June 2003 Issue

The war in Iraq has brought censorship to the forefront again, particularly when the faces of American prisoners of war were shown online. This put ISPs in the tricky position of supervising what content makes it online.

As the Internet continues to evolve, consumers are getting used to the fact that the Web no longer provides a free ride and are beginning to pay for a wide range of online content. To capitalize on this trend, AT&T partnered with Accenture to launch its PrePaid Web Cents Service.

With the arrival of Yahoo! Platinum service, the former directory-only Web site announced it was jumping into the pay-for-streaming arena. Sounds good, but in fact, this launch came a full two years after RealNetworks made a similar move. What took Yahoo! and many others so long?

While companies need their content locked up tight, they also need those intended to use that content to be able to do so with a minimum of hurdle-jumping. InnerPresence, which officially launched its first product InnerEye in June, has set its sights on doing just that.

The 2003 AIIM Enterprise Content Management conference in New York City April 7-9 shed light on some emerging themes in the ECM market.

Anyone in the content business who's lately heard a humming that sounds something like WebFountain but couldn't quite make out a distinct message, listen up. According to Robert Carlson, vice president of IBM's WebFountain project, they are "coming out."

An incredible number of companies today have corporate portals, yet despite widespread deployment, they remain an enigma. Even with this huge commitment of money and resources, companies often find that their portals remain underutilized.

There is a strong case for everyday organizations to syndicate their content. Producing high-quality content for a Web site is expensive, so why not realize more value from it by distributing the information as widely as possible?

How did a 200-year-old French library turn to an American company with headquarters in Alabama and Missouri to help them whip their catalogue into shape? Not unlike the library’s own epic history, the search for solutions took a meandering route.

Now that household broadband penetration may be approaching 20% and much of at-work Web access already comes through fatter pipes, an old argument is being made anew: all media brands need to get a video component. Well, maybe.

I find that my searches, particularly in the value-added online services, are a lot broader, which means that rather than wading through 15 or 20 records, I have to slog through 200 or 300 to find the answers I need. I use whatever tools I can when reviewing search results and have been keeping my eye on data visualization tools.

Without careful attention paid, not only to setting standards, but also to making sure that they are complied with yet of pliable stuff that can be modified to suit changing requirements, intranets can soon become a morass of irrelevant documents.

Before the Web brought real-time information to everyone, there was a dramatic distinction in what was considered financial news and information. Now the separation simply doesn’t exist.

Without achieving the right balance of planning, investment, and risk (and a multitude of other ingredients), a business won’t flourish. And according to Larry Prusak, who keynoted the recent Buying and Selling eContent conference, ideas are one key ingredient many businesses should not only be stocking up on, but also intensively home-growing in order to concoct a sure-fire formula for success.