And, yes, I am blushing slightly as I write this on my keyboard. But I have at least, in some arcane memory reflux, remembered their answers. The three gurus agreed that the keyboard was a problem – all about speed, the crazy survival of Qwerty as an organizational principle, and the then low-status of keyboarding (only for clerks and secretaries). One said that voice was the obvious answer, and that perfecting voice recognition and, alongside it, linguistic exchange, was the only reasonable step forward. After all, merely going to another interface without solving the great problem that users do not understand each other’s languages was pointless. The next guy up said that we were entering the age of the sensor and the camera, and that all interfaces would be driven by video and image, with minimal input from choice keys on a selection device. And the third quoted William Gibson and insisted that we would be actors on our own stage, avatars within individualized interfaces where we could simply select the services we needed and “physically” go where we wanted to go in the networks.

Well, it was a long time ago, and billions of people are now using hopeless Qwerty to communicate in the network. But the predictions came to mind, and having uttered them, it also occurred to me that they need updating. For example, wearable computing seems like an effort to merge the man into the machine and this implies a wonderful world where, as Sergey Brin demonstrated to the  New York Times, even the Google inventor can become 60% machine on a transient basis. While the Singularity University always seems a bit like Silicon Valley at its most crackpot (http://singularityu.org/news/2010/06/the-new-york-times-explained-our-singular-purpose/) we are steadily interfacing with thinking computing in a way hard to envisage a decade ago, and we shall see the output of this first in workflow and process solutions.

The area of Media Lab work that most intrigued me all that time ago was Seymour Papert and LEGO. We were going to make such strides in education so quickly, but like our work on replacing this keyboard, progress has been agonizingly slow. But, soft, here comes Hope from South Korea, bearing a robot called EngKey who recognizes English and will replace all those gap year students in South Korean classrooms who are now, in the new austerity, too expensive to import. Anyway, humans were never so very good at teaching: you want something endlessly patient and wholly repetitive, as well as accurate in assessment. Robots are far better equipped. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/science/11robotside.html

So as it happens we were looking in the wrong direction in this discussion on interfaces. The key to change was not what we needed to do to interact better with the machine, but what the machine could be developed to do to work more sentiently with us. So only when the machine recognizes our facial expressions (http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/02-09EinsteinRobot.asp) and listens to our speech intonations will progress be made. Progress today, in terms of helping autistic children or pre-schoolers (the RUBI Project at San Diego), and progress tomorrow in terms of the productivity gains that robotics will deliver in workflow and information handling.

This is all a long diatribe to encourage all of us to keep reading science fiction and going to conferences where you don’t understand what is being said: if my experience is anything to go by, you one day will. And then you will be much more able to understand why some things happen immediately and some things seem to be going backward rather than forward. On the latter topic, I saw today (an event like the first cuckoo of Spring) my first report on what has happened at The Times following the imposition of the paywall: Experian Hitwise reports that during the five weeks when readers were asked to register their payment details, visits to the site fell 33%, and that they are now off by 66%. So where will they go when the introductory special offer comes off? You soon won’t even be able get your robot to read it.

So , my questioner asked , you really do mean that most content has little worth in isolation and that paywalls are unlikely to succeed ? “Yes , I do ” was the answer and almost before it was out of my mouth I heard an echo of a conversation that must be happening across the information provider world right now , between senior commercial managers like my questionner and their group main board colleagues .” Information commoditized ?” , say the latter , “tell me this isn’t true . Tell me it applies to network johnny-come-latelys like the Murdochs in collapsing markets like newspapers . And tell me that it will never apply to the wonderful content we bought last year at 12X EBITDA and which we so badly needed to complete our dataset , enable us to expand in Central Asia and illustrate  the profound difference between ourselves and our hated competitor”.

And my friend , if he knows what is good for him , will say ” Just so ” and “I could not agree more” , but increasingly he will try to insert into the conversation things like ” Should we really be trying to build workflow on our own : might we look for allies at IBM , SAP or Oracle ?” or ” Maybe our historical hated competitor is really our future best friend ?” or ” Surely collaborating on tools with Autonomy or its ilk makes more sense than pretending we can re-invent and own the history of software ? ” Then he can reasonably say ” This is the last squeeze of the Lemon if that is representing the content model – and now at least we know about the development track that takes us to the next good place . And our business must be based on margin improvement and future visibility of returns , not upon some historic fixation with content which is increasingly remote to a network-based service industry .”

Will they listen ? I don’t know , but I am certain that the newspaper world was deaf to this dialogue . And I was very interested to see approval for Project Canvas in the UK last week . This creates a platform for the web integration of all free to air television in the UK . The Murdochs will inevitably feel that this competitively impacts their Sky franchise , but presumably , since it is clear that neither the Times nor the Sun can claim ( remember “it was the Sun wot done it ?”) to have delivered the UK coalition government , their political influence is deflating at the same rate as their readership .

Finally , on the same platform was Andy Stevens of IOPP giving a spendid example of agile publishing using MarkLogic to create mobile content sets around their journals data . As they say , check it out  (http://www.marklogic.com/news-and-events/news.html).

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 .

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 !

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 .

In the first instance TCR quoted the NY Times to the effect that between ages 8 and 18 , US students spend 7.5 hours in front of a screen every day ( smartphone , TV ,computer etc ) plus 90 minutes texting and 30 minutes talking on their cellphones . What struck me first of all was how quickly voice contact was falling away , and text moving down beside it . If you want someone you increasingly get to them via Facebook , it seems to me .  And then I thought that I am increasingly using LinkedIn as my directory , and finding the person I want to speak to there – and even sometimes look at the company profiles .

So I followed the Infocommerce advice when they published a recent piece on this (http://www.infocommercegroup.com/blogs/index.htm). I went to Microsoft and downloaded Contacts for Outlook , and I downloaded the LinkedIn connector that links to this . As a result , when I set out a moment ago to write to my old associate and friend Joachim Bartels on a subject close to our hearts  ( the Business Information Industry Association of Asia Pacific ) , I found the Linked In content linked into Outlook , together with a note of everything I have written to Joachim in recent times , and all the things that he has sent me ( plus a photo of the man himself , all energy  and vinegar , and ready to leap from the screen to chastise me for not responding more quickly ).

This could well be the beginning of a new wave of innovation . If we get used to storing our “personal” directories in one place , and then affiliating to them massive searchable environments  of other names who we could add to that directory , and then adding their companies and their web references , then we are surely building primary directories of the sort we once went to Experian or D&B or Acxiom for , so this trend must surely compel business information data suppliers to move up the value chain and link themselves to these contextual channels . Indeed , for a ZoomInfo type of player that may be the only way to find a route to Market .  And then I saw Chuck reminding us that in fact this whole field is alive with start-ups , and challenges to conventional business directory players , so I then saw that my sense of established players being challenged by the social media interface was even greater than I thought .

But why is it a challenge ? Well , I am just a US college kid at heart , and my screen pattern is not unlike theirs . So save me a few minutes when finding a contact or searching for an email address , or automatically update me when things change , or give me the collateral content when I am framing a request or writing a reply , and I will bless you for the productivity gain. And this gain is taking place inside my personal workflow , and is very well suited to my mobile content requirements .

I will also be able to do more things on one password and I will be happy to allow LinkedIn to become an effective overlay to my screen-based world if it will do these things intelligently . I only need one LinkedIn and cannot manage a multiplicity of social sites , so I have always rejected invitations to join others , business or social . But if it lets me down then I am glad to know there is a choice  .

Footnote : Business directories will never be the same again . Actually , nothing is the same again , yet certain things go on regardless . Spamming is one . The same edition of TCR told me that  ” according to a 2008 study by researchers at the University of California , Berkeley , and UC, San Diego , spammers get a response just once for every 12.5 million emails they send – a response rate of 0.000008% .” Goodness , thats lower than a classified on a Murdoch website – and spammers still make profits , or they would stop .

You are being taken down this track by someone under pressure, from friends and colleagues, allegedly “interested in what you will say about the sale of the Guardian’s regional newspapers.”  I am not so moved.  The deal is trivial and, given the UK regional press, inevitable.  The consideration is only interesting if you recall that two years ago DMGT refused an offer of  £1 billion for its Northcliffe regional company: valued at the the price point established by this latest deal they would now get, by my calculation, £220 million.  One of the disadvantages of reserving all voting rights to A shareholders, and they all being family and friends, is that you lock in a sentimental regard for the past as well as defending yourself against predators.  Meanwhile, back at the Guardian, we have all long acknowledged that the not-for-profit trust at GMG can only act to protect the newspaper.  More locked in sentiment.  The Guardian has 37 million registered online users, but exists to keep the print.  Then I, who love the paper, say turn print into the offshoot of the web and create custom newspapers deliverable  from local print centres working on contract to deliver to subscribers within 12 hours of  customization.  The next attack must be on the print works.

But the voices I am really moved to write about are on mobile phones.  Two discussions this week convince me that we are not taking the mobile or the mobile network seriously enough.  We are still in the Stone Age of mobile content.  Is there not something faintly ridiculous about Steve Jobs telling the media last week that they were doing a grand job, and their content was ” invaluable”?  And the media having an attack of the shivers about Apple not giving them enough user data, or allowing them to connect print or web subscriptions to the Apple store subscription.  Truth to tell, I cannot think of a single media property that is “have to have” on an iPad.  You buy the device , and then it is “nice” to be able to read a Murdoch newspaper on it (possibly nicer there than anywhere, given the obliterating possibilities of “delete”).  Sports Illustrated seems to be taking the platforms of mobility seriously, but for the most part inflexible real world content , or lightly reheated web content is the menu on offer.  When the content/service/solution is so hot that you can give away the reader with the subscription, then we will know that we have cossed the great divide.  Until then, the content industry just has a crossed line.

So who does know anything about this?  Well , the B2B boys are well down the track.  Here is the voice of the head of IT at the US insurer Nationwide, talking to the FT about his mobile apps: “For the best experience, it is better not to have a web-based version [of the application] but one that is specific, depending on what the user is doing. It is about having right functionality.”

“It is not just a question of designing applications so they fit on a mobile device’s smaller screen, he says, but providing the right amount of task-specific information to field-based staff.  Too often, re-purposed PC or web applications produce cluttered screens, and frustrated users.”

So this will be our test bed.  B2B publishers will want to quickly integrate content into mobile workflow models.  Apps will become cheaper and cheaper to originate and customize and a great deal of current workflow and process content work will migrate into mobile, after existing for a while in both fixed line and mobile networks.  Commercial users will “publish ” for themselves, and content originators will become systems integrators ( proprietory and third party content integrated with process software to drive solutions), as well as sellers of key standard pieces of functionality.

In the course of time those who survive these troubled media years will be publishing fluently to all of the networks.  I do hope the Guardian is one of them.  And I am certain that by then the hegemony of the keyboard will have been broken, and we shall be communicating with these platforms in the most natural mode possible – our Voices.

Ok , guilty as charged.  I have become too used to having to shock traditional media owners into action through prophecies of instant decline.  And I do claim to be an individual of sunny and optimistic disposition.  So I am going to write about a 1996 start-up which now has a commanding market position in its sector. It announced its global registered users for the end of 2009 in a statement this week, and though it is a success story well worth telling, for traditional media players in engineering, manufacturing and the science and technology segments attached to them, it is a filter placed between themselves and their users which few can now avoid or supplant.

The company is GlobalSpec.  Here a now hugely experienced team under Jeff Killeen have slowly but surely created a category leader through the simple device of treating engineers as a community, and encouraging them to do so around the data content of the sector.  Put all the product catalogues and listings with the product specifications in one place (25,000 catalogues, with 2.2 million products and 184 million searchable product specs).  Make them parametrically searchable, and you have a result that slots into engineering workflow as a must have component. Then add a vertical search engine alongside this, where all sources of engineering information available on the web can be categorized and found, where the design specifications of working engineers can be sourced, and where third party content as well as freely available public content can be obtained ( if you own an engineering journal, you face the agony of being here – or of not being seen).  Then add over 60 emailed engineering sector newsletters, all pushing industry news and announcements to self-qualified audiences.  And from this year, add eEvents, meetings, conference and exhibitions) .

So they have got a tiny segment well sewn up?  You could say that.  This week’s announcement about this “tiny segment” indicates that their registered user count rose during 2009, recession notwithstanding, by some 900,000 engineers. They now have 5.6 million registered users. In that same year of slowdown and industrial decline globally, registered readership of  the e-newsletters went up 21% , to an astounding total of 9.1 million.  And still new users are coming on board: the company indicates an accretion rate of 80,000 new users a month.

So something fairly significent is happening in places like this.  This is not about whether people will read their engineering newspaper on their laptop or their iPad, or whether there is still a place for long-form narrative in engineering texts, reference books or white papers.  It is about solutions to information handling that increase productivity, improve decision making and ensure better and less costly compliance with the regulation that bedevils the sector.  It is about the nature of the network: a community identifying itself, and communicating with and between itself.  GlobalSpec is the result of the painstaking work of people who now understand exactly how engineers work on their desktops within their enterprise systems.

So the engineers have congregated at Globalspec: how do you make money out of them?  With their willing co-operation you create sales and marketing services that suppliers in this marketplace will pay for.  Real-time sales leads from the database which give those suppliers who put their content in lead generation which is filtered, measured and immediately contactable.  Do not contaminate this with the word Advertising, but it is paid for from the same budget.  The newsletters, now moving down into highly fragmented sub-sectors of product and service types in the industry (and providing more inventory as they subdivide), also give more traditional promotional opportunities, as do the e-events.  Ask yourself: as a seller, do you go to the traditional engineering newsheet classifieds page to place your product in the community eye – or do you come here?

And this is truly Global.  If you want to speak to engineers in Shanghai instead of Scunthorpe or Spokane, then come here. The questions about it are many: How many GlobalSpecs can a sector sustain?  What happens to traditional media players who now supply their customers through this interface?  Do “old media” buy these success stories and could they run them if they did?  The fact is however that a new world order has arrived, and we all need to recognise it.  A colleague said recently “You never write about vertical search anymore – did it fail?”  No.  I don’t need to write about it anymore , because it has succeeded.

Footnote : Warburg Pincus, and Mark Colodny, the Managing Director who has been responsible for Globalspec, deserve recognition for patient and consistent support through the growth period.  As a result they now have a property of high value.  The exit is the real test!

In my briefcase I have a netbook – ideal for hotel internet access – and a Sony eBook Reader, plus of course the ubiquitous Blackberry.  Each of these devices was bought to save weight, since as I have got heavier I want the world that I carry around to get lighter.  The next device that I want to buy is one that combines the functions of all of these three at the weight of the heaviest.  So how does the iPad match my demand curve?  Well , it sort of …doesn’t.

Colour is not my high demand, since most of the sad things I read are in black and white.  Price is not my issue , since while I want the cheapest and most effective I can point to a long career of buying over-priced innovation in a triumph of hope over experience.  New functionality is not my issue either: I am now inured to the fact that with any device, including my highly computerized car and the digital controller on the heating system and the new hands free phone installation here, I will never live long enough to understand and implement all of the functionality that cleverer men than I have built in, so innovation and replacement cycles are designed to stop me worrying about that, and bring me to a new device, newly replete with all the things that I shall never learn to use.

Which brings me to Gartner and my ardent wish for the iPad to succeed.  Gartner’s range of projections is as impressive as ever, since long gone are the days when pure wishful thinking was the only fix we had on these markets.  Today, the talk is far more sober and grounded, but no less startling (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1278413).  For example, the realization here that by 2014 more than 3 billion people on the planet will be able to transact electronically (”transact” , not use a phone) is critical to our understanding of the global networked society.  In that year we are on target for a 90% mobile penetration rate (56% Africa, 68% Asia), and 6.5 billion mobile connections.  By 2013, mobile device connections, at 1.82 billion units, will overtake PCs at 1.72 billion as the primary connection to the network.  If you are thinking now of preparing your web presence at a future point for mobile optimization then you are almost too late: this is the last call for legacy conversion.  The people who succeed in 2013 are running hard now, and are probably not carrying the burdens of legacy web publishing, let alone legacy print publishing.

But the paragraph that caught my eye began ” By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web”.  And, later on “context will provide the key to delivering hyperpersonalized experiences across smartphones” and “context will center on observing patterns, particularly location, presence and social relationships…. Whereas search was based on a pull of information from the web, context-enriched services will, in many cases, prepopulate or push information to users”.

What phases me is having Gartner write digital publishing strategy, but in a vital sense they are quite right.  Push and Pull were central to the debate in the early web days, but faded out in the great Age of Search.  In the post-Google world, where search is just another tool, Push returns, wrapped in the guise of personalization.  Will My iPad, or its elaborations, do that for me?  This is the key question.

There is a sting in Gartner’s tail.  I will quote it in full:

“The most powerful position in the context business model will be a context provider.  Web, device, social platforms, telecom service providers, enterprise software vendors and communication infrastructure vendors will compete to become significant context providers during the next three years.  Any Web vendor that does not become a context provider risks handing over effective customer ownership to a context provider, which would impact the vendor’s mobile and classic Web businesses.”

Any Web vendor ? If you are a content or information service provider, This Means You.  The competitive struggle for survival in network publishing intensifies, and the only recourse is to hybrid models and full service solution provision.  There is no ” Just Content” position anymore, unless you want to be a supplier to the sub-contractors of the people who supply the services.

“Is” became “was” this month. From January 2010, the new measure of oil pricing for the Saudis will be the Argus Sour Crude Index, produced by a UK player that is a comparative minnow to McGraw’s Platts.  Neither company is responsible directly for the change, which has happened because West Texas prices began to veer away from Brent Crude prices for technical reasons that nobody appears to understand or admit.  But one up for the little guy, and a real revenue stream in providing access to the underlying pricing data.

Then a month elapses. Platts announces a new index, to cover oil production from the East Siberian fields.  ESPO pricing is expected to be an exciting new prospect in oil price indexation, alongside Platts flagship indices, Platts Dubai and Platts Dated Brent.  All part of the cut and thrust of competition in the energy sector, one of the most vibrant B2B information sectors of all (www.platts.com).

So why I am burdening you with all this unnecessary information?  Simply as a way of underlining, if needs be, that like accreditation in training, index publishing is becoming an interesting value phenomenon.  It creates lock-in around which workflow activities and value-add analytics can be built.  It gives brand focus and recognition.  It provides contract opportunities to supply and maintain service points on client intranets. In truth, it is sexier than it sounds.

But it is not without risk.  As this story shows, you can lose an index and you can invent a new one where none existed before.  Those who have them are inherently more valuable than those who do not.  And the principle of indexation spreads far and wide across B2B information; if you can benchmark pricing you are in a position of strength.  So why did the FT sell out its ownership of the FTSE , and why is Murdoch doing the same with the Dow?  Answers on a postcard: entries including the words “death wish” will not qualify, as being too obvious.