Amateur Hour

I'm just back from the Buying & Selling E-Content conference in Scottsdale. I had been particularly looking forward to hearing author Andrew Keen discuss the ideas he lays out in his book, Cult of the Amateur. I admit to being disappointed by his dialectic.

Keen's core argument (or at least what I think is his core argument - he's a man of many ideas who isn't particularly good at bringing them all together in an organized way) is that "curated content," content that has been selected and vetted by knowing professionals in publishing and media organizations, is valuable. Nobody can argue with that. But Keen goes on to suggest that giving voice to anyone who wants one via social media tools has been a giant step backward for both culture and society.

As a publisher, I expected to find myself cheering his view of things, yet I walked away from his presentation feeling quite unsettled. His argument didn't sit well with me, but I was unsure why.

On reflection, I think what bothers me is that curation is not just about selecting the best; it's also (at least in the media world) inherently about keeping out everything else. The historical success of the media has come from its ability to achieve monopolies - if not business monopolies, at least audience monopolies. With relatively few media outlets and few other cost-effective ways to reach large audiences, great power resulted, power that was not always wielded fairly or wisely. Even more significantly, media concentration meant the vast majority of people would never - by design - get needed exposure or be able make their voices heard.

I've written several books on obscure topics related to data publishing. Because of their limited appeal, no book publisher was ever interested in them. So I took the tough road of self-publishing and managed over the years to sell several thousand copies of these books. These books have helped society, albeit in a very limited way, by teaching associations and corporations how to publish more useful and effective directories, guides and databases. Yet Andrew Keen would seem to ascribe no societal value to my thoughts and insights because I couldn't get past the established gatekeepers. I could make the same point about this blog. It reaches several thousand people, and more than a few readers have told me they find it useful and insightful. Yet prior to social media, I wouldn't have this audience because no trade publisher would ever publish the specialized and eclectic thoughts I choose to discuss. Disintermediation has been very, very good to me!

What Andrew Keen is railing against is not really the rise of amateurs, but rather the decline in power of the professionals. Curated content now has to compete harder in the marketplace of ideas. It now also has to compete for attention. It used to be that those who could get past the media gatekeepers (e.g. Andrew Keen) were assured of doing well financially, sometimes achieving status and celebrity to boot. Now it's a much tougher game with fewer guarantees.

I've previously described what I call the five stages of Internet migration in the publishing world: denial, incredulity, anger, adoption and embrace. Most information publishers I know are well into stage four or beyond. Andrew Keen seems mired in stage three.

Labels: Andre Keen, Cult of the Amateur, disintermediation

Dow Jones Acquires Generate; Creates New Business Unit

Dow Jones and Company today announced its acquisition of Generate Inc., which enables business intelligence through a platform that combines real-time company intelligence with integrated relationship-mapping technology. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Generate's solution is geared toward executives to help them find opportunities with future business partners. Dow Jones plans to offer this solution to its financial services and business professional customers. According to a press release announcing the deal, the Generate acquisition further solidifies Dow Jones' "Power the Intelligent Enterprise" strategy, which calls for delivering information to a company's most information-intensive job function in the time and manner in which it is needed. Generate will be housed under a new Dow Jones business unit, Business & Relationship Intelligence, which is part of the company's Enterprise Media Group.

Generate's patented extraction and aggregation technology takes company and executive data from the Internet and maps relationships among those people and organizations. It crawls more than 75 million domains and extracts information on more than 4 million companies and 6.4 million executives. The technology also mines in real-time for more than 100 trigger events, such as mergers and acquisitions, which would be of interest to a business audience. The company intelligence is integrated with relationship-mapping technology that enables users to detect competitive moves, identify prospects and make the most of their corporate and personal networks.

This marks Dow Jones' second enterprise business-related acquisition of 2008. The first was its March purchase of Dutch language news service Betten Financial News BV.

This acquisition should serve to make Dow Jones an even more powerful information provider. Customers today demand solutions that efficiently provide the information they need as well as intelligence that will help make that data work even better for them. Plain data is never enough--technology that makes it actionable is a must.

Generate's technology is especially interesting, however. As executives become much more aware of the power of networking relationships (through the increased popularity of such social networking sites as LinkedIn), they will undoubtedly welcome the opportunity to utilize such technology that will help them increase the value of those relationships. More good news for customers is that Dow Jones seems very committed to the development of its Business & Relationship Intelligence unit. Expect the company to continue to acquire businesses that will fit under this umbrella and add additional value for Dow Jones' customers.

Northstar Travel Media Apparently for Sale

According to media reports, Northstar Travel Media is for sale. Boston Ventures, a private equity fund, acquired the travel information company from Reed Elsevier in 2001.

Among the company's offerings are directory/database products, including hotelandtravelindex.com (which provides hotel information to a customer base of travel agents and corporate travel planners) and omfg.com (Official Meeting Facilities Guide). OMFG, which provides property information for meeting planners, contains information on more than 42,000 facilities and 12,000 cities across the globe. Northstar also owns Star Service Online, which offers information and commentary on about 9,000 hotels worldwide.

Northstar's properties are certainly valuable to their customers. But the question is how valuable they are to prospective buyers. In such uncertain economic times, companies who may typically have been interested in making acquisitions are likely reconsidering such strategies. In addition, the travel industry is going to be among the hardest hit in a slow economic environment. Travel budgets (both personal and corporate) will undoubtedly be cut or reduced, diminishing the need for travel-related services.

It's not the best time for Boston Ventures to try to remove Northstar from its portfolio. Reasons for them doing so are unclear. It could be a while before any interested acquirers identify themselves.

LoopNet Enhances Offerings with REApplications Acquisition

LoopNet this week announced its acquisition of REApplications, a provider of on-demand commercial brokerage operations software. REApplications' solutions, which serve the commercial real estate market, are web-based and facilitate a variety of functions for managing market research, including property inventory; listings and comparables; commission management; customer relationship management (CRM); project tracking; and transaction management. LoopNet bought REApplications for an aggregate cash consideration of $9.4 million.

REApplications boasts an impressive list of commercial brokerage and property valuation firms, such as Coldwell Banker Commerical and Cushman &Wakefield LePage. REApplications will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of LoopNet, and the senior management team will remain in place.

This is yet another illustration of the value created from a data-software integration and it's certainly a big win for all of the involved parties. LoopNet is able to enhance its offerings and make them more valuable--and usable--to its current customers. At the same time, REApplications will likely yield growth it probably wouldn't have been able to achieve on its own as its solutions are placed in the hands of LoopNet customers--and that's a large group. LoopNet currently has more than 2.75 registered members. Lastly, customers of both LoopNet and REApplications will benefit from the efficiencies afforded by an integrated solution that enables them to more easily complete all tasks associated with the management and marketing activities.

In today's competitive marketplace, creating this data-software integration is a must. Customers need and demand valuable content packaged with services to create a complete solution to help them achieve their goals. That is exactly what LoopNet and REApplications are now positioned to provide.

LoopNet Expands Reach of Its Listings

Online commercial real estate marketplace LoopNet this week announced that its showcase property listings in the LoopNet.com marketplace will now appear on major search engines like Google and Yahoo as well as more than 100 websites of major newspapers--from The New York Times to the Dallas Morning News and The Wall Street Journal.

The LoopNet marketplace includes all commercial property categories, from office, industrial and retail to hotel, land and specialty properties. The site is used by commercial real estate agents to list properties for sale or lease. Those agents, as well as brokers, buyers and tenants use LoopNet listings to find available properties that meet their needs.

LoopNet already boasts an impressive customer list of commercial real estate firms, such as Century 21 Commercial, Cushman & Wakefield, Prudential and RE/MAX.

LoopNet's stature in the commercial real estate market has steadily increased over time and this latest announcement just emphasizes its growing profile in this industry. With this added exposure, LoopNet will be better able to serve the listing agent segment of its customer base by providing a larger showcase for its listings. Being aligned with LoopNet will also benefit the search engines and newspapers since it will greatly increase the number of listings they provide--which should yield more site visitors to their offerings in real estate as well as other advertising categories.