Business Management Consultant - Stuntdubl Search and Marketing Consulting

Todd’s commentary: This was among my favorite presentations at the conference, because it re-introduced an idea that is certainly worth revisiting. The ideas brought about by “digital natives” vs. “digital immigrants” is fundamental to understanding your user base on the web, and how they learn. There are some very interesting concepts in relation to these ideas that are often underexplored by web publishers. I am lucky enough to be a “digital ex-pat” - meaning I didn’t grow up with the new school learning while in school (rendering much of my education useless) - but I have highly embraced the digital world learning since my formal education. Thankfully, gives me some insights and understanding of both worlds - and the newfound understanding of this digital divide will make it easier to bridge that gap and market to the different levels of “natives”. Matt did an excellent job of presenting a VERY relevant concept to the group with the ways that it applied to their situations.

Content in the Emerging World of Digital Natives

Matt Hong, VP Thomson Gale

Thomson Gale – traditional provider of reference material to library, and business

Distinguishing characteristics:
Human sales force
Enterprise customer
Customer does not equal end user
Traditional utilization of this business model has caused some companies to have less than ideal knowledge of the behavior of end users of their products and services.

Internet sales channel
Direct to end user; no enterprise intermediary
Customer = end user

End user segmentation: Digital Immigrants v. Digital Natives

Digital Immigrant: individuals who were not born into the digital worl, but have emigrated to it

Digital Native: - further definition – see Mark prensky – digital natives, digital immigrants

Generation Y, Millennial, MyPod Generation: Generation of individuals born from 1978/ 1998 – approximately 76million
Mark Prensky

The world of digital natives is no longer “emerging”

The recent digital revolution has helped to create new and distinct behavior among certain end user demographs

Differences in User behavior between the two user groups.

Traditional value chain for information offerings
The components of the traditional value chain still apply; however the makeup of each component is shifting

How is content changing?
Content creators
57% of online teens create content for the internet
· Myspace
· Youtube
· Flickr

62% of content viewed by online users under the age of 21 is generated by someone they know.

Shift in content from authoritative to user-generated.

Tools and digital natives
Personalization and expression
MyYahoo
RSS
Avatars

Storing
Purchase history and search history
Furl and google notebook

Tagging
Yahoo myweb, flickr, and delicious

Collaboration and sharing
Wikis
Instant messaging
Virtual study groups

Internet as Primary Resource
71% of students reported using the internet as the major source of their recent school project

Internet as Workflow solution
Google, wikipedia, and facebook are used heavily
73% of college students reported using internet more than the library
About 85% of supported colleges have a profile on facebook

Summary and conclusions
Move to web creates need for better understanding of user behavior
The World of digital natives is already here and is a new core market
Digital revolution has creted new and distinct end user behavior
Components of traditional value chain still apply; the makeup of each component is changing
Growing disconnect between traditional information solutions and user behavior of digital natives:
· Authoritative v. user generated content
· Web 2.0 tools
· Internet as the workflow

Offer options or market segmented offerings based on different end user demographics and behavior

Continue to focus on, develop and utilize core competencies and differentiators.

Todd’s commentary: Ezra gave a great introduction to the conference as the keynote. Reshaping delivery channels seemed to be a very important focus of the conference, and he had an exceptional experience level in the field.

Notes on the session:

Ezra Ernst, CEO Swets North America

Background in publishing – worked for Prentice Hall, Lippincot and many other large publishers

Swets is a content distribution subscription agent
-21 countries
-160 nations
-65,000 publishers are partners
-60,000 clients (institutions)
-1.8 million subscriptions
-180,000 publications

Epsco and Harrassowitz are the major competitors

Company is 105 years old in September.

STM: E-journals management as core business
Non-STM: Growing and representing one third

80/20 Rule aka Pareto principle
First established by Vilfredo Pareto

Idea has been gospel in traditional businesses for over 200 years that 80% of revenue is generated by 20% of the products. This is the best sellers.

The Long Tail

Created by Chris Anderson from October 2004 Wired article.
In an electronic world where physical inventory is not a key factor the 80/20 rule loses it’s meaning.

When inventory is limitless or near limitless the options for customers do not shrink but rather expand.

As a business model the long tail can be summed up as the “biggest business comes from the smallest sales”

Rhapsody Music downloads in titles as an example.

Discusses discovery technique makes the long tail possible.

99% of rhapsody inventory gets download on a quarterly basis.

Information Discovery is the key to producing a long tail. If consumers are able to discover the content then there will be interest.

“Filters are people or software that help you find what you want in the long tail, driving demand from hits to niches”
-Chris Anderson

Katherine Mossman (Library Journal, July 2006) point out that in the long tail model librarians and libraries play a key role:

• Libraries act as almost limitless inventory collections
• Librarians act as search filters
• Collection management by librarians is a constant work in progress

What do librarians need to buy the longtail?

How does the long tail apply to scholarly content?
Electronic content offerings allow of almost limitless content types, publishers and consumers

Global information marketplace is able to quickly reach a global audience (over 65k publishers worldwide)

Indexes, impact factors, publications types still generate “hits” or “best sellers” which drive the publishing world but this model is changing.

Slight shift from content is king to customer is king, customers using statistics will determine what they want to buy.

Information Discovery drives changes
Bibliographic databases
Review Materials
Search – Federation, Google, In context
Institutional repositories
Standards – new publishing models

Statisics (usage) drives the new dynamic
Usage becomes the most significant variable when determining collections

Understanding how to measure

Evaluating usage statistics

Library collects and consolidates data – generate reports for analysis
Result: An overwhelming process: Libraries must collect, consolidate and analyze statistics, and create reports from content providers

Counter + SUSHI + ScholarlyStats
-Vendor can now consolidate statistics and generate reports from automated queries

ScholarlyStats
Evaluating Usage Statistics: Driving greater efficiency
-Web based portal, providing a single point of access
-Aggregates usage data into overviews on a monthly basis
-Allow organizations to easily analyze usage statistics per journal, publisher, database, and platform

Discovery and statistics are the key
In order to reap the benefits of a long tail and the intellectual returns that this phenomena generates researches must discover all relevant content

In order to manage the long tail phenomena in a information marketplace statistics (usage) is a critical factor

Institutions must be able to measure the ROI on content purchases and continue to make the right choices for their constituents

Questions from the audience:
Q:As more content is more available from search engines – Is there a need for digital rights management as licensing becomes more convoluted?

A: The reasons subscription agents won’t go away is because no librarian want to pay 10,000 invoices
You need to understand your Carnegie designation? Online solutions – swetswise provides conduit to licensing and managing content.

Q: Comments on the long tail being released in the library new bookshelf

A: As the consumer – being able to search the longtail – iTunes being the prime example.

Q: Can you provide some information on where the longtail intersects with the “hockey stick” of business revenue?

A: top 8 companies are 40% of revenue – 30% comes from bottom 1/3
80/20 applies to the top – and the bottom (longtail) keeps growing and growing

Q: If you took away the new customer phenomena?

A: Customer attrition is dropping – 98% are renewing with Swets – Industry average is 5 – 8% attrition. Managing transition from “P to E” is important

Q: How many companies are moving
A: Publishing is advertising driven and print won’t go away

Todd’s notes: Federated search is essentially the information industry’s terminology for meta-search. Federated search is used for querying multiple premium content databases. The panel did a nice job in discussing where the value propositions are in aggregating multiple data sources. Paul Levy’s viral video “The Content Butcher”, was definitely one of the highlights of the conference.

Moderated by: Randy Marcinko, CEO, MEI

Jill Konieczko, Library director, US News & World Report
At US News, our end-users have access to over 70 databases, from LexisNexis and ProQuest to the community of science the whole suite of yellow book directories. End-user access provides them with authoritative content from reliable sources, but it can be daunting, and time consuming for end –users to search in tand around 70 databases, especially since each requires a different syntax and offers different interfaces; consequently, we don’t always see he usage we need to ensure appropriate return on our (significant) investments. Employing a federated search helps us to achieve other objectives. (I didn’t quite get all of this)

Why Employ Federated search?

Paul Levy, CEO Deep Vertical
The boundaries of federated search, vertical search, news search and standard web search are merging. The industry needs to focus on improving the users front-end toolset to better manage the vast depth of information that the search industry has created.

Yield management mentality must be brought to the content industry. Matching up marketing with pricing models and yield-management.

Peter Noerr CTO, Muse Global
Federated searching is an exciting growth area in searching, and it is moving front and centre in almost every search tool around, offering immense coverage, strong results refinement.

Jerome Presenti, Chief Scientist, Vivismo

Paul Levy, CEO Deep Vertical
Paul created an amazing viral video on the “content butcher” that got some great laughs from the crowd.

Jerome Pesenti, Chief Scientist, Vivisimo

Question and Answers:
Discussions of Google premium content.

Paul Levy discusses the importance of “long tail” clients and equates it to the gambling industry where a $40 gambler in a casino is viewed as very important in a much different way than “whales” are, but still very important. Content publishers need to recognize the value of smaller long tail clients.

Peter Noerr discusses how social search and tagging may actually dilute importance. His comments remind me a bit of Steven Colbert’s idea of “wikiality”.

Peter Noerr talks about the difference between screen scrapings origins and the difference between it and html parsing.
The problem is not a lack of standards – the problem is the lack of USE of standards.

Q: Why would scale be the source of error with social networking data?

A: Peter: Expertise is the important point. In context is the importance. The noise level is the concern, and must be filtered somehow.
Paul comments on the methodology for blogs being indexed adds to the noise level of search results (words from multiple posts being indexed and creating fairly irrelevant results).

Jill discusses methods for identifying the most credible content and why social tagging is often less credible as a tagging methodology.

Q: Why can’t a control vocabulary work WITH social tagging?

A: Jill jokes – because there is no spell check to big laughs. Jill would like a controlled taxonomy for social tagging for better control over results.

Todd’s commentary: Lesley made a good case for the need for federated search to add value within the premium content community. From what I gathered CSA has provided some unique solutions for publishers to aggregate their content.

Lesley D’Almeida, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts Product Manager

CSA enables researches to be more effective by expanding and expediting discovery, aiding the management and organization of quality information relevant to their search … (unfinished)

200 million searches are done on CSA

History of CSA – csa.com registered in 1994 – among the first 5,000 sites on the web.

Many providers are skeptical, suspicious, and scared of the search medium.

Vision: CSA workst to create information services that take full advantage of technology that will aid researchers in their quest for discovery.

Why?
· Leverage our platform
· Increased customer requests for federated search capability
· Increase usage
· Satisfy customers

Where are we today?
Confident
Firm believers I the technology
2006 CODie Award for Best solution integrating content into an application for the Multisearch product.

Sales redevelopment was a big challenge – the shift from print to electronic
Biggest challenge was “internal clients” from VP’s on down.

The level of technical support was underrated. The sales cycle was much longer and more involved.

Questions: How has the revenue for you content changed by making everyone else’s content available through your medium?
A: There has been very minimal impact on content revenues. The main purpose of federated search was to leverage the platform.

Todd’s commentary: Tony had some great insight on the mobile content delivery market. If I really wanted to be ahead of the curve, this is the way I’d be moving. I really wanted to ask some questions about the fees associated with microbilling for content on mobile devices, but unfortunately there wasn’t time.

Delivering Content to Mobile Devices
BTYB
The Leader in Mobile Search and Live Entertainment
Tony Philip, CEO Upsnap

Wireless market metrics
There are nearly 1.8 billion wireless subscribers worldwide
There are 207.9 million us wireless subscribers

Wireless business models
-Premium per month services – billed to cell phone – pay-per-play or monthly subscription
-Free services

4info
½ page in USToday article on how to SMS

Pay-per-call connect off free cell phone SMS 411 – average pay per call price is $9.00

Auction model – free to consumer

Seamless integrations into partner infrastructures and customer devices
-Mobile search
-swing platform
-pay per call
-sports manager
-multiple interfaes
sms, wap, brew, j2me

Upsnap provides the first search and entertainment offering that can be used on any phone
· Mobile search
· Audio channel
· Voip
· Voice based search
· Location based search

Mobile opportunities for premium content
· New subscription revenue (recurring or one time)
· New advertising revenue (pay per call)
· Real time updates to static data (ex. Research reports)
· Video/audio

The global mobile data market will exceed $200 billion by 2010, predict the analysts at Frost & Sullivan

Todd’s commentary: This whole conference really opened my eyes to how important taxonomies are in other fields. There was a very humourous debate session during the conference that I didn’t manage to take notes on, but Majorie had an incredible amount of insight on taxonomy standards.

Taxonomy Standards – Majorie M.K. Hlava

President – Access Innovations, Inc. – Data Harmony
Vocabulary and Terminology Standards

What are the for?
· Accuracy
· Disambiguation
· Recall
· Precision
· Relevance
· Removing noise
· Increasing hits

Vocabulary control
Define scope of term (meaning)
Equivalence between synonyms
-and quasi synonyms
-single conept
-cars/automibles

Distinguish homographs
Mercury – car, planet, metal?

Nice to have
· Equivalence – synonyms - rogets
· Associative – related terms
· Hierarchies – taxonomy view
· History – development of the term
· Notes – help the user
· Notation – different way to sort
· Display – how to show the terms

Where do they come from?
· Ansi/NISO
o National information standards organization

· ISO
o International standards organization

· W3C – world wide web consortium
· US OMB – united states office of management and budgets
· IFLA

Effectiveness of Indexing

Vocabulary Control

Facets

Interoperability
· Same content – different domains
· Different vocabularity – same domain
· Degree of specificity / granularity
· Handling of synonyms
· Search methodology
o Z39.50
o Pre coordinated
o Post coordinated

Interoperability
o Merges vocabularies
o Merging databases
o Indixing using single vocab
o Federated searching
o Maping or crosswalks
o Decide on master vocab

Z39.19 – 2006 – Controlled Vocabularies – What’s New
NISO.org

Other methods – Zeng
Derivation modeling
Translation and adaption
Satellited vocabularies
Node or leaf indexing

Multiple senses for the same noun in a lexical database
Example: Bridge

W3c
OWL – Web Ontology Language
RDF – Resource description format
Topic maps
SKOS – simple knowledge organization systems

o Which community to serve?
o Build on the current standard
o Might make this link next

Other things to watch –
SIMILE – supported through the open source community.

I got to do a delightful presentation at SES San Jose with Andy, Rand, and Chris on Social Networking (wikipedia and tagging). Chris is an incredibly intelligent and quite personable guy, and is quite entertaining to talk (debate) with, though we definitely hold some differences in opinion about the SEO community, and on our definitions of “SPAM”. I think Oilman may have rubbed off just a little bit - perhaps proving the value of SEO - but unfortunately not improving Chris’s opinion of the industry. Anyhow, during the session at SES Chris valuespammed the crowd with one of his new projects that I wrote down for later, which has turned out to be incredibly entertaining - BLAUGH. Check it out for a chuckle - I think Chris is a pretty damn good SEO, though he would never admit to practicing the craft due to his low opinion of our field. One of my personal favorites from blaugh: