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NEWS FEATURES
In June, cable giant Comcast paid a reported $80 million for thePlatform, an online media publishing system. Then in July, EchoStar, owner of the nation’s second largest satellite TV service (the DISH Network), made a sizable investment in CinemaNow, the popular movies-on-demand portal. Add to these big high-profile investment deals the smaller content-sharing deals recently struck between NBC and YouTube and between Viacom and Google, and the picture of a trend comes into focus.
iStockphoto, a provider of royalty free stock photography, pioneered a micropayment model to bring affordable stock photographs to the masses and shook up the stock photo industry in the process. Now, following its acquisition by Getty Images earlier this year, iStockphoto is leveraging its parent company’s expertise to add video clips and broaden the site’s international appeal.
Preserving seemingly ephemeral web content is a daunting task. The problem is even more difficult because the content of web pages changes and the pages themselves come and go with great frequency, which means simply collecting URLs isn’t enough to keep tabs on valuable content. To help make digital content preservation possible, Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit has led a charge to effectively capture and store web content.
In order to support the emerging needs of its clients and meet the expanding definition of search, ISYS Search Software has introduced the latest version of its flagship suite.
In the wake of July’s click-fraud settlement, experts are speculating on its effects on web advertising and on how the industry can prevent click fraud in the first place.
FEATURED STORIES
Emerging forms of online collaboration and social networking foreshadow an always-connected future and the biggest change in communication in a century. They may be about accelerating individual careers now, but tools and solutions are coming online that will connect people based on their knowledge and talents, to unleash innovation and create new forms of content.
Surely, the search paradigm has won the day as the de facto, undisputed interface for digitized content. Google and Yahoo! alone account for a one-third or more of traffic coming to many of the top branded content sites online. And yet, now at the top of their game, the major engines are looking outside the search box for future business strategies, from web services-based software applications to content creation.
Times have sure changed since archiving records meant organizing paper files and boxing them up for storage. Today, companies must cope with electronic records including emails, instant messaging, and local and online documents—all compounded by compliance requirements. It’s high time to get these records under control.
COLUMNS
When Burger King was looking for an edgy way to promote itself among the coveted (nay, fetishized) young male demographic, it did the only thing a sensible old fart of a corporate entity can do when it struggles to be hip: it handed the camera to someone who really is, well, hip.
Most of us—even we pack rats—must deal with the practical limits of magnetic and physical storage space. Like it or not, we have to be selective about what we keep and what we delete. While on the corporate side, the threat of litigation might provide incentive to toss stuff as soon as possible to avoid preserving content that could be the target of discovery in a lawsuit, there are also requirements that some things be maintained.
It was just over a year ago that I had the first meeting with “Gerry,” the intranet manager for a charity located just south of London. With a number of regional offices all around the U.K., the intranet was the main information platform but had run in to the usual problems of using FrontPage to generate static pages. Gerry had been to one of my Nielsen Norman workshops on CMS selection and had persuaded the charity that 2005 would be a good time to relaunch the intranet.
Ebooks haven’t exactly set the publishing world on its ear. Calling ebook sales “disappointing” is an understatement. For years, ebook proponents touted percentage increases in ebook sales (after all, going from $10,000 to $20,000 is a 100% increase), extrapolating those increases to sales levels of “billions and billions” by the turn of the century, if not sooner.
So what does a publisher get when the editors choose to purchase an “exclusive” piece of content? How about when it’s baby pictures and the price tag is several million dollars? From a marketing perspective, People Magazine in the U.S., Hello! in the U.K., and New Idea in Australia invested to secure the rights to Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt’s baby pictures in order to build tremendous buzz. Sure, print copies of People Magazine jumped off shelves, generating revenue. But enough to pay the tab for the rights to be the first to show the world Shiloh’s plump baby lips? Probably not.
Simply put, really simple syndication isn’t simple at all. While ease of use on the consumer side—one-click subscription—is improving through aggregators like syndic8 or NewsGator, finding and using RSS feeds continues to mystify most readers. If you see that orange RSS (or XML) button and click, you get a discomfiting view of the code that makes the feed work. I don’t want to know. I just want to click, read, and go.
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FACES OF ECONTENT
“We want to know about their relationships with the computer.”
PRODUCT REVIEWS
Liferay is a very popular open-source portal. It boasts a large and growing developer community, and the team has kept the system clean and simple—perhaps a bit too simple for some requirements. Integration with commercial packages is Liferay’s major shortcoming.
CASE STUDIES
Open Text helps Fluor Hanford integrate its paperwork into a digital workflow by implementing an enterprise content management system.
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