AlacraBlog

Package Flexibly or Perish

The Grokster decision was a rare victory for traditional media.  But the protection gained by the movie and music industries will be short-lived as the way we are entertained and informed transforms from how it was just a few years ago.  The shift is everywhere and is picking up speed.  The current Business Week has Net to Newspapers: Drop Dead.  Yesterday’s FT issued another warning for newspapers in the Lex column.  A CNN poll confirms what recent box office receipts are indicating: Most Prefer To Watch Movies at Home.  Broadcast radio is under attack by satellite (live and recorded), iPods and the podcast phenomenon.

As entertainment and information delivery change at home, similar changes are taking place at work, at almost the same speed.  RSS is the new medium for current awareness and alerting.  (American Express is beta testing an RSS service now.)  Collaborative software (Jotspot, Social Text), currently in the early adopter stage, is taking many forms but will certainly be mainstream by next year.  Just as there are elevator pitch podcasts today, there will be company meeting podcasts soon.  For publishers and aggregators alike, flexibility in delivery and packaging will continue to be a critical component of success.

Tickers Should Be Tags

The problem (I suppose there’s more than one) with doing a Technorati blog search for business or company related information is the signal-to-noise ratio.  There’s just too much junk to sift through in the hope of finding a gem.  Much worse than a web search.   Doing a tag search rather than a blog search results in the opposite problem – there’s nothing there.  Try a tag search for a large public company and there’s practically nothing.  I did discover two interesting things:  Man on a Mission archives mission statements of large companies.  A tag search for PFE or JNJ will return a link to their mission statements.  (In the case of JNJ it’s actually a credo.) Earningscast allows you to listen to a company’s earnings call or download it to your iPod.  Both these sites tag their postings with ticker symbols.  If this became more prevalent, the value of the blogosphere to business researchers would increase dramatically.

Fred Gets Some Press

Alacra Board member Fred Wilson and his recently launched Union Square Ventures fund are written up nicely in this Business 2.0 article.

The Last Taxonomist

One of our terrific web editors recently left us to take a job as a taxonomist at a top law firm.  I was curious how many job openings there were for taxonomists so I did a quick search on Monster.  There were 7 listings in New York and New Jersey for jobs that contained “taxonomy” in the description, but only two were truly jobs as taxonomists.  The others were in content management and portal development.  Conventional wisdom, or at least the wisdom of several years ago would have said that as the amount of information continues to explode, the need for knowledge management and taxonomies would increase dramatically as well.  But the centralized model of knowledge management and taxonomy development is being overtaken by the do-it-yourself model, where information is tagged and categorized by the individual.  There’s been a lot written about this recently, but the two best pieces are Clay Shirky’s Ontology Is Overrated and Adam Mathes’ Folksonomies - Cooperative Classification and Communication Through Shared Metadata.

With Friends Like These…

I went to see my son perform last night at Carnegie Hall with the Manhattan Borough-Wide Band.  There are posted rules prohibiting the use of video and still cameras in the Hall, but I couldn’t resist.  Not only didn’t it work out (I got nabbed), I got this email this morning (click the pic to read)from a friend who was at the show. 

Hopefully I won’t show up in some bad-guy database like World-Check.

One Small Step

Yahoo! Search Subscriptions was announced today, a small step forward on the path towards integrating web search results with results from the “deep” or “invisible” web.  John Blossom and John Battelle provide some analysis.  Battelle recommends that Yahoo! “act as a central clearinghouse for transactions and subscription fulfillment/services.”  He goes further saying:

"In essence, publishers are terrified that if they allow their content into search engines, they'll never get paid for it, and they'll lose the relationship with the customer to boot. The database aggregators like LexisNexis, in particular, are wary of search. But if I could find LexisNexis articles in a Yahoo search, and easily click through and read them for a small fee (or a Rhapsody like option that lets me buy an unlimited sub for say $10 a month), why, I'd do it all day long. But don't ask me to log in to LexisNexis each time. Let Yahoo handle that. And don't make me pay $5 for each article. I'll never do it."

This is simplistic and frankly unrealistic.  First, not all the content on LexisNexis (and Dialog, Factiva, Alacra etc.) is the aggregators’ to price in this fashion.  It’s silly to think that  $10 per month would cover current revenue via an increase in subscribers. Secondly, although a news story might be a commodity item, there’s plenty of other more valuable content in these databases and users would still need to contract with someone other than Yahoo! to purchase it.  Finally, there’s the user experience and packaging, which is a point of competition among the aggregators that Yahoo! would find difficult to match.

Not that Yahoo! Search Subscriptions isn’t a good thing.  For certain users it improves the search experience and for the premium content participants, their results stay in front of their users in a more persistent fashion.  But if publishers can’t monetize the traffic (that’s what Yahoo! does) and they degrade their ability to monetize the content they’re not left with very much.  They need to be wary.  John Blossom says “…the real shoe dropping to listen for will be (as Battelle suggests) when the access to subscription content via Web search engines, regardless of its source, becomes as transparent as access to general web content.”  I think we have a ways to go before we hear that thud.

Corporate Linkage With Better Packaging

We’ve had significant demand for more accessible corporate linkage information among financial services and professional services customers, to be used both for conflict checking and market analysis purposes. Customer complaints about existing corporate linkage products has always been with the presentation of the data. Working with D&B, Alacra has developed a new Corporate Linkage report, which is an interactive PDF that exposes the entire family tree and segments the entities within a family tree by SIC code and geography.  We demonstrated this report (can you demonstrate a report?) at SLA and it generated a lot of interest.   
 

More Silliness from Fallows

Last May James Fallows had a column in the Sunday NY Times called Twilight of the Information Middlemen which I thought at the time lacked foresight and was just plain silly and wrong.  More information means more aggregation and more intermediaries.  The explosion of RSS has spawned lots of new middlemen.  More silliness from Fallows came yesterday with Enough Keyword Searches, Just Answer My Question.   Not wrong this time, just a blinding glimpse of the obvious:  “Yet for anything but simple keyword queries, even the best search engines are surprisingly ineffective.”  Duh! Or Duh!  For better sarcasm, check out Slashdot… “No matter which search engine I use, still none of them can help me search for my missing car keys or missing left socks.”  I guess I’m trying to figure out what audience he’s writing for.

Alacra and RSS

At the SLA Business & Finance Division Vendor Update on Monday June 6^th, I gave a 5 minute presentation on Alacra’s RSS initiative.  I was joined on the panel by representatives from Factiva, LexisNexis, Dialog, Business Monitor International and ISI Euromoney.  Judging from the lack of questions asked during the session and a few conversations later on, it seems as if the information professional community is not nearly as excited about RSS as perhaps they should be.  True, much of the information professional’s role has traditionally been reactive – receive a request, find the answer and then deliver the answer.  RSS can help answer questions that users have consistently, or answer questions that users didn’t know they wanted to ask.

For Alacra and our customers, a standard format for delivering current awareness and alerting services solves what we’ve found to be a very difficult challenge – firms want these services but each firm wants their own flavor.  Flavors can make these solutions cost prohibitive.

RSS has three important benefits:

• Consistency – Disparate content can fit into one format
• Portability – Any device with a reader can read RSS
• Serendipity – Facilitates the discovery of information you didn’t know you wanted to read

Alacra’s value-add in the RSS space will be to allow users to subscribe to headline feeds on companies, industries or countries which, if necessary, can reflect what they are permissioned for.  Additionally, users can be prompted for project codes if they decide to download a piece of content.  Users will have the convenience of subscribing via an Alacra web site and will be able to read their RSS feeds in any reader.

Back from Toronto

For Alacra, Toronto was the best SLA conference ever.  We had a terrific booth in an amazing location and the conference was incredibly well attended. Lots of booth traffic from both our existing customers as well as a huge number of prospects.   I didn't make it to any of the sessions (except the one at which I spoke) but the overall report was that although there was some redundant topics and some crowding in the rooms, all the speakers were extremely well received.  Mary Corcoran of Outsell provides some comments here. 

(See more pics in our photo albums at the bottom left of our Alacra Blog)