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FEATURED STORIES
Get to know the judges behind the EContent 100 List of companies that matter most 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.
Welcome to the Seventh Annual EContent 100—our list of companies that matter most in the digital content industry.
Our list of the 100 companies that matter most in the digital content industry.
A closer look at Adobe, which offers the premiere tools for desktop content creation across all platforms.
A closer look at Bango, whose founders envisioned that the mobile web would someday become as open and user-friendly as the PC web.
A closer look at Connectbeam, which has already earned a high profile and glowing reviews by offering an ingenious combination of bookmarking, tagging, and social software functionality.
A closer look at iCopyright, which boasts an 80% market share of major publishers and newswire services in the United States.
A closer look at Liferay, which started as a website project for founder Brian Chan's church and has turned into a leading open source enterprise portal framework for integrated web publishing and content management.
A closer look at LinkedIn, a social network that attracts a mature audience by emphasizing the “network” over the “social.”
A closer look at Macrovision, which helps keep content vendors in control of their creations online.
A closer look at Near-Time, which is trying to help business users tap their promise by offering a way to build wikis as publishing and collaboration platforms without IT help.
A closer look at Newstex, which doesn't add just any old blog to its network.
A closer look at O’Reilly, which is pioneering an electronic subscription-based reference library for programmers and IT pros.
A closer look at Siderean, which has developed a relational navigation approach using its own information platform system, Seamark, that is built around three basic principles: relationship, context, and participation.
A closer look at Sitecore, a content management system and portal software solutions-provider that has built a strong presence in the U.S., the U.K., and Scandinavia in its more than five years in business.
COLUMNS
I've just returned from representing EContent at the second Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit in London. This turned out to be an excellent conference in every respect. It was especially notable for the balance of strategic insight and tactical best practices in the areas of search, portals, collaboration, and content management.
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.
While it might seem that choosing the 100 companies that matter most in the econtent industry is our biggest challenge in this issue, I find the more difficult (and fun) aspect of participating in the selection of the annual EContent 100 list is figuring out what the correct categories are and which companies go in each. As we revise the taxonomy of econtent companies, each year we seem to have more discussions about what company goes into what category than we do about the merits of individual companies.
Keeping with years of tradition, I always like to mark the EContent 100 issue with brash predictions about where publishers will start seeing some money or investment in the coming days. For 2007 my prognostications focused on the rising importance of content merchandising, the ad-supported mobile media model, increased emphasis on ad-targeting, and the possible (possible, mind you) revival of micro-payments. Boy, am I glad I hedged my bets.
The proliferation of people-powered search engines and social media services, which effectively tap the wisdom of crowds to bubble up the good ideas and good content we care about most, are enabling a profound shift in how we locate, create, and share information.
What a difference a year makes. Since my column in last year’s EC100 issue, content applications of all types have been showing their 2.0 stripes, increasingly blurring the boundaries between web and print, and where their content resides. As “Web 2.0” has become part of our vocabulary, Content 2.0 parallels are blurring web-based and non-web-based content.
For the past three years, my annual wrap-up of content management systems has mostly counted the exploding number of branded products, for sale and open source, on the world market—now nearing 3,000. This year, I want to focus on a handful that are doing things so well that they show the way to the future for all the others.
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.
It’s funny how, once you get an idea in your head, you start seeing things in a different light. I have moved from “just in case” reading of blogs and discussion lists to “just in time” searching of list archives for what I need right now. Sure, I still read and participate in a few lists, and I can’t start my morning without a few of my favorite blogs, but I have given up on trying to stay on top of new developments throughout the infosphere.
Today in Arizona, pack mules will deliver mail to the Havasupai tribe. Their village, Supai, clings to the side of the Grand Canyon, and—as has been the case for a century—mules still provide the most efficient means of delivering the mail. This isn’t to imply that the Havasupai don’t get email. They are certainly online, as many of the packages delivered to them are products purchased through the web.
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