May

14

Sun and Storms over the Tiergarten

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, eBook, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, STM, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

“Its a moral and an ethical system”. Richard Charkin, in a passable imitation of the new business-like Archbishop of Canterbury, defended copyright at last week’s epic Publishers Forum in Berlin, though we all knew that he was referring to a set of trading rules which led Byron to tell his publisher, John Murray, that “Barabbas was the first publisher”. Klopotek’s Berlin show, over 250 strong this year, has become a stadium for opposing positions and sharply contrasted stances. Consider for example, the contrast between the aforesaid Mr Charkin, and Harald Greiner, his fellow opening keynoter on the first day. The Bloomsbury Executive Director remains the delightful iconoclast of his earlier years, though he moves in illustrious establishment circles as an ex President of the Publishers Association now about to become President of the International Publishers Association. A Prince amongst Publishers and our Renaissance Man, in fact, with a track record second to none in STM, reference, mass market paperback, fiction, professional, and in print and digital. Our old world looking into the new with the same passion, argumentativeness, curiosity and determination. A dealer and collaborator – his deal with Faber in drama is a clear sign of the times, as was his half-joking suggestion that Writers and Artists Yearbook was a portal for self-publishing.

Then step forward Mr Greiner. Here we saw the necessary technocrat preparing to create another world that all “publishers” (whatever that now means) increasingly recognize. Mr Greiner runs the IT infrastructure – an increasingly strategic component – of Holtzbrinck. For those of us who recall the German newspaper group, this is now a publishing corporation which owns only Die Welt, which has 75 % of its revenues outside of Germany and which has built a powerful science and education interest to replace its former news organization. With technology hubs in the US and the UK as well as in Germany, Harold Greiner’s drive was towards the industrialization and the professionalization of the industry. Older readers will recall the 1960s lament that the accountants were taking over publishing: the equivalent today is the new men of technology, and, if they are like Mr Greiner, they will be very impressive colleagues (as well as the people who return the margins to the business).

They talk the talk of services and solutions, and walk the Agile way, these New Men. Another who surfaced later on the first day was Marcello Vena, CEO of Digital Publishing from RCS Libri in Italy (think Fabbri, Rizzioli etc) Here was the Technologist as Digital Adventurer – from his eBooks Aboard experiment of making eBook reading free on the fast trains of Italy (clever marketing – get stuck in then you have to download to finish it when you arrive at your destination) to Big Jump, a joint venture with Amazon (yes, that is correct!) on a self-publishing, contest-based, crowd-reviewed platform which has generated 500 new books and 500,000 views. This excitingly followed Bob Stein, who pointed us back to the steady march of social reading , reminded us that writing will change as the Social Book becomes more important, and then pointed to the future of independent bookselling – in recommendation and review sites like www.brainpicking.com.

Day 2 set us different challenges. Put your head into 2020 and tell us what you see, the keynoters were asked. Nigel Newton, founder of Bloomsbury, saw the revival of the SME as the technology allowed small start-ups in a world where Amazon had sliced and diced the margins of big players. Francis Bennett, Deputy Chairman at Yale University Press and well-known as the creator of the book trade’s first digital metadata system, saw the role of publishing in the branded competition of universities struggling to attract research funds and grants. Monograph publishing was commercially exhausted and scholarly communication which had value needed immediate availability. Sven Fund, CEO and architect of the rebirth of Walter de Gruyter, saw focus and specialization and size as the answers to the fragmentation he saw around him, and stressed the need for partnership and technology standards in the world we are entering. Matt Turner, CTO at MarkLogic took up that theme. There was no time at which it was more important for publishers to concentrate their working capital of data on one platform, to have complete control over it and access to it, to be able to search it fluently within the platform and relate it to third party or remotely held data, and to be able to fully enhance it with semantic analysis.

And as we began to debate the future that these voices described it became ever clearer that the “publishing” community is not owned by those who self-described themselves as publishers. Baldur Bjarnason of Unbound challenged the very right of publishers to exist in a Viking raid on the high ground of publishing morality (a very different concept from that of Richard Charkin), and the Prince of Self Publishing, Hugh Howey, earnt real respect from an audience which might have felt challenged as he displayed some of the potential of self publishing, pointed out that it is a larger activity than most people think (and larger than “publishing” itself), and guided our thinking away from selection of original works and towards investing in the marketing and development of existing self-published work. And with Fionnuala Duggan and Eric Razenberg (CEO, ThiemeMeulenhoff) underscoring the revolution in education around learner-centric networks and the arrival of real personalised learning, the revolution seemed complete. Hugh Howey, Porter Anderson and Ed Nawotka ended the day in style, but the voice I recalled that night was that of Brian O’Leary. A quiet voice calling for a new architecture of Collaboration. A calm and rational presence embedded in two days of high excitement in a publishing conference that really did bring all the voices to the table.

Helmut von Berg, indefatigable organizer of this event for a decade, retires this year. He earnt the grateful thanks of all of us present in Berlin. He is succeeded by Ruediger Wischenbart and an editorial board who now know how hard it will be to improve on this.

Apr

16

Trust, Privacy and the Good Web Life

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Industry Analysis, mobile content, news media, privacy, Publishing, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

When J P Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce, speaks, as he did last year at the Outsell Signature Event, he often alludes to his childhood in a small Bengal village. When he went to the shop for cigarettes for his father or groceries needed by his mother, these were handed over to a child on trust, and with the justified expectation that payment would be made by an adult in due course. I had similar experiences in a Gloucestershire farming village, which demonstrates to me that trust and privacy form part of the lattice-work which underpins a society in which it feels good to exist, and in which there is a balanced view between everyone knowing enough about everyone in order to live at peace with them and trust them, and not knowing those things which are unnecessary to such trust and regarded as private by the individuals concerned.

We lost that balance in civil, real society in most western democracies in the second half of the twentieth century, so it is a bit surprizing that one of the most widespread criticisms of the virtual world of the networks is that these features are not in place. Yet the frequency with which both Trust and Privacy occur on conference agendas and in newspaper and blogosphere commentary reminds me all the time that we talk a great deal about the loss of these things, but do very little about them, even to the point of not consistently monitoring what is going on. And I was fascinated to hear, at a recent conference of librarians and academic researchers, one distinguished critic of publishing businesses point out that aggregators and publishers are now creating new and valuable information about the patterns of usage, the contexts in which certain types of usage take place, and the preferences of users where content was available unwrapped from its original – all of this great information was private to publishers and was not available to authors. And that the paradox here was the levels of sometimes unjustified trust given to academic peer review (he cited the Tamiflu case, of course) where those being trusted were denied full sight of the evidential data, in a milieu where peer reviewers are not required to even try to replicate the results achieved by the experiment which they are concerned to referee.

And these comments were made about science and medicine, areas where public trust must be blind because it cannot be fully informed. The other area where this same consideration applies is in security, the flipside of Trust. When we are told that something is “secure” in the network, few of us have the ability to make a judgement. Thus, until last week, few of us had doubts about SSL – until Heartbleed broke. I have been reading about this in a new online newssheet called Cyber Security Intelligence (info@cybersecurity-intelligence.com), founded by my friends Alfred Rolington and Tim Heath. And I take it that the success of this venture – I have certainly become an avid reader – is about the fact that Trust is now front and centre of our concerns on the network, and so Security, whether it is the Snowden leaks or security being compromised at our bank, becomes critical to all of us.

In these difficult circumstances we will probably behave as we usually behave. We will ignore warnings (who changed passwords because of Heartbleed?) and only seek control of the Trust question by increasing security close to us when it is easy to do so, and enhances our Privacy at the same time. To an extent, everything we do in the network is competitive. I must have better Security and enhanced Privacy because I need it/deserve it/can pay for it. You do not need it, since I need to evaluate you as credit risk/market research you as a target/use you as part of my data analytics sweep. In order, then, to even think about the question of balance with which I began this piece, we need to be able to decide, each for himself, our own settings in terms of Trust (Security) and Privacy.

The systems to help us do this are now becoming available, just as more and more of our personal information becomes network available/vulnerable. Users of the new Galaxy S5 smartphone, just launched by Samsung, may or may not be keen on its built-in personal heart rate monitor being available to insurers or employers. So the market at last seems interesting for services like Paogo (info@paogo.com), long in the wings (2008), or new developments like the French/American Tego (http://www.tegobox.com), in beta now for launch later this year. Here is something of what Tego says it will deliver:

“Simple
Simply tag a file and it will be encrypted and kept safe. Control what others can see and for how long.
Clear
No central server collecting your data, no tracking. Data never leaves your devices. Surf completely anonymously.
Personal
Build different personal environments with trusted contacts. Then share without risk”

Tego (“I protect” in Latin) will secure you against market analysts and hackers and your own government – but what about that issue of balance? When everything is all locked up we still won’t have the levels of Trust of JP’s Bengali village. Maybe I am looking for something completely different. Is anyone out there building a Trust machine, which does data analytics on your avatar, on your writing, on your facial expressions on Skype, and compare them with Trust models, so I really know whether to trust anyone out there ? And whether I am rated Trustworthy? I doubt it, since it would undermine elective politics completely, but if the answer to the machine is in the machine, as my dear friend Charles Clark was wont to say, then we should start now to engineer the network to find us that vital point of balance between Trust and Privacy.

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