Dead Tree Mouthpiece Asks What Is XML
December 16, 2008
Search and content processing vendors are reasonably comfortable with XML or documents in Extensible Markup Language formats. I don’t think much of the content management industry, but I know that most of these outfits can figure out when and how to use XML. Even Word 2007 takes a run at XML. Like an inexperienced soccer player, sometimes Microsoft gets to the right spot and then misses the goal. But the company is trying. You will find “What the Hell Is XML? And Should It Really Make Any Difference to My Business?” in Publishers Weekly here a good read. The author is Mike Shatzkin, and he does a good job of explaining that publishers have to slice and dice their content; that is, repurpose information to make new products or accelerate the creation of new information. He then presents XML as “information to go”. I think the notion is to embed XML tags into content so that software can do some of the work once handled by expensive human editors. For me, the most interesting comment in the article was this passage:
Here’s what we call the Copernican Change. We have lived all our lives in a universe where the book is “the sun” and everything else we might create or sell was a “subsidiary right” to the book, revolving around that sun. In our new universe, the content encased in a well-formed XML file is the sun. The book, an output of a well-formed XML file, is only one of an increasing number of revenue opportunities and marketing opportunities revolving around it. It requires more discipline and attention to the rules to create a well-formed XML file than it did to create a book. But when you’re done, the end result is more useful: content can be rendered many different ways and cleaved and recombined inexpensively, unlocking sales that are almost impossible to capture cost-effectively if you start with a “book.”
XML and its antecedents have been around for 30 years. Anyone remember CALS or SGML? The metaphor of Copernicus’ insights into how the solar system worked seems to suggest a new world view. Okay, but after Copernicus there was a period of cultural adjustment. I don’t think the dead tree crowd has the luxury of time. My recollection is that the clock strikes midnight for the New York Times in a couple of months. Sam Zell has already embraced bankruptcy as a gentlemanly way of dealing with the economics of the dead tree business model. The Newsweek Magazine staff is working on résumés and Web logs, not the jumbo next issue. Heliocentrism is a nifty concept, but it won’t work because like Copernicus De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was finally delivered from the print shop. Oh, Copernicus allegedly got the book right before he ascended to his caelum.
I think that it is too late for most of the dead tree outfits. Fitting in way, I suppose, Copernicus died just as his insights became available to a clueless public… printed on paper. There is a possible symmetry exists between Mr. Shatzkin’s reference to Copernicus and what has happened to most traditional publishers.
Stephen Arnold, December 16, 2008
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
