December 2011 Issue

This spring, some research had me making a series of calls to a range of people in the book publishing business, including authors, agents, publishers, and consultants. The topic-in broad terms-was about the shift to digital. How did these publishing leaders see the shift occurring today? How was it going so far, and-more importantly-what might the publishing landscape look like in 3 or 5 years?

Money is the root of all evil. It is also the foundation upon which economies are built. Certainly, it's high on the list of objectives for most organizations. Hey, even not-for-profits have to cover costs. So how do we reconcile this yearning for earning with such laudable corporate mottos as "do no evil"? Companies with good reputations generally earn them by delivering genuine value to customers. These, and others, often offset craven capitalistic endeavors by doing good works. Value and giving back are certainly admirable tactics, and I would not discourage any company from following this righteous path.

Content in the cloud is a natural evolution from storing files on our desktops-but the content creation explosion that has overfilled our inboxes and overwhelmed our social networks won't be solved by moving the growing mass of data from a private realm to a public one.In fact, there's a solution on the horizon that promises to keep the clouds fluffy and the content contextual. It's the "curated cloud," and it's the next big thing. By one measure, we created 5EB (exabytes) of data from the beginning of time until 2008. Now we're creating 5EB every 2 days. Where did that statistic come from? The folks who should know: Google.

During interviews with a publisher client recently, one of the managers likened his organization's approach to digital product development as a goat rodeo, as in, "Our managers are crazy. After each one of them provides input to our project, it's a goat rodeo." The colorful reference is to a chaotic situation, typically in a corporate or bureaucratic setting, according to Wikipedia. A goat rodeo involves several people who have different agendas and perceptions of what's going on around them, and reconciling those views is difficult. Despite energy and effort, it's impossible to bring any sense of order to the situation.

You would be hard-pressed to find anything that has changed the way we communicate and share information more than social networking sites. No matter how much change these sites have spurred, the world of social networking has been undergoing its own overhaul in 2011. The introduction of Google+ and f8 caused plenty of discussion and, in some cases, public outcry. Myspace drew new interest from investors with a push to become an "entertainment portal," but 2012 just might be the year we find out who the winners and losers of the battle may be.

Outsell, Inc.'s release of "The Business Intelligence Landscape Today: The New Rules of Aggregation" in September shed some new light on where content aggregators are succeeding and where they need to change in order to meet evolving market needs.

There are plenty of changes afoot on this year's list, as well as at the magazine. As you read through these pages, you'll notice a change in the EContent 100 categories-and a subsequent change in the companies we're honoring this year. As we focused less on enterprise content companies and more on the world of digital publishing and media, the judges had to re-imagine the list-and relearn the judging process. While many of the old standbys still made it onto this year's list, there are plenty of fresh faces as well-many of which are shaking up the content industry.

The 2011-2012 EContent 100, a list of the 100 Companies that Matter Most in the Digital Content Industry.

The EContent 100 judges include fellow Information Today, Inc. editors, EContent magazine contributing editors, and other experts in the digital content industry.

The EContent team suggests some sites, projects, and resources that, while outside the scope of the EContent 100 list, are well-worth a closer look.

A few days before the wedding, I found myself sitting with my laptop searching YouTube for makeup tips. In a matter of seconds, I'd found exactly what I was looking for. I discovered a channel called The MakeUpChair With Sineady Cady (she has a really lovely accent, and the videos are worth watching just to hear her). Sineady is a young makeup artist living in Ireland, who uses a blog and her YouTube channel to promote her brand and find new clients. Her email address is posted right there on the channel, so if you're looking for someone to do your makeup for a special day, you can shoot her a message.

Guess what's back in vogue: that lovely old chestnut, the paywall. In September, The Boston Globe announced it was putting up a paywall for its new http://bostonglobe.com website, leaving the very popular http://boston.com intact but apparently with less free content.It's part of a trend we are seeing in the newspaper world. Desperate to find new sources of revenue, traditional media is trying the tried-and-true paywall. The New York Times--which owns The Boston Globe by the way--made the transition last spring, but this was a paywall with a twist. It wasn't so much a wall as maybe a hedge.

When I think of digital publishing over the next year and beyond, I see three trends dominating the landscape: mobility, ubiquity, and touchability. User-generated content (UGC), social sharing, and social advertising are replacing the old-world concepts of traditional advertising. Your technology (today or tomorrow) should be able to support this paradigm shift.