Guest Columns

Our information universe is rapidly expanding as the Internet grows. At last count, there are at least 19.31 billion pages that make up the entire World Wide Web. The content that each new page produces each day is staggering - and these numbers will only continue to climb. Content curation is the wave of the info gathering future.

Blow up everything you know about content. Today, it's different. Looking back at the last decade and ahead to the next, there are three game-changing opportunities and challenges that, from our perspective at Common Sense Advisory, product planners and marketing managers must engage.

Earthquake in Haiti. Michael Jackson died. Social media the new buzz for business. Have you heard about these? Or do you currently reside under a rock? Okay, these things don't share the same importance, but there was no avoiding these news items in the past year or so. Given my better known name, Social Steve, I guess it is pretty obvious which one of these headlines I'll be looking at here.

It sounds simple enough: We'll architect our content to maximize its value to the business. Everyone can get behind that. Of course, it's not quite as simple as it sounds. This would explain why very few organizations actually walk the talk and direct consistent attention, and investment, toward architecting their content with a view to maximizing its value. It's not that most organizations don't see the need or that they don't want to do it. It's just that it has proven remarkably difficult.

Adobe's recent acquisitions, such as Adobe Connect (web conferencing), Omniture (web analytics) and Day Software (website design), make it clear that it understands the increasing importance of the web. Most of its acquisitions are web-based enterprise solutions that augment one of its primary applications-Adobe Acrobat.

News publishers pine for the good old days, those days positioned prominently in the sun, the center of the media world, standing tall on two legs. Their business model has long been a strong, two-legged one, built on the seemingly permanent business model of the 80/20 rule: about 20% of revenue coming in from circulation, subscriptions, and single copy sales, and about 80% derived from advertising.

The content ecosystem includes strategy, authoring/acquisition, storage, publishing, measurement, and search-not one-size-fits-all, but tailored to the production medium and to business goals-bound together by metadata, policy, and workflow. Myself, I see the whole shebang as enterprise content management.

In marketing, data is power. But up until recently, the flow of data has been a one-way street.

If you're not lucky enough to live in a town with a truly good local newspaper, you're missing out. I'm not just talking about a regional daily, either. No, I'm talking about the little weeklies churned out by hardworking folks who spend more time at town meetings than the average person can bear.

New technologies are being pioneered to exponentially increase doctors' access to medical knowledge and, in turn, the chance of finding new cures. These technologies are being developed by the same people who originally created the World Wide Web. They are called semantic technologies, and are currently being explored, improved, and applied to healthcare in a movement known as Health 3.0.

I am one of those millions of people you're always hearing about who have abandoned traditional cable television and started using the internet for all my viewing needs. Between my Roku box and laptop there isn't much I can't watch when and how I want-with the exception of some live sporting events, for which I frequent my local sports bar. So, I consider myself a bit of an online video connoisseur.

Being the owner of two of the most important e-readers on the market puts me in a unique position to speak to the best and the worst of what e-readers have to offer. In my view, the Kindle - iPad comparisons I have read are usually based on a rather arrogant assumption: that reading books is, somehow, a more worthwhile intellectual pursuit than magazines, newspapers, or other content sources.

In an increasingly paperless world, does the publishing industry stand a chance? Absolutely. The semantic evolution of web publishing could cut costs, save time, and increase ad revenue.

I am addicted to National Public Radio (NPR). Ask anyone here at the EContent office: there is a near-constant stream of talk-radio coming from my desk. It always gets me thinking, but one day, during a pledge drive, I heard a particularly interesting claim: NPR is one of the few news outlets continuing to grow. Since we here at EContent spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the fee vs. free debate, I couldn't help but wonder what member-supported NPR was doing so right that they convinced listeners to voluntarily give them money for what is essentially a free service.

Most people are familiar with the term "Web 2.0," which refers to a second generation of web development and design that focuses on fostering social networking via the web. Innovative companies are beginning to embrace the social web as a way to enhance communication, information sharing, and collaboration, thereby allowing them to work smarter rather than harder.

Ebooks are a hot topic right now, thanks in part to two big companies.

After a whirlwind of economic adjustments in 2009, publishers and content technology companies are hoping that the belt-tightening that they have undertaken this year will set the stage for renewed health in 2010. While there are polls and forecasts that seem to bear out these expectations, there are many unknowns that may lead to unpleasant surprises and challenging environments next year.

After reaching a high of 872 deals valued at $104.4 billion in 2007, M&A for the media and information industry dropped significantly in 2008 to 758 deals valued at $33.3 billion, marking a 70% year-over-year decline in overall deal value.

In Gilbane's 20-plus years of covering content technologies, we have consistently found that global companies succeed when they treat content management as a business practice-not as a technology, but as a formalized, institutionalized business practice tied to strategic business goals and objectives. Leading practitioners recognize the value of content as an enterprise asset, and they proactively manage their content as the asset it is. Their content management practices are designed to drive costs out of value creation while delivering scalability that's critical to the ability to capitalize on business opportunity.

At the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), we maintain a constant dialogue with our members to ensure that we address their needs. To help us plan our activities and events in 2010, we conducted a web-based poll of members and nonmembers to determine the critical issues industry executives want us to focus on.

I have good news and bad news about the information industry, both in the same statement: For decades, industry growth has been stable and steady. It's typically a 5% growth rate per year, and it always has been. It varies slightly, but overall, the industry is predictable and, like a grandfather's sweater, comfortable. Unfortunately, this sweater is showing some wear.

The recent valuation of Twitter came in at approximately a billion dollars, according to news reports. It's a big figure based on a lot of other numbers: monthly visitors to the site, the daily number of tweets, repeat usage, and-most critically-the extraordinarily rapid rise of all those statistics in such a short time. The one thing we know for sure is Twitter's profit margin: zero.

The Blob is back. Here comes that oozing, amorphous, alien life form known for swallowing everything in its path: AOL.

Many businesses budget tens of thousands of dollars a month, or more, for public relations programs but ignore the most effective PR resource in a company's arsenal: its own web site. You have well designed web pages for your customers - you need well-designed web pages for the press as well. Your online pressroom markets your company to the media 24/7. Think about how powerful it is when an editor spotlights your company as the leader in your space or as the source of information regarding a particular technology, product, or industry initiative. But an essential part of getting that kind of coverage requires having a user-friendly press page. What happens when a writer or an editor comes to your site; can she quickly and easily find what she is searching for, or does she move on to one of your competitors to get the needed information?

Our little Twitter is growing up. The time has come for us to come to terms with this fact, and take our Tweets to the next level. Mature Twitterers (those of us who have been around longer than Ashton Kutcher) are tired of the noise, and certainly don't want to be the ones creating it. So, we've taken matters into our own hands.

The news about news has been focused on failing newspapers, for which many blaming the Internet, Google, the unions, journalists, owners, and even consumers. While there are many issues at play, and as many soapboxes to stand on, I recently attended a symposium that provided evidence that many professionals are not waiting around for a government bailout, but working hard and thinking creatively to construct a strategy for journalism's future success.

Web 2.0 is going to change your life! It's the greatest thing since sliced bread. You'll be thinner, richer, and happier - all thanks to Web 2.0 technology. Are you as tired as everyone else of the rhetoric that promises to change our lives and make us rich, when most of it is just marketing hot air?

In the stampede to social media marketing, many companies are getting trampled. They assign someone to write a blog or set up a Facebook community, then use it as another soapbox to megaphone their standard marketing messages. As they yell, they wonder why audience members lose interest and wander away.

If you follow the world of startup innovation, as I have for more than 25 years, you've likely read about how the venture capital industry is under pressure lately. The IPO market is stalled, capital flow has obviously slowed considerably, and we read almost every day how difficult it is for founders to raise early-stage capital to fund their dreams.

I recently sat in on a very exciting presentation about how Web 2.0 will flatten organizations and unleash knowledge and creativity locked up in employees stifled by rigid hierarchies… Oh wait a minute, wasn't that the same talk I heard about knowledge management and collaboration back in 1998?

The Internet Strategy Forum (ISF) recently released findings for research conducted in 2008 focused on the demographics and responsibilities of those who manage corporate web sites and underwritten by us; 250 corporate web executives responded to the survey. The findings show that the people who run websites are better educated and more highly paid than they were in 2005. Also, there is a clear shift in title from "manager" to "director." These documented trends validate what many of those who work in the web industry have already intuited: websites are no longer being managed by renegade webmasters off in a corner doing their own thing, but by "mature" corporate web personnel who are responsible for delivering or supporting the delivery of an organization's mission, goals, products, and services online.

I have been writing about content management techniques and technologies for EContent since June 2004, when I was 67 years old. Last June, I turned 72 and decided to refocus my energy on my longtime interest, information philosophy. I will tell you something about that in my December column, which will be my last.

Along with the explosion of social media and user-generated content, the information industry continues to grow. Outsell predicts that the information industry will reach $448 billion in revenues by 2010, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.6% from 2007 to 2010.

The annual EContent 100 list provides an opportunity to consider the industry as a whole, and it reflects the content industry’s need to look at its present and its future from many perspectives. Long gone is the era in which print, online, audio, and video media formed distinct publishing markets, as is the time when enterprise firewalls defined the boundaries of where professionals discovered professional-grade content.