Content Matters

Data visualization is not yet mainstream, but it continues to pop up, giving users a better understanding of complex views of data.

The New York Times has begun to integrate visual maps more and more into their content.  Today’s Times includes a visual map showing links between Academy Award winners and the parties they thanked, including mom, the Academy, God, their fellow nominees and even the “People of Uganda, Argentina or Bavaria”  (had Borat won, we could have added the People of Kazakhstan).

In yesterday’s Business Section, accompanying an article on Chrysler’s struggles, the Times used a tree map showing how truck sales were slipping.

When used properly, data visualization tools allow the author (designer?) to convey much more information than you could with tabular displays, charts or graphs.  I’m glad to see their adoption increase.

What's the ROI on premium content?
For many organizations, that's a pretty tough question to answer.  While workflow applications can generate metrics to show a positive ROI, the business value of the underlying content is often more difficult to measure.

Information Today has partnered with the Babson Working Knowledge Center (part of the Executive Education division of Babson College) in sponsoring a contest on "Improving B2B Content ROI."

The contest - "Improving Content ROI", will be used to collect and identify best practices for improving the ROI of b2b Content.  The format of the contest entries will be "stories" describing how organizations have utilized external content to create business results.  That might include use of content to support traditional business decisions (product strategy, M&A, etc.), use of wikis or collaborative tools to share content with colleagues, or more.

The winning team will receive iPod Nanos for the entire team (up to 10 people).  The deadline for the contest is March 31.  You can submit an entry or learn more here.

UPDATE: All who submit stories will also get a FREE copy of the Best Practices Report that comes out of this process.  The deadline is coming up soon, so submit your stories today.

Last week, Shore Communications released the 2007 edition of its Content Industry Outlook.

The publication, available for free download, starts with a look back at 2006, then provides guidance for the trends they anticipate dominating 2007.  They note a coming shift in 2007, where the rise of social media and vertical search may begin to shift the balance of power slightly away from Google.  No doubt Google will still be the dominant player, but these new entries create new opportunity.

Shore describes their "Seven A's" for 2007: Answers, Audience, Aggregation, APIs, Alternatives, Acceleration and Asia. 
The Answers market has been building off the social media frenzy, with Yahoo, LinkedIn and many others getting into the space, even as Google has left it.  Shore describes the New Aggregation, where platforms that allow integration of internal, external and community-based content will find success, leveraging RSS and social media.  APIs and Widgets will also be critical in that path as content providers who continue to force their users towards closed, proprietary platforms will find new markets closed to them.

John Blossom and the Shore team always do a great job of staying on top of (and in front of) the trends.  The pace of change continues to increase, and some of the trends Shore talks about will certainly have bottom-line impact for content providers in 2007 and 2008.

Well, hardly anyone, according to a post on Poynter's e-Media Tidbits.

The post summarizes a study from the Norwegian Media Businesses' Association  that shows that PDF viewership accounts for 0.07% of newspaper circulation in Norway.  To put that into context (in case you're not fully up to speed on Norwegian newspaper circulation figures), that amounts to 128 copies per day for regional newspaper Bergens Tidende.

According to the article, the PDF files are sold (for roughly $2 USD) while the online web edition remains free. 

I think that the premise of the study (and the underlying business model) of selling a PDF copy of an entire newspaper is flawed, however.  It's not that no one wants a PDF version of a newspaper.  It's that no one wants a single PDF version of an entire newspaper.  Clearly, if you are using it online, the web version offers better navigation, constant updates and more.

I do think that there is a market for a PDF version of a custom newspaper.  Suppose I could get a PDF delivered to my Blackberry each morning containing the top political stories, articles about my favorite teams and more.  That would give me something useful to read on the subway (where the offline capability of PDF would be a plus).  I probably wouldn't pay for it, but I'd accept some advertising.  I think that PDF can be a compelling format for custom, personalized newspapers, but not simply a dump of 64 printed pages.

The failure of the PDF newspapers in Norway is not an indictment of the concept of offline news.  It's an indictment of the lack of thought of how users will consume a product before they package it.

The NY Post broke the news today that the long-rumored merger between satellite radio providers XM and Sirius Satellite Radio was a done deal.
The combined entity will have 14 million subscribers, approximately $1.5 billion in revenues and a market cap of $13 billion. 

The deal is being billed as a merger of equals, with XM shareholders receiving 4.6 shares of Sirius stock for each share held.  Sirius CEO Mel Karmazin will hold that same title at the combined company, while XM Chairman Gary Parsons will serve as Chairman.

The deal is a good one for both parties.  At this stage, both companies need to grow their market share, and competing against one another for expensive on-air talent (Howard Stern and NASCAR for Sirius; Oprah and Major League Baseball for XM) is a very costly way to get there.  In addition, each has been aggressively courting auto manufacturers, which contributes to their cost base.  Analysts estimate that the combined entity will be able to save $7 billion annually.

There had been previous concern that regulators might not approve a merger, but Bear Stearns reported last week that the merger would be likely to pass regulatory hurdles.  Clearly, the competition for XM and Sirius are traditional radio, HD Radio and the emerging forms of Internet radio such as Pandora, Lastfm and the many music blogs.  The combined entity will not have a lot of pricing power in this competitive landscape.

In late 2005, when naming both companies to the "50 Content Companies that Matter", I was unsure which of the two would emerge as the leader.  With this merger, the combined company is in a much stronger position than either could have been alone.

UPDATE: Staci Kramer at Paid Content shares an exchange she had with FCC Chairman Kevin Martin a month ago about a potential XM-Sirius merger.  There's no question that the regulatory hurdle remains high for this merger, though I believe the biggest competitive threat for these two will come from the emerging technologies, not from one another.

Tracking blog readership is a far from perfect science.
Applications like Feedburner allow you to see how many of the users who are subscribed to your feed login on a given day.  But that doesn't let you know how many have read a given blog or post.

While it will remain murky, understanding your blog subscriber base is about to get a little clearer.  Google has announced that beginning February 17, it will begin reporting subscriber numbers for users of Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage.

Until now, Google Reader users were missing from the charts produced by Feedburner (as shown in the example on the right).  So, bloggers should expect to see an uptick in their reported readership.  Market share figures on RSS readers are hard to come by, but with Google Readers's recent growth, I'd expect them to amount to 15-20% of the traffic of a technology-focused blog.

To better understand how Feedburner calculates subscribers, take a look at this post from the Feedburner blog last fall, which commemorated TechCrunch reaching the 100,000 subscriber mark.

In 2004, Howard Dean gained attention for leveraging the Internet in his presidential campaign.  Dean's use was primarily for fundraising, though he also dabbled with the use of a blog.
In 2006, liberal bloggers like DailyKos played a huge role in helping Ned Lamont gain the credibility and support to knock off Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary.  Joe later won the general election as an independent, but clearly the bloggers got noticed.
For 2008, all of the candidates are trying to show themselves as being "web enabled".  Barack Obama and Hillary each used their websites for their announcements and virtually all the candidates have created MySpace pages.
Unfortunately, none of the candidates in either party have yet shown the ability to truly leverage any web 2.0 capabilities.  Hilary simply used the web to reply to a set of screened emails; it was simply website as a proxy for a TV appearance.
A new site, TechPresident, focuses on how candidates are using the Web and what the web is saying about the candidates.  A product of the Personal Democracy Forum, TechPresident includes a number of contributing blogger/writers from across the political and editorial spectrum. 
On the site, you can see how many MySpace friends each of the candidates has (the Democrats are doing fairly well among this constituency, many of whom are too young to vote) and see flickr feeds of citizen photojournalists.
Despite a few early hiccups (like Amanda Marcotte, the blogger who resigned from the Edwards campaign) the campaigns seem to have a wide-eyed, almost naive view of the Internet.  It will be interesting to see how they respond when their actions (via video or in writing) are used against them on the Web, such as on the Real McCain site.
Overall, my hope is that we see one or more of the candidates really embrace the web as a significant part of their communications efforts.  Web 2.0 makes the Internet a two-way communications platform.  While there are risks to that model, there could be tremendous opportunity for the candidate who embraces it.

Thanks to Tim O'Reilly  for the heads up on TechPresident.

Update: The NY Times published this article on TechPresident.

In last week’s Haaretz interview with Arthur Sulzberger (in Davos), the New York Times Publisher reiterated that the New York Times Reader would not be a free service.  That was hardly news, as the Times made clear from the start that it would not be free forever.

This morning, my Times Reader prompted me for a mandatory download of the latest version.  In my experience, mandatory upgrades are rarely for the benefit of the user.  I’m guessing that this latest upgrade includes the mechanism to support the paid model.  I assume that it will continue to be free for print and Times Select subscribers, which makes sense.  For while Sulzberger indicated the likelihood that the Times would stop printing newspapers in the not-to-distant future, they clearly do not intend to stop generating subscription revenue.

BTW – this release also had a few surprises.  For starters, it overwrote all of the settings that I had previously put in (for example, time for the daily download of news).  It also defaulted to automatically downloading future versions of the Times Reader.  Considering that the technology behind the Times Reader is from Microsoft, I guess that shouldn’t come as a shock.

Two stories during this week about the future of print publishing caught my eye.

First was the heavily covered Haaretz interview with Arthur Sulzberger of the New York Times where he indicated the possibility that the Times could stop offering a print edition within five years.

The second article to catch my attention was a post by Colin Crawford, SVP of Online for publisher IDG (via PaidContent’s post) that the growth of their online business now exceeds the decline in print revenues and accounts for more than 35% of their revenues.  IDG, of course, is the publisher of ComputerWorld, PCWorld and other trade publications, and is also parent to IT Consulting firm IDC. 

Together, these two articles should provide a jolt to the handful of publishing industry holdouts who want to believe that print will still play a significant role in 10-20 years.  In my experience, these holdouts tend to either think their customer demographics are different (believe me, they’re not) or they are still holding onto the belief that their electronic products are unique and should be priced at a huge premium to print (they’re not and they shouldn’t).  For publishers whose print subscriber base is shrinking faster than their online subscriber base is growing, it may already be too late.

The story of Primedia has largely been a disappointing one for shareholders and employees alike.

The Company was originally founded as K-III Communications by Bill Reilly, Charlie McCurdy and Beverly Chell, with backing by KKR.  The management team had formerly run Macmillan Publishing, and following Macmillan's acquisition by Robert Maxwell, the team approached KKR with the intent of building a top tier media and publishing company. 

The model employed by K-III was the leveraged buildup, a new form of financing pioneered by KKR and later profiled in an HBS case study.  The model, using debt to finance acquisitions, required a strong level of discipline in acquisition terms (multiples) and strong organic growth to fund the debt.  Unfortunately, over time, Primedia began to pay higher multiples in an effort to "buy earnings", while many of its properties (including a number of former MacMillan businesses) were past their peak and not able to generate growth organically.

In the mid-to-late 1990's, Primedia began to divest assets to fund the debt.  Initially, press releases would talk about divestitures of "non-core assets".  Over time, a number of the flagship assets, including Seventeen and New York Magazines were sold to pay down the debt.  Last year, Primedia sold off its b2b trade publishing unit (now Prism Business Media).

What was left was a slimmed down company (less than $1 billion in revenues) with three primary businesses: Enthusiast media (largely automotive),  Consumer Guides (Apartment Guides, New Home Guides and Auto Guides) and Education (a small segment built largely around Channel One).

Now, via PaidContent and the Primedia website, comes word of their plan to sell the Enthusiast Division, with more than 90 websites, 75 publications, 65 conferences and more than half of their 2006 revenues.  The sale will be used to pay down debt.

Assuming they are successful with their divestiture, that will leave a business consisting mainly of the Apartment and New Home Guides, plus Channel One.  While this business (formerly known as Haas Publishing) has always been among the most profitable businesses for Primedia, it's astounding to think that's all that is left from what was once a $2 Billion diversified publishing business.  While I'm sure that KKR will be happy to recover some of its investment (after 15+ years), for those of us who previously worked at Primedia, it's sad to see.

UPDATE: The NY Post (which has always covered Primedia more closely than the mainstream business news) has this article, suggesting the sale will bring $1 billion or more.

Last week, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jigsaw Data CEO Jim Fowler for an update.

Jigsaw, previously profiled as one of the 50 Content Companies that Matter, has built a web 2.0 business card exchange, leveraging their user community to build and maintain their database.

According to Fowler, Jigsaw has had strong revenue growth during the past year and expects to achieve profitability in 2007.  As of December, Jigsaw had more than 5 million contacts in their database and, based upon their current run-rates, expects to reach 10 million by the end of this year.  They have more than 165,000 registered users, who submit content to the Jigsaw database, and their system of rewarding those who “challenge” old or inaccurate data keeps the database clean.

As is often the case with startups, some of their revenue is coming from unexpected sources.  While their core business model is selling access to the database to corporate sales and marketing groups, the fastest growing segment is from companies using the Jigsaw database to clean their CRM data.  Jigsaw has a dead record locator, or “graveyard” as Fowler describes it, with more than 700,000 records.  Clients can tap into this graveyard to identify inactive contacts and can use the live Jigsaw database to append and update partial data in customer management databases.  Fowler indicates that data cleaning now amounts to more than half of their revenue.

On the product side, Jigsaw is launching some new features to attract new users and increase usage among their existing base.  Until now, Jigsaw has required new users to register with a credit card, to ensure that they knew who was submitting or updating data.  In their new release due this month, Jigsaw will allow sign up without a credit card, for users with a legitimate enterprise email address.

Later this spring, Jigsaw will be adding some new features to increase the level of user-contributed content.  Today, if a user adds a contact, they later receive points (which they can use for their own downloads) if that contact is downloaded by another user.  Under the new model, there will be more competition.  While a user will still receive points for downloads of records they have added, a new user can take over “ownership” of that record by adding additional information, thereby taking over the “revenue stream” for that record.  That’s a good incentive for users to periodically update the records they have contributed and look to add more information to records updated by others.

Jigsaw Data has demonstrated a compelling model for user-generated content.  In my tests, their data shows favorably, as compared to traditional databases or web-scraping approaches like ZoomInfo.  To-date, they have done a good job of balancing the needs of their editorial participants (the users who update the database) and their revenue-producing corporate accounts.  While social networking sites like LinkedIn have dominated the mindshare of the web 2.0 prospecting space, the reality is that most sales organizations still rely upon old-fashioned cold-calling to drum up business.  Jigsaw is effectively leveraging the community to address that market need.

This is a little off-topic for Content Matters, but every time I recruit for a position, I’m amazed at the responses that I get.  So consider this part online venting and part guidance.

Online services like Monster, CareerBuilder, Indeed and others have made job hunting easier.  In many ways, though, it’s made the process more difficult.  Employers have too many resumes to screen and it’s difficult for candidates to stand out.

As a result, when screening resumes, most employers first look for ways to exclude, rather than include.  If we can weed out all the bad ones, what’s left may be a manageable universe to go through.

Below are some tips that may seem fairly obvious, but I find that even when recruiting for the most senior positions, I get applicants who violate these rules.  If you follow them, you’ll have a better chance of making it through the first cut.

5. Check your LinkedIn profile, myspace page, facebook listing, ZoomInfo page and anything on the first page of Google results; the employer most likely will.

4. Don’t name your resume sally_smith_projectmgr_resume.doc.  That makes me assume you’re not really a project manager, but have modified your resume to look like one.  Yes, it’s OK to have multiple versions of your resume.  Just don’t name them that way.  Instead, just name them all generically (sally_smith.doc) then use your directory tree to store different versions (e.g. my documents\resume\project management\sally_smith.doc). 

3. Write a real cover letter and take the time to make it relevant to the job that was posted.  Don’t use a merge letter, where your first line ends up saying “I am seeking an opportunity as Director-Product Marketing-NYC.”  Take a few minutes to read the position description, then browse through the company’s website.  Use what you learn to make your cover letter compelling.  Contrary to popular opinion, job hunting is not a “numbers game”.  Applying online for thousands of positions for which you are not qualified will not get you hired.  Identifying those where you have specific experiences that match the requirements, and clearly highlighting those experiences in a cover letter will get you an interview.

2. If the position is based in New York City and your Monster posting says you are only exploring opportunities in Phoenix, don’t bother applying.  In fact, if you are applying for any position where you would be interested in a relocation, use your cover letter to explain that.  Say “For family reasons, I’m looking to return to the northeast” or whatever.  Otherwise, you won’t get consideration unless you have a very unique set of skills unavailable in the employer’s market.

1. The first thing I see when you send your resume is your email address.  What does that email address say about you?
If it’s an AOL address, it says you’re not a very sophisticated technology user.  That’s fine for some positions, but if you’re applying for an e-Commerce role, you’ll be dead in the water.  Even a Yahoo or Hotmail address makes me think of a teenager rather than a serious business professional.  If you have your own domain, that’s great.  Otherwise, get a Gmail account.  It’s free and it looks professional. 
Also, please keep your email address simple.  Ideally, you should just have your name, such as [email protected].  I realize that’s not always possible, particularly with more common names than mine, but if you try using the underscore and perhaps a middle initial, you might have luck.  Regardless, avoid using things like [email protected] or [email protected]. 

Will following these guidelines get you hired?  No promises there.  However, they will keep you from being automatically routed to my junk file.

Update: Derek Park at Former Slacker, has nine resume tips of his own...

Alacra is seeking an experienced Product Manager to lead the growth of our Alacra Compliance application.

Candidates should have 5+ years of product management experience in the content or technology field.  An understanding of the Compliance or Anti-Money Laundering space is a big plus.  We'd also consider someone with a strong AML background without the product management experience.

You can read all the details in the position description.

Interested parties should contact .

This weekend's Sunday NY Times Magazine has an interesting article entitled BrewTube.  The article profiles the new Bud.TV to be launched this Monday.

When you hear Bud.TV, if you're thinking of Clydesdales and the "Wassup" guys, think again.  That side of Bud will be shown during the Super Bowl.  BudTV will have original programming leveraging talent from LivePlanet (Project Greenlight), writers from Da Ali G Show, Saturday Night Live and Howard Stern Show.

The initial shows will include "Finish Our Film", where LivePlanet will shoot the first and last minutes of a short film and seek community participation to develop the plot of the middle and "Happy Hour", a one-to-four minute "episode" created by a rotating group of comic writers.

Not all the material will be humor-based.  One planned program is a 130-episode science fiction series called "Afterworld". 

Clearly, these are the early days of Internet television, and there is no clear direction for the model.  Bud.TV is an ambitious first effort at what is likely to become a compelling model - advertisers creating original programming content.  The model is not new - in some ways it recalls the early days of soap operas.  However,  I think most people agree that the existing model of commercials will not be viable in an interactive environment.  I may tolerate them in some instances (such as previews before a movie), but sitting through a 15 second advertisement before watching a YouTube clip is not going to fly. 

When you think of the cost of television advertising (Anheuser Busch spent $287M in 2005), this initial foray into Internet TV programming is probably not a huge expense for Anheuser Busch.  It will be interesting to see how this evolves.

The turnout at this year’s Information Industry Summit was strong, with a lot of new faces.  Overall, it was a useful conference.

The new Previews ½ day session Monday worked well, with an opportunity for emerging companies to tell their story.  Someone needs to coach these CEOs, though, that you can’t use 17 slides for a five-minute presentation.  It’s funny how leaders so often fall in love with demonstrating their technology that they forget how to make a quick benefits-centric elevator pitch.

Probably the best news of the conference was the modest level of discussion about Google.  Yes, the G-word popped up in a number of sessions, but we seem to have gotten past the “Google’s going to eat my business” anxiety.  It seems that the industry is beginning to learn how to survive, and in some cases thrive, in a Google ecosphere.

Despite a number of medical-related no-shows (get well Reid, Walter and the rest), the panels were fairly strong.  One of the things that the SIIA does well is to mix up the format to include keynotes, traditional moderated panels and interviews.  The interviews, particularly those by journalists Bambi Francisco and Staci Kramer, made for compelling discussions.

For details of the individual sessions, you can check the following earlier posts:

Traditional Magazines and Digital Publishing (Staci Kramer)
CEO Outlook (Jim Kollegger)
Advertising and PR for Everyone (David Meerman Scott)
Tad Smith Interview (Hal Espo)
Rich Zannino Keynote
Vanishing Icons (Tolman Geffs)
Traditional vs. User-Generated Content (John Blossom)
Should Content Be Free (Fred Wilson keynote)
Previews: Deal Trends
Previews: Content Delivery
Previews: Content Creators

Streaming video is available, courtesy of Scribe Media, for the following sessions:
Traditional Magazines and Digital Publishing (Staci Kramer)
Advertising and PR for Everyone (David Meerman Scott)
CEO Outlook (Jim Kollegger)
Should Content Be Free (Fred Wilson keynote)

The Event was well-blogged - here's just a sampling:
PaidContent
Search Engine Watch
Shore Communications
WebInkNow
Newstex Blog
Pando Blog
Screenwerk
Manage to Change
NY Convergence

Ken Doctor's Content Bridges

...according to a December, 2006 study just released by Lee Rainie and the team at Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Effective tagging has long been considered the "holy grail" for improving information retrieval.  While tagging can dramatically improve search results for text, it's even more critical for graphics, audio and video content.

Publishers have long known this and have employed editors (originally as employees, but now largely outsourced) or technology to categorize and tag their content.  Then a few years ago, the idea of folksonomies, or community-based tagging, popped up, with the advent of  delicious, RawSugar, flickr and other applications.  But, until now, most of us have assumed that it was just a sliver of users doing the tagging.  Delicious, the most renowned of the tagging platforms, has only 1 million users and of those, only a modest percentage are active taggers.

According to the new Pew study, 28% of all online users surveyed have tagged a page, a photograph, video or blog post.  Overall, 7% of the 2,400 users in the survey tag content on a daily basis.  Pew phrased the question as "Please tell me if you ever use the internet to categorize or tag online content like a photo, news story, or a blog post.”  As such, they are capturing an audience of users who probably don't even think of what they are doing as tagging.

What would be interesting is to see how much tagging is being done to other people's content vs. their own.  When I browse through flickr or youtube, I see most content is tagged reasonably well.  That makes sense as users are tagging it either to make it easier for them to find their own stuff or to help it be discovered by others.  While you'd expect all content creators to follow that approach, a random look at blog posts shows that most bloggers do not bother to apply Technorati tags to their posts.  Delicious, on the other hand, is more of a bookmarking service, so you gain the benefit of a community tagging other people's content.  But, as indicated, participation is low.

The Pew study points out that demographics come into play here.  Most taggers are under-40, well educated and have higher income.  Over time, as tagging applications provide greater benefits to users, tagging should continue to increase.  And information retrieval should continue to improve.

The study may be downloaded free of charge at the Pew site.