Report from the Semantico Digital Publishing Symposium on Publishing and the Social Web – Part Two
Disruption is happening unevenly across publishing. Where the commercial threat is most intense is also where we see the greatest ferment of evolutionary change in online business models. Winners and losers are not always easy to spot yet among the general fallout, but a clear message emerges: innovate or die.
This was one of the key findings of the second Semantico Symposium, held recently in London to discuss the impact of social media on publishers and information providers. An invited audience of publishing industry leaders debated the issues under Chatham House rules, covering the following three themes:
- Trends and drivers
- Disruptive effects
- Strategy options
It was a stimulating event with a high calibre guest list, delegates attending from organisations including Bloomsbury, CABI, CourseSmart, Harper Collins, Informa, ITHAKA and the Royal Society of Chemistry. To do justice to the discussion, we’re reporting it over three blog posts. This post is on the theme of
disruptive effects.
Continue reading →
As the leading developer of access management systems for digital publishing, we were naturally intrigued by IBM’s prediction before Christmas: ‘You will never need a password again‘. This is one of the five predictions IBM made about ‘innovations that will change the way we live, work and play in the next five years’. Biometric data, it seems, will not only tighten up security online but also massively simplify the business of authenticating your identity, something we all have to do wearyingly often nowadays.
‘Over the next five years, your unique biological identity and biometric data – facial definitions, iris scans, voice files, even your DNA – will become the key to safeguarding your personal identity and information and replace the current user ID and password system.’
Five years really isn’t all that long a time. So, should we at Semantico retool all our client sites for the coming change and rewrite our software accordingly? It may surprise you to learn that we didn’t hire in some extra developers to start working on the task over Christmas.
Continue reading 
Anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with social media will know that using it as a backchannel is not an option you switch on or off. It is, inherently, at least 50% backchannel. Social media’s most salient characteristic, in fact, is its interactivity. So much so that one has trouble disentangling message ‘push’ from what you almost immediately get back. Post to a LinkedIn group, say, and people reply. And they expect a reply in return. You might have been trying to do a bit of PR, but what you get drawn into is a conversation.
This diminution of lag between messaging and response – coupled with the transparency of that response to the whole community (be it positive or negative) is what makes social media so hard to fit into traditional models of business communications.
When I was preparing a couple of articles on social media for this blog earlier in the year, I had a quick scoot around Google to see if I could find a taxonomy of social media. I hadn’t realised it would be such a big ask.
It seemed, to me at least, a fairly reasonable request. Standard research procedure. You’re surveying a particular knowledge area and you want a map of the terrain and boundaries; some kind of idea of what the thing you’re researching might contain and how these contents can be broken down into logical categories. I wasn’t asking for a precise ontology, just a usable classification scheme.
Aside from the unsatisfactory nature of what I turned up, (follow the links in this post by all means and judge for yourself whether I’m being too harsh), the question soon loomed of why on earth I would expect such a thing to be available.