For the last week or so I’ve been doing some telephone interviews with key persons in the business information industry to get their thoughts as part of a special issue for the April Information Advisor on how Web 2.0 is impacting business research.
So far there have been two remarks that I feel are particularly interesting. One was from the new CEO of Factiva, Claude Green, who on March 1 took over the position from Clare Hart.
Green told me that Factiva is considering how the firm might eventually try to assist the publishers whose newspapers and journals Factiva includes by electronically tracking how Factiva subscribers are using that content—what stories are they reading, what’s generating the most amount of interest, etc. Of course all of this data will be in aggregate, so there should not be any individual privacy concerns per se.
Still, when data flows from the provider to the publisher–perhaps in realtime– there will be some interesting implications, one being whether future editorial decisions are going to be made from this kind of bottom up news reading behavior…
The other interesting point was made to me by Patrick Spain of HighBeam. Spain, who was a co-founder and CEO of Hoovers, told me that his firm is thinking about ways to get its user base to build custom content collections around one of their passions. The potential topics can be quite niche—everything from the definitive word on, say, a particular World War II battleship, to a hot consumer product, a complex financial investment plan, and so on.
The collection would include not just substantive news and articles from HighPoint’s proprietary collection, but other open source articles, web sites, photos, videos and more. These long tail information packages could then be shared, or monetized via keyword advertising or other techniques, possibly providing some income opportunities for the user who created the collection.
Fascinating stuff…!
Stay tuned for more…
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