Tagging and The Scotsman Digital Archive

Posted on February 27, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Digital Archive, Digitisation, Future, Newspapers, Paid Content, Tools and Services, User Generated, del.icio.us | Leave a Comment

Following on from some of the issues raised in “When tags work and when they don’t: Amazon and LibraryThing“.  

The team behind the Scotsman Digital Archive - a searchable archive of The Scotsman newspaper from 1817-1950 developed during 2005 - http://archive.scotsman.com/ - developed functionality that allows users to “clip” and “tag” articles of interest that they might want to get back to later.

Scotdman ArchiveThis is important in the context of a relatively large repository - and especially important when searching across text extracted via OCR from historical material. 

The tagging functionality allows users to organise, group and locate articles easily and was quickly adopted by the user community as the benefits were substantial and obvious.

Clearly this tagging adds a great deal of value to the archive, providing some structure and pathways to difficult to find or significant material that could ultimately benefit the wider community of users.

The next obvious stage of development would have been to develop the social/community side of this by allowing users to share their tags with other users, make them public and connect with each other.  This reinforces the principle that the best way to get users to add value to data is to do it in such a way that they don’t realise they are doing so - I guess this is the same as saying provide a clear incentive (see Amazon, Google Maps, Listal.com etc).  It also goes without saying that it should be as pain-free as possible.

The other point to note here is that in certain circumstances you can get users to tag for the greater good - and not just as a by-product of some personal benefit.  You can see this in del.icio.us where individuals can develop into experts through their consistent and regular tagging of material on specific subject areas.  These experts can eventually develop a “network” of like minded indivuduals and attract “fans” who track what they are tagging via RSS.  This network effect is one of the most powerful aspects of del.icio.us.  The profile that the experts receive from their peers within the community is a great incentive to continue tagging. 

[Disclosure:  Please note author is former General Manager of scotsman.com.]

More than one million unique, historical newspaper pages online …

Posted on February 23, 2007
Filed Under Digitisation, Good Things, Newspapers, Paid Content, Search, Tools and Services | Leave a Comment

Announced on the 15th February via press release, Small Town Papers Inc. have partnered with World Vital Records, Inc., to make over one million newspaper pages from small towns across America available and searchable online.  

The press release states that:

“We selected World Vital Records to distribute our collection of small-town newspapers because of their commitment to the millions of people who want to research their family history,” said Paul Jeffko, president and founder of SmallTownPapers, Inc. “World Vital Records is delivering on their mission to help people discover their ancestors with an incredible collection of exclusive materials, including SmallTownPapers.”

Current editions are available from over 250 small town newspapers and users can also search the archive.  Users have to register to access added benefits such as the “Scrap Book” and “Notifiers”.  The revenue model appears to be advertising rather than subscription based and the site looks to be reasonably well monetised via display and contextual (Google AdSense) advertising deals.  Geo-targeting of ads also appears to be pretty good - while looking at an edition of the Mifflinburg Telegraph from November 10th 2005 I was getting sky and banner ads from The Sun (UK national) and Talk Talk (UK Broadband service).  

There is a “order a digital reprint” link but it doesn’t work so I guess there are plans to offer this service online eventually.

They are looking to extend the service.  On the ”For Publishers” page it states:

“Would you like your newspaper to be included in the  SmallTownPapers web site? We can convert your paper or film archives to a fully-searchable image archive. Small community  newspapers can participate with little or no cost.” 

As far as I could tell boolean operators are not available in search and pages are not segemented into individual articles for search or display purposes - meaning you can’t search for “apples AND pears” within the same article.  If you search for  ”Edinburgh garden” you get “Edinburgh” from one article and “garden” from another which makes it harder to find things.

Saying that - not bad for a free service.  

Newspaper Digital Editions - future or futile?

Posted on February 23, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Copyright, Digitisation, Future, Newspapers, Paid Content | 1 Comment

Following on from the Roy Greenslade post on newspaper Digital Editions - “Is PDF an acronym for Pretty Damn Futile?”

Digital Editions are indeed an easy leap for old word print editors / execs to make - amazing that they are still going for it with such enthusiasm really.  Half an hour of research would tell them that it simply isn’t going to meet their objectives - if  those objectives include significant subscription or ad revenues.

It ticks the “digital” box, but in reality doesn’t really do much else in terms of value for the regular user.  Any demand there is comes from those that need to keep a record of how the paper actually looked when it was published - ad agencies, media monitoring companies and there also tends to be a small market for certain types of reader who are out of circulation area.  Even if they were available for free most users would never use them - they will go to the newspaper web site or use Google or Google News to find current or older articles. 

Last time I reviewed uptake of digital editions among newspaper titles (to be honest it was some time ago now) it varied between 0.2% and 1% of actual newspaper circulation - at this rate it was always going to be a struggle to get revenue to justify the cost of production.  Even the NYT who invested in their digital edition provider - NewsStand - and were therefore more incentivised than most to make it work, could only make it to the higher end of this range. It could be that uptake has changed for these services - but I doubt it.  Anyone got any stats on this other than the recent report analysis on Norwegian titles?

One area that does seems to work a bit better is specialist publications and magazines where readers like to hold on to copies for reference purposes and build their own archive. 

As more newspapers digitise their historical material there will at least be some justification for the cost of production as the process of turning the newspaper into a Digital Edition can also populate a Digital Archive - allowing users to search from the first edition of the newspaper to the most recent from a single user interface. 

Even this justification will be short-lived as the goal will be to eventually populate the Digital Archive directly from the newspaper / web site production system - The Guardian and Observer already do this for their Digital Editions.

This is quite old but good overview of the key suppliers and issues from J.D. Lassica in OJR from June 2004 - “Are Digital Newspaper Editions More Than Smoke and Mirrors?“

Media syndication startup Mochila gets $8M funding

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Copyright, Journalism, Newspapers, Paid Content, Technology | Leave a Comment

Red Herring reports on the new funding for Mochila.  They have an interesting model that combines good return for publishers on their licensed material when it is syndicated (70%) and a resonable 30% on any ad revenue generated from free material (40% goes to rights owner) - in both cases Mochila keeps 30%.

“The barriers into the media business are now very low. They’ve taken away the barriers of being a buyer of media,” Charles River Ventures partner Austin Westerling said. “What they’re basically doing there is creating an ad network on top of already high-quality content. I think there’s quite an interesting opportunity.” 

 

Decline and fall of a music empire

Posted on January 4, 2007
Filed Under Advertising, Broadband, Copyright, Digitisation, Entertainment, Future, Music, Newspapers, Paid Content, Technology, Trends | Leave a Comment

The FT reports on MusicZone’s slide into administration.  There is upside for the industry in terms of the growth of digital revenues but this growth is no where near enough to cover the dramatic decline in the revenue from physical formats. This will all sound very familiar to newspaper executives.

The downward trend has been clear for five years but recent figures suggest that the decline in CDs and DVDs has accelerated. The IFPI, the music trade association, reported a 10 per cent slide in physical format sales in the first half of the year around the world.

Ged Doherty, the head of Sony BMG’s UK operations, predicted two months ago that CD sales would halve over the next three years.

“We predict digital growth of 25 per cent per year but it is not enough to replace the loss from falling CD sales.”

Mr Doherty warned that, if current trends continued, by 2010 the industry’s total revenues could be 30 per cent lower than they are now. He said: “We have to reinvent.”

Start-up will seek out content being used without permission

Posted on December 19, 2006
Filed Under Copyright, Digitisation, Future, Newspapers, Paid Content, Search, User Generated, Weblogs | Leave a Comment

Start-up founded by ex-Yahoo and Verisign execs will help content owners work out if there material is being used withlout permission. Might not be welcomed by social networking / blooging sites:

Attributor analyzes the content of clients, who could range from individuals to big media companies, using a technique known as “digital fingerprinting,” which determines unique and identifying characteristics of content. It uses these digital fingerprints to search its index of the Web for the content. The company claims to be able to spot a customer’s content based on the appearance of as little as a few sentences of text or a few seconds of audio or video. It will provide customers with alerts and a dashboard of identified uses of their content on the Web and the context in which it is used.

And.

Its co-founders, former Yahoo Inc. executive Jim Brock, and Jim Pitkow, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who has sold companies to Google and VeriSign Inc., claim to have cracked the thorny computer-science problem of scouring the entire Web by using undisclosed technology to efficiently process and comb through chunks of content. The company says it will have over 10 billion Web pages in its index before the end of this month.

Registration scheme foiled …

Posted on February 21, 2006
Filed Under Bad Things, Newspapers, Paid Content, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

Steve Outing posts on his behaviour in relation to the “first article free of registration” strategy a good number of pubishers have deployed.

We are actively looking at this.  From recent analysis there is evidence to support this theory - according to HBX - 92% of what we term “drive by” or causal users of the sites look at only one article during a visit despite there being very well targeted related artricles - 7% carry on so must be registered or register at this point.  Not sure what happens to the other 1%.  

WSJ Europe / Asia moves to compact format and bundles with WSJ.com

Posted on May 9, 2005
Filed Under Paid Content | Leave a Comment

These initiatives include reformatting its Asian and European editions on Oct. 17 into an easier-to-read, convenient and accessible compact format; combining the Asian and European print editions with the award-winning The Wall Street
Journal Online at WSJ.com to better serve the needs of highly mobile international business leaders; pursuing a new, more targeted circulation strategy focused on C-suite executives; and making a number of related personnel promotions and reassignments. The combination of a compact format, plus the full content of The Wall Street Journal Online — the largest paid subscription news site on the Web — will offer readers a more convenient daily package of more news in more ways that better suits how busy readers use news today.

John McMenamin, head of international advertising sales, The Wall Street Journal, said, “These new initiatives are an aggressive step to offer advertisers increased access to the Journal’s unparalleled audience by combining both print and online platforms, and shifting to a compact format that better lends itself to the needs of our global readership and the advertisers who want more opportunity to reach them.”

The newspapers will carry more themed and regionally relevant content and an updated statistics package, more navigational online tools, more stories and fewer jumps between pages. The Asian Wall Street Journal will be renamed The Wall Street Journal Asia when the compact edition launches in October, and will continue to be edited in Hong Kong. The Wall Street Journal Europe will continue to be edited in Brussels.

The full release is available. 

Business week: Mainstream press will open archives

Posted on May 4, 2005
Filed Under Digitisation, Newspapers, Paid Content | Leave a Comment

Link: Prediction: Mainstream press will open archives.

Circulation down at FT but 80,000 paying for FT.com

Posted on May 2, 2005
Filed Under Paid Content | Leave a Comment

Pearson Chairman Dennis Stevenson commented that: 

"The fact is the FT’s circulation always suffers in recession. However the FT’s circulation in the U.K. has gone down further than you would expect - it has happened at a time when 80,000 people are looking at FT.com and paying to do so."

Good answer, but I bet you any money they would prefer 80,000 readers of the paper.  Difficult to compare the two media forms but in simple terms if you compare revenue per edition (advertising and cover price) the newspaper will generate at least 10 times what each "edition" of FT.com generates. 

keep looking »

Blogroll


Categories


Archives