Jan

5

Seven Pillars of Wisdom

Filed Under B2B, Blog, data protection, eBook, Education, eLearning, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Pearson, privacy, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Thomson, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

My holiday reading, courtesy of Skip Pritchard who gave it to me, has been Michael Korda’s vast biography of T E Lawrence, and despite my familiarity with the story, I have found it an entrancing experience. Lawrence is almost impossible to reconstruct, since he shone a different light in the direction of every individual he met, and one is left feeling that nowhere does a real Lawrence exist. So very like the information game, then! Every observer sees a different fraction of play, and no one can predict the outcome. This comment is meant to mask my residual guilt at reading my book while my knee mended and not writing pages of forecasts and predictions for the amusement of readers, and to confirm my frailties as a prophet of anything.

Lawrence wrote “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”, one of the world’s unread classics (and almost unreadable in parts: he lost the only copy of the full manuscript on Reading train station and had to recreate 200,000 words, during which he clearly became bored.) In 800 words I can communicate seven thoughts – not so much Pillars  as pillows, and not predictions but observations of this unknowable industry. Here goes:

1.  Some think its about content and others that it is about platforms and technology. For me it is still about communications, and the greatest challenge is still holding people’s attention, having gained their recognition. Even Facebook hits a plateau. The gods remain Reputation, Identity, and Attention.

2. You are either a communication company or you are not. News Corp is a format company. It does newspapers, film and television and has little corporate bandwidth for non-format communications. This cannot be changed by executive whim, and the collapse of Beyond Oblivion, its music initiative, before the holidays (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jan/04/music-service-beyond-oblivion-folds), as well as the veil of silence around the performance of The Daily on the iPad, following on as they do the oblivion that was My Space, demonstrates all of this very well. Yet Mr Murdoch has signed on to Twitter. There is no evidence yet that the world can be saved with a single Tweet. There is no evidence yet that traditional media and information businesses can recreate themselves in new marketplaces without either starting afresh somewhere else  or by buying a new business and moving into it. Boinc.

3. Apple, according to MacRumors (http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/03/apples-january-media-event-to-involve-digital-textbooks-and-education/), is about to enter the textbook market, maybe with Pearson and certainly via the iPad. This was apparently a dearly held dream of Steve Jobs, at least according to Walter Isaacson, who is shaping up to be not just the biographer but also the Delphic oracle. I have some doubts – not about the iPad as a display device, but about whether markets want textbooks re-invented. Learners would like learning re-invented, and made easier and more compelling. Textbooks are an extinct format. And learning should operate equally well on whatever platform you have available. What a waste of all this energy around eLearning if we abolish the old formats like textbooks and replace them with rigid device platforms. And yet I am sure that the analysts are right – there are only a few global growth markets and education is the largest.

4. Then I had a great comment from Brad Patterson at EduLang (www.edulang.com). He points out that 500 million people are trying to learn English and only 50 million can afford textbooks, online or otherwise. So his business model for his interesting TOEFL and TOIEC Simulators is “pay what you can”, with half going to a reading charity. In many ways this is very neat – it reaches out to 450 million people with a trust relationship, and could be a really interesting business model to watch. Above all, how encouraging it is to see someone moving the goalposts – we did not score many goals in regular business model configurations so lets applaud the courage of someone doing something different.

5. Semantic Web technology and deployment in mass markets is getting closer and closer. I took part in the beta of Garlik (www.garlik.com) some 3 years ago, partly because of an interest in technology around identity, and partly out of interest in technologies derived from the University of Southampton Computer Science department, and blessed by such eminences as Wendy Hall, Nigel Shadbolt – and Sir Tim Berners Lee himself. Two days before Christmas Garlik was sold to Experian, in a move that I think was as significant as Reuters buying ClearForest all those years ago. Garlik protects personal identity through web search, was founded by the men who built the UK online banks Egg and First Direct, and backed by Doughty Hanson. This is a straw in a wind which will go galeforce.

6. But if the Semantic Web is going to be so clever, and linked data will recreate so many service environments, where is it now? Well, look at the obvious places. In most of our economies building and construction is the largest sector in terms of activity and players, large and small, and has great companies serving it with supplier and materials information. Thus, in a US market replete with Reed Construction, Hanley Wood and McGraw-Hill. But what if a semantic web-based environment were able to search all online catalogues and directories to produce a sweeping coverage of suppliers and products that was at once more detailed and more comprehensive than any directory-style database, and could include more metadata from suppliers and users to create a continually developing industry specification site, deliverable and self-formatting to every platform and device? That is what interests me about MaterialSource, (http://www.materialsource.com/about) as well as its use of SPARQL, Semantic Web Pages for faceted and graph-based browsing, smartphone and tablet Apps using HTML5, ontologies etc, etc. If they do it, someone will have to buy them!

7. I keep on thinking about the neglect of audio, so I was delighted to see SoundCloud (http://soundcloud.com/). There has to be room for an audio portal, and a community for sharing sound and cross-referencing its sources and users. I anticipate that they know things about users that Beyond Oblivion didn’t.

Last words of a predictive nature before I get back to real work. A correspondent asks “what technology are you following in 2012!” Since I say every week that I am not following technologies but users, I take mild offense at this, but I do admit to a penchant for 3D printing. Now that really could have an impact. Especially in medical workflow. I have also been asked by a venture capitalist who should know better what is likely “to be certain” to succeed this year. He is a serious man so I owe him a serious answer: anything that saves more time and money than it costs. The prime example this year in the UK has been Shutl, a delivery logistics service that gets your online purchases to you physically (average delivery time in London was 90 minutes, with a cost of £5). Is that all the queries? I am beginning to feel like an Agony Aunt!

 

Dec

16

Metadata Memento Mori

Filed Under B2B, Blog, data protection, Education, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, news media, Publishing, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

Content was once valuable. Then content about content, the metadata that identifies our content values and made them accessible, became a greater and more powerful value. Soon we stood at the edge of a universe where no searching would take place which did not involve machine interrogation of metadata. We evolved ever more complex systems of symbology to ensure that customers who used our content were locked into accepting our view of the content universe by virtue of accepting our coding and metadata, and using it in relation to third party content. Further, we passed into European law, in terms of the provisions of the so-called directive on the legal protection of databases, the notion that our metadata was itself a protectable database. Now content is less valuable, more commoditized, and inevitably widely copied. So it is our fall back position that our metadata contains the unique intellectual property and as long as we still have that in a place of safety we are secure. And can sleep easily in our beds.

Until the day before yesterday, that is. For on the 14 December the European Union’s Official Journal published a settlement offer from Thomson Reuters in an competition enquiry which has run for two years (http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:C:2011:364:0021:0024:EN:PDF) The case concerns Thomson Reuters’ use of its RICs codes. Insofar as they have become the standard way in which traded equities are described in datafeeds, the fact that the market bought the Reuters solution as a surrogate for standardization did give Thomson Reuters competitive advantage – and this is made clear by the fact that the Commission investigation was prompted by its commercial rivals. But that advantage was not unearnt, and the standardization that resulted from it brought benefits across the market. Now Thomson Reuters, to end the process, offers licensing deals and increased access to its metadata. This may turn out to be a momentous moment for the industry.

I have no interest here in examining whether Thomson Reuters are right or wrong to seek a deal. From Microsoft to Google to Apple, the frustrations of enquiries by the competition commissioner’s office in Brussels have worn down the best and most resilient. But I do want to comment om what may be happening here. If you accept my thesis that content is becoming increasingly commoditized and that systems for describing it are increasingly valuable, we may have to recalibrate our picture of what is happening as a result of this news. What if, in fact, the commoditization involved here spreads slowly up the entire information value chain over time. In this model, the famous value pyramid which we have all used to subjugate our audiences and colleagues is under commoditization water at its base, which is where raw data and published works are kept. Now the next level is becoming slightly damp from this rising tide, as descriptive modalities get prised off and become part of the common property of all information users. So information vendors scramble further up the pyramid, seeking dry land where ownership can be re-asserted. Maybe more advanced metadata will offer protection and enhance asset value. The Scorm dataset in an educational product can annotate learning outcomes and allow objects and assessment to be associated. Or, following the financial services theme here, maybe we add Celerity-style intelligence to content which allows a news release to be “read” in machine-to-machine dialogue, and trading actions sparked by the understanding created. We will certainly do all these things, because no one will buy our services if they do not accord with the most appropriate descriptive norms available. But will they protect our intellectual property in conent or data? No, I am increasingly afraid that they will not.

It will take many years to happen. And it will happen at a very different pace in different marketplaces. But the days when you valued a company by its content IP, by its copyrights and its unique ownership value have been over for some time. And now we can see that the higher order values are themselves becoming susceptible to competition regulation which seems, in this age, to over-ride IP rights in every instance. So what are we actually doing when we say we are building value? Normally, it seems to me, we are combining content with operational software systems to create value represented by utility. From the app to the workflow system, content retains its importance in the network because we shape it not just for research, but for action, for process, for communication. And that, after all, is where the definition of a networked society with a networked economy lies.

And if we were in doubt about this, reflect on the current pre-occupation about Big Data. Is our society going to be willing to hold up the vital release of “new” scientific knowledge from the ossified files of journal publishers just because some of this stuff is owned by Elsevier and some by Wiley? The water of analytic progress is already flowing around the dams of copyright ownership, and this week surged past a major player protecting his coding, though the proposed licensing scheme does leave a finger in the hole in the dyke. We seem to me to be running at ever greater speed towards a service economy in professional information where the only sustaining value is the customer appreciation of service given, measured in terms of productivity, process improvement, and compliance . These benefits will be created from content largely available on the open web, and increasingly using metadata standards which have gone generic and are now, like RICs, part of the common parlance of the networked marketplace. The language of IP in he information economy is getting to sound a bit old-fashioned.

« go back — keep looking »