Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, a collaboration between Apt and The Institute for the Future of the Book, is now live. This is a pretty cool looking project with comments by 7 women shown in the margin. This project is an attempt to develop conversation in a more conversational format on the web.
By Theresa Regli - Posted Nov 3, 2008
Digital media—photos, audio files, video clips, Flash animations, games and banner ads, PDF documents and Web pages—have become an increasingly significant part of our everyday experience. The management of digital media throughout its lifetime—regardless of final output medium—is the general domain of digital asset management (DAM).
At CMS Watch, we recently conducted a 6-month research project, doing critical product evaluations of 18 DAM tools and looking at the overall DAM market. Through extensive interviews with users of the software products, we gained deep insight into how well DAM software is meeting the everyday needs of businesses.|
Digital asset management technology has made significant strides in maturity, but remains a highly fragmented and specialized industry, where many customers are forsaking "name" players in favor of niche or hosted solutions. DAM vendors generally "grew up" specializing in a specific area, such as photo library services (useful for museums and traditional publishers), brand asset management (for managing graphics and other brand collateral) or video management/management of time-based assets (vital for broadcasters). Many buyers of DAM technology pick their vendor based on their area of specialization, and rightly so, because few vendors perform very well in more than one or two scenarios.
Current trends
As we spoke with DAM industry veterans, system users and vendors for our research, several trends emerged:
* Larger adoption of the Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) for managing metadata around assets. While most vendors boast support for Adobe’s standard that allows metadata to "travel" with an asset, not all support of XMP is created equally. Some vendors extract XMP metadata from an asset as it’s ingested into the system and store it in a separate repository, while others (such as Media Beacon) keep the metadata and asset as one, but still use the XMP information to manage the asset. Vendors are likely to continue to focus on XMP as a key way to unlock and manage an asset’s metadata.
* Renewed focus on digital rights management (DRM). Although maintaining digital rights is vital in many DAM and media asset management (MAM) scenarios, few vendors have a solid solution to that need and are looking to create one. If DRM is important to you, be sure to look at how a vendor’s DRM capabilities stack up when you create your short list.
* Lack of real asset workflow solutions. Compared to the other technologies we cover at CMS Watch, DAM systems have comparably weak workflow capabilities. Many DAM processes are complex, and many asset managers have required third-party tools to create truly automated workflows.
* Increased need for enterprise system integration, DAM to Web content management systems in particular. Many asset managers wish to distribute products via the Web, and thus have a business need to merge those two technologies, making an easier bridge to cross. Therefore, many asset managers and industry veterans see the concept of the DAM system as the "single source of truth" as a bit antiquated because the repository needs to serve multiple platforms.
* More focus on Web clients vs. the traditional desktop client. As with Web content management and enterprise search tools, vendors are trying to design more dashboard-like experiences for their Web client, and so far, few have achieved the same functionality from Web clients as they have with the desktop thick clients.
* Divergent product builds. DAM vendors historically have spent a lot of time doing implementation, and as a result, there are a lot of aggregate solutions out there that aren’t necessarily part of the core product. As a buyer, be cautious and make sure what you see is what you’re going to get.
* Workgroup solutions hitting the ceiling. Some of the smaller vendors we evaluated face challenges as their customer asset bases grow, requiring them to integrate with more complex enterprise systems.
* Increase in software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based DAM. Widen, a pure-play SaaS vendor, has seen quite a bit of growth since early 2007, and ClearStory Systems experienced an uptick in the SaaS area during Q1 2008 despite other corporate turmoil in late 2007. North Plains recently debuted an on-demand service. Other vendors may jump on the SaaS bandwagon.
* Generally weak video support leading to third-party investments. While many vendors support video, it hasn’t quite worked out as the video production and management super tool early DAM proponents envisioned. Part of the problem is the bandwidth required. Many customers of existing DAM products look to buy an Avid (avid.com) server or an Apple (apple.com) Final Cut Pro server to manage and serve video assets. As such, DAM vendors continue to miss the mark on video.
Despite the continued "on the cusp" feel to the DAM market, DAM’s big moment never seems to arrive: always the bridesmaid, but never the bride. As such, many DAM "leaders" were recently on the brink of extinction, some were saved by their now-enterprise content management (ECM) parents, while other vendors chug along as 20-person shops with a core platform on which they build custom solutions for long-term clients. Orignal Article
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Much has been said about the masterful use of social media by the Obama campaign. The people working for the President-Elect were by far the more active - and the more savvy - of the two US Presidential candidates in terms of understanding and effectively employing social media as a way of engaging and motivating voters. Regardless of your political leanings, the numbers speak for themselves.
But was it just a means to an end? Or is this personal engagement - embracing social media as a new way of communicating with the masses - something we should expect Obama to use throughout his presidency?
If change.gov - the new site for the President-Elect - is any indication, the second act of Obama's social media strategy may have even more impact on the United States than the impressive - and historic - first act.
Given the rich history of politicians using a variety of means to attain office and - upon election - rapidly changing their respective tunes, the end of the campaign and the beginning of presidency held with it a certain amount of trepidation. Would the people's candidate - one who had been engaged and engaging - suddenly revert to the guise and personality of the classic politician?
Despite the overwhelming prevalence of "hope," an air of political cynicism - one formed by decades, if not centuries of experience - still festered below the surface. But that cynicism may have been dealt another blow. And the Obama campaign may have found another way to continue the conversation that they started.
With the launch of change.gov, Obama appears to be staying the course. He's not avoiding the conversation; he's embracing it. And while there's not much to the change.gov site currently, it's the fragments that tell the story. And it's a story of a continued commitment to interact with the people on a very personal basis:
"The story of the campaign and this historic moment has been your story. It is about the great things we can do when we come together around a common purpose. The story of bringing this country together as a healed and united nation will be led by President-Elect Obama, but written by you. The millions of you who built this campaign from the ground up, and echoed your call for the change you wanted to see implemented by the Obama Administration - this process of setting up that new government is about you."
As part of continuing that story, the Obama organization is asking the people of the US to share their stories and to share their goals.
In short, Obama has begun crowdsourcing the political agenda. And when it comes right down to it, isn't that what democracy is supposed to be about anyway? A government of the people, by the people, for the people?
A few weeks ago when Gartner hypothesized that "social networks will complement, and may replace, some government functions," it seemed almost laughable. But today, in the wake of what has occurred this week, it seems all the more accurate and attainable.
The Obama organization continues to turn the political machine on its ear and continues to shake the conventional wisdom of "political strategy." If change.gov is any indication, the use of social media appears to have been much more than a gimmick for Obama. It appears to have truly been a means of embracing change.
Whatever happens next, it will be incredibly interesting to see how this next act plays out. And what acts - or actions - follow.
(Photo credit Joe Crimmings Photography. Used under Creative Commons.)
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1) We have a fresh slate at HarperStudio. What's your advice?
The huge opportunity for book publishers is to get unstuck. You're not in the printing business. The life and death of trees is not your concern. You're in the business of leveraging the big ideas authors have. There are a hundred ways to do that, yet book publishers obsess about just one or two of them. Here's the news flash: that's not what authors care about. Authors don't care about units sold. They care about ideas spread. If you can help them do that, we're delighted to share our profits with you. But one (broken) sales channel--bookstores--and one broken model (guaranteed sale of slow-to-market books) is not the way to get there. If you free yourself up enough to throw that out, you'll figure out dozens of ways to leverage and spread and profit from ideas worth spreading.
2) If everything is free, how is anyone going to make any money?
First, the market and the internet don't care if you make money. That's important to say. You have no right to make money from every development in media, and the humility that comes from approaching the market that way matters. It's not "how can the market make me money" it's "how can I do things for this market." Because generally, when you do something for an audience, they repay you. The Grateful Dead made plenty of money. Tom Peters makes many millions of dollars a year giving speeches, while books are a tiny fraction of that. Barack Obama used ideas to get elected, book royalties are just a nice side effect. There are doctors and consultants who profit from spreading ideas. Novelists and musicians can make money with bespoke work and appearances and interactions. And you know what? It's entirely likely that many people in the chain WON'T make any money. That's okay. That's the way change works.
3) How do you think publishers and authors could work more productively together?
Publishing is far too focused on the pub day. The event of the publication. This is a tiny drip, perhaps the least important moment in a long timeline. As soon as publishers see themselves as marketers and agents and managers and developers of content, things change.
4) What's the most important lesson the book publishing industry can learn from the music industry?
The market doesn't care a whit about maintaining your industry. The lesson from Napster and iTunes is that there's even MORE music than there was before. What got hurt was Tower and the guys in the suits and the unlimited budgets for groupies and drugs. The music will keep coming. Same thing is true with books. So you can decide to hassle your readers (oh, I mean your customers) and you can decide that a book on a Kindle SHOULD cost $15 because it replaces a $15 book, and if you do, we (the readers) will just walk away. Or, you could say, "if books on the Kindle were $1, perhaps we could create a vast audience of people who buy books like candy, all the time, and read more and don't pirate stuff cause it's convenient and cheap..." I'm a pessimist that the book industry will learn from music. How are you betting?
5) You talk about all of these inspiring people in TRIBES. Is there anyone you had to leave out that we should look into?
There are so many inspiring people out there, you see them at every turn. As someone considering the opportunity to lead, I don't think you need more examples than the ones I've got in the book, I think you need to think hard about what's holding you back. It's not for lack of proof or from a paucity of examples, that's for sure.
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Have been doing some dreaming and wishing lately regarding my children's education. There is a school in Berkeley that Alice Waters of Chez Panisse fame started that has education revolving around gardening and food preparation. The obvious lessons are science and math, but of course the less obvious are socializing, working together, interconnectedness and who knows what else. It is such an amazing idea and seemingly simple to employ. Edible Schoolyard
Also, I have been watching the group in New York, 826NYC. It is a fantastic venue where tutoring takes place and creativity grows. Somehow I would like to incorporate these ideas into my kids education.
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