October 2008 Archives

CM Pros (the Content Management Professionals Association) has replaced their listserv with a new forum and even non-members will be able to view much of the content - members can contribute.

They also announced that the early registration discounts for the Summit ends November 4th, as it does for our conference.

They also announced nominations for CM Pros Board of Directors:

CM Pros seeks enthusiastic candidates to run for three open seats on the Board of Directors. To qualify as a candidate, you must be a CM Pros member in good standing. Nominations open soon and voting is scheduled for December. Consider nominating yourself or someone else you believe would make a great candidate. If you are passionate about content management this is your opportunity to contribute to and gain from the continued growth of the profession and the organization.

http://www.cmprofessionals.org/

By David Lipsey, Managing Director, Entertainment & Media, FTI

Can anyone deliver customized content to its customers - in print, on the Web in rich applications, in social networking or to wireless media? To make matters more challenging, what if your customers are two-to-five year olds? Well, Sesame Workshop recently had to address this test to keep its brand relevant to precocious preschoolers. In fact, this non-profit organization behind Sesame Street took the bold view that multi-channel publishing is the future of the Workshop, and recognized that online will become its primary channel of distribution down the line. At the upcoming Gilbane Boston Conference (link to information on session), I will moderate a panel of multi-channel publishing experts, including the VP charged with Sesame Workshop's internet initiative. We will provide you with the latest in content delivery, opportunities to serve more users and more applications, and insights to show that yes, almost anyone can do it. Please join me, Joe Bachana from DPCI (an industry leader in his own right) and the ever-innovative O'Reilly Press for a didactic and enlightening discussion that will get you mulling over ideas for enhancing your brand experience for customers.

This is the title of the presentation I was asked to give at the Kites Symposium of Multilingual Communication and Content Management in Finland this week. The main point I will be making is that multilingual content will only become easily and widely available when multilingual technology is deeply integrated in information technologies. I doubt that this will be considered controversial by anyone, but both the market demand and the technology has reached a point where companies are looking for slow steady growth to be accelerated. Although this demand is naturally higher in Europe, the potential for reaching new, or deeper into existing, markets ensure that even small to mid-size U.S. companies will be looking to incorporate multilingual technologies as soon as the cost and ease of doing so allows for it (abstract appended below). For more on how companies are thinking about this, see the recent report by our Content Globalization practice Multilingual Communications as a Business Imperative: Why Organizations Need to Optimize the Global Content Value Chain.

As Leonor says, machine translation, which has been around for years, is going to play a large role in multilingual applications in spite of its limited capabilities. For example, you may have noticed the Google translate feature at the top of this page and a couple of our other blogs. This was free, took no more than 5 minutes to install, and is very useful - try it out.

Here is the abstract for my presentation:

Language technologies are becoming integral to content and information technologies. This is a slow process, but inevitable. There is no question of the requirement for multilingual functionality. Those who might have thought or hoped that we would be a monolingual world in the foreseeable future must re-adjust their view when looking at the behavior (good and bad) across the globe today. Even in the U.S., where most of the population has always had a narrow view of language, organizations are awakening to the need for multilingual capability. This awakening is sure to continue because of global commercial opportunities. And because of the inexpensive global access provided by the Web, multilingual requirements are increasingly important for even very small businesses. Meeting the full market demand for multilingual requirements at the scale necessary won't be possible without multilingual technologies becoming an integral component of mainstream information technologies.

While language technologies are not new and processes for managing translation and localization are well established, there is still much to learn about how to integrate language and other information technologies. First, the number of organizations, and people within organizations, with deep experience in translation processes and technologies is still relatively small. Second, there is fragmentation in the supplier market, within customer organizations, and along the "Global Content Value Chain", that together contribute to slower growth. Third, development of all information technologies continues to accelerate, challenging even forward thinking organizations with large IT budgets.

Because of the central importance of multilingualism, all organizations need to understand as much as possible, what and how language technologies are being used today, how they are, or are not, integrated with other technologies and applications, and how and when emerging language and information technologies will affect commercial and information dissemination strategies.

The information technologies most immediately relevant to multilingual applications are content management technologies, including authoring, editing, publishing, search, and content management. Recent research on the use of language and content technologies by organizations with deep experience using both kinds of technologies, reveals that there is insufficient integration and interoperability across authoring, content management, localization/translation, and publishing. Much can be learned from analyzing how some organizations have successfully dealt with this constraint.

Language and semantic technologies continue to improve, both organically because of a renewed interest in their possibilities, and because of increases in readily available computing power. In addition to small expert niche companies, very large developer organizations such as Google and Microsoft are investing heavily in language technologies. Machine translation is one example, and one that is increasingly seen as having a serious role to play in many, if not all, translation applications. However, to fully achieve pervasive multilingual capability technology integration needs to progress from the integration of individual software applications, to the incorporation into large mainstream enterprise applications, widely deployed client tools, and software infrastructures.

Technology integration is not the only barrier to market growth. Yet, as more of these technologies are integrated, it will become easier to implement multilingual solutions, they will be less costly, easier to use, and procurement will be simplified.

Publisher's Weekly is reporting that a settlement might be at hand.

Nearly three years after publishers filed a lawsuit against Google over its controversial program to scan books from library shelves, a settlement could be near. Although rumors of a settlement have flared up and died down intermittently over the years, sources this week confirmed for Library Journal and Publishers Weekly that talk of a final agreement has indeed heated up, and one publishing insider with knowledge of the talks confirmed that a settlement announcement was "imminent." Asked if the broad strokes of a final settlement with Google had indeed been reached, Association of American Publishers spokesperson Judith Platt suggested that the rumor mill was once again starting its run up to Frankfurt, which begins October 15. A Google spokesperson said the company does not comment on speculation.

If Google does stay in the scanning business, I wish someone would teach them how to scan physical copies of books to anything approach industry standard quality.

UPDATE (10/28/08): Wired News has a brief report on the settlement. The notion of a Book Rights Registry caught my eye. The Google Books website has a brief explanation of the settlement.

We've been especially focused on enterprise search this year. In addition to Lynda's blog and our normal conference coverage, we have released two extensive reports, one authored by Lynda and one by Stephen Arnold, and Udi Manber VP Engineering, Search, Google, keynoted our San Francisco conference. We are continuing this focus at our upcoming Boston conference where Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research, will provide the opening keynote.

Prabhakar's talk is titled "The Future of Search". The reason I added "enterprise" to the title of the post, is that Prabhakar's talk will be of special interest to enterprises because of its emphasis on complex data in databases and marked-up content repositories. Prabhakar's background includes stints CTO at Verity and IBM so enterprise (or, if you prefer "behind-the-firewall", or "intranet") search requirements are not new to him.

Here is the description from the conference site:

Web content continues to grow, change, diversify, and fragment. Meanwhile, users are performing increasingly sophisticated and open-ended tasks online, connecting broadly to content and services across the Web. The simple search result page of blue text links needs to evolve to address these complex tasks, and this evolution includes a more formal understanding of user's intent, and a deeper model of how particular pieces of Web content can help. Structured databases power a significant fraction of Web pages, and microformats and other forms of markup have been proposed as mechanisms to expose this structure. But uptake of these mechanisms remains limited, as content owners await the killer application for this technology. That application is search. If search engines can make deep use of structured information about content, provided through open standards, then search engines and site owners can together bring consumers a far richer experience. We are entering a period of massive change to enable search engines to handle more complex content. Prabhakar Raghavan, head of Yahoo! Research, will address the future of search: how search engines are becoming more sophisticated, what the breakthrough point will be for semantics on the Web and what this means for developers and publishers.

Join us on December 3rd at 8:30am at the Boston Westin Copley. Register.