Content Matters

Today it was announced that Weblogs, Inc. was acquired by AOL.  Congratulations to Rafat Ali whose PaidContent.org broke the news yesterday during the We Media conference.  Jason Calcanis' Weblogs, Inc. had quickly developed some very compelling content, most prominently Engadget, but also the Blackberry Hub, Blogging Baby, Autoblog and others.  It's the same model that Primedia Enthusiast Magazines had used in the "traditional" publishing market; have compelling content geared towards niche markets of enthusiasts, written by enthusiasts.  And here, it's proven to be just as compelling, but without the huge infrastructure required for a magazine publisher.  It's rumored that the sale was in the $25M range, which seems a solid price for that property.

Of course, anyone involved in the NYC technology industry during the dot.com boom knows Jason.  His Silicon Alley Reporter was must reading for anyone in the tech or content space.  He later sold its successor to Wicks Business Information, which then sold to Dow Jones.

A day later, PaidContent also reports (via Jason Kottke) the rumors (yet unconfirmed) that Dave Winer's weblogs.com has been sold to Verisign.  Weblogs.com was the first ping server.  For those who don't blog, a ping server is the way that bloggers let the world know they've added a new post.  While search engines spider and index content periodically, blogs are more like newsfeeds, so you need to ping the server to let all the search engines, RSS Readers and other tools know that you've added a new post.

What both of these transactions show is that the blogosphere is generating real value right now.  This is not like the dot.com days where acquisitions or IPOs were based upon future potential, but instead are solid purchases based upon the traffic (and ad dollars) being generated right now.

Congratulations to Jason and Dave.

UPDATE: Michael Graves, of Verisign, confirms the Weblogs.com deal and explains the fit.

Today, I add Del.icio.us to the 50 Content Companies that Matter.

Tagging is a concept not often thought of outside of the content industry.  Traditional publishers and aggregators tag their content to make it more easily retrievable, either manually (as Chemical Abstracts Service might do to patent filings) or automatically, generally using Bayesian classification or similar.  On the client side, some sophisticated corporate users have begun tagging efforts inside the enterprise, typically as part of a Knowledge Management initiative.  These have tended to be labor-intensive processes with questionable ROI’s.

In the blogosphere, these centralized approaches don’t work.  The blog world does have a similar challenge in terms of the model (publisher or client) – with Technorati allowing “publishers” (bloggers) to tag their content, while Del.icio.us pushes the tagging to the reader.  In this market, I am betting that the latter solution will be the winner.

Del.icio.us has brought tagging to the masses, providing a platform for community-based tagging.  This approach lets users gain the benefits of the tags of all the other users out there, sort of a “Wisdom of Crowds” approach.

Perhaps more importantly, Del.icio.us has done this without anyone really knowing that they are tagging content.  Rather than tagging content, Del.icio.us has branded this as “social bookmarking”.  Where tagging is performing work for the benefits of others, social bookmarking has direct benefits for those who use it.  And for those who see “social bookmarking” as too technical, the new term “folksonomy” has emerged, combining the taxonomy concept of classification with the community-based aspect of Del.icio.us.

Rather than a simple folder-based approach to storing and sorting websites of interest, Del.icio.us lets you assign tags (or categories) to pages to make it easier to group, sort or retrieve them.  For example, the Content Matters blog might be assigned tags of Content, Technology, Blog and Tools.  The Del.icio.us toolbar, either as a pop up stand-alone toolbar, or embedded within your browser toolbar, lets you assign tags as quickly as you might add them to your favorites list.  But the benefits are much greater.  I’d point them out here, but there are already some great posts on the topic, including those by Fred Wilson and Tom Evslin among others.  Also, Jeff Jarvis provides a nice summary of the Tagging session at yesterday's Web 2.0 conference.  My suggestion is to configure Del.icio.us, invest 20 minutes tagging the pages on your Favorites list, then start seeing the benefits yourself.

During my years at ClearForest, we had a vision of every document in the world being tagged (by ClearForest) at least once.  Del.icio.us is providing a framework where every document or page on the web may get tagged by everyone who reads it.  And for that, they are clearly one of the 50 Content Companies that Matter.

The concept of content does not typically get a lot of coverage outside of those who create and sell it.  That’s why it’s interesting that there are two new, compelling books, covering the world of content.

Having spent the day in the jury pool at the US Federal Court's Southern District, I've gotten a great opportunity to catch up on my reading.

John Battelle’s analysis of Google, The Search, has cracked the top 100 list at Amazon and has been selected as one of five nominees for the FT/Goldman Sachs "Business Book of the Year."  I will post a review of The Search shortly, particularly if I find myself selected for this jury.

At the same time, another new book has emerged, sharing case studies on companies who have successfully leveraged content on the Web.  David Meerman Scott’s Cashing in with Content is not a content industry book, per se.  Instead, it’s geared towards marketing professionals, business leaders, and anyone looking to communicate a message effectively, whether for marketing, awareness, recruitment or other purposes.

The heart of the book is a series of twenty case studies of organizations which utilize content effectively.  They are broken into three groups: E-Commerce, Business-to-business, and Educational, Healthcare, Nonprofit and Politics.  The case studies are well set-up and include interviews with key executives at each organization.  Do yourself a favor and read through all twenty, not just the ones "in your target area".  For example, I found that the practices of Aerosmith, Kenyon College and Tourism Toronto were all somewhat relevant to my e-commerce sites' needs.

The book concludes by defining a set of twelve best practices, exemplified by the twenty organizations profiled in the case studies.  Some of these practices may seem painfully obvious (“If you serve a global market, use global content”) but are often ignored by those developing websites.  Others take traditional offline practices and reinforce the need to apply them in the online world, such as “Link Content Directly to the Sales Cycle”.  Each of these best practices are then tied back to the specific case studies which support them.  For example, in supporting the sales cycle, the Tourism Toronto website supports those travelers first thinking about visiting Canada, then helps them throughout their trip planning.  The site also lets users self-select a path, depending upon whether they are an individual planning a vacation or business trip, a tour group or an organization planning a conference or meeting.

Business books are often either too ethereal or focused on practices only the largest organizations can afford.  David Scott’s Cashing in with Content is neither.  It offers a series of straightforward practices, supported by numerous real-world examples, in an enjoyable, quick read format.  If you want to be sure that your organization’s message is being communicated effectively, buy a copy, read it and put it into practice. 

Also, be sure to check out David Scott’s Web Ink Now blog, where he continues his focus on how to leverage content to generate results.