In the same spirit of self-denial that drives me to abstain from a love of eating croissants for breakfast, I have also decided to stop using the expression “B** D***”. I am so depressed by publishers asking what it means, and then finding that, because of “definition creep” or “meaning drift”, I have defined it differently from everyone else, including my own last attempted definition, that I am going to cease the usage until the term dies a natural, or gets limited to one sphere of activity. So Data Analytics is my new string bag, and Predictive Analytics is the first field of relevant activity to be placed inside it. Or do I mean Predictive behaviour analytics?

I was very impressed by analysts studying our use of electricity (http://www.datasciencecentral.com/profiles/blogs/want-to-predict-human-behavior-use-these-6-lessons-based-on-data-). Since the work throws up some lessons which we should bear in mind as we push predictive analytics into advertising and marketing. The thought that it was easier to influence human populations through peer pressure and an appeal to altruism, as against offers of “two for one”, cash bonuses and discounts is clearly true, yet our behaviour in marketing and advertising demonstrates that we behave as if the opposite was the case. The emphasis on knowing the industry context – all analytics are contextualised – and the thought that, even today, we tend to try to make the analysis work on insufficient data, are both notions that ring true for me. We need as well to develop some scientific rigour around this type of work, using good scientific method to develop and disprove working hypotheses. Discerning the signal from the noise, like “never stop improving”, are vital, as well as being hard to do. I ended this investigation thinking that even as the science was young, the attitudes of users as customers were even more immature. If we are to get good results we have to school ourselves to ask the right questions – and know which of our expectations are least likely to be met.

Which brings me to the people we should be asking. Amongst the sites and companies that I looked at, many were devoted from differing angles to marketing and advertising. But many took such differing approaches that you could imagine using several in different but aligned contexts. Take a look for example at DataSift (www.datasift.com). It now claims some 70% accuracy (this is a high number) in sentiment tracking, creating an effective toolset for interpreting social data. Here is the answer to those many publishers in the last year who have asked me “what is social media data for, once you have harvested it?” Yet this is completely different from something like SumAll (https://sumall.com), which is a marketeers toolset for data visualization, enabling users to detct and dsiplay the patterns that analysis creates in the data. Then again, marketing people will find MapR (www.mapr.com) fascinating, as a set of tools to support pricing decisions and develop customer experience analytics. Over at Rocket Fuel Inc (www.rocketfuel.com) you can see artificial intelligence being applied to digital advertising. As a great believer in sponsorship, I found their Sponsorship Booster modelling impressive. This player in predictive modelling has venture capital support from a range of players, from Summit to Nokia.

When the data is flowing in real time, different analytical tools are called for, and MemSQL (www.memsql.com) has customers as diverse as Zynga, and Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley to prove it. Zoomdata (www.zoomdata.com) is a wonderful contextualization environment allowing users to connect data, stream it, visualize it and give end-user access to it – on the fly. This is technology which really could have a transformative effect on the way that you interface your content to end users, and you can demo it on the Data Palette on the site. And finally, do you have enough of the right data? Or does some government office somewhere have data that could immensely improve your results? Check it on Enigma (press.enigma.io), the self-styled “Google of Public Data”, a discovery tool which could change radically product offerings throughout the industry. Perhaps it is significent that the New York Times is an investor here.

So, for the publisher who has built the platform and integrated search, and perhaps begun to develop some custom tools, there is a very heartening message in all of this. A prolific tool set industry is growing up around you at enormous pace, and if these seven culled from the data industry long lists are anything to judge by, the move from commoditized data increasingly free on the network to higher levels of value add which preserve customer retention and enhance brand are well within our grasp.

And now, a word of explanation. My silence here in the last 10 days reflects my listening elsewhere. And speaking – to two Future of Publishing sessions, in London and New York, sponsored by IXXUS (www.Ixxus.com), and at a seminar organized by the University of Southampton’s Web Sciences Doctoral students group (slides are available here). At each of these sessions we discussed the networked society and its implications. And Big Data reared its ugly head, strengthening my resolution never to mention the apparently undefinable term again, but to talk instead of massive data components and the strengthening business of data analytics. But nowhere did we discuss data protection – or revelation – and I regret that, especially now that the brilliant latest issue of DataIQ, the journal of DQM Group (www.dqmgroup.com) has come to hand. On page after page it nails the issues that every data holder should have in mind, and which our networked content industry grievously neglects at its peril. If the FBI don’t get you, the German courts will!

But I am less surprized, on reflection, by the US revelations than I thought I would be, bearing in mind the huge amounts of high level analytics and search software that agencies of the US government have bought over the years. On the one hand we should be grateful that a degree of paranoia has spawned an industry. This is where Seisint (Lexis Risk) came from, here is where Palantir and other software developers have flourished. These software developments were always intended for more than calculating the Presidential expenses or searching the library. The Military/Intelligence complex has been a rich patron for developing many of the tools that the networked society depends upon. On the other side we should reflect that mass observation on this scale is the Orwellian manifestation of a police state, and that those who battle for the liberty of the individual are betrayed if it becomes necessary to infringe that liberty in the cause of protecting it. In saying this, I should also say that I am sure that the UK government would be equally intrusive if they could afford it, and in times like these the natural tendencies of governments to use National Security as the cloak for the erosion of civil liberties is global. But after the emergency, do you ever remember government giving privacy rights back?

Which brings me to the network protection of user data in non-security contexts. Here there can be no doubt about who owns what: the problem is getting people to admit to the obvious. Thus, it seems to me axiomatic that when I use a networked service, then the transactional data that I input remains mine, unless or until I have accepted conditions of service that say otherwise. And even those conditions cannot rob me of my ownership: all they can do is define agreed conditions or re-use for the people I am dealing with at the time. Eventually, in the network, we will each of us be able to isolate every data entry that we make anywhere and store it in a personal DropBox in the Cloud. We will then sell or gift rights of re-use to designated parts to Apple, to market researchers, to the US government as part of a visa waiver application. But we shall at least be in control, and have pushed back on the arrogance of data players who seem to believe that every sign-on is their property. It is this type on “unthinking”, I am sure, that lies behind Bloomberg’s huge intrusion into user rights when they allowed their news team to examine the access records of their clients. I know we do not like Bankers in our society now (Don’t worry, Doctors and Lawyers and Journalists and Politicians – we shall be back for you again just as soon as we have finished off these financiers), but surely no one at Goldman Sachs deserves a call from a news reporter saying “I see you have not used your terminal this week, so are you still employed?”

Here in Europe we pride ourselves on ordering things differently. Our secret weapon is Germany, where, for fairly obvious historical reasons, privacy is now a fetish and data protection has become a goal pursued on behalf of citizens by a lobby of what can only be described as, well, privacy fundamentalists. The current revision of the European Data Protection Directive (95/46/EC) into European law will effectively turn the current opt-out regime in the EU into an opt-in world. Not necessarily a bad thing, says Mark Roy, CEO of the Data Agency in an article in DataIQ. I agree, and I also agree that the right of erasure (the right to be forgotten) is pretty difficult to manage. But the real horror story is the bureaucracy, the checking, the courts and the fines that all of this entails. Somewhere here there has to be a balance between German fanaticism and US laissez faire regarding the rights of individuals to the ownership of their own information. We have never seemed further apart from creating this essential building block of a networked society.

* Video, video, video – from the internet, terrestrial and satellite, and DVD/Blu-ray, all in one place, seamlessly
* Games – serious gaming in a context that makes sense to kids in and out of the classroom, capable of collaborative or single user working anywhere
* Connectivity, making the learner a real participant in the process as well as ensuring that all online and broadcast environments were linked into this hub
* Voice and gesture control, and the ability to profile and remember individual participants
* Multiscreen and split screen working, using video and internet at the same time
* Skype connections to remote teachers or wider collaborative groups
* Each user to have the computing power of a top range laptop at their disposal, backed by a network of 300,000 servers – the computing power of 1991 in one application

These are, of course, the headlines from yesterday’s launch of Microsoft’s Xbox One (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-05/21/new-xbox-console). And I do not care about the numbering system, or whether we get Halo or Call of Duty: Ghosts. Or that some platforms are more backward-compatible than others. Frankly, my son had passed me by as a gamer by the time he was seven, and was making allowances for my mental and physical inability to keep up. But Convergence – that is something else. In the long years while we lurched from one technology to another – from CD-ROM to the iPad – all of our efforts seemed one – dimensional. Which is not to say that the iPad is not a useful tool in an educational context. But dilute the Apple Kool-Aid, please. Whatever Steve Job’s lifelong wishes were about creating a new start in education, nothing that has happened since Apple made its specific education launch convinces me that it is the textbook of the future. Or, as far as el-hi education is concerned, that it is desirable or appropriate to look for an eTextbook of the future. “Textbook” may be an albatross that we have to cut loose from the neck of education 7-18, and especially 11-18, if we are going to make meaningful progress at all.

If education at these ages is going to enter the immersive world of the network, then it has to be rooted in the multiservice environment of the home, as well as the school. Indeed, looking at the expensive and pitiful struggle in the UK to keep the actual physical buildings of the school together I wonder sometimes about how we will keep these locations open for more than one-on-one progress checking and assessment. As K-12 becomes more virtual, here are some of the issues we must look out for:

* the continuing progress towards personalised education, driven through specified learning journeys which are loaded with appropriate learning outcomes. Education is Workflow.
* the ability to monitor in the network the compliance of these outcomes with overall curriculum requirements demanded by education authorities, politicians, parents
* the ability to monitor and assess learner progress on the fly and tweak the system to allow repeat/re-iteration on topics where a full understanding has not been achieved
* the ability of teachers to morph into moderators, enabling them to select and suggest good learning strategies for individual learners, adopt best practice from successful peers and recognize, with the assistance of good monitoring and guidance solutions, where progress is made and when help is needed
* the ability to use this system architecture to keep parents informed of progress and problems, using the same systems for communication and dialogue as those in place in the home. Education is social media.

In this world there will be no examinations, since we shall know who knows what at which required level. In this world, every parent, every night, will be able to know what has been done and how well it has been accomplished. In this world, education will return to being the exploratory journey towards understanding that it has been at its most successful. And while it will take a long time for this world to come about, I think that the only road to the future is not the route of adding more and better devices at the edge of education, but by taking a holistic view through the only available architecture – the games platform.

All of this begs many interesting questions. Will Sony come up with a better answer in the new PlayStation? Perhaps. Will Nintendo make the Wii move here as its gesture control gets refined? Maybe. Of more concern to me is that now that games have come out of the bedroom and into the living room, and are now bidding to be the multiscreen service that runs television and streaming DVD in the home as the Home Hub, it will not be long before they emerge in the school as well. And this time teachers will not be able to say “leave your devices at the door”. OK, Microsoft may have to rebrand and call it XBox Ed. And make it available through its smartphone technology. But maybe, just maybe, yesterday was a new dawn. As EM Forster could not have resisted saying at this point: “Only Kinect”.

This is in my head this evening since a note from a very bright and lively innovatory service player in Vienna, the Semantic Web Company, reminds me that they are a member of Wand Within (http://www.poolparty.biz/poolparty-becomes-partner-of-wand-within-program/), and refers me back to Ross Leher, the founder of Wand and my host on that visit in the mid-80s. I have written about Wand many times since, but it has never struck me more forcibly that it is the semantic web movement that releases the power of taxonomy by placing it in the context of technologies that enable us to be really creative in service innovations around it. The wonder to me is that Ross, his son, and their smart company, have been able to survive the 30 years it has taken for the world to get to where they were. I can well remember sending directory companies to them, but the sort of places where I was recommending them as a cure were dying of market forces anyway. The sort of things that Ross was preaching were endemic to the information culture in Denver and its environs anyway: this is light engineering and aircraft building country, and its largest information services player, IHS Inc (Information Handling Services), was created from the needs of customers with big “parts” lists, a multiplicity of standards to obey and scores of component suppliers.

Wand Within’s members are a guide to the aristocracy of semantic web service suppliers. TEMIS, the important French data analytics player, has often been referenced here as I wrote a White Paper with them on Collaboration earlier this year. DataFacet is Wand’s own toolset. Pingar, the New Zealand semantic search company has also been covered here. But it is also worth taking careful note of the Semantic Web Company and its PoolParty tools. (http://blog.semantic-web.at/2013/05/07/17-video-tutorials-are-available-now-learn-how-to-use-poolparty-step-by-step/). Here is another European source of advanced service development tools which should be critically important to publishers and service providers in the coming year. And attentive readers (both of you) will have noted regular reference here to a project called Jurion being developed by Wolters Kluwer Germany which represents, for me, one of the most complete visions of a semantic web-driven project yet available to us anywhere. The Semantic Web Company were their partners in this venture
(http://www.wolterskluwer.de/ueber-uns/presse/pressemitteilungen/aktuelle-pressemit-einzeln/?tx_ttnews[tt_news]=1309&tx_ttnews[backPid]=10365&cHash=af81776d45e924a85dc9ff273c2b40f6) and both of them may one day be persuaded to translate their press release into English!

So if we look for innovation, let us look for the new, and also for older services which the new play back on side. And let us recognize that innovation can be the re-integration of historic practice in a new context as well as discovery or invention. And, of course, invention never comes entirely from the ether. In just the sense used by Newton, the early fathers of thesauri are the information scientists upon whose shoulders we are now standing.

And one brief moment more, and a little more old law publishing. Thoughts of the Semantic Web Company in Vienna nourished the idea that if it was no accident that taxonomies came out of Denver, then innovation in a world of concepts would be natural in the great city of Freud and Wittgenstein. Which recalled visits in the 1980s to that city to see Tony Hilscher and Franz Stein of Manz Verlag (now 40% owned by Wolters Kluwer) and the wonderful aroma of coffee and cakes from Demel’s coffee house in the same street. And their company history reminds us of how intimately intellectual and commercial life can be linked to common ends:

“In 1912 the famous architect and critic of architecture Adolf Loos designed the main entrance to the bookstore, situated at Kohlmarkt 16 in Vienna’s First District. This entry has been preserved in its original state to the present day. Following Sigmund Freud’s principles of psychoanalysis, its most significant feature, a recessed entryway combined with indirect lighting, was to exercise a subconscious attraction on passersby, pulling them magically inside to browse.”

This is the 201st issue of this blog: thank you for your patience.

“Although we have long made limited
customer relationship data available to
our journalists, we realize this was a
mistake.” Doctoroff went on to note
that Bloomberg terminals are also
equipped with cameras that can see
through the clothing of female
subscribers, but he stressed that
images collected by the cameras are
not shared with ‘those nerds in the
News division.’

I much enjoyed the ChartGirl (http://chartgirl.com/pdf/BLOOMBERG.pdf) take on the Bloomberg story, and as is very often the case, Hilary Sargent got more sense into a chart than I can get into a thousand words. But we are now two days into the story, and already I note the appearance of stories saying we are giving Bloomberg too hard a time, that this could have happened anywhere, and that using online services is courting insecurity so we really should not be so very surprized. I am sorry, but this part of the development loses me completely. Is there any difference between Bloomberg allowing its news staff to access customer sign-on and usage data and News Corp tolerating a culture of news snooping that led to widespread phone-hacking? In principle, No. In degree, there may be differences, but if you aspire to be a trusted service provider then you simply cannot allow this to go on. I have no doubt that Thomson Reuters have spent the day checking their security, and Dow Jones have been explaining their policies at length. But neither so far has been revealed in the Bloomberg light, and it may say something about the cultures of these various players that this is the case.

The principle at stake here was taught me by the head of a London law practice in 1981. He was an early Eurolex user when I was running that early online service for lawyers, and he burst into my office at 8 am one morning bearing yards of printout. “Have you been watching the questions my staff have been asking”, he demanded, and when I said No, and explained we had confidentiality undertakings in our employment contracts, he calmed down and explained that the questions and search routines asked by his staff indicated exactly how he was going to defend a client insurer resisting a claim for damages to the wonderfully fragile legs of a famous actress who had fallen over at the film studios. As he departed he said “What I put into your machine is mine, and when and how I use it is mine also. You can use it, in anonymized form, to improve the service, but beyond that you may not go”.

It seems to me an important principle. As we as a society prepare to defend ownership of our supermarket bills, protect our phone usage from all comers, dream of building ePassports and eWallets to repatriate our own information to us, so that, if we wish, we can sell it to the highest bidder, we shall all of us call upon such principles, invoking them as property laws in our increasingly user-centric networked society. So how come that Bloomberg got things so shockingly wrong? Bloomberg, that secret cavern of a private company, whose whole culture is omerta and whose staff are sworn to secrecy beyond mortality? It comes down to an identifiable trait in private companies. It is about an omniscient esprit de corps. It reflects a certain arrogance that says that if you have grown fast enough and with enough certainty then you can make your own rules. In the pre BusinessWeek days Bloomberg was renowned for never buying anything, but instead for emulating what it wanted by “doing it again – better”. This admirable and industrial culture clearly also has a downside. It breeds people who can walk on water where confidentiality is concerned. The result will perhaps be a sobering ducking.

And hopefully the shock of cold water will touch the rest of the industry as well. Often, even in the financial services sector, users will want to put their content together to create a resource that the market needs. DataMonitor as a service combining anonymized information from banks and hedge funds on shorting contracts and equity leasing is a case in point. But it does not just indicate data that could be used to help create better markets. It comprises data that belonged to the traders and was theirs to sell, regardless of the ownership of terminals or networks which created that data. Unless we adhere to this idea we shall not have a networked society in any real sense, since all players will feel obligated to work one on one to prevent the data leakage.

We got this right 30 years ago: we cannot afford to sell the pass now, as we move into the Age of data analytics and the semantic web.

But from this low point everything got better. Under the ebullient chairmanship of Barry McIlhenney we looked through the PPA Publishing Futures report, where some of the characteristics of the industry became clear. In old world terms, the PPA’s consumer and B2B sectors are pulling further apart, and after a year of slippage in 2012, forecasts for the coming year are more buoyant in B2B than elsewhere. My surprize was that 34% of sales revenue was outside the UK (46% in B2B). It was not surprizing that consumer is only 8% digital, or that B2B is down to 41% of revenues coming from print (though the remainder is a mix of digital with events and consultancy). Average profit margin was 15-16%: very much higher for many B2B companies: rather lower for some consumer players who see little advertising recovery in print. But the world of the future that they all see is a wider range of revenue sources derived from additional services from remodelled businesses which are more “customer-centric” (one of the expressions du jour). The risks are the UK’s dodgy economy, the shortage of investment, the speed of change and the skills gap. B2B now recognizes that scale matters, and confidence is linked to size. On a scale of 1-10, member confidence stood at 8.4, with B2B averaging 9.1.

If indeed confidence is half the battle then this is good. And what followed bore out a good deal of that. Future’s Nial Ferguson showed the T3 technology service platform, a real mix of events, awards and digital services that has 40k subscriptions and 4 m uniques a year, doubling year on year. This has the same usage in the US as in the UK. Less than 20% of margins is now print, while 50% is digital.William Reed Publishing’s 50 Best Restaurants service has similar characteristics, with significant sponsorship (another theme of the day was the importance of sponsorship) and use of social media marketing techniques. Some players still feared the cannibalistic tendency of some digital developments (dmgmedia) but others saw and grasped for completely new business model concepts. In the latter category Immediate Media (BBC Magazines and Magicalia) was a stand-out, with CEO Tom Bureau placing ecommerce centre stage and using brand astutely with some key demographics. But was this really customer-centric? Going retail, in a High Street retail market in the UK that seems to have lost touch with customers, must surely imply that you know customer needs better than bricks and mortar retail does. What we heard about was not mass customization, but a development of reader reply cards, making it hard to see just what the partnership (another good word of the day) with market data player CACI really meant. The big pull at Immediate is Radio Times (bought by 900k AB1s a month and 2.2 m at Christmas; the problem is that they are mostly over 55). Making programming links to travel services (inviting people to book beach holidays at the murder scene in the successful UK crime thriller Broadchurch was a stretch too far for me!), is one thing: supplying customer needs in a user-centric matter is quite another. But I really liked the idea of using brand clout to get the travel companies to share booking data with you.

Dennis, in the hands of James Tye, their CEO, had a more relaxed view. He feels the key problem is format transfer. So they have invested in their supplier, Contentment, and their Padify environment, and have based themselves on HTML5 so as to “future-proof” the business. With 50 apps in the market and 50% of The Week’s subscribers taking a digital product, and given the strength of their print, there is an implication here, as well as elsewhere, that management have time to plan and strategize a response to a networked world. Listening to this I wondered if it was justified: I would have said that the only way to secure any degree of future-proofing was to get all the data – not content – semantically enriched and upon a single platform capable of interrogating structured and unstructured information, and make the key asset the searchable metadata, thus enabling content production to HTML5 or anything else, regardless of format. This prepares the way for a truly user driven network world – one where, amongst other things, the user drives the service through personalization. Templating is very restrictive, and Create Once, Publish Everywhere sounds grand, but only works when the user sees the format and editorial input that you have created for him as more important than removing those constraints and giving him just the content he needs or requires at a particular point in time or in a particular context.

And then on to Events. I did not go on the stream headed Content: Still King? for fear of blood pressure problems, but I really enjoyed the B2B sessions. People kept using words like Collaboration, Community – and even client ROI. Many of my anticipated criticisms from the previous post were confounded. I really liked the IHS Janes experience of getting users to ask for and subscribe to online seminar sessions, using the expertise of the Janes advisors in a new way. And then feeding back the data gathered into the publication system for blogs, articles etc. I rejoiced at the EMAP presentation: how refreshing it was to hear a manager in a unit that creates about 30% of EMAP’s revenue say that sales staff had to be retrained to ask the right questions and listen to the answers in the cause of getting customers to tell you what they want. EMAP’s 780 sponsors are now some 50% of gross revenue, and the object, as yet not attained, is to retain 75% each year. Naming rights enjoyed by BT and Oracle in terms of Retail Week events made a good case study, and supported the idea of a 12% growth rate in the coming year (given performances of 7 and 17 % in the two previous years, during which the changeover to a sponsor centric view has taken place).

And my grand vision of event software that allowed attendees, sponsors and exhibitors to create their own meetings and agendas within the event? It all takes place on Twitter and Facebook, apparently – which implies that event owners do not have the data flowing from this either. But the good news is that event organizers do need to give sponsors and exhibitors some idea of the ROI on the event: it might help here to have some convincing data to put into that model!

By the time I reached the street it had stopped raining. I hope that is true for this industry as a whole, and that they sound convincing when they meet their historic users once again – in the network.

Meanwhile, how sad it is to see the old B2B players in Europe dodging the inevitable. While Schibsteds and Axel Springer in the declining newspaper market now make a fetish of collecting B2B classifieds services (Reed sold Total Jobs to the latter very shrewdly), mainstream B2B in the UK, outside of the market leaders mentioned, seems to have something of a collective death wish at the moment. Like Gaul, EMAP is in three parts, each of them unsalable as they stand. The data section is too diverse, the exhibitions is too small, and the magazines too unprofitable. Over at UBM, they now talk the language of exhibitions and conferences as if it was the golden hope. B2B at Informa remains a collection of fragmented and unrelated businesses, which was how management wanted things historically, but now ignores the need to centre on data, and play the combined strengths of all the data into the key markets you want to grow. And if Datamonitor does not provide a rich way of enhancing service values across the group then what does? Meanwhile Incisive and Haymarket seem to groan for solutions, while only Centaur amongst the smaller players seems to have woken up and smelt the coffee.

I am reciting this doleful catalogue as a way of steeling myself for this week’s PPA Conference in London. What would make me most happy is hearing someone say – “Yes, we are re-investing our events portfolio with a transformative agreement with a software partner. The object is to build readership into virtual events, extending our conferences and exhibitions into year-long happenings, open 24/7. Yes, we know we have to give attendees at real events more – find out what they want, research and book meetings for them etc, while giving exhibitors a better deal, client introductions and profiles, and a year long follow-up with new product releases and regular contact. Yes, we know that, even if it almost too late, we need to build community urgently before we finally lose the chance, and we know that conference delegates, exhibition attendees and exhibitors all want a better deal. Not several better deals – just the one will be good enough”.

I was once, briefly, non-executive chairman of an events software company. I know that rapid development has taken place to assemble data, match buyers and sellers, set up itineraries and update core data holdings with key changes year by year. And I go to about 15 conferences and exhibitions each year, but have yet to be asked who I wanted to meet, or what I wanted to realise from the experience. Afterwards, however, I am deluged with surveys about what I accomplished and how good the show was. This seems to me to be quite upside down. Like most of my fellow citizens, I am well-known in the network: find me on LinkedIn or Twitter and you could even guess, from my friends and contacts, who else I might like to meet. UBM bought the rights to reality-failed COMDEX, and launched a virtual exhibition in November 2012. It attracted an audience that seemed to please UBM, but on the website I see no mention of a 2013 edition, or even of a web presence continuing from the last effort. And last year’s registration asked none of the questions that might be thought relevant to using the meeting effectively. Yet, as I have mentioned here before, if virtual reality is cheap enough to teach language learners spoken English proficiency (www.rendezvu.com) then it will surely sustain the 5000 visitors and 50 exhibitors that came last year. Or will it just slip away, just as London’s Online show has slipped back into a library conference in the hands of Incisive.

So I am worried by what I will find at the PPA. Meanwhile, virtual reality is being used intensively in other places – particularly in the cash-starved museums and art galleries of Europe. Maybe our publishing directors should organize an outing to the local resource to see how its done!

In part this reflects the changing role of the Article. Once the place of publisher solace as the importance of low impact journals declined, it is now the vital source of the things that make science tick – metadata, data, abstracting, cross-referencing, citation, and the rest. It is now in danger of becoming the rapid act at the beginning of the process which initiates the absorption of new findings into the body of science. Indeed some scientists (Signalling Gateway provided examples years ago) prefer simply to have their findings cited – or release their data for scrutiny by their colleagues. Dr Donald Cooper of the University of Colorado, Boulder, used F1000Research to publish a summary of data collected in a study that investigated the effect of ion channels on reward behavior in mice .In response to public referee comments he emphasized that he published his data set in F1000Research “to quickly share some of our ongoing behavioral data sets in order to encourage collaboration with others in the field”. (http://f1000.com/resources/Open-Science-Announcement.pdf)

I have already indicated how important I think post-publication peer review will be in all of this. So let me now propose a four-stage Open Science “publication process” for your consideration:

1. Research team assembles the paper, using Endnote or another process tool of choice, but working in XML. They then make this available on the research programme or university repository, alongside the evidential data derived from the work.

2. They then submit it to F1000 or one of its nascent competitors for peer review at a fee of $1000. This review, over a period defined by them, will throw up queries, even corrections and edits, as well as opinion rating the worth of the work as a contribution to science.

3. Depending upon the worth of the work, it will be submitted/selected for inclusion in Nature, Cell, Science or one of the top flight branded journals. These will form an Athenaeum of top science, and continue to confer all of the career-enhancing prestige that they do today. There will be no other journals.

4. However, the people we used to call publishers and the academics we used to call their reviewers will continue to collect articles from open sources for inclusion in their database collections. Here they will do entity extraction and other semantic analysis to make what they will claim as the classic environments which each specialist researcher needs to have online, while providing search tools to enable users to search here, or here plus all of the linked data available on the repositories where the original article was published – or search here, on the data, and on all other articles plus data that have been post-publication reviewed anywhere. They will become the Masters of Metadata, or they will become extinct. This is where, I feel, the entity or knowledge stores that I described recently at Wiley are headed. This is where old-style publishing gets embedded into the workflow of science.

So here is a model for Open Science that removes copyright in favour of CC licenses, gives scope for “publishers” to move upstream in the value chain, and to increasingly compete in the data and enhanced workflow environments where their end-users now live. The collaboration and investment announced two months ago between Nature and Frontiers (www.frontiersin.org), the very fast growing Swiss open access publisher seems to me to offer clues about the collaborative nature of this future. And Macmillan Digital Science’s deal on data with SciBite is another collaborative environment heading in this direction. And in all truth, we are all now surrounded by experimentation and the tools to create more. TEMIS, the French data analytics practice, has an established base in STM (interestingly their US competitor, AlchemyAPI, seems to work most in press and PR analysis). But if you need evidence of what is happening here, then go to www.programmableweb.com and look at the listings of science research APIs. A new one this month is BioMortar API “standardized packages of genetic patterns encoded to generate disparate biological functions”. We are at the edge of my knowledge here, but I bet this is a metadata game. Or ScholarlyIQ, a package to help publishers and librarians sort out what their COUNTER stats mean (endorsed by AIP), or ReegleTagging API, designed for the auto-tagging of clean energy research, or, indeed, OpenScience API, Nature Publishing’s own open access point to searching its own data.

And one thing I forgot. Some decades ago, I was privileged to watch one of the great STM publishers of this or any age, Dr Ivan Klimes, as he constructed Rapid Communications of Oxford. Then our theme was speed. In a world where conventional article publishing could take two years, by using a revolutionary technology called fax to work with remote reviewers, he could do it in four months. Dr Sam Gandy, an Alzheimer’s researcher, is quoted by F1000 as saying that his paper was published in 32 hours, and they point out that 35% of their articles take less than 4 days from submission to publication. As I prepare to stop writing this and press “publish” to instantly release it, I cannot fail to note that immediacy may be just as important as anything else for some researchers – and their readers.

By design and accident (loss of a keynoter) I played to more halls in this meeting than in any of the previous five that I have attended. Leave that to one side: my slideset is available under downloads on this site and on the conference site at www.publishersforum.de you will find slides, summaries, images, videos and references (including a very interesting tweetstream at #publishersforum) as these meetings get increasingly blanket-documented with linked description, comment and commentary. Data, in fact. An audience of 350 people at work with speakers, organizers, and media to discuss and share. Collaboration. And that was the theme of the meeting – Collaboration in the Age of Data adds up to Networked Publishing.

And from these sessions it is now clear where we are headed This Spring is definitive in ways that other Springs have not quite been. In every previous year you could be sure, here in thoughtful, conservative Germany, that someone would say that we wee jumping the gun, that format would survive fragmentation, that the “book would never die”. No such voices this week. In an audience that loves books and lives by them, I felt an absolute certainty that while “book as comforting metaphor” would survive, my friends and colleagues in the body of the hall knew that they had entered the Age of Data. We described network publishing as allusive, particulate, and above all, linked. We talked about workflow: our customer’s workflow as well as our own. This was the age of Metadata as well as the Age of Data. Speaker after speaker spoke of the potential to release new value from content as data, and the need for systems and services to support that monetization potential.

And the feedback loop was everywhere in evidence. The user and the networked power of users has completely shifted the balance from the editorial selectivity of gatekeeper producers to the individualized requirements of users. We once Pushed where now the increasingly Pull. But loyalty was not sacrificed on the way: if you provide solutions that fit user needs exactly then you can experience what Jan Reicert of Mendeley described in a private session as “amazing user love”. On the main agenda, Brian O’Leary spoke, with his usual lucid intelligence, on the disaggregation of supply, and amongst publishers Dan Pollock (formerly Nature, now Jordans) effectively defined the network publishing challenge, (replete like the auto industry with lack of standards) while Fionnuala Duggan of Coursesmart tracked the way in which the textbook in digital form becomes a change agent in conservative teaching societies while enabling the development of new learning tools. Kim Sienkiewicz of IIl demonstrated the semantic web at work in educational metadata. And Christian Dirschl of Wolters Kluwer Germany updated us on the continued development of the Jurion project, a landmark in semantic web publishing for lawyers.

Alongside the publishers stood the Enablers. Publishing seldom realises the value that it gets from its suppliers. Indeed, one of my current mantras is that the importance of software in the industry is now so great that few content players are not also software developers, and that the relationships they enter into with third parties are often no longer supplier agreements, but really partnership and often strategic alliance agreements, and need to be recognized as such. They not only add value, but they materially affect the valuation of the content players themselves. It is no accident that it was Uli von Klopotek who opened this event for his company, and it was gratifying to see on the platform a range of services that are symptomatic of the re-birth described here. Hugh McGuire from Pressbooks in Canada exemplifies that enablement, as does Martin Kaltenbock of Austria’s Semantic Web Company. Jack Freivald of Information Builders, Adam DuVander of Progammable Web, and Anna Lewis and Oliver Brooks of ValoBox were each able to demonstrate further value additionality through an elaboration of networked publishing. The result was a rich gulasch suppe of networked expedients ( far more nutritional than the prevalent currywurst of this city!).

The conference agenda spoke of momentum. Laura Dawson (Bowker), a prescient commentator, noted how far we had gone in her Open Book presentation. And if we still lack standards, we have people like BISG and Editeur on this agenda struggling towards them. One of the most attractive features of the old book business was its anarchic and “cottage industry” flavour. I think it will retain many anarchic and small business qualities in the network, but it will be increasing bounded by standards of networked communication.

I love this and want it to work: at the same time I get all sorts of goosebumps about what the result might be. I believe passionately that the network will produce art forms of its own. The long history of gaming, graphic novels, manga, picaresque narrative, novels of manners, film and television, and animated developments of all types from cartoons onwards, must, if our culture plays out true to type, be antecedents to something else. Clearly narrative is very important and clearly visualization is as well. In the same PR tranche a further Faber announcement indicated that the new Ian Pears novel, Arcadia, to be published next year, will appear first of all in an “semi-interactive” form, and only subsequently in a printed form. Here again is evidence of open-mindedness, though I found the idea that Mr Pears, whose writing I have enjoyed, wrote the novel, according to the Guardian (16 April) “inspired by quantum physics, and written in “nodes” which had been mapped to a graph constructed after consultation with an Oxford Mathematics professor. The aim was to create an infinite number of ways in which the story could be read -”. That word “infinite” has a whiff of the publicity department about it if you ask me, especially since Mr Pears later says “I’m still in charge of the story because I am arrogant enough to feel that I’m a better story-teller”.

Never mind. This is brave and ambitious stuff. The announcement occurred in this same week when The Guardian itself launched its own first essay in Citizen Journalism (see my 4 April blog on “Editorial Views and Viewers”). The Guardian has not gone for nOtice, but has created an app of its own for community responses and submissions. TNW characterized it like this:

“You can access the app via the Web, but there’s also native incarnations for Android and iOS. To contribute content to GuardianWitness, you need to create an account, either using your existing Guardian credentials, or through your Facebook and Twitter details.

The Guardian actually posts ‘assignments’, inviting users to post content based on themes – for example, when Britain experiences unseasonably bad weather. Editors set a range of assignments each week, covering news, sport, culture and life and style.

Photos and videos will constitute a large part of this, particularly for users out and about on the streets with their smartphones.

Selected submissions could be featured on the Guardian website or also in the Guardian and Observer newspapers, while video submissions could be added to the GuardianWitness YouTube channel.

The apps also lend themselves well to big breaking news stories, where Guardian and Observer journalists simply can’t cover the sheer scale of it on their own.

However, if you don’t fancy one of the assignments, and there’s nothing big going on in your neck of the woods, you can also simply submit a story, which constitutes an ‘open’ assignment.

For the Guardian, encouraging the public to submit their content via dedicated apps is a great move, and serves to formalize the growing shift towards user-generated content. It transforms anyone into a roving reporter, giving them direct access to a major news brand. Surely it’s only a matter of time before more big-brand news outlets follow suit, including the BBC.”

When John Buchan climbed down from the editorial chair at Thomas Nelson he went off to govern Canada. I always envied him this in my time: it had to be easier than trying to govern (Canadian) Thomson Corporation’s regiments of accountant managers (as my Chairman said, with deep seriousness, “you could make this so much easier for yourself if you stuck to only publishing bestsellers”). But the equations that we faced then will never be the same again. Just as print will go, so will editorial and authorial control. In a contributory content world, users will assess and vote for each others contribution, pre-buy content to which they are contributing, subscribe where they are contributors, and vote for each others contributions, views, plotlines or innovative media narrative combinations. The tools of the trade are on their desks: for some years now everyone has the potential to be his own studio, or her own graphic artist. The result may not be High Art, but the skills levels of whole populations will increase rapidly as “entertainment” becomes not just experiencing things, but participating in them as well. If self-publishing eBooks has taught us anything, from Amanda Hockings and John Lock onwards, it is that the publisher editorial selection process does not satisfy the participatory urges of large populations, and that user review and rating is seen as the selectivity tool, not publisher puff and blurb.

Now I must dash. There is a real hold-up on the M25 that I feel I should cover for the Guardian…!