone in politics can attest, it’s easy to have a crowd rant about dangers and to generate press coverage, but harder to turn those feelings into something vaguely useful. And, contrary to many pundits who have sought to find some way that Wikia Search could be said to have affected Google, there is no evidence it had any effect whatsoever. While Google’s “SearchWiki” interface has an obviously similar name, beyond that possible bit of marketing the underlying system is much more about personalisation than presenting results to others.
How delicious! “Vaguely useful.”
When I think about this article in the context of the fire fight now raging about online information and the traditional media (aka “dead tree outfits”), I chuckled. The article does a very good job of making clear that a gatekeeper has to step forward and impose order on the unruly crowd. Indeed. As civil disorder peppers cities from Athens to Zagreb, order is useful.
On one hand, Google seems to be the outfit best suited to manage the search side of the world. Whom do you suppose should handle the information side? Mr. Finkelstein’s approach left this addled goose with the idea that newspapers and publishers are the ideal candidates to tidy up the messy information businesses.
I have no idea who will craft “a representative trajectory of Web evangelism”. I do have a hunch that the dead tree crowd will have some ideas and expect to be paid to perform this valuable service.
Stephen Arnold, April 17, 2009
ISYS Search Adds Muscle
April 16, 2009
ISYS Search Software has been a reliable tool for the ArnoldIT.com for years. We started using the system when it was in Version 3.0, and now Version 9.0 runs happily on our machines. I was delighted to learn that ISYS Search Software has added an experienced search and content processing professional to its management team. Mike O’Donoghue has become the director of channels and alliances for Europe and the Middle East. Mr. O’Donoghue has 30 years’ experience in the information sector.
O’Donoghue’s hiring continues ISYS’s aggressive growth in staff, revenue and product development. Under his direction, the EMEA channel group has signed several new partners across Europe, helping ISYS establish new channels in Austria, Germany and the Benelux region.
Scott Coles, CEO, ISYS Search Software told Beyond Search:
Several market drivers in Europe have accelerated information access and discovery’s evolution from nice-to-have productivity tools to must-have infrastructure for risk mitigation. Mike brings nearly a decade of building European channels for enterprise search technologies, and his contributions are already evident in the amount of channel business we’re doing today.
You can learn more about Mr. Coles’s view of the search sector by reading this exclusive interview with him. More information about ISYS Search Software is available at www.isys-software.com.
Stephen Arnold, April 16, 2009
Twitter: Now a Thought Leader Gets It
April 16, 2009
I was delighted to read Steve Espinosa’s “How Twitter Will Win Local Search” here. The story appeared in Silicon Alley Insider. I have been reluctant to post my specific views of Twitter because I sell these addled ideas to even more addled clients. But when something runs in the pulsing “blogosphere”, I want to call attention to the information. One useful function of Twitter is providing very timely, quite specific information about local activities. At lunch, one of the goslings monitors Tweets flowing in real time from Twitter users in the Louisville area. (We don’t get many Tweets in Harrod’s Creek. Ground hogs and possums have yet to acquire iPhones.) Why is this important? The young goslings at ArnoldIT.com use it to locate lunch specials. One of the perks of putting up with the addled goose is a company provided meal at a sit down restaurant every work day. The Twitter thing works like a champ, and it gave me the confidence in my new Google: The Digital Gutenberg to assert that the Google may find itself on the outside looking in with regard to real time search.
Mr. Espinosa said:
You actually have a profitable revenue source that may not be the end all be all model, but will be a huge chuck of revenue that does not interrupt the user experience but actually makes it better.
I think he may be on the trail leading toward a business model. A happy quack to him for posting this analysis. The trick to understanding real time search is to think in terms of the utility of lots of eyeballs and users who may have an answer to a particular, location-centric query. The next step is to think about monetization options as Mr. Espinosa has. Will Twitter be the winner in this space? Who knows. Will some company emerge as an oxygen hog? Absolutely.
Stephen Arnold, April 16, 2009
Google: Lousy Economy, Web Search Share Rises
April 16, 2009
Short honk: I should just cut and paste previous Google search share write ups into a standing article called “Google Web Search Share Rises”. You will find the MSNBC (irony, of course) write up about Google’s continued dominance of Web search bittersweet. I found it funny. The article is here. The MSNBC write up “Google Widens Its U.S. Search Lead” stated:
Microsoft Corp’s share of the U.S. search market increased by 0.1 percentage points to 8.3 percent in March. (Msnbc.com is a joint Microsoft – NBC Universal venture.)
Keep in mind that the Google has a share of about 64 percent, which is in Harrod’s Creek officially a country mile. More amusing to me is the recent announcement that the Google has a deal with Universal for a video site. I wonder if MSNBC might become GOONBC? Just a thought.
Stephen Arnold, April 16, 2009
Google: Social Adjustment for Facebook
April 16, 2009
Social adjustment in my grade school meant suspension. Social adjustment in one of the prisons I visited for a client project meant kill a guy. When I read this Datamation article — “Inside Google’s Facebook Killer” here—I thought about social adjustment. Now the write up by Mike Elgan took a more aggressive approach to describing Google’s social initiative. The phrase was “Facebook killer.” Mr. Elgan wrote:
Starting today, you can choose a “vanity URL” of sorts, meaning you can use your Gmail address as part of your Google Profiles URL. (The URL used to use a long string of numbers.) For example, my new URL is: www.google.com/profiles/mike.elgan Looking at it now, you’d never guess that Google Profiles is the biggest potential threat to Facebook anywhere.
Mr. Elgan points out that Google’s death beam is not at full power. Nevertheless, it does seem as if the GOOG wants to hop on the social bandwagon. Microsoft has a stake in the Facebook property, and Google has been on the outside of the candy store looking in.
Mr. Elgan noted:
Google Profiles should include a major section that functions as a Twitter client. It would show all your incoming Tweets, and share them with your “friends” or contacts on Google Profiles. Alternatively, you should be able to show and share only the tweets sent by people on your contacts list. In other words, either your full Twitter stream or a subset of that stream, would serve as your “Wall Posts.” The end result of this integration would be a social network far better than Facebook. Rather than being a link dead-end like Facebook, Profiles would be a launching pad of discoverability for everything you want to promote.
These are good ideas. Several observations:
- If Google does kill Facebook, will anti trust forces swing into action?
- Will Google be able to generate revenue once the Facebook funeral is over?
- Will Facebook, Twitter, and their ecosystems sit on their hands and watch the spectacle?
Interesting. I wonder if I should start collecting write ups about Google that feature the noun “killer”? Seems like a popular word at this time. I prefer “social adjustment of Facebook and its ex Googlers in its ranks.” Gentler, nicer. Euphemistic.
Stephen Arnold, April 16, 2009
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