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Content Management Not Good Business for Printers
DRM for the Printed Page
Monday, January 13, 2003
Emerging Service Directory Architecture
Very cool, very now -- emerging service directory architecture for Small-Medium Business: Go get the white paper.
SMBmeta Initiative.David Weinberger scoops the SMBmeta Initiative by Dan Bricklin. This metadata scheme allows small and medium size businesses to express their identity in XML. David rightly points out why this approach is so smart:
- Dan doesn't want to own the data
- It's free for anyone to aggregate
- Its extensible
What I also like (from the whitepaper, which also provides a great account on why RSS is a success):
- It is low cost, but has a cost to prevent spam (an economic problem)
- It doesn't attempt to serve large enterprises
- Simple and open
- Its decentralized, but has leadership behind it
If you want more information, go to the new TrellixTech web site. There you'll find a blog, the spec, and a highly readable paper on the topic. [Joho]via [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
The printing industry has tried to do something like this several times over the years, and keeps getting big pieces of it wrong. But they aren't alone. There's a post on Dan's weblog from Elliot Noss, CEO of TUCOWS,
"The SMBmeta proposal sounds really cool! I've had hundreds of people propose ways to get a business directory created over the years but this is the first one that makes sense to me. It's open and distributed like the Internet should be. We're going to look at this closely and figure out how we can help our registrants and resellers take advantage of it."
This is perfect for the publishing and graphic arts industries. For several years a company I worked with kicked around the idea of a "service bus" architecture, a term I think came from someone at HP, but it never got off the ground. The idea was a dynamic directory that would allow editors, artists, cover designers, writers, proof readers, literary agents, printers, binders, distributors, etc. to all plug in a description of their skills and services -- along with a pricing structure -- to create a publishing services marketplace. The idea was stillborn because no one could come up with a suitable structure. This is the first one I've seen that makes sense, and I can see already how it might be extended for special uses within vertical industries.
Friday, December 20, 2002
Content Management Not Good Business for Printers
Several years ago I completed a comprehensive study on Digital Asset Management for Print Providers. I concluded that few, if any, printers were equipped to deliver content management in any meaningful or profitable way, and that focusing on content management as a service was likely to be a losing proposition for most who attempted it.This has certainly proven true of mid-sized and smaller printers, but it's become increasingly evident that even the major players have trouble building a value proposition around their content management systems. Why?
Printers have never accepted the reality that print is now a tertiary media -- it is important only for it's utility as a delivery mechanism. Accustomed to 500 years of history where printers held the keys to the information universe, modern printers have failed to grasp that their power as information gatekeeper is gone.
What began in the 1930s with wealthy MegaCos supplementing print advertising with broadcast time has become a personal publishing revolution in digital media. The average user no longer needs a printer -- or a TV or Radio station for that matter -- to reach their market. And they no longer think of print as their first choice in information delivery.
At the NAPL Print Outlook 2003 conference earlier this month, several of the industry's most recognizable talking heads finally said, with some emphasis, "It's not the economy, Mr. Printer."
While the change hasn't permeated all markets or all users, the trend is clear. Content creators now choose print based solely on their delivery needs, and look to printers as delivery providers and little else. Their content is digital, distributed digitally, managed digitally, and distributed first via the Web, e-mail, video, or audio, and via print only when there is tangible market benefit.
This means that printers had better figure out how to attach themselves to those data streams -- making it seamless for customers -- and redesign their delivery mechanisms to be more in line with user needs (shorter and shorter runs, better shipping and logistics.) And they had better learn where print really does (and doesn't) add value to a product.
Banta to Take Q4 Charge of $26.8 Million, Includes Content Management Product[...] As a result, Banta will take a pretax charge of $26.8 million (64 cents per diluted share) in the fourth quarter ending Dec. 28, 2002.
The impairment charge includes a reduction in the asset carrying value of Banta's digital content management software product. The valuation adjustment is based on an analysis of future revenue expectations for the product. The charge also includes impairment of an investment in a Mexican joint venture, a reduction of goodwill associated with a past acquisition, and updated valuations on other long-lived assets. [...] [WhatTheyThink]
Wednesday, December 11, 2002
DRM for the Printed Page
In this post Jenny Levine at TSL relays the story of a massive digital archive of comic books being built by readers and raises the issue of when we'll see broad-based DRM for printed pages. Hopefully never, but PrivaSuite by Aliroo is an encryption package that can be used to encrypt/decrypt hard-copy pages. It's intended for secure faxes and other items, and is derived from technology developed for the Israeli military. I first ran across Aliroo a couple of years ago when I was monitoring e-document technologies for CAP Ventures.While PrivaSuite, and any other conceivable DRM for print, is too cumbersome at this stage to be used unilaterally, the technology is already being used and refined.
Digital Rights Management for the Printed Page?"I was somewhat shocked when I looked recently at the statistics regarding the volume of digital content being posted to newsgroups. As one would assume -- since these are newsgroups -- pornographic content (alt.binaries.pictures.erotica) still leads the list in newsgroup topics, and the most active posting of conventional content is in the alt.binaries.sounds.mp3.complete_cd group. But right behind music CDs is alt.binaries.pictures.c... [The Wednesday Morning Quarterback] via [The Shifted Librarian]
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