AlacraBlog

Enjoy It While We Can

A good article in the FT yesterday about the strength in the management consulting business – Advice Is Once More In Demand.  This is definitely helping Alacra’s business, as our consulting customers require more information to support client pitches and engagements.  It’s a great cycle in that increased M&A activity (which also helps) is generating lots of consulting business.

One Big Database

You can bet there’s going to be a ton of new legislation regarding the safeguarding for credit card information and other bits of personal data.  In addition to the vendors of credit and other personal information like ChoicePoint and West, every major retailer has a database of credit card information.  The most recent hack was at DSWShoe.  For a dark, slice of death vignette on the growing availability of personal information, click and listen here.

Fresh Spaghetti

David Curle of Outsell graciously provided me with a updated picture of Outsell Spaghetti. 

What Are The Taxonomists Thinking?

Like me, many readers have been to plenty of conferences over the past 10 years where people spoke about taxonomies.  Creation, maintenance, modification, cost, compatibility, importance, usefulness.  Control of the taxonomy was crucial.  Each change or addition went through a process.  The taxonomists were protective over their creations and strong advocates for their correctness.  What are they thinking now?

A little over a year ago it became clear there were a large and growing number of bloggers with domain expertise in a growing number of domains.  Om Malik on Broadband for example.  Or Fred Wilson, Brad Feld and Ed Sim on Venture Capital.  To help readers find the posts they were interested in many bloggers tagged their blog postings with categories.  Fred has Venture Capital and Technology, New Music and Presidential Politics, for example.  He’s created his own taxonomy.  The issue is (was):  If everyone has their own taxonomy, will anything work? 

It will.  I was skeptical at first about the viability of folksonomies.  Too messy, not hierarchical.  But it’s becoming clear to me that the lack of a fixed hierarchy (or any hierarchy at all) can be advantageous and that over time the mess will be largely self-correcting.  Sort of what James Surowiecki proposes in The Wisdom of Crowds.  Blogs or RSS feeds with similar domain expertise may eventually adopt similar same tags, so that their stuff can be more readily found.  Or, aggregators may step in and create tag maps or synonym tables, so that Fred’s Venture Capital and Technology maps to Brad’s Term Sheet category.  Or services like del.icio.us will become a de facto thesaurus.  (An excellent description of del.icio.us is here.)  In the business information arena, there is certainly a need for hierarchical structures -  what industries do companies fall into, what regions do countries fall into, etc.  But on the web, flatness is a virtue. 

But I Really Like The Spaghetti Chart

Outsell defended my critique of their Outsell 100 numbers by saying that despite the fact they're comparing apples, oranges, pears and grapes, it's all fruit.  And maybe when you dig much deeper into the numbers you can argue it's all fruit.  (I wouldn't.)  But from 30,000 feet, even a profitable $50 million trade publisher is invisible in a field that includes Google and Yahoo!  In the last quarter Yahoo's fee-based business grew 61 percent; to $149 million in revenue.  Their fee-based business includes enhanced email and dating services...I'm not sure trade publishers and aggregators are competing with these slices of Yahoo.

Again, I think the Outsell team has a good a handle on the market as anyone.  But the industry has changed dramatically since the Outsell 100 has been established and I would argue that the industry's metrics have changed as well.  If you look at the Laird Squared Business Information Services Fifty, you get a different, narrower view of the market but one that is probably closer to home to the people attending Buying and Selling eContent.  And of course these lists only include public companies.

For the BSeC audience, the important questions are who is effectively leveraging Google and Yahoo and who is seeing their businesses marginalized.  I think an updated Outsell Spaghetti picture would do the trick.

Highlights of Buying and Selling eContent

Another well-executed conference by Information Today.

David Weinberger, (www.evident.com) co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, gave the keynote this year and got the conference off to an excellent start.  A few sentence summary wouldn’t do his talk justice but the theme was “everything is miscellaneous.”  Whereas 1) previous efforts to organize the world’s knowledge have been extremely rigid (Aristotle and Dewey were his examples) and 2) definitive taxonomies have been the goal of modern-day information architects, the current information environment is better suited to more free-form methods of categorization such as user tagging and folksonomies.  David went through many of neat features of Flickr, del.icio.ous and Technorati and really set the bar for the rest of the conference.  When I got back to my desk this morning I saw that Union Square Ventures had made an investment in del.icio.us.

After the keynote, Rafat Ali (www.paidcontent.org), John Blossom (www.shore.com), Jeff Dearth (www.mediabankers.com), Janet Liggett of Pfizer and Chuck Richard (www.outsell.com) talked about the Content Industry Outlook.  Quick takes:  To keep up with what’s going on in the industry you need to check out Rafat’s site.  John’s slides were excellent; I assume he’ll put them up on his site.  He has some strong, compelling opinions as to where the content industry is headed.  Jeff re-confirmed (music to my ears) that M&A in the information industry is very hot right now and shows no sign of abating.  Chuck covered some statistics from the Outsell100.  Outsell and Chuck have a terrific handle on the industry.  However, aside from answering the question “Is the industry growing,” I think the Outsell 100 data revealed at conferences is underwhelming.  It’s mixing apples and oranges and pears and grapes – the fact that Google’s and Yahoo!’s growth are in the mix means little for an online or print publisher, or an aggregator, or a software company.  And, much of the action is happening in the private companies so the numbers, at least to me, are meaningless.

Monday afternoon was spent talking about understanding the content supply chain from publisher to aggregator to consumer to solutions provider.  Overall, the theme worked; I thought Mike Stelzer of E&Y (www.ey.com) was the highlight.  Lou Celi’s talk outlined how a publisher can squeeze every bit of revenue out of the content lemon (www.eiu.com).

On Tuesday morning, Ross Mayfield (www.socialtext, http://ross.typepad.com/) elaborated on Weinberger’s themes from Monday by giving quick demos of wikis, blogs and RSS and explaining how the various technologies can come together in a corporate environment.  I sat in on the roundtable discussion hosted by Ross and David Scott (www.freshspot.com, www.webinknow.com).   It seems as though many of these technologies have only been embraced by early adopters and that the corporate world is still a little intimidated by them, or have not figured out cost-effective uses for them. I think they need some more success stories, better marketed.

Jeff Cutler, the new Chief Revenue Officer of Gurunet (www.answers.com) moderated a panel called Threats and Opportunities:  Business Models & Strategies for Success.  Each of the panelists (Don Hawk of TechTarget, Corey Johnson of Valeo, Joe Kasputys of Global Insight and Dave Mandelbrot of Yahoo!) gave interesting opening remarks, but I thought the session was misnamed.  Admittedly, I missed the final 15 minutes as I had a plane to catch, but it seemed that the session was targeted at publishers and while engaging, didn’t really stay on topic. 

For me, the networking was great as there were plenty of Alacra content providers to catch up with.  Two suggestions for Information Today for next year: 1) vet the presenters’ slides, as a few presentations went on too long and 2) figure out how to get more buyers to attend.  It was really a seller’s conference.   

Last Night at the SLA B&F Event

Last night's Business & Finance panel discussion was very well-organized by (ex-Alacra Account Exec) Denise Slifer and expertly moderated by Pam Rollo.  Perhaps too expertly moderated, in that the discussion was exceptionally tame.  Maybe this event wasn't the appropriate forum, but since we know there are issues between the buyers and the vendors and it's so hard to get a group like this together, I think more audience participation during the session would have enhanced the event.  It seemed like the audience wanted to speak but only had a few minutes at the end. 
I thought a lot about the questions relating to innovation (specifically in our industry).  I agree with the panelists that said there's lots of innovation happening behind the customer's firewall.  (Some of this is happening with Alacra's help.)  I also agree that in the business information and knowledge management arenas there are other bits of innovation occuring "at the margin."  But looking more broadly I see tremendous amounts of innovation from internet search to RSS to click-through comps to independent research and all sorts of views and packaging of data.  My experience is that professional services organizations are not generally early adopters in the office and when some interesting thing does make it behind the firewall, it's already been out in the world for a while and has lost some of it's newness.

Upcoming Panels

On Wednesday, April 6, there’s an SLA Business & Finance Division panel discussion called The Art of the Deal Redux: The Impact of the New Economy on the Art of the Deal.  On the Information Provider side, I will be on the panel with Kieran Kennedy of FactSet, Debra Walton of Thomson Financial and Alan Scott of Factiva.  The Information Consumers will be represented by Laurie Leichman of McKinsey, Cathy Porta of PwC, Susie Adinolfi of Merrill Lynch and Steve Medley of Bear Stearns.  I feel like I’ve finally made the major leagues as part of this line-up.  This should be interesting...

The following week I’ll be at Camelback for Buying & Selling eContent.  The Monday afternoon program is Who Is Buying Content: Understanding Content Supply Chain.  I’m also on the panel for this program, talking about the aggregator’s perspective – who are the customers, tracking usage, ensuring permissioning and how to get to the desktop.  Lots of other great speakers at that event too.