Publishing Technology Trends - Event Review

In December, we held the first event in our new Publishing Technology Trends seminar series. The venue was Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, on the banks of the river Thames in London. The session we held there was designed to communicate the latest developments in information industry technology to selected publishing industry executives.

"Authoritative? What's that? And who says?"

Leigh Dodds, Chief Technology Officer, Ingenta

You could have heard a pin drop among our audience as Leigh reviewed the ways in which we ascribe authority to content, explored the potential for crossover between traditional peer review and emerging Web 2.0 systems, and considered whether we can make processes more visible to end users.

The massive amounts of information available both through conventional publishing channels and on the web make it difficult for users to find reliable information. Particularly disturbing for publishers is that users are, ultimately, more concerned with finding an answer to their question than with issues of authority. Furthermore, users often have a very different understanding of authority to publishers; consider, on the one hand, the widely-accepted Google model wherein subjective measures of popularity and relevance are a proxy for authority, and on the other, publishers’ expectation that authority denotes submission to, and acceptance by, a formal process.

Web 2.0 publishing certainly reduces the time-to-market as the majority of processes take place post-publication. User-generated sites such as Wikipedia certainly benefit from the speed and simplicity with which pages can be created, reviewed and edited - but even Wikipedia itself does not describe the content delivered through such "creative anarchy" as authoritative.

One interesting observation was that posting content online earlier in the publication process did encourage authors to make it more presentable; a transfer of responsibility for some part of the copyediting process from publisher to author.

You can read more about this presentation, and view Leigh's slides, on Ingenta's All My Eye blog; Leigh has also bookmarked further reading material.

"Beyond articles"

Toby Green, Head of Publishing, OECD

In this digital era, argues Toby Green, publishers should be doing a lot more with content than simply posting it online in static, print-inherited formats.  Users may expect scholarly articles to adhere to a fairly dry, traditional format - but we can begin to introduce data and functionality around them that have no need of such restrictions. A table within an article could link to a spreadsheet of the full dataset. This in turn could link to an entire database - giving the user the opportunity to manipulate existing data in pursuit of their own research goals. And the loop could be closed with a further link - "do you want to see analysis of this data?" - back to the original article.

 The appeal - and potential - of this approach is demonstrated in allowing users to quickly and easily access and compare data sets, enabling powerful penetration of that data to reveal otherwise unheeded truths.
OECD is responding to this vision of multi-dimensional data as it develops its publishing platform. The organisation is also collaborating with CrossRef to expand the types of data that can be deposited to CrossRef and thus cited independently of the articles to which it relates.

Toby's session prompted a number of questions from the audience, ranging from restrictions that apply to DOI application, to the business models under which additional data could be made available to users (OECD's is, effectively, free to subscribers) and the copyright/IP concerns of publishing data that has been produced within a research institution.

You can read more on this topic and view Toby's slides in this blog posting.

"Adding value to visitors"

Paul Goad, Managing Director, TACODA

Behavioural targetting is gaining traction in the advertising industry. Traditional online advertising values users based on their context, and favours big sites that have their own sales force and connections to networks; smaller providers simply had no way of breaking into these networks. Behavioural targetting, however, values users for themselves rather than for their context.  Publishers can now be rewarded for having built up a community of users.

Behavioural targetting has also extended the areas that advertisers can tap into, beyond the limitations of contextual channels. Agencies such as Tacoda, which provides software and services that support behavioural targetting, can provide comprehensive statistics that not only enable optimisation of advertising strategies but that further help publishers to understand their users, which in turn can help publishers refine web strategies from traffic management to content segmentation.

Simply, behavioural targetting works by categorising the sites within a site owner's network and noting which categories of site are visited by a user. Profiling is anonymous (using browser cookies) and no personal data is collected or stored. Browsing behaviour is monitored and the data is matched into one of many hundreds of profiles. Once the cookie (and thus, the user) has been matched to a profile, appropriate ads are displayed. Site owners have control over the types of ads displayed and can respond to any sensitivities in their userbase; they also benefit financially from contributing the data that helps to build core profiles.

Read more and view Paul's slides in this blog posting.

"Keeping pace with online challenges"

Randy Petway, VP, Publishing Technology

Even now, the online revolution remains the biggest challenge facing publishers today; many have not yet scratched the surface of the digital potential of their content, while those who have made some progress are nonetheless challenged by the speed of technological evolution, which increasingly disconnects key sources of competitive advantage from their traditional core competences.

Online shopping (Amazon) and social web (Facebook, MySpace, orkut, YouTube, reddit, StumbleUpon...) sites not only encourage more users to spend more time on the web, they shape those users' expectations of how websites look and, more importantly, how they function. Furthermore, a strong brand or compelling content will not protect providers from the need to innovate. Fodors, an authoritative and well-known brand founded 70 years ago, with a 10-year-old online presence and 700 global correspondents, has lost ground to Trip Advisor, a 7-year-old newcomer which can boast more traffic than its older rival.

The adoption curve for new technologies is increasingly steep. Three years ago, only non-adopters had heard of AJAX, but 62% of CTOs surveyed during 2007 were expecting to have it in use by the end of the year. The converse of such quick adoption, of course, is quick abandonment when things go wrong - a minor bug in Facebook app Superpoke saw it lose hundreds of thousands of users in a few days; they migrated to a substitute application that did not have the bug.

Content delivery processes used to be binary; publishers delivered their content to consumers. But now we use multiple channels to reach users, and package content with supplementary elements which have begun to be perceived as part of the product (community and mobile features, for example). A consistent platform is required to support this level of functionality - one that allows for modules to be bolted on when new features are required.

Given the futuregazing required to develop appropriate modules, and the complexity of building, implementing and maintaining them, many publishers choose to outsource their platform to a third party that can deliver and develop it in a cost-effective manner. As Home Depot would say, "You can do it. We can help".

Read more and view Randy's slides in this blog posting.

"Key issues in the development of publishing"

David Worlock, Chief Research Fellow, Outsell

The history of the web can be viewed as three ages:

Larger publishers have been slow to come on board with the catalyst age because they are generally too distant from their users. Nonetheless, during the last year, a lot of activity has been stimulated by:

2008, David suggests, may be the year in which we:

David's slides (viewable in this blog posting) list the companies that he thinks will perform best (or most interestingly) in 2008, along with his top ten "issues that matter".

He closed with "the agility imperative":


The day was a great success, with much interesting debate, good food and a thought-provoking tour of the theatre to top things off. We'd like to thank all our speakers and those that attended for contributing. We fully intend to hold similar events in the future, so watch this space for details.