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The New York Times > Technology > For a Start-Up, Visions of Profit in Podcasting

Markoff on the commercial prospects for Podcasting, specifically Odeo.

No Times today. A big dumping of snow here on the Cape has forced me to the nyt.com for my daily read. 

Library Journal – Revenge of the Blog People!

"A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of "web log.") Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People."

That’s Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association and Dean of Library Services, Madden Library, California State University, Fresno, writing in the  Library Journal in response to the blogger critics who slagged him for writing an op-ed in the LA Times in December which criticized Google’s avowed plan to digitize library collections.

This is an important piece and I recommend clicking through to read it in its entirety. [clicks to Chris Locke for the alert to its existence]

The topic of digitization and open access to the "stacks" has roiled the professional librarian/research world since ASCII was invented. A story I wrote about WAIS and Gopher and Brewster Kahle in the early 90s sparked a bit of a "s**t-storm" due to its rhetorical prediction that the digitization of the world’s information and easy access to such tools would make the librarian profession as secure as stablehands and paddock boys were the year Henry Ford rolled the first horseless carriage out of a Michigan garage.

 Well, of course that is not the case, and the role of the librarian/searcher will doubtless persist and perhaps intensify over time as the mechanics of the information space continue to explode beyond our capacity to tame the output [sort of Ithiel de Sola Pool meets I Love Lucy on the assembly line of bits]. Librarians have displayed some scorn over the democratization of data access, mostly on the misassumption by laymen that online search tools are comprehensive, but also on the difficulty to verify data sources in an age when any fool can forge an earnings report, release it, and play the options.

 Gorman, and other librarians, aren’t opposed to digitization per se, but to the danger of laymen assuming that if it isn’t in Google, it doesn’t exist. The sin of omission through ignorance of existence.

This tendency is particularly dangerous for amateur searchers when their favorite search tool can’t penetrate the "costwalls"  [ack. to Jim Thompson for my favorite word-of-the-day"] that hide newspaper archives, etc. (costwalls have their own perils for those erect them, per Penenberg’s wirednews piece about the loss of relevance for the WSJ per his Google search to see where the world’s best newspaper ranked on results for the term "Enron." Net result — it didn’t, ergo irrelevance].

Wired News: Whither The Wall Street Journal? Penenberg on the WSJ and his recommendation they drop the subscription model and open their doors to the traffic.

Two points he touches on, but deserve development. He cites the Battelle meme of irrelevancy due to the walled-garden model which prohibits bloggers from deep linking inside the archive. Same could be said of the NYT. Sites that permit a permalink into their articles will reap what they sow by letting we bloggers funnel scads of traffic into their pages. Highbeam (not another Highbeam reference!) takes it even a step further and lets bloggers deep link into the archives (which could actually end run the newspaper industry’s precious rev. stream from their morgues.

The killer in the open-site model such as the one followed at Forbes (Adam misstates Forbes "…got rid of registration requirements when it discovered they drove away traffic.") Forbes never required registration for access. It was a founding principle to counter the Journal’s model with an open one and make cash from the traffic [CORRECTION: Adam writes: "You are mistaken. Not in your day, though. But a few years ago the site did require registration. I know this for two reasons. Number one, I had to register just to read old friends like Penelope Patsuris. Number two, Michael Noer recently came to the graduate seminar I teach at NYU and reminded me about Forbes.com's former registration requirement.]) was pointed out yesterday by Forbes.com’s editor, Paul Maidment.

Online operations need coal in the form of stories, articles, content, bus plunge stories, to meet their inventory needs. As long as online arms like Forbes, Businessweek, NYT are dependent on print parents feeding them, they’ll never stand on their own two feet. Force them to build their own editorial capabilities and they sink under the overhead. 

I sense some very interesting days ahead in big print media as they come to terms with their online offspring. The place with the best prospects, imho, is Reuters, which has no print parent and could easily become the arms merchant of linked news by embracing bloggers.

I was following some links from Romensko’s daily email yesterday and one landed me on the New York Post which lo and behold was testing IntelliTXT, the contextual adword technology that automatically highlights keywords in a story and provides a link to an advertiser.

Forbes.com was one of the first pubs out of the gate with the technology but pulled the plug in December when the editorial staff righteously stood up and cried foul. Today’s NYT reports that the Times itself is considering implementing the stupid, stupid, stupid technology. Even though Steven Hall at Adrants was quoted as saying the ads are “easy to ignore.” I disagree. They aren’t. Especially for the clueless who may, at first pass, think they are a hyperlink to more detail on the story or a definition. They are annoying as hell, stupid in their blindness, and probably, sigh, the way of the future.

This crap completely crosses the line between church and state. Penenberg equates them to the comments in Pop-Up Videos. While Hall says they are easy to process and preferable to flashing banners, skyscrapers and other dancing baloney, I disagree — the news hole needs to be sacred — ads need to be labelled ads and kept out of the content well. Figures Popular Mechanics would use them.

Congratulations to the editorial side of Forbes for swatting it down.

Sorry, but after swatting down at least a dozen online-poker spams every day, and now a wave of trackback spams from “tigerspice.com” I have to ask:

WTF is it with poker?

My teen-aged son is obsessed with watching it on television — louche men wearing bug sunglasses — and it seems to have encroached into nearly every channel with celebrity poker, world series of poker, dogs playing poker.

I have a dark fantasy of inventing the email equivalent of a neutron bomb and replying to the online poker spammers with some sort of digital missile missive that will cause faces to rot off.

Forbes.com: Stopping The Presses
Good commentary by Paul Maidment, editor at Forbes.com, on the state of affairs in the newspaper industry. Thanks to Mark Cahill at Atex for the pointer.

MP3s for pennies? Russian cops say no | CNET News.com

In the “Oops, blogged too soon department …” In my daily dump below, I promised to dig a little deeper into allofmp3.com’s copyright status. Looks like the Russian music seller is in the deep doo-doo with the IP cops. From CNET:

“A Russian digital-music site offering high-quality song downloads for just pennies apiece is the target of a criminal copyright investigation by the local police, recording industry groups said Tuesday.

“AllofMP3.com has been operating for several years, asking consumers to pay just 2 cents per megabyte of downloads–usually between 4 cents and 10 cents per song. Alongside the catalogue available at traditional stores like Apple Computer’s iTunes, the site offered access to songs from the Beatles and other groups that haven’t yet authorized digital distribution.”

I see French People

“I’m color-blind … I don’t see French people. I just see smart people who are creating value and innovation.”

What has the global economy come to? Full page ads in the NYT (c-20) touting the benefits of doing business in France? I thought the era of despising the French as a pack of concessionary socialists went out with “freedom-fries” and the vitriol of the barking heads at Fox News. But no. Now Ed Zander, CEO of Motorola, is proclaiming he’s color-blind to the Frenchness of the French. So what if its employment-for-life in the United States of Europe? As Ed tells us: “Great food, great wine!”

WordPress 1.5
This is like a newspaper publisher telling the readers that he’s just bought a new press. Big whoop. How about a writer upgrade? The power of upgrades compells me to disprove the famous “WordPress 5-minute install” and trash my blog later today in the interests of being current. I get twitchy if I’m not running in the beta-zone. Time to roll out mysqladmin.php and get gnarly with the CSS templates.

Time to Retire “Twisted”
A piece in the Times looks at Aspen and its richification over the years despite Hunter Thompson’s efforts to beat back the greed-heads with the Freak Power Party. The piece ends with a very good suggestion by an Aspen writer who says he checks himself everytime he types the word “twisted” and remembers that’s a Dr. Thompson word and should be retired into the rafters like Bobby Orr’s Number 4. Here. Here. Time to create the HST Archive of Language and relegate “Fear and Loathing”, “Greedhead”, “Twisted” etc. to the ceiling.

A Blog Post I Wish I had Time to Report
Tip of the hat to B. Lipman who introduced me to allofmp3.com, a Russian paid-music service that lets you PayPal in balance and then download CD quality music (the usual western music, not Cossack dance tunes) for pennies per song. With iTunes and others essentially pricing a song at a buck, what’s with allofmp3.com getting away with full CDs for $2.00 and songs for $0.14? Ah, it seems Russian copyright law is a very interesting thing. I shall explore and expiate. Love to see the RIAA go gunning to shutdown a Russian music service and find itself in the court system of one of the world’s greatest kleptocracies.

Highbeam vs. Factiva …
I emailed a detailed description of my online research habits to customer service at Factiva last week but haven’t received a reply. They claim I’m unfairly comparing Highbeam’s all-you-can search model with their “Individual”-$2.95 per article rate. I’ll give them another few days then post my pricing and feature analysis before declaring this tempest dead.

Adam Penenberg writes a fine piece on the implications of the Valerie Plame scandal and the protections afforded to journalists at Time and the New York Times to keep their sources confidential and what that means for bloggers.

I may quibble with Adam’s observation that the issue is a First Amendment issue, when in fact it is the lack of a national press shield law that would allow journalists to keep anonymous sources anonymous, but I thought I’d weigh in on the more hairy issue of whether bloggers are journalists.

There is no official certification in existence for journalists. Journalists are not officially regulated and licensed the way physicians, attorneys and accountants are. One does not pass the equivalent of a bar exam to become a journalist. While there are professional associations of journalists that often extend credentials to reporters — the four Congressional Press Galleries review and grant press passes, not Congress — some entities such as the White House, approve the granting of credentials. Hence the recent fracas over a gay hooker gaining access without any “professional” oversight.

Journalists have resisted the official regulation of their ranks and should continue to do so. I also feel they should eschew the protection of the law when it comes to anonymous sources and take their chances on the stand with the rest of the citizenry. Anonymity is a slippery slope and should only be applied, in my opinion, to physician-patient privacy, client-attorney privilege, and pastor-congregant communications.

When reduced to their essence, bloggers are individuals who write and publish into a public medium. Whether they are acknowledged as journalists by the subjects they attempt to report and write about is a reputational problem, not one of credentials, professional standards, or other frameworks. If a blogger can develop a reputation for whatever salient elements define a “journalist” (objectivity, accuracy, literacy, and audience), and win credentials to a Presidential convention, well then good for them.

The crux of Adam’s thesis is:

But should bloggers receive protection under the law as regular reporters? Should they be able to maintain the confidentiality of their sources and not be forced to testify before grand juries or at trial?

Sadly, no, because contrary to conventional wisdom, journalists don’t have these protections. The press has been under assault from the legislative and judicial branches for the past 40 years. These constitutionally protected privileges have become essentially meaningless to reporters and, by extension, everyone else. Bloggers simply can’t count on the law to protect them from the law.

State shield laws have proliferated — there about 31 states with such laws — and calls to extend them to a federal level are mounting. Senator Dodd filed legislation last November to implement a shield law on a federal level.

I dissent. The issue is not a classic First Amendment freedom of speech argument, but the right to publically publish anonymous information and keep that information anonymous in the face of subpoena and other fishing expeditions by law enforcement. I believe that seeking legislative protections above and beyond the First Amendment is a concession of privilege by a free press to officialdom. Journalist should reject all attempts to classify, certify, and protect them by the legislative and judicials branches they are supposed to cover. Permitting elected and appointed officials to determine who is and isn’t a journalist is abhorrent.

The question, which Adam hit on the head, is the definition of who is, and who isn’t covered by a shield law. The definition generally comes down to an employee of a recognized news organization. Well, bloggers should get indignant right out of the box on that definition, and accept the fact that if they want to publish, bloviate, attack, or slander they have to take their chances with the so-called professionals.

Bill Ketter at the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune sums up my opposition to shield laws in this column.

He writes:

“In Washington, U.S. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., has proposed a shield law. He feels that while reporters carry the burden to report news accurately, the government must ensure them the freedom to report the truth without fear of imprisonment.

A noble purpose indeed.

But one of our fears is the government. What it gives it can also take away. And while politicians can help us, as they’re apparently trying to do now, they can also hurt us the next time they get mad at the press.

They can, that is, if we let them by conceding that the First Amendment isn’t all it is cracked up to be. Relying on something other than the language of our founding fathers could end up costing us dearly in this risky business of publishing news some people don’t want out.

There is cause for concern. Ever since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1972 that reporters have no right to refuse to give information to grand juries, there have been several efforts to break the bond of confidentiality between reporters and their sources. This has the indirect effect of censorship by scaring off those news sources who won’t risk possible disclosure.

But even most shield laws make exceptions when disclosure is necessary to avoid violation of a person’s constitutional rights or a miscarriage of justice, such as a wrongful conviction. Or there is absolutely no other means of obtaining the information in a case that has an overwhelming public issue at stake.

These exceptions strike at the heart of press freedom. The minute we agree that the press is free except for this remote eventuality or that one, we’ve started giving away this little piece of the First Amendment or that one. The result might be that, over time, the legislative effort to bolster the rights of reporters could end up diminishing them.

Better that we rely on the First Amendment, and fight for reporter’s privilege — and the public’s right to know — on a case-by-case basis.”

I knew the second his picture flashed on CNN "American Morning" that he was gone. I knew the only way that bubbly chucklehead Soledad O’Brien was going to put Hunter Thompson on CNN was if he was dead. The NYT didn’t have the news, so I suffered through a half-hour of banter between the cheery morning hosts because my cable modem was null and void for some reason. Finally the crawl confirmed the news.

I met Hunter Stockton Thompson in the Tosca — my favorite San Francisco bar — during the Democratic Convention in 1984. He was drinking heavily with Warren Hinckle, columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, stacking little brandy snifters into a pyramid, keeping score and warning the bartender to leave them alone. I was in my 20s, covering the convention for a New England newspaper. I was too shy to introduce myself and Hinkle was doing a good job warning autograph seekers away, so I plugged some quarters into the juke and selected some opera arias — the only jukebox in America that I know to be filled with arias — and returned to my table. While taking a piss I found myself standing next to the man. "Hey," I said. "Boring convention?"

Mondale was a lock, the most boring man on the planet, and the only excitement was the nomination of Geraldine Ferraro.

"Don’t talk to strangers taking a piss. The vice squad will bust you."

I took his advice and continued to empty my bladder. I was wearing my press pass. A big impressive thing with a holographic on it. He noticed it and asked: "Who you write for?" I told him. He said, "Cow town?"

I’ve never asked anyone in my life for an autograph, but this was my chance. Both Fear and Loathings had scarred me as a teenager, I had to do it.

"May I have your autograph?" "Let me wash my hands first." He toweled off. I handed him a pen, and he signed the pass. I thanked him, he returned to the bar, I returned to my table, and that was that.

The next day Dennis McNally, the publicist for the Grateful Dead, asked me if he could borrow my press pass so he could sneak Jerry Garcia into the Moscone Center. I was worried the Secret Service would confiscate it and screw me out of my ticket, something I didn’t want to explain to my clueless editors back in Massachusetts, but in exchange Dennis offered me backstage passes for the Dead shows at the Greek Theater in Berkeley. That was a great trade and Jerry was very honored to get into the convention wearing a pass that had Hunter’s signature scrawled on it.

I am very sad today. As sad as I was that August day when Jerry took the dirt nap.

Patrick Spain, the founder of Highbeam, emailed:

Probably the last thing you wanted was another HighBeam person weighing in, but I thought I would anyway and you can ignore it, if its not helpful to you.

Most of the differences in the business models of Factiva and HighBeam are apparent from looking at the sites. I leave you to say what you like about them. Their individual model is an annual fee and then payment on a per article basis. Ours is monthly or annual subscription that provides unlimited access to our resources. I am the first to admit that Factiva has more and deeper sources than HighBeam, though I would question whether most people need or will pay for “perfect” answers rather than just “excellent” ones.

The real difference is that Factiva, at least on its site for individuals, is still selling content. We aren’t. We think the time for selling content online is past. We are selling access to a research environment that has tools, content, and an easy to use interface. If we do it right, you get an excellent answer quickly and easily. Howard Schultz at Starbucks would call this selling the “experience” rather than just the coffee.

Furthermore, we give a lot of the tools and some of the content on HighBeam away for free and support it with advertising. The user base of the free part of our site is many, many times the size of the paying user base. We make money from both.

Another more fundamental difference is that our only focus is to serve the research needs of individuals in a variety of business environments. Factiva sells primarily at the enterprise level. There is a pronounced, yet underreported, shift toward employees purchasing the goods and services that they consume directly from the vendor, rather than through a central corporate purchasing entity. This trend, made possible by the Internet, is most evident in the purchase of travel services, which has almost entirely devolved to individual employees. But it can also be seen in in the information business and the software business. Salesforce.com will sell a single employee a seat at $50 a month.

We think that individuals within companies purchasing exactly what they need, when they need it, is the future. The old model of selling large ticket goods and services to central purchasing entities (many of which are now outsourced or gone altogether) with an expensive direct sales force is increasingly broken. Within this fundamental and irreversible shift lies immense business opportunity.

Patrick

Patrick Spain
Chairman & CEO
HighBeam Research, Inc.

As part of the ongoing discussion between Highbeam and Factiva on the relative strengths of each service, I received some feedback from Highbeam on my earlier recommendation that they integrate into Office 2003′s “research” function so I can search from within Microsoft OneNote.

Highbeam points out that they are integrated, but under an old name, “E-Library”.

I tested a search via Highbeam into the Forbes archives to pull out an old story I wrote in the early 90s about the impact of Internet-based search tools such as WAIS and GOPHER on the professional search market. The search failed, pointing me to an InformationToday article. So I needed to go directly into Highbeam, declare I only wanted to search Forbes, and voila, I hit the piece.

Highbeam gives me an option to link to the article. So, this is a test of that function to see if I can direct readers deep into their archive.

We’ll see if it works.

1. Hmm, it seems to have befuckticated my WordPress style sheet.
2. Removing the link cleared up the problem — a strikethrough of all text on the blog.
3. Let’s see what happens when the link code is restored. Nope it’s messing me up. The link works, but it trashes the CSS template.
4. Okay, time to email Highbeam and ask what’s up.

Here’s the problem

Here’s the code that’s killing me:

Good-bye, Dewey decimals. (Internet and Wide Area Information Servers)

Hmm. Now it works. Ghost in the code of something. The problem probably lies in WordPress then. It’s been flaky recently. Maybe time to upgrade.

Anyway, interested in whether a user other than myself can deep link into Highbeam’s archive and see the fulltext or if they get a come-on. I’ll test from a different, uncookied PC

Platt in Pumps – Computerworld
Don Tennant, EIC at Computerworld, has a pretty funny fly-on-the-wall perspective of the board meeting in Chicago when Carly got the axe.

The New York Times Company Investor Relations

Tip of the hat to Rafat — I found this news at paidcontent.org.

Whoa. Active M&A season in the world o’content. First Dow pays a big price for Marketwatch, now the Times snatches up About (nee’ The Mining Company).

I’m not, and never have been, a big fan of About.com. (the guides don’t add that much value and the click-throughs are irritatingly framed) But there’s no fighting the reality that guides have always been a big draw for the masses. They made Scott Kurnit wealthy, and About.com was Tom Rogers big Hail Mary acquisition when he was helming Primedia. How this integrates with the NYT.com and Boston.com hasn’t penetrated my thick skull yet. In any case, it is a big step up to the plate for NYT Digital and signals aspirations far beyond making a buck off of their morgue and ad impressions.

It’s all beginning to feel very 1996 all over again. The interesting thing, Google IPO fever aside, is the action is in the acquisitions, not the offerings. With About.com done, what’s next on the M&A radar?

Forrester Magazine
A tip of the hat to Jimmy Guterman and the staff at Forrester Magazine for their launch this month. I’m proud to be a contributor to the first issue with a piece on Innovation Networks, along with former-Forbes colleague Adam Penenberg and Inside.com co-founder Richard Siklos.

Jimmy and I go back to PC Week in the 80s (when I used Norton Utilities to forge higher scores than his on our shared copy of Tetris), then Forbes.com where he helped us get off the ground with some excellent writing.

Jimmy is a great rock writer, the man who made The Industry Standard’s Media Grok a must-read, and an excellent editor as evidenced by the quality of Forrester Magazine. The debut is an auspicious one and sure to be a hit with its audience. It’s tough to break out of the tech magazine cliche, but this one manages to.

You can follow the link above to request an issue. No ads. Not a party organ for Forrester, just really good technology coverage that breaks out of the tired pack (aside from the obligatory Larry and Sergey photos on the covers).

Some good stuff:

First: John Battelle pointed to O’Reilly’s Make, a new quarterly magazine for the DIY crowd that likes to do things like aerial photography with kites, replace Ipod batteries, and build desktop Gauss rifles. At the sample table of contents I found a series of links to nice stuff like:

Gmail hacks, a collection of add-ons and plug-ins which make Gmail even better to use. My new favorite gets ride of the annoying systray notifier and puts an icon into the menu of Firefox which shows how many unread messages are waiting in the account.

My second link o’ the day is courtesy of Jerry Michalski, who, in a discussion of Wikipedia, linked to a very cool “screencast” demo of how a Wikipedia entry evolved. It was built using Camtasia by Jon Udell at Infoworld. Definitely something I want to check out myself. Camtasia was developed by Techsmith, the same people who developed my favorite screen scraper — SnagIt — and is available for a free trial download. Otherwise it costs $300.

Finally, this winter’s personal obsession has been fixed-gear bicycles. Bikes that have one gear and don’t coast. These are essentially track racing bikes — some don’t even have brakes — and are favored by urban bike messengers. They’re also great winter training tools for racers who use them to build length strength and smooth out their pedalling stroke. Basically you never, ever stop pedalling. Try to stop and it’s like being on a rolling ejector seat.

I built mine out of an old frame and some spare parts and a few new parts ordered from Harris Cyclery in Newton, Mass. The guru there is Sheldon Brown, the man of all things bicycling.

Anyway, fixed-gear is one of those subcultures within a subculture which appeals to my current zen bent towards minimalistic technology. No gears. No brakes. No fancy materials. I like things stripped down to their essence and fixed-gear bikes represent the ne plus ultra of human powered transportation in my opinion.

Here’s a link to a picture of my ride — “The Snotrocket” — at the wonderful Fixed Gear Gallery collection of bike porn.

For a very cool video of a messenger race down 7th Ave. in Manhattan, check out Lucas Brunelle’s 50 mb flick. It is worth the download and receives my vote for best use of a Guns n’ Roses soundtrack.

Michael Wolff – I Want Media

Michael Wolff — not he of McKinsey’s Media Practice, but the one who wrote Burnrate — spoke at the SIIA summit in NYC at the beginning of the month.

He weighs in on subscription vs. free models:

I think the fact that the Journal felt that it was powerful enough to charge, and for a long time everyone regarded the Journal’s activities online as the ultimate. They had unlocked the puzzle. In fact, I don’t think they did. I think they locked themselves into a puzzle.

While the New York Times on the other hand became this ubiquitous information brand. It became finally the national information brand. And it did this, I think, because it was free. So free is the word. And free is what I want to talk about — free information, which in the media industry is now the topic, the theme. This is the thing that is unavoidable, that everyone has to deal with.

In the mid-90s, Neil Budde (now running Yahoo News) was THE man for subscription models and posed a massive challenge to overcome within Forbes and other publications that were wrestling with the inclination to lock their words down behind a subscription model. “Well the Journal is kicking butt by charging!” was thrown in my face every time I tried to argue that the game was about reach, not subs. I was banging the give-it-away-and-get-massive model and lo and behold Jim Cramer tries to nuke the plan with this 1997 screed.

Dark days indeed when we trying to argue the point that even simple registration was enough of deterrent to cause users to shift to friendlier destinations.

Anyway, now comes Wolff saying that the Journal trashed itself by charging and the Times (which is rumored to be mulling a paid model) went global by being free.

I’m a little surprised the paid vs free debate even lingers in this day and age. My read on the Marketwatch acquisition was it was Dow throwing in the towel and admitting they were leaving a lot of money on the ground by choking their pageview inventory behind the subscription wall at the Journal (which I pay for and have paid for since it launched).

Check out Jack Shafer’s “Unbundle-Rebundle” at Slate to see how the winds of give-it-away are blowing through the newspaper industry.

Bill Gates and other communists | Perspectives | CNET News.com
Richard Stallman responds at Cnet to BillG’s comparison between opensource and commies: “The IETF rejected Microsoft’s protocol, but Microsoft said it would try to convince major ISPs to use it anyway. Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism; it was set up by that famous communist agent, the U.S. Department of Defense.”

I guess my earlier comparison with Highbeam struck a nerve, because a nice guy from Factiva just phoned to tell me I wasn’t looking at Factiva the right way.

The “individual” account, which whales the subscriber to the tune of $2.95 an article is not for me, said the Factiva rep. I need to ignore the individual account and take the corporate flat-fee model. Okay. I’m game. I’ll check the pricing structure and report back. First glance doesn’t tell me much, but I’ll keep digging in the interest of fairness.

Kind of weird getting a call from a blog post. Struck a nerve I guess.

I’ve been flirting with the technology research world for the past year, consulting for two of the biggest names in the business on a few editorial projects and discussing a full-time position with one of the big players.

Today’s (2.14.05) NYT has a piece in the business section by Eric Pfanner on the disruptions in the market for paid IT research, pointing to the wide availability of information through trade pubs (who I also have been consulting and considering a full-time position with) and good old Blogs.

The kickers in Pfanner’s piece are:

“”The costs of entry in this field are very small,” said Mark Newman, chief research officer at Informa. “A bunch of guys with good contacts in the industry can do an awful lot with very little.” That dynamic could threaten research companies and trade publications alike, particularly as the open-source ethos spreads on the Internet.”

The furry rodents in the new world of IT information are the Glen Fleishman’s and Om Malik’s of the blogging world, who are not only faster than their big counterparts at Forrester, Gartner, Meta, etc., but a heck of a lot cheaper. The trade press is already getting kicked around by printless players like TechTarget, but it’s further down the food chain, at the niche tech news blogs, that the first cracks in the information monolith are beginning to show. Team up a few strong tech bloggers with a conference program, a print newsletter for the browser-challenged, and the fun could really begin.

To continue with Pfanner’s piece in the Times:

“After all, a free blog is cheaper than a magazine subscription … [out of sequence] Analysts say corporate executives increasingly turn to technology publications, which sometimes offer similar information at a small fraction of the price. Particularly on the Internet, the distinction between an expensive research report and a low-cost piece of journalism is less apparent.”

The fix is in. Crack the economics of supporting smart tech information bloggers by banding them together to present a unified sponsorship model, put them on stage at their own conferences, and continue to undersell, undersell, undersell the big boys and the dinosaurs will be wondering what happened to their eggs.