Magazine Publishers of America
It was a lunch conversation made in digital heaven. To my right the conversation was about metadata; to my left it was about “query string manipulation.” If I wasn’t completely in my element, I had the strong suspicion this is exactly where I should be: at the Mark Logic Digital Summit, December 10, 2009 at the Plaza Hotel in New York.
I think the publishing industry has successfully devoured the low-hanging digital fruit. Web 2.0 features now seem like yesterday’s fashion. Mobile and video stand before us with the hockey-stick promise still slightly out of reach. We’ll get to social media.
We’ve heard all the iterations about content being king. At the Mark Logic event, a speaker said that if content is king, then the consumer is King Kong. Metaphors have the habit of breaking down under their own weight, so I’ll stop here. We do know that content is currently at the center of the industry imagination, as publishers seek to take back control of this asset. The recently announced content consortium addresses this need. Everyone has a view about paid content.
If you haven’t heard it already, we are drowning in data. If that is not bad enough, as some magazine publishers have acknowledged, we can’t find all the data we are drowning in. And you can’t monetize what you can’t find. Fortunately there are a number of emerging technology companies that help publishers search all content: text, video, audio, and images. We have met with Ramp and find they have some interesting applications (www.ramp.com).
David Kellog, CEO, Mark Logic, opened the conference by emphasizing that there is a quiet adoption of XML (Extensible Markup Language) and related technologies that allows publishers to deliver content in ways not possible before. XML is a high performance platform for manipulating, repurposing and monetizing data so it can be delivered to the right device when the consumer wants it.
In Kellogg’s words publishers are facing a hostile content-eco-system that requires them to be nimble and have the capabilities to integrate, enrich, slice-and-dice, analyze, contextualize and deliver content to an increasing number of devices in a dynamic manner. XML enables such applications.
David Worlock, Co-Chair, Outsell Leadership Programs, continued this conversation, suggesting one challenge publishers face is to demonstrate that “good enough content” is not really good enough in the business sense. Worlock, a thirty-year veteran of the digital wars, mentioned that an iceberg twice the size of Manhattan had broken off and is currently floating off Australia. This is apparently the kind of thing he keeps an eye on. You can’t always find your way by focusing on the obvious.
Worlock’s focus was on content within the context of re-usability. He argued for a re-examination of the value of content, not as a product but as a service. The challenge for publishers to the escape the commodity trap and move up the content value chain by using tools such as indexing, mapping, visualization and the like. He calls this content merged into the workflow of our lives. Unique, quality content is important but not beyond certain price points. Worlock was largely talking about the business-to-business space but his admonition for publishers to understand content as part of an eco-system and network was useful. And his ideas might have more applications for consumer magazines when content at scale becomes disaggregated from the original form.
Rich Maggiotto, Founder, President & CEO, Zinio, reminded attendees how fast the digital reading experience is changing and that his company is right in the middle of it offering a multi-screen reading experience on a global scale. By any measure Zino has a very large newsstand with 2,000 titles available. The titles include magazines, comics and children’s books and can be read on tablet PCs, netbooks and smartbooks. In 2010-11 titles will be available on Nokia, Droid, television, e-readers, play stations, and on the screens in the back seats of planes.
Zinio’s launch of Vivmag, a high-end, rich-media, digital magazine with 350,000 paid consumers has allowed the company to experiment with the reflow of high-fidelity content. It is not about the device, of course; it is about every device and Zinio keeps a close eye on the sectors. Maggiotto sees environmental, generational, and technical developments driving consumers to the third screen, which will offer full saturated color, sooner rather than later. And with netbook manufacturers Asus and Acer likely leading the charge, the price of e-readers and converged devices will be coming down.
I wasn’t able to attend all the application and technology tracks but a few caught my eye. Chris Tse, Director of Innovation, Business Week gave a lively talk on rethinking social media for business. Business Week’s Business Exchange is a web site that “allows users to create business topics, collaboratively aggregate content from the entire web and connect with other business focused users around the web.” According to Tse there are no writers or editors at the Exchange, though BW editors and writers can participate. As with other sites, 10% of users tend to contribute to the Exchange that is organized along the Digg model. All content that is contributed can be automatically be added to Facebook and Twitter, for example.
Tse acknowledged that conversations in social media don’t monetize well and that scale is still an issue. But this seems an important and elegant bridge that marries traditional and social media by making full use of web tools and architecture.
Fernando Mesa, Principal Technologist, Mark Logic, addressed the disruptive technologies that solve new business problems in media. He got right to the point. Cloud computing, social media and mobile technologies are forcing new business models on publishers.
A lot has been written about cloud computing and a lot of jokes told on the subject. Mesa tended to get down to business and took this application out of the clouds. He didn’t really go on about cloud computing being the harbinger of a post-software world. For Mesa cloud computing is an on-demand service that allows resource pooling, network access and rapid elasticity in the business. In other words you don’t have to wait around for the IT department. This way you can test markets or use an application for a short period of time. If you need to respond quickly to a competitor’s move, the cloud might be the way to go.
Mesa used the Business Exchange as a good example of building on the social media platform and making content more valuable, meaningful and viral.
For a Principal Technologist, Mesa was very bullish on mobile which he called “bigger than bigger.” Mobile is “an eco-system enabler, end-to-end.” A number of speakers during the day echoed similar thoughts, suggesting mobile offers a second chance to media companies.
Mesa reminded us that many of the e-reader standards, built on the e-pub format, are already available and being improved regularly. When creating, managing, distributing, and consuming content within the eco-system and lifecycle of content, Mesa recommends using the technologies that allow for agility. Obviously XML is just one application. Mesa advises content producers to invest less in “plumbing” and more in structuring content through tagging and the like so content will have more value over time on more platforms.
Norm Walsh, another Principal Technologist, spoke about the intersection of mobility and content and “Walkabout,” his geospatial web application that runs on the iPhone. Since many smart phones know where you are, they have the ability to adapt information dynamically. This might include mapping mashups that take advantage of content tagged with latitude and longitude markers. In this scenario much of this data is stored on the server and this reduces the amount of data on the actual device. The applications of these location-based technologies will be huge for consumers at retail.
One response to the disruption in the magazine space is to focus more on monetizing content. This attention is heightened as more content platforms come to market. As new opportunities present themselves, publishers need to retrieve their assets quickly “through metadata searches in large, rich media libraries.” This need becomes even more challenging as media companies often store assets in different systems, making retrievals more difficult.
I’m adding XML to my Christmas list.
Charles McCullaghSenior Vice PresidentMember Services & Technology
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