* the previous lot, outed on May 11, were moving in education towards the idea that teacher and school staff recruitment was best controlled by government on its own website. This is it, launched only 3 months before the UK election.

* one of the big bills for local government in the UK is teacher advertising. If this were to be done by government itself on the web, serious savings could be made, and these could be channelled back into the education system.

* futhermore, government doing the advertising enables better quality control to take place, offers ways of monitoring local government practises and ensuring compliance. And online application using government approved forms would create productivity gains and entrench better human resources practises. And government need not expand to contain the new service – it has been outsourced to Tribal Education, a supplier whose service fees would be less than the annual cost of advertising every vacancy in the commercial education press.

* and, what is more, the previous government can be blamed for the scheme! Surely a winner, then?

Hold on a minute. I did type “commercial education press”, didn’t I? Well, yes, there is one, led by the venerable Times Education Supplement (TES). Does it do teaching jobs online? Yes, it has an excellent service, developed since Mr Murdoch’s News International sold this unit away from Times Newspapers, fearing as he did that government may pull this trick. Now its owned by private equity investors who have courageously re-invested in it to modernize it, enable it to beat off web competition from eTeach and, to my great delight, have re-created it as a portal for communications amongst teachers. It has a great role yet to play in the exchange of resources in the UK teaching marketplace.

But will it be able to play that role if government policy cuts off its lifeline advertising revenues? Hard to say, but surely a Conservative government, devoted to the interests of private enterprize, will discontinue such a media abusive policy and ensure that this saving is not made. Even harder to say, in my view: government now has a bigger reason for not doing anything about putting  this into reverse – cost reduction beats out ideology in most instances.

Of course, that begs the question of whether costs really will be reduced this way. Last time round this track in the UK, it was National Health Service jobs. Britain’s NHS, with 1.6 million employees (third in the world behind the Red Army and the Indian Railways), was and is a huge recruitment advertising engine. Creating NHS Jobs permanently blighted the prospects of the nursing press and health management publishing in the UK, but there was a private sector winner, in the form of DMGT’s Jobsite, who leased the systems it used to the NHS in return for being able to mirror the NHS site, getting traffic though no revenues. The NHS system is now embedded in NHS personnel practise and there can be no going back.

So government has the capacity to blight whole sectors of publishing activity through re-inventing publisher services on the web? You betcha, and if you doubt, look at the UK’s regional press, once deeply dependent on local government advertising. The huge decline in local press interests, despite all the bleatings of politicians who professed their devotion to the local rag, was as much about the loss of government advertising as anything. And is this inevitable and should it be reversed? Given that government uses the network less effectively and in a more costly way than most users, there is a good case for advising them to stay clear. But that will not happen.

In a society where publishing is increasingly democratized, government will see its chance. And the ability to control and direct is irresistable. If the instrument of control is a job ad, then so be it. The advice to a Young Publisher may well be “Join the civil service” in due course, but for society at large this process may create a democratic deficit.

Come to think of it, did I describe that website as a policy ruin? I was wrong. It is a foundation for the next incumbent to build a more ideologically correct version. But how I wish that I was wrong about that too.

Lets start just there . Suppose for a moment that you agree with me that life cycles on the web are still speeding up . In other words , it took a decade for Google to build its brand , but five years for Facebook , and perhaps three years for their successors . This is a direct response to the rapid increase in the speed of ntework communication and not just the size of user populations . We now expect that friends and collagues will respond to a network relationship which demands attention.My daughter reported to her family this morning that she had been quoted in a Bloomberg article in the San Francisco Chronicle : within 30 minutes she had email responses from her husband , her father and her step-mother . We talk the language of these changes in pace but we do not really understand what their impact will be .

Yet in one sense we do . Notice how the network never throws anything away . Business model development is circular , as with much else in a world where there is no maturity , just renewal . So when I get a question about lead generation as an advertising business model on the web , I am bound to go back five years to a time when , in the US , lead gen was being seen as the saviour of the online advertising world . And why does online advertising need a saviour ? Because although it has grown persistently through the decline of print advertising , it is still a small , low margin sector of the economic activity of the web , once you have factored Google out of the equation . And , if you believe what I have written about speed of change , then you must factor in the decline of Google , and its replacement by a semantic-based atlternative  brewing even now in a garage near Bangalore .

Lead generation came about because its progenitors sought better than CPM returns , less dependence on search engines and more value-add to procure loyalty – stickiness . But just as the print yellow page players have never made an online impact commensurate with their offline power , so the lead gen players have never made an impact that measured up to the role that we designed for them five years ago . And part of the reason for this is another marked web behaviour model – the limitations the network seems to place on competitive replacement of aligned business models .

I need to unwrap that .I can do so by saying that in the mid-’90s I was one who proclaimed that a thousand business models would now flower on the web , and that users would pick the best , and then the better as it appeared , and so on in a frenzy of service choice activity . Well , I was wrong . What appears to have happened is that users chose , in every class of service , the best of its class , and then another , and while many more then appeared with enhancements , they stayed very loyal to those first choices , and many networked marketplaces became duopolistic as a result . And then , when a definite break with the old and still satisfactory services  took place , it occurred because of market disruption from a new ( and usually technological ) market activity . These duopolies , while they should have been a market stabilizing activity , now show signs of breaking down more speedily .Bear in mind too that technologies are getting cheaper , and technology spend has rarely , if ever , been a barrier to entry .

Which is a dispiriting picture if you are a duopolist in an online advertising market sector . Is this a determinist model : you must go down when the technology silver bullet hits you ? Not at all . Just review your entire business model annually , and let users drive your service enhancements and technology picks .If you are a sector leader , the real barrier is brand – something it takes newcomers more time to climb over than technology , though the breathing space it provides is very short . In online advertising , any sector duopolist must surely be looking at video for value enhancement , at developing web presence for advertisers ( the leading growth field in this year’s Outsell survey ), and above all at social media/buying clubs online . And this investigation of the direction of flow and the speed of change begins on Day 2 , after initial service change . Looking back , the most common characteristic of change-agents has been their propensity to believe that once changed , markets would stay that way long enough for everyone to make money . It ain’t necessarily so .

In more sober moments we inevitably discussed two urgent issues amongst the many strands pursued by speakers . The conference opened on Paywall Tuesday , the day when the Times and the Sunday Times launched their joint suicide pact . This topic reverberated around us on both days , with contrary viewpoints taken by speakers who felt , much as Peter Preston did in today’s Observer ((30 May 2010) that a facsimile newspaper would find a small and loyal audience , while others , including the afore-mentioned rock-god , felt that even if you argued  for the value and distinctive nature of the Times ” journal of record ” status and its very high quality columnists ,  the thing to do was to sell these values for themselves and sell them seperately , not look back over one’s shoulder at a format which , literally , now belongs in another world .

But that world was always with us . The other major topic was the future history of the iPad . Adam Hodgkin even passed his round the audience ( there was relief on his face when it eventually came back ) and both he and OUP’s Evan Schnittman dilated interestingly on business modela and distribution in a device -laden world . The sceptics said that the iPad had found the enthusiasts , but not yet a definition of use in a mass market . We may have to wait for 3.0 for the right functionality , but who cares , since we Europeans are still awaiting 1.0 .No one went to the wonderful extremes of Sue Halpern in May’s edition of The New York Review of Books . This is worth quoting ” In fact , Web browsing on the iPad is less than ideal …..But why bother going through a browser to get to YouTube or to read the AP headlines or check the weather when there is a dedicated app for each of these ? This is what is really revolutionary and game changing about the iPad: once there is an app for everything , its Apple’s Web , not the wide world’s ” Wow , this lady is obviously a rock-goddess !

Meanwhile , in the conference room we were more likely to decide that Google was the threat to the Web that needed attention . We covered video advertising , noted the return of display courtesy of Hugo Drayton (Inskin) , and looked at classifieds through the well-educated eyes of Fish 4 . In a hugely impressive session , Louise Rogers , the CEO of TSL Education , gave an object lesson in how to create community and fill it with user-derived content  – and fascinated many of us by her consistent refusal to go for instant monetization , preferring to build community strength in depth to continue to support her recruitment advertising model . This seemed admirable , though the proper approach will be tested by UK  government spending cuts in her sector – and the eventual wish of her private equity investors to make an exit . Her case study , and excellent demonstrations of clear strategic thinking at the Economist , at Bloomsbury publishing and at Complinet meant that no one could leave the room without the conviction that the digital revolution is now over . We even began a serious discussion of the semantic web without a single groan from a full audience representing some 120 industry players .

My apologies : I cannot mention each exceptional speaker by name . But any meeting that starts ( when he reached us ) with a keynote from Simon Waldman , looking back at his Guardian years and the ” creative destruction ” of the markets in which he worked  , and ended with Shane O’Neill giving a rallying cry of hope  based on the re-use of ex-government data  was not short on inspiration . I came away exultant : this industry is going to make it , and neither Google nor Apple can do anything to stop us !

But it was the walls of ancient Merv that brought me down . Having struggled arthritically to the top , and then onto the citadel , the view from what was once the greatest city in the world barring only Babylon exhibits – a desert . After Genghis Khan , the great city , which may have had a population close to one million , was never re-occupied . The deserts of Turkmenistan are unforgiving. Progress stopped here .

Almost the first thing that I saw on my return to work was the agenda for the next ePublishing Innovation Forum 2010 (www.epublishing-forum.com) which I am chairing in London on 25-26 May – next week – in London . Like the view from the top of the walls of Merv , it is inspiring , but for utterly different reasons . It reminds me of the pace and iterative nature of change in an information marketplace that is recreating itself from ground level in cycles that used to take a decade to complete , but which can now take 10 months .

Peering from the top of the walls , I know that I can no longer envisage an agenda that covers the whole spectrum of change . The great team who organize this event now know this too , so the keynotes are particularly important , from Simon Waldman of the Guardian at the beginning ( “The internet ate my business” !) to Shane O’Neill and his political perspective on using third party ( government) content at the end . In between come some case studies I really want to hear – Chris Pilling on the Complinet experience , or the Economist strategy on networks from Aeneas McDonnell . Evan Schnittman at OUP is a wonderful commentator on distribution issues , and Jonathan Glasspool at Bloomsbury is building a new digital world of professional and academic publishing with some interesting acquisitions .

Out there on the walls are also some seasoned observors , eyes narrowed to slits in the face of blinding sun and sandstorms . Adam Hodgkin , one of the industries most experienced venturers , will tell us how you build businesses which exploit iPhone and iPad , while Hugo Drayton , veteran of the Advertising Legion , puts fresh heart into markets which have at times looked like the Karakoram Desert itself .  

And I have only scratched the surface .Ian Eckert knows all about publishing platforms – from newspapers ( I first met him at Portsmouth and Sunderland , a group now as well forgotten as Merv itself ) to UBM , to TES and now back to making things work at Abacus . And TES’s current CEO , Louise Rogers , will be there to show how UGC really works .Other case studies include Fish4 ( who will no doubt remind me that I was once their chairman too ) and Conde Nast . And the panellists come from vital places like Nature , Penguin , Incisive Media and Pearson Education .All this gets somehow shoe-horned into two days ( pity the chairman ) and has so far gained a bigger audience than last year . I am pleased and proud that my colleagues at Outsell are once more , for a third year , its media partners .

Unlike ancient Merv , the network allows media to die in one context while regenerating in another . We have to use events like this to tap into the collective experience of that powerfull  speaking team to find out what natural laws govern that regeneration , whether experience can be replicated , how we can really understand user behaviour , what constitutes value add in the eyes of our users and whether we can understand and work with them successfully before they decide that we are part of the problem , not the solution . While I remain confident that publishing will never become a deserted city , it may be best to find out now what is in the minds of the Mongol horde on the network ,something which the citizens of old Merv never deigned to do .

I look forward to seeing you there .

In my last blog on this subject I merely mentioned Foursquare (http://foursquare.com/ and on the strength of that ( perhaps)  founder Dennis Crowley went off in search of series B funding at around $80m . This round had , says the SFGate  Business Insider service , ” every VC and their mother humping ( FourSquare’s) leg ” . Come to think of it , it wasn’t me who encouraged this : we rather frown on the uncontrollable urges of dogs and VCs in this village . Then came the news that the competition between FourSquare and Gowalla was resolving in favour of  the former , though both had a boost at SXSW (don’t ask ) and Foursquare told Bloomberg on Friday that they had moved from 170,000 users in December to 1 million now . Also since I wrote my piece the press has quoted Facebook and Microsoft as potential bidders , and some have even imagined Yahoo buying it for $100 million. Bloomberg quote an analyst called Kip Cassino ( cometh the hour , cometh the man with the name ) as estimating location -based services at an annual ad-spend of $4.1 billion in five years ((23 April) .

The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss has the right idea in her article online on 26 April : this is the three dimensional Nectar card ( think store discount cards in the US ). Local sites in the US have tracked around 2000 businesses signing up in California , and in the UK the first signatory was – the FT .(http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/apr/12/foursquare-ft) We award Rob Grimshaw our prize for adroit brand association , and love the alliance with business schools alongside this .

And , no , I am not diverted by Blippy ( www.blippy.com ) , the what-I-bought-where site , and the news this week that a third of Craigslist’s income comes from advertising porn and prostitution only gets me excited in the sense that if they are getting $36m from this source , and they are the champions of free listings , then there is a great marketplace in the non-porn sector . Truth to tell , the concentration of service values on the geolocational mobile computer we will still insist on calling a phone is now and will in future become so great that , like Foursuare , new worlds will be created in the made-for-mobile sector which only come down to earth and internet when different types of processing and communications are  needed. For an interesting example , look at Plyce , the French version of all of this (www.plyce.com).

At a dinner this week I found myself talking to a revered former CEO from the regional press . I mentioned the great press baron(et) of Farnham , Sir Ray Tindle , whose average circulation of his many local titles , was , when I went to see him in the 1990s , around 12,000. Yet there was real profit in his enterprizes and a huge local lock-in for services which , then , people regarded as their own . That ownership is the trick that Facebook has pulled off in the internet , and which Foursquare can do in the geolocational sphere . The Guardian think they will be at 3 million by the end of the summer , but the important matter is that each of those users feel that they are living in a village of their own making , though it is one they can take with them wherever they go . Sir Ray , when I spoke to him , said that he had just bought the local newspaper in Llanwit Major – ” Its my size of town ! ” he said . I think that he would love Foursquare and see the opportunity to define the town , and eventually the newsflow and everything else , in the virtual mind-mapping of the individual , and even create custom print for him one day .

I shall be back here in a few weeks , having missed the UK  election campaign . However , I have cast my postal vote , and if my fellow citizens follow my lead then we shall have a completely new country by mid-May . On reflection , I think that geolocational services may be a better bet !

The Thomson Reuters markets division will become two simplified platforms by the autumn , dealing with enterprize users on the one hand , and individual users and small operators on the other . These platforms will be web-based , and the Thomson Reuters servers will be able to be moved alongside  client servers to ensure lower operational costs . The web -based environments clearly are designed to appeal to a new generation in the industry which joined since trading platforms were in place , as well as providing a contrast with the Bloomberg insistence on its dedicated terminals ( Shades of the dedicated Lexis box ! )

And something else as well . Andrew quotes Devin Wenig, the CEO of Thomson Reuters Markets , as saying ” The industry is a hugely different place from where it was in April 2008 ( when the Thomson Reuters merger took place ) and we think a lot of changes are permanent and structural. Big banks are disapearingbut we’ve created 1000 new accounts in …six months ”

And there is surely the essence . Players in rapidly restructuring networked markets will themselves have to be slimmer , do more on less and enable their clients to do more in the network at least for the same pricing . And that new generation of clients will expect a  greater fluency in customization and personalization  along with better risk management and improved collaboration features ( the launch of Eikon ) as well as interfaces to news and information ( like Insider ) which source video as well as text and allow brokers to offer analysis on video to their clients across the platform .

In short , Thomson Reuters are , with a few exceptions , facing very similar issues to those faced by a Pearson in education , or an Elsevier in STM . And from here on in the parallelism ceases and turns into convergence . Thomson Reuters announced a deal last week to bring Palantir’s QA Studio software to its platforms . This type of quantitative analysis allows data exploration , do pattern identification , test alpha strategies and collaborate . This pushes on with the developments in data mining began with ClearForest three years ago , and again parallels what is alreday happening ( Palantir’s markets are the intelligence , defense and law enforcement communities  ! )

Where does the next push come ? Well , data management is now crucial , and so is compliance and risk management/reduction . And that sounds just like the issues facing diagnostic systems in the medical marketplaces . Often in financial markets there is too much news , and it is insufficiently auto or machine analysed , and human intervention takes too long : this points towards further pressure for automated news tagging so that it can be submitted directly to computerized trading systems . And here another common broad market problem occurs . Users and regulators begin to exert pressure at the lowest levels of data organization for common standards to emerge  ( XBRL would be the case study in the finance field ). This moves the competition zone up a level , but that competitive element must remain because it drives everything forward . Without it , common standards turn into a reason for not changing anything . So play up , lads and play the game ! We still have to tackle workflow and process improvement before the end of this long information industry day !

” I know the successor to Facebook ”

There , it is really quite easy . And it came to me naturally while contemplating the plainly inadequate oarsmanship of the Brothers Winklevoss and the demise of BeBo , suffocated in its sleep by the new regime at AOL . The twins , litigants in the Facebook case and winners of a $65 million dollar bonus for losing , are plainly seekers after Lost Causes . Thus they were rowing in the Oxford boat defeated by Cambridge in the recent Boat Race . I am not sure if they were connected to their lawyers and launching an appeal against the race judges while still rowing , but I am pretty sure that their mobiles were close by , and that their stay in the UK has been an intensively networked experience . And that is where , if they truly want to defeat Mr Zuckerberg , they should be investing their winnings . For the successor to Facebook is lurking out there in the mobile networks even now , built for the network , and not adapted to it as Facebook was .

Over at News Corp , the senior strategists are doing all-nighters to work out what AOL just got : neither MySpace or BeBo will make it . I could save them so much time . The answer is : Go and buy www.foursquare.com . Here is a made for the network social media environment that lets users rate the places that they visit , put them into the social media context , give them credit and points for discovering things ( I could be “mayor” of my local pub if I was’t too busy drinking there ) , and above all , like Facebook , give them credit in the eyes of their peers .

Amazingly then , tomorrow’s social media on the mobile/cell network appears to be a close relation of a number of web-based antecedents . Craigslist for a start . Mobile networking is all about spatial awareness and recommendation . Other parallel players might be the splendid www.brownbook.com , derived from the recommendation directory world , or Qype in Hamburg , Germany. If you are too late to buy FourSquare then there might be some ideas here . The latest BrownBook release now lists 34 million commercial entities globally where you can make comments and recommendations .

Once FourSquare is up and away bigtime ( sorry , the language goes with the subject) , you will want to create the real time links that show you when your friends are checked in to the bar or restaurant or hair salon or pub that you are just approaching on the street outside . Then the fun begins , but early investment before concept maturity is advisable . And only a few things remain to be said . One is that having discovered this I seem to have let the cat out of the bag before buying a major ( or any) stake . Which is why I am poor . Secondly , I seem to be saying that the future of social media and directories are inextricably linked , which is not where I thought I was going to end up . Lastly , if the history of the network is about constant innovation , then BeBo , MySpace and FaceBook can all be described as players who innovated once , and then stuck to the knitting . Which is why they will all be overtaken by the Next New Thing . And , guess what , you read it first here !

Well , anyway , it passed the time , did this thought . And recalled a splendid conversation with my daughter , who is planning to set out on a medical education , which took place some days ago . I had alluded to www.23andMe.com , the very interesting start-up site which should be known because it is bringing a new look to genetic analysis ( and is known because its founder , Anne Wojcicki, is the wife of Sergey Brin ). This service , for a price of between $399 and $599 , sends you a saliva test , analyses your sample , finds your relatives out as far as fourth cousins , and then gives you guidance on conditions that may be inherent in your genetic make-up . All fairly crude , of course , but enough to be compulsive -or dangerous.

My daughter opted for the latter . Donning the mantle of an aspiring professional , she could see only too clearly the dangers of knowing enough to be frightened and not enough to be fully informed . And what about employer discrimination , and insurance company refusals to insure known risks ? Clearly it was a minefield and it was best if amateurs ( I qualify here ) kept clear . But I still wonder. I see citizens of the future carrying and trading this type of information as part of a restoration of the balance in their relationships with the medical profession . I feel certain that the avoidance of risk will become a powerful factor in decisions about having children , and I have little confidence left in doctors or politicians when they know best .

And if there is any value in this thought , then it points a finger directly at medical publishing and medical informatics in regard to the communication job that they carry out at present . We all laughed at the very idea in the early days of Open Access that the woman on the Idaho omnibus would be able to make sense of a research article on her child’s cancer . www.23andMe.com has the same problem . Fine graphics , videos and cartoons got us over the ealy explanatory stages ( I loved the English English voice over – an American voice in this context suggests marketing ? ). Then we are in citation country , and gene-talk is very hard to follow . For example , I would need to be paid $599 to understand this :

“Although a variety of factors influence a patient’s ideal dose of warfarin, the genetic variations in the CYP2C9 and VKORC1 genes reported by 23andMe play an important part. In January 2010 the FDA updated warfarin’s label to say that information on these variants can assist physicians in selecting a starting dose of the drug. The agency also provided initial dosage recommendations for patients with different variant combinations. The FDA does not, however, require that genetic testing be done before prescribing warfarin.

Versions of the CYP2C9 gene known as *2 and *3 can slow down the body’s ability to break down warfarin. This causes the drug’s concentration in the bloodstream to decrease more slowly, so the patient needs a lower dose to begin with. Each T at rs1799853 indicates a copy of CYP2C9*2. Each C at rs1057910 indicates a copy of CYP2C9*3.

The normally functioning version of CYP2C9 is called *1.”

But this will change . Our genetic heritage may well be the health equivalent of internet banking . If it is , then medical publishers will need to explain themselves to a much wider readership – or maybe , in instances like Nature Publishing taking on the management of  Scientific American , this is already happening . As I walked out of Hotel Dieu into a Spring evening in the square outside of Notre Dame I could already imagine the disintegration and re-integration of medical publishing as we know it , all built around lifetime alerting services updating us on knowledge about research into the subject that most concerns us – ourselves .

This may sound over dramatic  , but the arrival of the £1 per day /£2 per week pay wall at the Times needs to be seen this way , or as some sort of outlandish joke . The problem facing the Times was about recreating its relationships with eitherits advertisers or with its readers . There is no strategic reason for the paywall : it is simply the expression of tired managerial brains , cudgelled by a demanding owner , saying ridiculous things like ” Well , we put so much effort into it that we should be able to get a £1 for it …” or   , even worse , ” People don’t recognize our value so we must make them pay for it …”

There is great value in the Times , even if too much of its news reporting is agency rewrites . There is value in its journal of record status , in its commentators and in its editorial position , when that does not refect its owner’s desire to play political kingmaker . Under Murdoch it is far reduced from even its Thomson days . Its brand still has power and value . What was needed was the skill and insight to stop and start again. What is the user relationship online ? What value add features , branded by the Times but searching the entire web through a Times-created focus , are valuable enough to become desktop attributes , a way of organizing and personalizing the news for the fixed , or seperately , for mobile markets ?What rich subcommunities does the Times have around its citeable Law Reports , or its obituaries , or its classifieds , that could become a platform for user exchange within the Times brand ? While Times Online has done some good and innovative things over the past five years , none of them got a look in at the end . Instead we got the crass decision : it is a newspaper in the real world , and being no different on the Web , we charge £1 for it

I learn from Jeff Jarvis and Michael Wolff in various quotations that Rupert Murdoch does not use the Internet , but that he has recently started to use email . This may explain the stumbling , stubborn road to ruin on the Web . My Space was bad enough:there was an opportunity to innovate and stay in front . Arguably Facebook should never have made it if Murdoch’s men had not thought that buying market share was enough ,and had realized instead that buying market share just gives you an opportunity to tune and develop service attributes from the front of the market , not the back . .

Now News is ailing . They provide casebook examples of how difficult it is for real world media executives , even if they are His Children and Trusted Cronies  , to make network publishing decisions without any network publishing experience . With advertizing markets down , growth in satellite curtailed by regulators and the Chinese government , and Fox becoming a politicized space that does not appeal to all communities and advertizers , it is possible to imagine the rise and fall of this media Imperium within the single generation of a remarkable dealmaker who never really understood the media he owned . None of which quite quenches my anger about the Times . .

In my darkness a kindly amanuensis has intervened to warn me that tomorrow They will call to ask me about “The Future of the Textbook “. They have sent 10 questions , apparently . They say I could answer them with my eyes shut , which may be fortunate this week . They also say that I am to concentrate on the 10 years out scenario. I love research when I am asking the questions , but , somehow , I feel a bit worried about providing the answers .  Do you mind if , like Old Tiresias beneath the wall of crumbling Troy , I count my beads in public for a space and soundlessly mouth some types of answers ?

Crumbling Troy ? Surely the age of the textbook is over . In ten years there will not be a textbook market , but a market in networked mass customization of learning objects , held in commercial stores but also freely created by teachers online and traded between teachers . Lesson planning softeware , deriving objects from stores , from teacher networks , and from VLE/LMS environments where these survive in open network usage , will enable teachers to create and trade learning journies/pathways designed for particular ability levels or learning problems . As education becomes more self-applied in older age ranges , higher education and vocational training , so these pathways will be increasingly designed by their users .Learning plans will have assessment and diagnostic tools on board , with the opportunity to rehearse or create new pathways of greater intensity to accomplish remedial requirements . Where these learning workflows are developed by teachers for learners , only a small proportion of teachers will be the creatives , but the work of peer schools and teachers will be widely acknowledged and imitated and customized in other contexts . 

So how will textbook publishers survive here ? The answer is that most of them won’t .Like newspaper publishers in the last five years we shall hear them intone ” Textbook content is king ” and “No one feels safe without a textbook ” until it is obvious to all that like Tom and Jerry in a madcap chase , they have run off the cliff edge and only the violent oscillation of their feet will keep them from plunging into the valley floor . Which they then inevitably do .

Some publishers have hedged this change . Pearson will sell textbooks until the end , but I suspect that long before that Pearson’s Learning Solutions , providing contracted -in school consortia systems integration to cope with these new workflows , will be the dominant revenue source . Elsewhere others have grasped enough of the point to go to interim customization, with Safari Books and Macmillan’s new Dynamic Textbooks demonstrating some of the range of possibilities .

This change to the personalized learning route is independent of gadgets . iPad will not revolutionize it , or iPhone or Android or anything else . These access modes will create accessibility , and add access features , but the learning services  requirement here is more about the network than the device . Collaboration between learners is a key element here.And it is all about mark-up , standards and accessible objects . Most of these are already in place .

Who will win here ? Two or three integrated software/content houses with global markets will dominate . Pearson plus who ? Small software players offering enhanced user experiences will rip across the market like comets , but mostly end up as acquisitions for the big players , or widely emulated feature sets . About a third of content in the market will be created as proprietory objects , another third available to teachers by local school board/authority licensing deals – and the rest will be free and Web-located. The major role for “publishers ” , if we use such an archaic term , will be in locating , indexing and relating suitable objects , and sometimes encouraging teachers to invent new ones if required . Come to think of it , to behave like educational publishers used to do when they sought to s eflect the best practice of the best schools back to the rest .

I could go on , but having had more light today than I am used to , I need to stop . What do you say ? One last question ? Will blended learning prevail ? Since I am on record as saying that blended learning is as much an oxymoron as military intelligence , I am surprized that you ask . The only thing that blends properly is coffee . If you are suggesting that blended learning is as interesting as instant coffee then I might agree . But other markets show us likely patterns : when people grasp the digital point they very soon go for it unadulterated .