content trading and abstracting

This page looks at online syndication services and markets for selling articles, papers or books to publishers. It also looks at anonymous publication and abstracting schemes.

     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.

Five 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.

In contrast, Knexa seeks to dispense with the intermediary. Like several US and EU schemes it is a "new online marketplace for buying and selling digital articles and books". Authors set prices on their work: would-be readers either pay the price or make auction-like bids. Users can browse the items for sale or ask a question and wait for an author to propose a priced answer. Users can rate the authors and are encouraged to base their purchases in part on these ratings. Knexa takes a 20% commission on each sale.

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.

     Anonymous Publication schemes

Data havens and systems for anonymizing publication of text have gained some attention in academic and cyberlibertarian circles as a means of subverting censorship or copyright. Ian Clarke, for example, sniffs that

Copyright law attempts to prevent communication in some circumstances. And therefore, in order for Freenet to do its job successfully, it must prevent enforcement of copyright law

through an anonymous Peer to Peer scheme such as Gnutella (discussed in our Intellectual Property guide). That's reminiscent of Jaron Lanier's alarmist article in defense of Napster, asserting that copyright is "a massive government-sponsored protection racket" and "if we make Napster-like free file sharing illegal, we'll have to rid ourselves of either computers or democracy".

Projects include -

Anderson's Eternity Service
Charles University Eternity Service
FreeHaven, an academic project at MIT
Clarke's Freenet and its Espra offshoot
Gnutella
the Intermemory Project
Mojo Nation
OceanStore
Publius
TAZ and Rewebber
Usenet Eternity

     Automated abstracting schemes

We've suggested in our Digital Guide that there's reason to question much of the hype about artificial intelligence (AI).

Two of the more interesting AI Projects are the Columbia Newsblaster, an AI-based news portal created by Columbia University's Natural Language Processing (NLP) Group, and Cornell University's Big Ear.

Newsblaster harvests news in real time from major free online sources, assembles that data in basic categories for a predominantly US audience and generates a summary of each item, with a link to the full stories for those who want to read more.

Big Ear scans law-related mailing lists, tracking when a posting announces a new site, document or product. It extracts the announcement for publication on its own list of announcements of interest to wired lawyers.

For background a starting point is Stephen Wan's site on Automatic Text Summarization, including a history, overview of projects, bibliography and glossary.

Marieke Napier's 2000 Cultivate article The Soldiers are in the Coffee – An Introduction to Machine Translation points to resources about automated translation of web sites. There's a more detailed analysis in the Compendium by John Hutchins.

Overall, most solutions currently reside within the browser (eg BabelFish or the translation facility in the Google search engine) rather than as cheap facilities that can be incorporated within sites. Worldlingo is one of several site-specific commercial services.

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