Jun
22
After the Web was Over
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, online advertising, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments
Please evaluate the following three statements: There is no Advertising marketplace on the Internet; Print will be a hobby for collectors only within your lifetime; The Web is the next and fastest casualty of tech disruption. Last year, given my ever optimistic approach to these matters, I would have wagered that the first two were certainly true in the medium to long term, but that the third was fairly unlikely, and that there was every chance that the Web would grow and develop as a format, and be able to resist all challenges for a very long time. After all, print in the book format lasted for over five hundred years, and if it would be an act of near-certifiable madness to try to create a print-only book publisher today, the fact that you can now throw off digitally-derived printed books from the print on demand segment of a digital process, and price it as if it came out of a long print run of yesteryear, means that having print remains an option for those who like serial reading with restricted cross-referencing.
But the Web? The wonderful, flexible Web? In some ways we have still only just grasped its potential. It was no fault of Tim Berners-Lee that eCommerce jumped aboard his good intentions for linking scientific research reporting. What they created, a shopping mall bigger than Edmonton, Canada, was a restoration of the shopper-as-hunter ethos of primitive man, and by making all goods findable, may have destroyed advertising as we knew it in the disaggregated world. What Berners-Lee intended for science has come to pass, though a combination of the residual controls of private sector publishing, the need for metadata and ranking above content, and the migration of scholarly communication into the blogosphere and twittersphere may be re-positioning the importance of URL-based connectivity.
No, its surely unthinkable. After all, we have struggled so hard to make the Web work. Back in the 1990s, I was chief stoker on many a crew determined to shovel everything that we had ever created or archived in print into the massive maw of the Web Moloch. It took over a decade to discover that creating things for the Web was better, that ex-print material could be a liability, and that digital-first meant, amongst other things, optimizing content design in favour of formats that echoed the way people were likely to use them on a screen. Surely all these hard-earned advances cannot be in jeopardy so soon? Some of us had just fancied that they had cracked it, after all!
And some have only just learned that Web and Internet are not the same things at all. While the world is committed to the cats cradle of private and public networks globally which carry standard format data in an Internet context, because here the IP protocol acts as a standard that locks them in, and change involves everyone changing at once, this is far from true when it comes to the constructions that sit on top of the network. They can change whenever enough people want them to change and a groundswell for change emerges. And having recently returned from Singapore, and then New York, I feel the groundswell more powerfully than I did last year. And this is not about WiFi and its not about the total engagement of mobile networks in the world we are building. It is all about how and why and where we carry our massive computing power around with us. I am typing this on an iPad Air, which is a powerful machine. Next to it stands a laptop which was as powerful as my original iPad of three years ago. Either of them could have run the Eurolex service of 1985, where I and my colleagues were able to distribute the case law and statutes of Great Britain (450 million words in secular terms!) to some 1500 law practices. These changes – Moores Law, nanotechnology, the Cloud – increase in impact. Are they the foundations of Web disruption?
Or do those lie elsewhere – in the increasing impatience of end users seeking answers, gratification, solutions? Sir Tim was catering for researchers, for whom enquiry process was a way of life. In the speeded up world of 25 years later, “solutioning” is moving away from enquiry and into the realm of prefabrication. For very many users and usages, the answer is in the App. No, I don’t want to search on search engines – they produce options, not answers. Give me the App. In a bar in Singapore, was I as naked as I felt – the only one without a smartphone in front of him, earnestly consulting a page of App choices? In the new Whitney Museum in New York, I was certainly the only person looking at Andrew Wyeth or Edwin Hopper with a (foreign) naked eye. When the machines in those young hands become as powerful as today’s portable devices – and there is nothing more certain than the fact that they will, time and screen size will dictate a major change in modality. We shall all be App publishers then.
But perhaps not publishers of Apps as we now know them. Think for a start that these Apps will have to be solutions engines. They will need to customize to user practice. They will need Cloud support for memory and computation. They will need to be up to date at all times. They will need to be fully responsive to the IoT environment, so capable of acquiring fresh data from us and our travels. They will be connected, and while I am sure that I do not yet know fully what “deep linking” means in this context, the great advances of the Web in knowledge connectivity will surely not go away along with the static, horizontal presentation that we shall come to see the Web as having entailed. Apps may be tokens for shared, community experiences, or solitary voyages that create shareable experiences. Above all, though, I would wager that in this phase we do cross a last frontier. While we provide the shell, the storage and some algorithms, the reader/user populates it and shares it, becoming in every sense the “publisher” in the process.
May
16
Up and About in Amsterdam and London
Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | 2 Comments
It is about seven years ago now that I crowded into a meeting room in San Mateo, California, and was introduced to the entire staff of MarkLogic. I was in the midst of a negotiation just up the road in Burlingame to sell my company to Outsell, but I had been energised by a conversation with Dave Kellogg, the very charismatic CEO of the young MarkLogic, to pay them a visit. “Stand over here”, said Kellogg, “and tell us where Europe is”. Presuming that he meant European publishing, rather than the Alps and the Pyrenees, I began a halting description of a market in slow digital transition, but was soon overtaken by other voices. Apparently, MarkLogic was the latest thing in database technology, and apparently the primitive nature of the market I had been apologetically describing, was pure opportunity lurking in the shadows and waiting to be turned into the stardust of a new age of media management. I drove away feeling that we might have gone an adjective too far in our enthusiasm but that something here had to be watched. This week I found out what that was.
Since that meeting I have had a long and pleasurable association with the company, and last week its annual user show arrived in a Europe it now knows intimately, with MarkLogic World 2015 conferences in Amsterdam and London. Alongside these events a dinner for publishing people took place, and I was able to attend and speak at both. With revenues last year marching past the $100m marker, and with a further funding round completed last week producing a further $100m in investment from backers that included Sequoia and Wellington, this is another emerging Silicon Valley force to be reckoned with in software. You would need a conference facility to speak to its 400 plus staff, and it is currently just discovering where AsiaPacific is – in media terms. And while publishing was a very proper starter market, the company is deeply embedded in government computing (Obamacare), broadcasting (the BBC Sports Olympic coverage was a breakthrough moment for a database that could allow 13 million viewers that ability to configure their own personalised view of the content), financial services and in all those accidental publishing places where entities who never thought of themselves as media now find that in a network context that is exactly what they are.
I am not the right person to expound on NoSQL databases, though I get a stronger sense each year that I am looking at the next Oracle, now directed by the equally charismatic Gary Bloom, a business leader whose own experiences were shaped in the Oracle that now faces this competitive pressure. Nor should I be writing about semantic analysis, triple stores or the vital importance of being able to work with structured and unstructured data in the same context. But I do now see clearly what happens as a result, and the transformation these technologies are creating in the lives of the people around those dinner tables. Job titles here become meaningless. These hard-working people were various designated as CTO, CIO, Chief Data Officer, Data Architect, Chief Product Manager, Business Development Manager and many more combinations of these. But they were around those tables because of a shift in power that has taken place throughout the media, and I slowly realised how little we have taken that shift into account and what it means for creativity in our businesses.
In the dim and distant past, in Old Publishing, editorial direction was the root of creativity. We spoke of “flair” and “hunch” as components in the business of selectivity. Then, we had Marketing, and we spoke of “fieldwork” and “research” as the drivers of creative decision making about how to formulate our products and develop our offerings. Many of us have now moved to the next stage as well, but it could be argued that we are in some respects still living in the Marketing-driven world. In very crude terms I could argue that the Editorial world was driven by format – books, magazines, newspapers. The Marketing phase was driven by content – trying to assemble content ever more carefully to meet the perceived needs of customers. The current drive, although it began in the search for ways of speeding up new product development, is towards Solutions, producing answers to real problems expressed by users, but creatively organising those solutions so that they produce measurable customer benefit, aka Value, often expressed in terms of productivity or cost saving.
And who in our information business is organising this new creativity? Not the editorial department, who are now just a part of process, if they exist at all. Not the Marketing department, who are solely occupied in presenting the results of what we produce to the customers we are trying to reach. The real creatives in information companies are those responsive to the unrecognised force derived from living in a networked society: in a networked economy the service requirement derives from the all-powerful user. All those job titles listed above, from CTO to Data Architect, are increasingly being turned inside out, and ceasing to be functions of internal systems development. Instead they are becoming the way in which we respond to what markets need, design solutions that make sense to end users, and create wealth.
If this is the case then some will feel that the creative role of the Data Architect is grossly under-recognised. I would agree, though the power in these roles, derived at once from a networked economy and from the rapid proliferation of intelligent ways of organising data like MarkLogic, is shown both in the scramble to recruit talent in this field and by the growing influence it has on budgets and expenditure. And this also raises a worry. If these people are the creative cadre of the future, are information businesses exposing them sufficiently to their customers. And given that customers never entirely told the truth in the long history of market research (a bit like political opinion polling?) do the designers of our solutions get enough observation time inside the customer context to discern where value may lie? We have the project development strategies (Agile et al) and we have the tools and structures, but do we have the evidence upon which to make decisions that will add value in contexts where our customers expect ever more customized responses from us?
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