Entries tagged with “data” from Tools of Change for Publishing
New York Times Movie Reviews Released as API
Peter Brantley
October 30, 2008
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The New York Times has released an application programming interface (API) to its movie reviews, which is a rather significant feature. From the Times' Open blog:
Finally -- and this is the key -- we're giving you access to our Movies search feature, containing all 22,000 reviews indexed by title, reviewer's name, director's name, names of the top five actors, and plot keywords. So, if you'd like to build a list of what The New York Times thinks of Pedro Almodóvar or Lindsay Lohan, we've got you covered. And this is only the beginning: in the next few weeks we'll be rolling out better lookup and search features that will let you call up reviews based on publication date or the movie's release date, just to name two.
The Times also released campaign finance and metadata APIs earlier this month.
Publishing Lessons from Web 2.0 Expo
Liza Daly
September 26, 2008
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Last week I was in New York for the city's first Web 2.0 Expo. I was a member of the program committee and one of our goals was to make it a uniquely New York event. This meant a real focus on measurable outcomes and integrating Web 2.0 principles into established business, in contrast with the more startup-friendly atmosphere of the San Francisco event. The fact that the conference ran during the week of the Wall Street meltdown only reinforced the need for pragmatism in tough economic times.
Naturally I was interested in applying what I learned to the publishing world. If you couldn't make it to the event, here were my big take-aways:
Web 2.0 is social software
Consultant Dion Hinchcliffe's tutorial on the Web 2.0 landscape summed it up best: Web 2.0 means software that gets better the more people use it. This is radically different from traditional software development, which gets better only when programmers add new features. (In the case of Microsoft Word, it generally gets worse.)
The best example in the publishing space is LibraryThing, which has a more accurate book catalog than Amazon.com, but also content found nowhere else. My favorites are the Legacy Libraries, which collect works associated with famous dead people. The Legacy Library project illustrates a related principle of Web 2.0: encourage unintended uses. LibraryThing was designed for individuals to catalog and rate their own books, but this user-driven initiative has added tremendous unexpected value.
Thinking outside the box
That is, outside of a single computer (geeks like to call them "boxes"). More Web applications are either being built on top of other services, or make use of so-called cloud computing. Amazon, Google and other providers now offer a wealth of ready-made software and infinite computing power to allow companies to leapfrog over problems of cost and scaling.
Only a few years ago when I was approached by a publisher to start a project, we would begin at the beginning: purchasing a computer, selecting a service provider, writing some HTML, crunching some data. With services like Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud, there's no longer any need to buy hardware: instantly an application can be deployed on one computer, or a thousand, at very low cost. This makes experimentation much more feasible: if no users come to a new product, no expensive hardware investment has been wasted. If it's successful, a few keystrokes can add 10X the computing power.
Cloud computing has also created tremendous benefit for offline processing tasks, as shown by The New York Times when converting their digitized archive for use on the Web.
It's not just about people, it's about data
Finally, Toby Segaran's talk on "The Ecosystem of Corporate and Social Data" reminded me how much value publishers have. Toby explored clever ways of finding usually-expensive data for free (for example, rather than paying for Yellow Page listings of restaurants, he scraped the New York City health department Web site, which includes ratings of every food-service facility).
Diving deeper, he emphasized how much value can be added to digital services if they are already full of content. Wikipedia came preloaded with a public domain encyclopedia, as it's much easier to correct or update old content than to enter it wholesale. The more of your content that users can find and interact with (for example, by providing an extensive full-content backlist), the more engaged they'll be.
Speaker presentations for the conference are available here: Web 2.0 NYC presentations.
CEOs Must Have API Literacy
Peter Brantley
September 23, 2008
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With the release of the expanded Google Book Search application programming interface (API) presenting new opportunities and decisions for publishers, Adam Hodgin argues for API-literate CEOs:
Why does it matter whether your CEO knows what an API is? It matters because publishers (and newspaper owners, TV networks, film studios, content makers of all shapes) are not going to allow Google (YouTube, he she or ItTube, or anybody else) to manage and define the API which has access to their content. Having, or buying into, allying with, the API's which manage and accesses your content may be the key decision for media companies in the next decade. Either your CEO knows what an API is, and can find out how, in strategic terms, to negotiate Google's, Amazon's, Facebook's and Apple's, or he/she needs to be a media genius who does it by gut instinct (Rupert Murdoch is the only one of those that I can think of and he is the wrong side of 70). The heads of Random House, Conde Nast, Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette and Pearson really ought to have an intuition about the way their business can develop an API to the servers which are hosting all their content. I wonder if any of them do?
Guardian Blazes New Media Trail with paidContent.org Acquisition
Mac Slocum
July 12, 2008
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According to Kara Swisher, The Guardian Media Group has purchased ContentNext, publisher of paidContent.org, for more than $30 million. ReadWriteWeb says this acquisition and separate open-data initiatives have pushed The Guardian to the head of the media pack:
What do you get when you combine cutting edge tech openness with some of the leading new media publishers online? A kick ass publisher ready for the 21st century, hopefully. Meanwhile the rest of the newspaper industry struggles to survive attacks from Craigslist.
Researchers: Government Should Build Reusable Data, Not Web Sites
Peter Brantley
June 10, 2008
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In a paper going around quite rapidly, researchers argue that the government should move to emphasize structured, reusable data over solely user-facing Web portals. From Ars Technica:
A new paper from researchers at Princeton University suggests a different strategy. David Robinson, Harlan Yu, William Zeller, and Ed Felten, all of Princeton's Information Technology Policy Center, suggest that government officials abandon the dream of developing usable web sites, and instead focus on providing raw public data such as regulatory decisions, Congressional votes, and campaign finance data in open, structured formats such as RSS and XML. This raw data would be made freely and publicly available to anyone who wanted it and could be used for any purpose.
The Importance of Viewing the World as Readers Do
Andrew Savikas
May 14, 2008
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In the rush to experiment and innovate with technology for printing, selling, writing, and marketing books, there have been some recent and relevant calls to take pains to remember the reader in all of this.
For a publisher (and in particular an editor and especially an author), energy and effort is understandably often directed at the book itself. But echoing a point made during this conversation between Kathy Sierra and Tim O'Reilly, customers don't really care about you or your products -- they care about what they're trying to accomplish, and successful product marketers remember that.
At Friday's BISG Making Information Pay event, Michael Cader drove the point home nicely using the Alex Rider series of books as an example. "I want to buy my son the third book in the series, and he wants to read it." But just looking at the books on the shelf, "I can't figure out which one is the third one." These are books that are competing just fine with the Wii and MySpace and World of Warcraft, yet (at least according to Michael -- I should acknowledge I'm unfamiliar with the books) they don't include an easy way for novices to navigate from one book to the next.
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