Content Matters

Since we were livetwitting NetGain, I didn't live-blog it. Here are some of my thoughts post-conference.

NetGain was the first effort by the SIIA to bring together its Software and Content divisions. The SIIA was formed through the merger of the Software Publisher's Association and the Information Industry Association in 1999. So, it was about time to actually let the members of both divisions come together for an event.

The dual audience made for some challenges but clearly benefited the conference as a whole. One key challenge was how to level-set the audience for a given topic. For example, in the Platforms panel which I sat on, we knew that the software division members would have a strong understanding of platforms, while many from the content division would not. We decided to target our discussion at the content side, though at times the discussion clearly veered too far to the technical.

The major themes of the conference were centered around SaaS, Platforms and cloud computing. One interesting twist was that while the tech companies are typically ahead of content businesses in adoption of technology, on the business model side, SaaS may be new to software, but the ASP subscription model is old hat to the publishers. Of course, what's new to that model is the use of open APIs, as opposed to the walled garden ASP models of the traditional publishing market.

The other change to the program this year was the inclusion of Previews, an event that has run as part of the Information Industry Summit the past two years. The Previews event showcased ten emerging content and technology companies. While the New York previews was held as a stand-alone half-day event, at NetGain, Previews sessions were interspersed through the main program. I found that I prefer the dedicated Previews event, but integrating it into the main program provided stronger attendance.

I thought that the best speakers over the two days were Matt Glotzbatch, Product Management Director for Google Enterprise, Sphere CEO Tony Conrad and Webb Shaw of JJ Keller. Barry Bealer ran a compelling session on emerging business models. Clay Shirky was entertaining, though for people who are close to the Web 2.0 world, there was not a lot of new ground covered.

Among the Previews companies, I thought the stars were SlideRocket, which provide a SaaS presentation tool that supports rich media and community, Zuora, a SaaS billing and entitlement solution for complex subscription models, founded by ex-Salesforce.com execs, and ReachForce, a lead generation data service.

Tuesday night wrapped up with the 23rd annual CODiE Awards. For the first time, this year, the SIIA included a CODiE showcase where about a third of the nominated companies presented their capabilities. Congratulations to all of the CODiE Award winners (including Alacra Book).

Were you at NetGain? What did you think? Please put your thoughts in the comments.

PS - Regarding our efforts at LiveTwitting, I think the results were mixed. You can view all of the tweets here. The Newstex team was kind enough to stitch the tweets together into a single RSS feed here. It's clear that the short-form communications are good for sharing quick snippets or quotes but, as John Blossom pointed out, the instant nature of twitter makes it hard to distill your thoughts into a comprehensive analysis. Pithy is good for some things but not all.

The website that I've visited the most the past few days is Is Twitter Down?

It's no secret that Twitter has had numerous outages lately. It's hit or miss at any moment as to whether the site will be up.

The timing was not great for me. Along with Larry Schwartz, Ed Keating and John Blossom, I've tried to get attendees at this week's SIIA NetGain conference to livetwitter the event.

The composite stream of our tweets is now available as an RSS feed (thanks to Larry and the Newstex team).

Twitter has had tremendous growth (at least on the two coasts), purely coming via word of mouth from the digerati. Unfortunately for them, the barrier to entry would not be very high.  If they can't get the uptime problems solved quickly, I fear that Google or another will step in and take their position.

The team at Twitter is clearly aware of their precarious position as shown in this blog post.

At the same time, posting quotes like this doesn't instill confidence among your users:

The issue that we experienced today is actually not related to the problem we experienced yesterday. In turn, these two problems do not share the same cause with the downtime we experienced last week. At root is the database, but the cause is different

via @lfschwartz and @mashable, something to keep you occupied while waiting for Twitter to come back up - the video of Allen Stern's "Twitter Come Back"

Am at SIIA NetGain.
Rather than live-blogging it, we're trying to livetwit it.
As with any new technology, some hiccups, particularly as we learn that it seems to be case-sensitive.

Can follow the posts at http://livetwitting.com/events.html

For more info, take a look at this earlier post.

The early days of Internet publishing can be considered the “field of dreams” period - Build it and they will come. Those were the days of mega-portals where Internet users would come to find content. Content distribution was easier then. Most publishers simply built their own portal and/or inked licensing deals with companies like Yahoo, Lycos and AOL.

As if we didn’t have enough evidence, the current conditions of Yahoo and AOL make it pretty clear that the field of dreams days have ended. Internet users are more sophisticated now and they don’t need some mega portal company deciding which content they should look at. The deportalization of the Internet (as Fred Wilson and others have described it) is here and users today want to be in control of what content they get, where they access it and how it should be arranged.

For publishers and aggregators, this means that you can no longer simply make your content available on your proprietary site; instead, you need to package your content up and make it available where the users are.

Alacra today launched its first widget, the Alacra Affiliate Widget, designed to get content in front of potential users wherever they may be.  The Alacra Affiliate Widget is a widgetized version of the Premium Content Ad Network which we launched earlier this year. You can see the widget scrolling in the right-hand column of this blog.

The Alacra Affiliate Widget displays contextually relevant content (available for purchase at www.alacrastore.com) based upon the content of the page it runs on. The goal of the Widget is to help readers of blogs, financial news or commentary websites to identify related content that may be of interest to them.

For bloggers and website owners, the Alacra Affiliate Widget provides new ways to monetize their traffic. The widget is built on the Alacra Affiliate Program, so bloggers and website owners share in the revenue generated by reader purchases on the Alacra Store.

For Alacra content partners, the Alacra Affiliate Widget enables them to get their content in front of potential buyers while those buyers are in the midst of researching or reading about a company. The ads are contextually relevant, so they serve up headlines on companies that are mentioned in the blog post or article they are already reading. In addition, they are behaviorally relevant as they serve up research content at the time a user is researching a company. Compare that to a typical display advertising network – if a user is reading a page on a financial commentary about HP’s intended acquisition of EDS, a typical contextual ad server will return ads for Hewlett Packard printers or laptops. But, clearly, no one’s reading that article because they want to buy a printer. With the Alacra Widget, the user will see an ad displaying links to recent credit and investment research on HP and EDS, as well as M&A analyses and, perhaps, transcripts from HP’s analyst call discussing the deal.

If you’re interested in exploring ways to better monetize your blog or website traffic or wish to learn more about the Alacra Affiliate Widget, drop me a note at barry-dot-graubart-at-Alacra-dot-com. Or, click here to configure and download the widget.

More details about the Alacra Affiliate Widget can be found on the Alacra Blog.

I will be at the SIIA NetGain conference in San Francisco Sunday – Tuesday. NetGain should be a very interesting conference, as it brings together both halves of the SIIA – the software and content groups.

The convergence of these two groups at the conference takes place at an opportune time, as the emergence of new application-led platforms from companies like Google and Salesforce.com which marry technology with content in a software-as-a-service environment.

I will be discussing the impact of these emerging platforms on a panel Monday afternoon entitled Platforms – Will They Tilt in Your Favor? The panel also features Tom Herrmann of Oracle and ZoomInfo President Bryan Burdick and will be moderated by Tim Miller, analyst at the 451 Group. It looks as though our panel is the last one before cocktail hour, so I hope you’ll join us for what should be a fascinating discussion.

For SIIA attendees who use Twitter, we’ll also be using LiveTwitting, a service that will enable participants to twitter the SIIA event, with all of the results displayed in a single RSS feed or website. I’ve provided instructions on how to LiveTwitter the event here. If you’re a Twitterer, please join us in live-twitting the conference.

Traditional publishers have largely struggled to embrace web 2.0. That’s not surprising and in some ways sitting on the sidelines might be the right strategy for many of them. At the same time, every publishing conference has an obligatory “web 2.0” session, though many are light on ways for publishers to really engage their audience using social strategies.

This week, I attended Marketing Sherpa’s Selling Online Subscriptions.  The conference was very good, overall, and was filled with specific ideas for improving customer acquisition and retention rates. Of course, there was a Web 2.0 panel, with Oz Sultan (who left the Economist a few weeks ago to join professional services firm Tacit Knowledge) and Jamie Steven of Real Networks and moderated by SEO-PR CEO Greg Jarboe.

Oz  was a strong panelist and shared examples of what they’d done at the Economist, deploying their Debate series, which allowed them to get sponsorship for this interactive forum, developing a Facebook widget for their fan page and more. Jamie shared examples of Real Networks efforts (some successful, others less so) to engage their audience by allowing them to create and share playlists with friends and family. He also shared how their initial efforts to develop a Facebook app have been less successful than they’d hoped and how they’re now partnering with an as-yet-unnamed partner with great Facebook penetration (Slide, perhaps?) for a co-branded widget.

The session was pretty good, but then they got to the question of “what can publishers do to embrace Web 2.0”?  The first response, from Jamie, was “launch a blog”. This is the same advice I’ve heard from web 2.0 panelists for the past few years.

But my question is “Are blogs really a web 2.0 strategy”?

To me, Web 2.0 is all about connectivity, collaboration, engagement and community. While blogs can be a part of that, for the most part publisher blogs become a one-way communication platform; they’re a bullhorn. Most publishers use blogs as a means of posting editorials online but they tend to generate little or no comments.

Oz had other suggestions that I think were more relevant – open up your content and create a mashup with Google maps or do something to generate more value out of your content.

So, by all means publishers, launch a blog. In fact, launch several. But don’t consider that a Web 2.0 strategy.

The long-hyped awaited semantic search engine Powerset has finally launched. To start, Powerset is running its search engine against Wikipedia and including reference data from Freebase.

Powerset uses semantic analysis in a few ways:
There is a natural language query box, so it can interpret questions like "Which companies has Microsoft acquired?", matching entities and facts from your search request to those in the Wikipedia data.

In displaying results, it first attempts to disambiguate multiple references to your search and arranges the content accordingly. Next, it applies fact extraction, identifying relationships between entities and displaying what it calls Factz.

In this example, we see how Powerset handles the "disambiguation 101" example of the word Java, starting with the island, the programming language, a band, and more. Next, it shows Factz about Java - relationships for programmed, used and supported.

The Factz seem a bit simple - it appears they're simply extracting noun-verb pairs. So, while the initial factz for Java make sense (such as programmed-language), as you dig deeper you find examples like "jarred confdesigner", whatever that may mean. The fact was apparently extracted from the sentence: ConfDesigner can be started directly via "java -jar confdesigner.jar" (because of added jar-Manifest).

I show this example not to disparage Powerset, but rather to point out how difficult it is to do semantic analysis on a massive corpus of text like Wikipedia. With a homogenous data set, for example, business news or bioinformatics data, you can tune a semantic engine for maximum precision and recall. With such a general data set, it's incredibly hard to consistently generate strong results.

The Powerset user interface is very clean. For any Wikipedia page, they add an "Article Outline" floating toolbar. This Ajax-based toolbar can either display the standard outline of the page (simply parsing the wikipedia tags around heading sections) or you can click on "Show Factz" and it will display the facts that it uncovers within each section as shown here. I think this adds a lot of value to Wikipedia.

Overall, I'd expect that I will use Powerset to search Wikipedia going forward, rather than going to the underlying site. While other power users may do so, the bulk of the wikipedia traffic comes from Google and I expect that to continue in the future.

I don't think the team at Powerset expects to make their money as a better search tool for Wikipedia in the long run. Rather, it's a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the capabilities of semantic search. Powerset has delivered a very compelling site search engine. While others may try to compare Powerset to Google, that's not a realistic comparison. Barney Pell and company have set their ambitions on replacing Google, but in the long run, I think they'll find their niche will be in semantic search for the enterprise, a web site or a specific domain.

I've been pretty close to the semantic search and text mining space since my early days at ClearForest in 2000, and while the promise of semantic analysis has always been great, the actual deliverables have consistently come up short.

Powerset seems to be making a credible claim to be the first legitimate semantic search engine of any scale.

Powerset has been 2+ years in the making, which seems a lifetime in the persistent beta world of Web 2.0, but they've built on 15+ years of computational linguistics and seem to have a viable offering. It will be interesting to see where they take it next.

For more on Powerset, read John Blossom, TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb.

Google tonight will launch Google Friend Connect, the first major product introduction around the Open Social platform.  Friend Connect will allow websites to integrate social networking capabilities without the need to write code.

The announcement comes on the heels of announcements from MySpace and Facebook that they are enabling more data portability. In other words, visitors to a given website should be able to leverage the relationship data they have stored at any other social networking site.

Data portability will be critical to the future growth of social networks. Anyone who tries to figure out which friends they have on LinkedIn vs. Facebook vs. Plaxo vs. MySpace knows the value of this. And, for Google and its partners, whoever gets out in front on that wave has the chance to be the primary host for that data. It seems that Google has taken a slightly closed approach to openness - rather than a fully open service, they provide code to enable you to open a Google Open Social iFrame.

Will try to post more tonight after the site goes live, but there's lots of good coverage already from  Forrester's Charlene Li, TechCrunch, Dan Farber at CNET, Read/Write/Web and Mashable, among others.

The URL (not yet working) for Friend Connect will be live tonight.

I've been following the commentary on the election results on Twitter tonight, trading messages with Larry Schwartz, Dave Winer and others.

Around 10:20pm EST, Twitter went down for a good 15 minutes or so. They've had a bunch of such outages recently and just let go their head of ops. I'd post this as a tweet, but, umm.. Twitter's down.

Twitter's really getting good mindshare (at least among the digerati) but they could lose it all in a hurry if they don't fix the scaling issues. I hope they get it done because I really like the app, but Friendfeed or someone like Google (who just introduced some Twitter-like sharing capabilities in Reader) could take the business away in a heartbeat.

Royal Pingdom has a great chart showing social network downtime since January. As shown here, Twitter tops the list, down twice as long as the runner-up site, Reunion.com. Good news, I guess, for those looking to cheat on a spouse with their highschool sweetheart, but bad news for those of us using Twitter.  See the chart here:

btw - you can follow my tweets here.

A side note - it really looks as though the west coast still has a lot more fun than us on the east coast. The same group who spent last week waiting for Iron Man to be released were all heading out to a Fast Company party tonight while the east coasters were sitting home watching election results.

Time Warner (NYSE:TWX) reported Q1 earnings of $771 million today. The $0.21 per share earnings were just shy of the $0.23 street consensus and the big news from the announcement and earnings call was the news that they plan to spin out  the cable business. But, the number that jumped out at me was the AOL results. In a quarter where Google beat their targets and Yahoo managed to hit theirs, AOL revenue was down from $1.46 billion to $1.13 billion over the same period a year ago.

PaidContent quotes new CEO Jeff Bewkes: "We were not satisfied with the performance of display advertising on our owned-and-operated network. ... We didn’t integrate Platform-A fast enough .. and that led to sales-channel conflict".

Whether it was the integration of Advertising.com and Tacoda or not, AOL needs to produce stronger results from its core advertising business. Analysts have long been clamoring for them to spin out AOL; as Google continues to grow and MicroHoo shakes out, they better get their act together before time runs out.