content

This page is under construction.

     rights management

A separate guide deals with Intellectual Property - Australian and overseas developments regarding copyright, patents and trademarks in the digital environment.

     syndication

There's a dawning realisation that consumers visit sites to conduct transactions or to access content, not for the joy of admiring someone's code. Along with navigation, "content is king".  

But content doesn't fall from the skies like a nicely roasted duck, silver knife and fork attached. Given the difficulty sites experience in generating their own content - it's challenging, it's expensive - many are replicating traditional publishing models by buying syndicated content.

Four experiments of interest are:

Byline, "the world's first Internet syndication service", offering instant global access - within a sophisticated electronic rights management and licensing system - to a growing bank of journalism. Journalists and other rights holders can post articles electronically, for global or more restricted licensing. Editors, publishers and other potential customers are able to search the site for print syndication and use of material in online/offline electronic forms.

Screaming Media - the name is some indication that the company was founded by the former head of one of the zanier major advertising agencies - offers content in which to embed your online advertisements. For those interested in developments with online advertising we supply a few pointers (more will appear in future) in our Marketing guide to industry and academic studies.

Rightscenter.com - developed by maverick and master of self-promotion John Brockman, Rightscenter is advertised as "the publishing network of the next century", with publishers, authors, agents and others able to identify and trade books over an extranet. Our assessment is that so far most players prefer to use the networks of the current century, particularly if they can 'do lunch' in the process. As of mid 2000 Rightscenter.com had around 1,000 titles.

iSyndicate.com - styled as "the content marketplace", iSyndicate distributes graphics, text, audio and video content from 880 sources to a claimed 223,000 sites.

For images one perspective is offered by Exploiting Images & Image Collections in the New Media: Goldmine or Legal Minefield? (London, Kluwer 99), an uneven but valuable collection of essays edited by Barbara Hoffman. The answer to the question is of course that it's both a goldmine - Hoffman suggests that the market is worth upwards of US$1 billion with a 15% annual growth rate - and a minefield.