Newsweek (Finally) Wants to Embrace the Web -- But is it Too Late?

I can't sum up my feelings when I heard Jon Meacham tell Jon Stewart on the Daily Show, that Newsweek needs to "fully embrace the Internet." However I can describe my reactions: rolled my eyes, shook my head, and muttered, "about (effing) time." Really, I don't have anything against Jon Meacham, (and he is really smart) but I do have an issue with really smart people having had their head in the sand for the past 15 years, and not having "fully embraced" the Internet.

Stewart and Meacham hailed the importance of Journalism -- and lamented the subsequent lack of business model that supports the gathering of general news. Meacham "speculated" that Newsweek had it backwards -- where you are solely focused on the digital -- and then spin up a magazine! Yes!! Yes!! By gotcha he got it. Why this wasn't obvious 10 years ago, or even 3, when WaPo's management wrote this memo, outlining The 10 Web Principles, is beyond me.

Well, it isn't a mystery really. Writers have been skeptical of the Web for all the wrong reasons, putting more value in having something in print than in pixels. The reality is, and trust me, I have tested this on a whole bunch of journos and it is like light dawn's on marble head, news on the Web (and the corresponding byline) will be consumed by more people than in print. And for some reason that matters to journos - which is the reason you find Meacham on broadcast, writing books or even Twittering. They want their names out there; they want to know they are an influencer.

So while wanting to embrace the Web is a good thing albeit a bit overdue, sadly Meacham and Co will  find  that the work flow has been honed and hewn over the past 77 years to be a print-first paradigm -- and to shift Web-first is going to be ghastly difficult because the entire infrastructure needs to be ripped out. This is not an intractable situation -- but it is a problem, because it will require a capital budget expense -- which is hard to justify when the company is on the block.

I hope for the sake of investigative journalism, for balanced journalism, for war coverage and domestic issues coverage, Newsweek can sort it out. It's not too late yet, but it the clock is chiming.

The Perversity of PowerPoint

Fresh from a holiday to Barcelona and Italy, I have been busy attacking my "to read" pile, when I came across this story, which illustrates the perversity of PowerPoint. And while it has nothing to do with digital publishing per se -- it has everything to do with effective communication.

This image was shown to General Stanley A. McChrystal, leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, to convey the complexity of the war.

And while the image certainly succeeded it also lead Gen. McChrystal to quip: “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war” -- which was followed by uproarious laughter -- probably not the creator's intention.

Finally. It may have taken a four-star general to opine what many of us have felt for years: that PowerPoint is not the medium for all things -- and certainly not for something as complex as war strategy. But think about something else: How many wo/man-hours went into creating this? You don't just slap this together (despite the fact that it looks like it was). Hours and hours were spent trying to pull something together that fell flat with its audience. And how many hours of productivity were lost by the members of the audience who had to sit through a mind-numbing presentation.

Effective communicators hate slide decks. They know that to connect with their audience -- they need to "read" the non-verbal cues and have listened to the conversations going on just before -- and tack accordingly. An effective communicator interacts with his or her audience -- hard to do when one is supposed to follow a scripted slide show. Personally I find decks to be cumbersome and counter-productive, and would prefer to go low tech -- or at most to use slides that illustrate a point.

A deck is a crutch -- usually, and I am on a limb here, for people who don't know what is going on -- or, more charitably, for those who do but who are nervous in front of crowds, or finally, for those who have a message to get out -- and don't care about the audience. PowerPoint is an anthama to the Hallmark slogan "When You Care to Send the Very Best." Stick a Don't in there.

While we talk about cost of time to produce these beasts of boredom -- how about what it costs to actually sit through them?? Dave Paridi, co-author of "Guide to PowerPoint," calculates the losses  from poor PowerPoints -- looking merely at the work to it takes to clarify a poor presentation. Frankly I think he way understates the losses.  Nowhere does he address the amount of lost productivity from the people who had to sit through the poor presentation to begin with -- and could they have received that information in some other format that would have been faster and more effective.

The reality is, we don't create a video for every instance of communication, and PowerPoint should not be the de facto messenger either. Think of slides as exclamation points -- and use sparingly.

Getting Man & Machine to Communicate

"Semantics is hot," declares Seth Grimes, "but only in a geeky sort of way." And then Grimes offers 11 different ways semantics is impacting -- search. In fact Semantic Search takes two geeky subjects and, when conjoined, attempts to become a precision tool for finding what the user really wants.

But what does the user really want? And here is the crux of the problem. The machine needs to discern the true question the user is asking when searching -- but the challenge is the machine and man do not share the same language. Man wants to ask a question -- well, naturally -- meaning highly unstructure. And machines need people to be structured. NLP, Natural Language Processing, is where the machine finally understands human-speak. (We're a long way off still -- but heading in the right direction.)

It helps if we know Boolean -- but few do. Really smart people I know may know that putting a + sign between words means AND, but few know that the - (minus) sign means NOT. Nor do they think to put phrases in "". Really smart people I know forget that really smart people don't know Boolean -- which leaves many really smart -- and not so smart people --having a dismal time when they are searching for things. (To prove my point -- this article on 10 Google Search Tricks has been in the top 10 in popularity for the last 10 days.)

Which circles back to why semantics is hot. Generating semantic metadata means machines can locate content about this -- when a person asks for that. It presents content to us by clustering content under categories -- so we may browse through and find what are looking for. Semantic Metadata is a great first step to getting man and machine to communicate.

Having Fun With Semantic Metadata

Last week, I hosted a webinar on Semantic Metadata for the company previously known as Nstein (now Open Text) -- along with two of my colleagues, Sheila Woo and Matt Mullen. Despite putting it together in just under 10 days we still had over 250 registrants, which proves my point that interest in Semantic Metadata has created a "hockey stick" graph; slight incline for 10 years -- and soaring upward now.

Matt and Sheila are uniquely well-versed in how semantic metadata can assist the largest of information providers, so it was an engaging webcast. We looked at how Semantic Metadata can boost Audience Engagement, how it can increase traffic and stickiness, how we could improve productivity and contain costs -- and how it can provide a unique search tool on both the back end and the front. When we polled the audience, more than 40% said they could imagine using Semantic Metadata to improve audience engagement. This tracks with Gilbane's analysis that Audience Engagement is the number one focus of enterprise Marketers.

When we turned it loose for questions we must have piqued the imaginations of many -- because over 25 questions flew in. The range was from how long does it take to implement (the obvious answer is the ever-annoying "it depends) to how do I create a taxonomy (this is Sheila's forté - so she riffed on that) you can go generic with an IPTC taxonomy or do an analysis of all your assets to create a custom taxonomy.

People were particularly intrigued with the idea of putting a "linguistic fingerprint" on assets --using a combination of linguistic and computational analysis -- so you can find content that highly similar to another. Or, as we say, "relevant content."

We had someone ask how you could use Semantic Metadata to improve information security, that was my baby: consider adding it into an email process to determine if sensitive information is being sent out through the firewall.

The truth is, Semantic Metadata, which is the data that describes in rich detail the "aboutness" of something, can be incorporated into virtually any application that incorporates "unstructured" data. If you are a content freak like I am -- it's time to consider becoming a semantic metadata geek.

History of Indexing & what exactly is 'semantic metadata?'

The Internet is the biggest library in the world -- with all the books on the floor.

-- unknown

I'm sure most of us have never spent even a minute or so pondering about the classification system that keeps libraries sane. But they weren't always pristine. According to editors at TheStraightDope.com, when Melville Dewey spent his junior year (1872-73) working in Amherst College's library, he was frustrated by the disarray of Amherst's collection. A real self-starter (apparently) Dewey examined how other libraries were organizing books. One method, which dated back to the Han Dynasty (206 BC - 9) was to assign books a given a spot on a shelf and log in a journal the location and book title. Another mode was to alphabetize the entire collection -- which created a fair amount of juggling when new books came in! Other libraries (harkening back to the Hellenic era) chose to organize by subject. But what constituted a subject? Sir Francis Bacon in the 1600s, said there were three branches of knowledge: history (deriving from memory), poetry (from imagination), and philosophy (from reason.) The Vatican said there were a pithy two: sacred and profane.

Dewey channeled his frustrations and within four years took the best of all the methods and developed a standard of classification and indexing that still exists today. The system consisted of combining "the analytical simplicity of decimal numbers to an intuitive scheme of knowledge, one that would fluidly accommodate all the books ever written, and all the books that could be written as well," said Mathew Battles, Library Historian. Further, Dewey's systems worked for any asset -- not just books.

Alas, Dewey's system for libraries has not been the way the Web sites are indexed -- although that is starting to change. Like Dewey, companies are starting to create federated classification systems for all of their content, creating Taxonomies and Authority Files for centralized knowledge management. Another term for this type of information is semantic tags -- or more accurately, semantic metadata. Most of the efforts to create semantic metadata have been largely manual, which, as Chris Hill says "is a losing proposition" with the deluge of content now being acquired and developed. The typical approach is tag "after the fact" is problematic as well - as it tends not to be comprehensive nor complying with classification standards that have been created.

As Nstein Technologies spokeswoman for the last 3 years, I've spoken on the subject of semantic metadata quite a bit, usually as the lone voice in the room uttering those words! So I was amazed last month when at two different DAM conferences semantic metadata was uttered by virtually every speaker! Yet, it was apparent that few in the audience understood the scope of what metadata could be.
It seems we are at a point in history when every knows they need metadata -- but really don't know the "aboutness" of the subject!!


So a trio of us are hosting a webinar next week on "Semantic Metadata 101: Your Assets are Bare Without It." Linguistics expert Sheila Woo (and Director of Product Development) and Nstein's Sales Engineer will be joining me on Wednesday, March 31, 10am EDT/ 3pm GMT.

If you are involved with managing large repositories of content, you head up knowledge management, you are a CMO looking to leverage content to drive readers, engage and cross promote products and services, then join us. They'll be plenty of time for questions -- just bring your own cookies and coffee.

Nstein's New 3S Boosts WCM Maturity

My first foray into Web content management (WCM) was back in early 1995 when we built a system to manage the content of two daily newspapers – including more than $100 million in Classified advertizing. We cobbled together a series of flat files with a nasty grey background that tiled. It wasn’t pretty but it served our needs at the time.

My second round at Web content management was in 1996 – when we realized that despite using HTML includes, trying to update the look and feel of two daily newspapers was improbable – and bordering on impossible – without putting everything into a database. Further, we were thwarted from our secondary goal of slicing and dicing content from our papers and our six radio stations into new “topic areas.” It was a manual laborer’s nightmare. Intrigued by CNET’s flexibility and ability to scale with large data sets, in early 1997, we became a beta site for Vignette’s StoryServer, which was a commercial product of CNET’s prototypical (and revolutionary!) WCM. (StoryServer is largely recognized as the first “real” WCM.) With it we could create new templates and indicate which stories would flow onto those templates. And when my company was bought by Gannett 6 months later, we had a fine infrastructure upon which to move the other three New Jersey papers. Later, long after I left, Gannett’s New Jersey papers were moved onto yet another platform – ostensibly to centralize many of the Gannett papers across the nation.

In his research, Forrester’s Stephen Powers did a fine job outlining this type of WCM evolution in his "Web Content Management  Maturity Model,” looking at the four different stages that companies fall into when it comes to addressing Web needs – from the Basic “just get it up there” stage to the Engagement stage. In this last plateau, executives (versus IT) sponsor building a framework that impacts marketing, business, IT and all business goals.

Of the 261 enterprise executives surveyed by Powers and his team, most companies fell in between the second, “Tactical,” and the third, “Enterprise,” stages. The challenge for Information and Knowledge Management (I and KM) professionals is that they “miss opportunities to treat WCM as critical plumbing rather than as an application silo, and they fail to see how WCM fits in to a broader persuasive content architecture,” writes Powers.

And while Powers rightly suggests these professionals use his guidelines to determine where they are on the Maturity scale to drive conversations internally it is also an initiative fraught with political landmines unless one happens to be working for enlightened despots!

There is another way. Nstein Technologies, which has been on the forefront of developing semantic analysis solutions for over a decade, has just launched its 3S platform. 3S allows Web content from disparate sites, of varying levels of maturity, to be automatically semantically annotated – and then “mashed” together so it can be sliced and diced into new topic pages. That static sister site that focuses only on carpeting now can easily be mashed together with content from another WCM that focuses on furnishings. The result – a richer engagement for your audience to be sure, but also the ability for business owners to create new, highly targeted sites that are subsets of the amalgamation of the two (or more) sites. Nstein smartly made the management of these microsites easy. Simply create a query and marry it to a theme – or template. It’s that simple. Nstein also allows the management of ad banners so you can promote products or services specific to this mashed up content.

Understanding where you are on the WCM maturity model is without a doubt important. But if management’s "maturity model" is lacking, Nstein’s 3S helps bridge these WCM stages quickly and painlessly.

Media M'nA Expected Up, Tools for Sharing/Repurposing Needed

Interesting report issued by Ad Media Partners, analyzing a survey of senior executives within leading media (traditional media and digital media) and marketing services (advertising, marketing services and digital marketing) businesses on prospects for industry mergers and acquisitions for 2010.

(Note: Blogger seems to have a problem with ampersands, which I don't recall encountering before, thus, I am abbreviating mergers & acquisitions with M'nA.)

Four out of five respondents (83% in marketing services and 80% in media) anticipate that M'nA by strategic buyers will be up in 2010. This is a dramatic turnaround from 2009 results when less than one-third of those surveyed anticipated activity would increase.  Executives overall weren't so certain about financial buyers, with half saying they would be active, and approximately 40% saying financial buyers would be flat.

As to be expected, the top two drivers for M'nA were:

• Attractive Buying Opportunities 52%
• Strategic Refocusing 49% 

Of course the success of any merger is predicated on the buyer achieving its goals to leverage assets and achieve some level of economies of scale. This will put greater pressure on IT departments to ensure that systems are aligned if not consolidated. Should be a great opportunity for DAM and other vendors who can help leverage content from various silos -- with minimal disruption to productivity.