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Shake It Up, Baby! Web Services and the User-Centric Digital Content Remix

Posted on: Sunday, 2 April 2006, 06:00 CDT

By Smith, Steve

Think "on demand" means pulling down last night's Letterman monologue at your leisure, or "RSS-ing" the NYTimes.com theater reviews into MyYahoo!?

Think again.

Squads of military personnel walk into a Baghdad crossroads. From their cell phones, PDAs, or laptops, they plug into fresh reports on this location from the last passing squad, enemy sightings, or even instructions for clearing their weapons of sandlive, contextually relevant, constantly updated data pouring into any device from a simple XML "Warrior Knowledge" base. Now that's on-demand.

In markedly less bullet-strewn university classrooms, O'Reilly Media's Safari U lets instructors craft online syllabi without requiring students to buy a single book. "Educators have access to a whole library, [and] can mix and match content and create their own custom print books" to form a vast array of book chapters and articles, according to C.J. Rayhill, CTO. Students subscribe to the syllabus, which links only to the information they need, without weighty, expensive tomes of chapters they never use. Instructors and students can even annotate the virtual syllabus with notes and commentary. Plug and play? This is plug, play, and remix.

Welcome to an on-demand nation, an emerging Web where users don't just demand content, they also define its value in unanticipated ways. "Think about your Web site as an application," says Kelly Abbot, technology director of Red Door Interactive, which manages publishers' "presence" on the Web. "Develop Web Services," he advises. Unleash that data from traditional site experiences. Let live information flow among partners, get pulled, parsed, re-mixed, and pushed to a range of devices and even into other applications.

Get ready to fragment yourselves, says Jupiter Media analyst Barry Parr. "Publishers need to look at their content at the story level and not at the site level. Each story needs to stand on its own and as a profit center if you want to go far." The perils are great; publishers lose absolute control of their data, maybe even the business models that supported it. But from the simplest of Web Services, RSS, to advanced database publishing and even APIs that let users drill into your content repository, the emerging service orientation model argues that users provide not only the demand for content but also provide its value.

RSS: A REAL SIMPLE START

Many publishers still ignore the most basic Web Service of all, but "if you are not aggressively creating RSS feeds, you will be missing the audience that is consuming content," warns Chris Redlitz, president of aggregator Feedster. Beyond capturing millions of subscribers via readers and My Yahoo!, RSS represents a critical entry point to a plug-and-play future. RSS forces publishers to convert content to the basic open source language of most Web Services, XML, and moves publishers away from site-centricity to service orientation, thinking about content as bits and pieces to be dispersed elsewhere in malleable formats. "It is the atomized nature of content," says Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media. "RSS makes you break the content down to abstract summaries and bodies. We have to increasingly think about how to make it possible to get the gist in some short form."

A new syndication product from Feedster lets content partners create "FeedPapers" that merge RSS feeds from selected providers into streams of highly granular, topical headlines and links.

Beyond personalized Web pages and blog feeds, RSS will likely become a polished syndication system. This spring, AOL will literally pull highly customized aggregations of branded media from Feedster's RSS databases. "You can have a financial news feed from select sources and selected keywords like 'commodities' or 'large cap,'" says Redlitz. "The whole idea is to create a custom interface using APIs. AOL has a control panel to slice and dice our content as they want." Once the interface is more refined, consumers, too, will get this same ability to parse and remix your news stories into a fully personalized newspaper that is divorced not only from your site but from your branded feed. "The open source nature of everything allows you to access, layer, build, and morph content," he says. "I don't see any reason it won't happen sooner than later."

A Web of context: At the University of Virginia, MarkLogic helped produce a digital version of Dolley Madison's letters, which renders a host of contextual links to related letters, personalities, and history-a context, rather than a mere search result.

More importantly, fragmentation adds, rather than diminishes, value, Parr reminds publishers worried about unbridled hyper- distribution. "People who are linking and tagging will give your content better indexing than many editors, and the value of that metadata is impossible to calculate." Because of the way search and RSS engines determine results rankings, via page links and accumulated tags, a finance story related to a tech company finds life on a gadget blog. An obscure reference to a Sacramento author in a Maine newspaper could make the article a fixture on California city guides. Often dubbed folksonomy or the semantic Web, the concept envisions every story holding masses of metadata generated by users, indexed in ways far beyond what any single editor can imagine, and opening it up for unanticipated uses. Ultimately, the RSS, and the blogosphere that depends on it, turns the Web into a platform where content is a service that others plug into their needs. "RSS is giving us a lesson," says Parr.

AT YOUR SERVICE ARCHITECTURE

The ill-defined world of Web Services will surely drown publishers in an alphabet soup of open standard protocols at the heart of most plug-and-play systems. Technologies like SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) allow highly interactive information exchanges between sites, and the XQuery search language can render from well-tagged XML data specific sections and subsets of documents. Others like REST and XML-RPC are what Abbott calls "protocols that point to the future," although sifting through the choices will be daunting. "They have to get their head around what kind of formats make documents more intelligent and capable of wider use," says O'Reilly, and in most cases that means starting, as he did, with an ambitious program of densely tagging XML.

"XML is the method of choice for Web sites that wish to make their data available to the Web," and it has been critical to the successes of open content sites like Flickr and Blogger.com," says Abbott. "It seems the most portable and malleable." Open standards have multiple positive business effects, says David Spenhoff, VP of marketing at MarkLogic, which makes the XML database server behind O'Reilly's Safari U. Free from proprietary CMS approaches, XML- based approaches become interoperable with other sites and databases; publishers are not locked into specific vendors and don't have to waste time developing content models or query languages, let alone build custom point-to-point connections between partners that need to be rebuilt whenever one aspect of each system changes. Most important, open standards future-proof content by changing slowly and in unison. Best of all, "you don't have to know all the places the content needs to go," says Spenhoff. Tagged XML can be pulled, parsed, queried, and delivered endlessly among sites and to just about any imaginable device.

FIGHTING GOOGLIZATION

More than liberating data to flow more freely, open source and intelligent document protocols may arm publishers against a looming war against the commoditization of content by the proliferation of ad-supported search. At the New England Journal of Medicine site, doctors used to use Google-like search algorithms on case records from Massachusetts General Hospital. The unwieldy reams of full- document results required manual browsing to find cases directly related to their current patient. By re-engineering the Web site recently into a well-tagged XML base, an XQuery style search now provides a sense array of possible filters up front so queries can render only pieces of documents, or cases with specific citations and diagnoses, or with links to MRI scans.

A Web of links. Searching the XML database of case histories at the New England Journal of Medicine site lets doctors not only parse results by diagnosis and patient complaint but also link to relevant MRI scans, Woodwork, and EKGs.

Efforts like the NEJM "are not about bringing specific documents, but information contained in documents," says MarkLogic's Spenhoff, which provides the XQuery tools for the project. Now doctors can run sophisticated queries and assemble dossiers of cases joined by common citations or symptoms. Google and Yahoo! can't even approach such value-added results, and that is exactly how publishers want to keep it.

"We're hedging our bets against Google itself and against content becoming a commodity," says Corey Podolsky, director of business tech services at Oxford University Press. The OUP's upcoming "Oxford Publishing Platform" converts its massive library into XML and rich meta-tagging to provide digital subscriptions to libraries. Search engines now deliver so much free i\nformation, including digitized print product, that even venerable brands feel pressured. "Publishers have to find ways to add value to the process," he says, "and one of the most significant things we can do is add the context around the content, add the metadata and the environment that allows them to find and engage the content rather than a simple search." Ultimately, Oxford foresees mixed and matched document pieces that link to related data and multimedia, timelines that make sense of the result, historical background-all triggered by metatags and honed databases a search engine can't touch, he argues.

For O'Reilly Media, an XML-based service approach lets subscribers to its Safari online book library do data collection, rather than search. "It can show me all the code snippets with specific functions in any book with Java or Perl as the title," says Rayhill. "You can't do that in Google Print." In a service-oriented world, publishers hope that the content itself represents only one kind of value. How content gets parsed and reassembled by users, pushed into other applications, even combined and published with user-generated additions will represent the critical extra layer of value. According to Rayhill, "It allows us to have a leg up on search."

USER-ADDED VALUE

When one of the oldest scholarly book publishers on the planet declares that the end of formal book and chapter structures may be in sight, publishers everywhere should take note. "It is realistic to assume that users will custom publish and purchase only content they want, and we are preparing ourselves for that day," says OUP's Podolsky. His upcoming platform "creates a subscription-based online product, or it can push content to wireless and handheld devices or license to third party databases," he says. "The current chapter- based model of books does not lend itself to this."

More than simply making do-it-yourself cookbooks out of recipe bases, personal custom publishing will also mean users plugging their own thoughts into the content. Whether it is on blogs or personal ebook readers, which Podolsky thinks will finally see their day, "you will be able to social network or collaborate while reading a book, have conversations while reading, adding notes and sending them off."

Ultimately, Abbott believes publishers will need to offer robust APIs via XML that let partners and perhaps even consumers not just capture feeds but drill into publishers' core data sets, program their own interfaces, and repurpose your data as they like. "I could pull all articles ever published from the NYTimes.com on Cleveland," says Abbott. RSS feeds defined by traditional content sections or editors are not enough. "There is no way to know how any slice of your information could be culled by partners and consumers," and that value is discovered only by letting users find new value in your content. He calls them Value-Added End Users (VAEU). "Think of these users as evangelists who want to tap into your IT power. Let them get on the grid, and who knows what value they can add to your company."

O'Reilly Media converted tech books from multiple partners into XML with highly refined tagging. A user can search against and pull together from thousands of works specific instances of how-to tips or even snippets of Java code for reuse.

"The point is to bring the content into different contexts," says O'Reilly. An API into his Safari library actually integrates his books into online help systems in some Microsoft software development environments. This arrangement is at the bleeding edge of a future where not only applications but things pull in contextually relevant information. Scanning a grocery package with a camera phone could call in comparative pricing and recommendations for multiple publishers, requiring just-in-time data that behaves like a utility, water or electricity always on tap for any use. "We will be in a world that ups the information content of objects," says O'Reilly.

CONTENT BY THE OUNCE?

While it may sound like a user ideal, plug and play ups the anxiety level of business owners; even its acolytes are unsure whether publishing fortunes will get made or broken. "It's going to be a challenge," admits O'Reilly. Divorcing content from the original site-centric business may move all of us to the lower yields of an iTunes economy where users pay only for pieces they want. However, defenders of the model argue that fragmenting content also exploits the "long tail" effect by surfacing and monetizing shards of content that were undervalued in print distribution. Rayhill points to specific articles in otherwise outdated books that remain valuable in O'Reilly's library. Tagging and flexible delivery "allows our content to be viable at the end of the tail," he says.

For the most part, the vast majority of publishers are not even close to embracing on-demand technologies or businesses, admits Spenhoff. "The kinds of events that would really cause them to sharply address this are only starting to happen as they see competitive pressures of the Internet force them to provide high value in the content experience."

Ultimately, the perfect on-demand economy is so finely attuned and responsive to user needs, it produces an efficient stream of in- demand content with no filler. Offering an eerie glimpse into our future, O'Reilly is introducing tools for qualified subscribers to watch and respond to tech books as they are being written in an online wiki. In this model of complete market efficiency, information is not a product, but a kind of "flow," a real-time stream informed by user-demand at every point. As O'Reilly muses, "You have the possibility of content becoming more like a wave, a momentum."

Psst, Toto: we're not in Kansas anymore. Publishers: your content needs to be ready to take some twists and go some unexpected places.

Companies Featured in This Article

AOL

www.aol.com

Feedster

www.feedster.com

Flickr

www.flickr.com

MarkLogic

www.marklogic.com

New England Journal of Medicine

www.nejm.org

O'Reilly Media

www.oreilly.com

Oxford University Press

www.oup.co.uk

JupiterResearch

www.jupiterresearch.com

Red Door Interactive

www.reddoor.biz

Safari U

www.safariu.com

U.S. Army

www.army.mil

STEVE SMITH (POPEYESMITH@COMCAST.NET) IS A DELAWARE-BASED FREELANCE WRITER AND WEB CONSULTANT.

COMMENTS? EMAIL LETTERS TO THE EDITOR TO ECLETTERS@INFOTODAY.COM.

Copyright Information Today, Inc. Apr 2006

Source: EContent

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