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.

Apr

26

Not Virtual, Just Reality

Filed Under B2B, Blog, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, online advertising, Publishing, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Many people seem to have fallen victim to what I want to call TES (Tech Expectation Syndrome). They get lost in the ocean swells between over-hyped pre-exploitation excitement, and gradual market development under a different guise is a different context. Looking back through my file of words that seem to have disappointed at the top of the typical Gartner expectation spike and are now safely on the plateau of exploitation, I find things like VADs and VANs (now our digital networks), GIS (now a part of every activity known to man since geolocation became the bedrock of mobile telephony), AI (now becoming the M2M nexus of the working world, and so terrifying that even Stephen Hawking cannot exorcise it) …and, of course, VR, the wonderfully exciting 3D environment that we fell in love with, and then decided that headsets were not for us, and that this would only work for dedicated gamers.

And if forgetfulness about how much unexploited technology is available to our new product and service development cycles is one of our sins in the publishing and media marketplaces, let me add another while the Sunday afternoon mood of self-flagellation is upon me. After sustained efforts of re-invention, we keep falling back on PSP (product simulation psychosis). We put extra stuff, more video, longer text, archival support and other elements into the digital “version” and then promote it and sell it just as if it were analogous to the print “version”. We know these things are growing apart but we seem reluctant to acknowledge the difference. No where has this been more marked than in the newspaper industry, which strictly speaking we should now stop calling the newspaper industry. If we called it “news media” we might get closer to seeing how differentiation is taking place, and mark the points at which the digital service elements are going out on a track that print can never follow, and creating information in formats which will become the hallmark of communication. They are the defining moments in the separation of print and digital, and we should point to them whenever some senior executive says (so many do, I am afraid) “There will always be a market for print” or “digital is neat but what are its real advantages for which I would pay extra”.

They still say these things and there have been moments when I have thought the entire news industry would go the way of Yellow Pages, despite Vox, Buzzfeed, Fast Company (and that stubbornly non-innovative digital analogue of print, the Huffington Post). And then last week I saw surprizing green shoots of change, and not from the new digital news industry, but from those good souls who have huffed and puffed up and down the the peaks of inflated expectations a time or two, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The latter have been celebrating Nasdaq’s birthday in fine style. They have taken my pathetic wave metaphors in a different context into a graphers delight, a 3D journey around the index from its inception (http://graphics.wsj.com/3d-nasdaq/). Use it on your mobile, walk round the room with it, or (get this!) get the WSJ headset and really appreciate it. This is not just a beautiful birthday card – you are looking at the way graphical information will be read, or, rather experienced, as the years go on. Here we move away from anything which can be “printed”, and once this style of activity does become the way in which we experience and record change, then only the network can deliver it.

But I would have to reserve special praise for what the New York Times did last week on an architectural review of the new Whitney Museum building (http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/19/arts/artsspecial/new-whitney-museum.html). This is a delight to the eye. Once you have seen this you will never want to read a review of a new building which does not include this type of 3D analytical effect. It enhances every readers’ appreciation of the points Michael Kimmelman is making, yet this is VR lite, needing no headset and simply deploying great VR graphics to display the planes and vistas of a new building in a moving dynamic. And until they start moving you think you are just encountering another illustration in text. This answers the question – what would you pay extra for – because it adds a new dimension to understanding which could only have come from this environment.

We have noted here before the way in which old businesses can survive, despite and sometimes because, they are family businesses with a history of transition. A few months ago the Holtzbrinck family cashed their “get out of newspaper jail” card with Springer; both DMGT and Hearst have made huge strides in diminishing the effects of blighted newspaper advertising cycles by becoming experts in B2B data businesses, to the point where these assets begin to dominate all others. But if the Sulzburgers and the Murdochs are to escape then it will probably have to be re-invention that does it, and until last week there seemed to be few signs that this was likely to happen. But here, rather than playing games with the paywall business model, or buying related digital businesses that are not well understood corporately, both of these traditional market players showed early signs of trying to understand how technology could be deployed to add new value for the user. These are late conversions on the road to digital Damascus, but perhaps even more welcome as a result.

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