Why the Basis of the Universe Isn’t Matter or Energy—It’s Data

Enjoyed reading this interview in Wired magazine with noted science author James Gleick.

He quoted Claude Shannon's views on information:

A string of bits has a quantity, whether it represents something that’s true, something that’s utterly false, or something that’s just meaningless nonsense.

He also made a very succint comment about how he (and perhaps more of us) should look at new technology:

When people say that the Internet is going to make us all geniuses, that was said about the telegraph. On the other hand, when they say the Internet is going to make us stupid, that also was said about the telegraph. I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos. There’s a delicate balance.

Here's the link to the interview.

Getting Ready for the Bounce: How Do You Turn Opportunities for Innovative Services Into Revenues?

The author Mark Twain once scoffed at reporters who had been writing stories about his having passed away by saying at a public appearance, "The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated." Well, perhaps the buzz that the global economy is dying is also a bit premature, as well. While things are still pretty tough out there, we're picking up a lot of signs recently that companies are starting to bounce back and seize great opportunities for information products and services that beckon around the world.

The key to many of these opportunities, though, is the time and the cost of execution. With lean product development staffs and leaner client budgets, getting a client to "yes" means being able to turn ideas into actions as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible. In the information industry, this often means that you have to be able to demonstrate a new concept for a product or service as rapidly as possible. The good news for many information technology and services companies is that today's software development environments enable companies to cobble together some great new application demos very quickly. A common sticking point, though, is that the content that would make those demo apps look best is not quite what clients were looking for - or just not available. Canned data and pages may get you past a few quick moments with a client, but when you want them to pull the string on the revenue-generating phase of a client relationship it generally takes more than that to build a high level of confidence.

This is where MuseGlobal has really helped our clients to shine in recent years, and even more in today's tough economy. Our MuseConnect content integration technologies offer information services developers truly amazing turnaround times in assembling content from any number of internal and external information sources. Having developed more than 6,000 Smart Connectors for MuseConnect through the years means that your ideas for assembling as much valuable content as possible in a new or enhanced information product or service can appear more rapidly than you may imagine. Since MuseGlobal maintains its own development staging services for our clients, we have the ability to start streaming updates from content sources to your development environment whenever you're ready to receive them. Sometimes within just a few hours of having spoken about an idea your development staff can be working with live data from the key information sources that they need to accelerate their efforts.

This can make an enormous difference in jump-starting innovation and product development from many perspectives. Instead of waiting weeks or months to get content from databases, subscription services, file services and search engines flowing into prototype applications, you can eliminate content connectivity and availability as a bottleneck for developing and testing new software and services. Besides shortening the product development cycle in general, it also means that you'll spend more time looking at "real-world" information flowing through your new applications that will put it through its paces. The result will be more reliable and useful applications that encounter fewer surprises once they hit your clients' production environments. Time-to-market issues get solved more rapidly and efficiently, which means that more revenues come more quickly. In an economy in which anything that can help a sales cycle to shorten is critical to meeting sales goals, you might say that MuseGlobal's Smart Connectors are like found money.

Once you do sell and install your new applications, the even better news is that MuseGlobal Smart Connectors will continue to be reliable for you and your clients all on their own. That's because MuseGlobal delivers its Smart Connectors as a service to you through MuseConnect's unique content integration architecture. Whether it's pre-existing content source connectors or connectors tailored to your specific needs, MuseGlobal will be testing your content connectors constantly - and ensuring that they keep on working for your clients. Instead of client teams having to focus on maintenance issues that are annoying your key accounts they can be focusing on the next great opportunities for your products and services to be solving valuable problems.

There are no perfect answers to bouncing back from the effects of a tough economy, of course, but we've discovered in these times that our MuseConnect OEM content integration solutions can help more answers to be tried, tested and delivered to more of our clients' customers - an advantage that can turn a tough sales environment into one in which you can have the edge through rapid innovation. I hope that we can help you and your teams to see how MuseGlobal technologies and services can put your own organization on the path to innovative information products and services soon - and to keep them running smoothly and cost-effectively for years to come.

Unified Access for Enterprise Content: Is Search Technology the Key?

While many suppliers of enterprise content technology are struggling to define a path towards growth this year, one arena that continues to hold its own in the face of adverse market conditions is enterprise search. According to IDC analyst Sue Feldman, one of our most trusted sources of content technology intelligence, the enterprise search market grew by approximately 22% in 2008, not even pausing for breath in the fourth quarter. Enterprises around the world are seeking out ways to get more "bang for their buck" from their information resources, trying to corral all of their knowledge assets into easily accessed collections through search technologies.

Feldman notes that vendors are starting to gain traction with a concept called “unified access” — the ability to pull content from a variety of internal and external sources into a single platform. As the company which has been trying to "unify everything" for our OEM partners for years, the fact that vendors are beginning to focus on pulling together disparate content sources through search engines and other technologies comes as no surprise. The main question is, are most enterprise-oriented content and technology companies truly ready to supply their clients what they need to provide truly unified access to content? And, perhaps more to the point, do they really understand what is required for successful unified access from both a content and a technology perspective?

What seems to be happening is that many technology companies which have been focused on "nuts and bolts" enterprise technology issues such as data storage, document management and networking are beginning to discover that there are strong pressures from their client base to deliver more than nuts and bolts and software for the princely sums that their products and services have commanded in the past. Some of these companies have been thinking of themselves as "information companies" for many years, but then discovering that there is a gap between what their own particular flavor of technology can deliver to their clients and what their clients really consider to be valuable information services. Managing files or databases is one thing: pulling together every conceivable information resource needed into a cost-effective framework that meets everyone's group and individual needs for information is quite another.

And the needs of enterprises for information don't stop at merely federating the right search engine results into a common framework. Sue Feldman mentions in a recent report that enterprise content users are particularly keen to get subscription content melded in with internal and Web resources far more effectively than in the past. It's an "on demand" world today, making subscriptions for fixed collections of content for fixed groups of users less attractive than being able to extend rights to subscription content to the people who really need it in the "here and now." These are problems that subscription information services wrestle with regularly, but they're generally not the kind of thing that technology companies focus on deeply. Similarly, subscription information services companies generally tread fairly lightly on the really knotty enterprise content integration issues that technology companies focus on regularly.

How does a technology company shoehorn content from thousands of different types of content sources, including any number of subscription information resources, into a cohesive whole that protects the value of their brand? Well, search technologies can play a key role, but it takes more than a simple crawl of easily accessed content sources to pull all of the content that an enterprise needs from internal and external sources into a common framework. Most search engines are geared to handle just a handful of different types of content repositories. In the typical enterprise there may be hundreds and even thousands of different kinds of content sources that need to be brought into a common framework. Even if you were able to crawl all of those sources with one search engine, good luck building a common index for them. The timeliness and size of that index would always be a major design and maintenance compromise.

As the leading source of OEM content integration technologies, MuseGlobal finds itself oftentimes at the intersection of these very thorny issues. Enterprise technology companies need to respond rapidly to client demands for completely integrated content sources that cross many different technology suppliers while maintaining the value of their core technologies in the eyes of their clients. Enterprise information companies need to be able to "play the game" of enterprise information integration successfully with whatever technologies suit their clients best - while maintaining a clearly understandable value proposition to the people using and paying for their content. In both instances the key to a viable solution for both the short term and the long term lies oftentimes in MuseGlobal's ability to unify access to more types of content from more types of content sources than any other content integration technology available today.

That's why MuseGlobal's Smart Connector technologies are so popular these days. Smart Connectors enable connectivity to thousands of different types of content sources on an "on demand" basis from any technology platform, combining in a common format all of the information that someone needs into the most relevant "just-in-time" information that people need based on a single query. Then Smart Connectors can push back to those sources whatever updates that clients may need to post to them.

MuseGlobal has done it hundreds of times for thousands of enterprise installations for nearly a decade. How can enterprise subscription information services ensure that their clients will not lose sight of their services as their complex integration needs threaten to leave their products and services out of the picture? MuseGlobal's ability to integrate not just content sources but complex and multi-layered security and access permissioning into simple and easily administered single sign-ons for their users ensures that their content will be at their clients' fingertips on whatever platform suits them best. Best of all, it's all stuff that we've done again and again - we've ironed out pretty much all of the big issues that most companies will face in staring down the challenges of unified access to content.

It turns out that although search solutions are a big part of what people are willing to invest in these days that it takes far more than search alone to meet their expectations. It takes the ability to unify absolutely everything into the freshest and most relevant information resources available, the ability to do it rapidly, cost-effectively and efficiently, the ability to maintain the unity of your content sources with as little work as possible and the ability to keep potentially complex administration needs from turning a beautiful solution into a cauldron of troublesome issues. This is all do-able stuff - or, should I say, done stuff. At least we think so. "Bang for the buck" from unified access is not news to us - it's just what it takes to do unified access right.

Elsevier's Y.S. Chi Points to the Value of Engineering Content "Experiences"

We had a good time at the Buying and Selling eContent conference in Scottsdale this year, our first time at this event. Certainly there were many familiar faces from the content industry there, including Y.S. Chi, Vice-Chair of Elsevier, who gave what I thought was probably the most insightful presentation of the conference. Y.S. highlighted how the content industry needs to focus more on developing valuable "experiences" than more content.

What did he mean by this? Well, certainly Y.S. had in mind many of the workflow-oriented tools that publishers are beginning to emphasize in trying to add value to long-established database services. And I would think that it might also include some of the advanced social media projects that Elsevier and other major scientific publishers are embarking on that enable scientists to collaborate on building valuable reference content and research.

But I think that Y.S. was also pointing towards one of the key factors that makes publishing so hard for many established companies these days: owning content is not as important oftentimes as getting content to do something useful for people. If content can be thought of as the raw materials of publishing, then getting content from point "A" to point "B" is no longer such a great business to be in now that the Web and corporate intranets make the A-B value proposition pretty low on the value totem pole.

Search engines that publishers put on top of their own content collections help to find those raw materials more easily, but the value of those searchable services is considered high only when they are able to locate all of the possible content that applies to a given problem or task. Leaving content out of the equation means that you have only part of what you need to build a valuable experience. That's kind of like building a fantastic roller coaster but leaving out a few hundred feet of track. Sometimes doing just part of the job very well is just not enough.

The traditional solution that publishers would use to address the "missing track" issue would be to license more content or to create it themselves. That worked pretty well when there were relatively few sources of licensed content and relatively few people willing to create it themselves. But most sizable enterprises have very sophisticated sources of internal content as well as a growing array of sources that are generated by their peers in other companies or universities that help them to meet their goals. Add in Web sites that are growing sources of fresh information about businesses and key trends and it's not so easy to fill in that missing track. It's as if the roller coaster that the customer wants keeps growing far faster than the publsihers' ability to fill the gap.

In the experience economy that Y.S. references it's all about anticipating the gaps and finding more innovative ways to fill them more quickly than someone else, so that the raw materials of content can be transformed into experiences as efficiently as possible. Well, if the value of experiences is so high, then why do publishers still place so much emphasis on getting content integrated into the back end of databases when it's greatest value is found outside of a database? In other words, why not push the point of content integration as close to the point at which content is experienced? This will enable more sources to be brought together from more places more easily and efficiently.

Well, not surprisingly that's the key to what MuseGlobal does with content. The Muse Content Machine is a content integration platform that enables a publisher to assemble more searchable sources of content more quickly and more effectively than any one else. Instead of trying to create one master database with one login and one search engine The Muse Content Machine can enable a publisher to build applications that access multiple searchable sources from a single query. To your customers it will look like you've built a rich application from one commonly indexed database. But behind the scenes The Muse Content Machine federates content from thousands of different types of content sources and delivers the freshest and most relevant content from each source. Nasty details such as multiple source logins, different data formats and different types of content sources - search engines, databases, Web harvesting, feeds, video and audio, catalogs - are all ironed out very neatly and efficiently by The Muse Content Machine.

The Muse Content Machine lets publishers focus on getting the right content into the experiences that their customers want, regardless of whether those sources are in their key databases, at the customer's site or available from the Web. With thousands of different types of content sources already integrated into The Muse Content Engine our answer to "can you integrate this?" is usually "been there, done that." Best of all, when changes to a source occur The Muse Content Machine makes it easy to respond to those changes and keep all of your sources working together. To your customers it will be just one big powerful experience - but to you it will be the miracle of the most advanced content integration capabilities making everything that's not unified appear to be a unified source of content. The result: you'll have spent a lot less on developing content and a lot more on developing the experiences that will bring in higher revenues with lower maintenance costs.

Keep your eye on Elsevier as they begin to take advantage of Y.S. Chi's vision - and keep an eye on MuseGlobal as we help publishers, software companies and other media players to create more realizable value from unified content.

Why are Search Engines Still Searching for Answers to Content Integration?

Recently I read an interesting article on Redmondmag.com, entitled "Searching for an Answer in the Enterprise." The article notes that enterprises are beginning to come up against the uncomfortable fact that today's enterprise search engines were never really meant to deal with all of the various types of content resources that the typical major enterprise uses to store information. While your typical search engine can be trained fairly well to traverse some of the more common data sources such as major databases and document servers there's a wealth of legacy systems, document management systems, content management systems and ERP systems that store much of the typical enterprise's internal wealth of content.

Unfortunately search engines aren't designed to deal with such a wide variety of content sources easily. Search engines are designed to look at accessible documents and to make an index of all of the information that's in them, so that someone can come along later and search that index. That's great - if you have access to all of the documents that you need to index on a regular basis. Unfortunately in many enterprises that's a very, very difficult thing to arrange. Many enterprise databases and other data repositories are enormous and are being updated constantly. To incorporate their contents in a separate search engine index would take enormous resources both for allowing the search engine to crawl such a database with some regularity and to update and store the search engine index - not to mention questions about security and data integrity that such a crawl might raise. In an era in which data leaks can mean huge legal and public relations issues solving search can be a lot easier than it sounds in slide presentations.

Federated search technology can help to overcome these limitations. Instead of trying to build one enormous index of every document that someone might need to search a federated search engine will take one search request and then formulate queries for each of the sources where there's content that might answer someone's question. Instead of relying on occasionally updated Web search indexes a federated search enables the index associated with each content source to be traversed separately. This means that as soon as each of those individual indexes is updated you're going to have access to the most current information. The results from each source are then combined to display the most relevant content available from all sources.

This certainly helps to solve the problem of getting the very precise results that the typical enterprise user expects - they don't want a pretty relevant report on last quarter's results, they want THE report on last quarter's results - but it's an approach that only works when you have access to every source of content that someone may need. If you don't then people will be disappointed and go off to use another way to find the information that they need. In other words, your investment in search technology will be ignored.

So to do federated searching the right way you need access to ALL of the possible content sources that someone may need to access. Yet this article points out:

In addition, Microsoft has moved to the forefront in the promotion of new federated search capabilities based on Creative Commons' OpenSearch standard. Several companies, including Open Text Corp., Business Objects, Cognos and EMC Corp., are developing federated search connectors to enable Microsoft's enterprise search customers to connect to their information systems.

Well, this is good news, I suppose, but why settle for "some" when you need all? This is of course where Muse comes in. We've been doing nothing but develop technology for federated content integration for more than ten years. Of course our thousands of pre-built source connectors can help you to do all of the federated searching that you need, but that's just where federated content integration starts. In addition to search engines, databases, ERP, ECM and the other alphabet soup acronyms that make up today's universe of enterprise content repositories Muse technology enables our partners to deliver content from the Web, from subscription content sources, from datafeeds and from web mining applications as well. Our partners get OEM software from Muse that enables them to equip any search service, Web application, email newsletter service or enterprise software application with all of the content that they need to deliver.

So our hats are off to all of those enterprise software solutions who are working hard to address some of the solution to federated content integration. You're doing great, but let us know when we can help you with a solution to all of your federated content integration needs. We're ready when you are!

Saleforce.com's Salesforce Content Platform is Just the Beginning for Sales-Friendly Content Federation

It's interesting to look at the announcement of Salesforce.com's new Salesforce Content service and to see how they are becoming an ever-stronger player in managing content for the enterprise. Part search engine, part social tagging tool, part document management, part distribution service, Salesforce Content makes it easy for sales teams and marketing departments to get sales collateral and other key materials into the right hands at the right time easily.

Looking beyond the relatively limited scope of content in this product introduction, though, it's clear to me that SFDC is defining an interesting niche between traditional content management services for enterprise portals and document management services. In other words, why make your users wrestle with getting content into and out of repositories that have little to do with one's job focus when you can manage it in a collaborative, workflow-oriented workspace that their eyes are glued to every day?

This move by Salesforce.com places pressure on more traditional repository vendors to provide their content in workflow-oriented environments more easily and quickly. That's where Muse can come in, obviously: why hassle getting enterprise content from multiple sources into an environment like Salesforce.com when you can have The Content Machine from MuseGlobal take care of those interfaces for you? Workflow platforms like Salesforce.com are becoming the front end for many types of professionals. You can't afford to have them leave your own content platform behind as enterprise content migrates into these environments. Help your customers bring their own content along for the ride - and let us partner with you make it easy for them to do it.

Congratulations to Salesforce.com for another step forward in putting the most valuable content that sales and marketing professionals need to succeed in the right place at the right time. It's Muse-ic to our ears. Sorry, couldn't resist...

Content Federation and Muse: Finally the World Gets It

Welcome to MUSEings, our new weblog on which I’ll be sharing my views every week or so on what’s happening in the content industry and with MuseGlobal products and services. To everyone who may be coming to our site for the first time, welcome to the leader in federated content integration services. Muse has been developing our federation and content integration capabilities since 1998 and now finds itself in the enviable position of having become masters of a way of delivering content that many publishers and enterprises are just beginning to look at in a new light. To those of you who know us from “back when,” guess what? Federation is now the hot thing! And it’s for a very good reason.

When Muse was focused mostly on providing federated search results from multiple search engines federation was something that was interesting mostly to people in libraries and a few publishing houses where there were a lot of specialized databases that needed to be pulled together into a common search results page. Muse technology enables that process by querying multiple content sources that can be assembled in a common format “on the fly.” Instead of having to build one enormous normalized search database from multiple sources Muse gives you what’s available right now from each source in its freshest form in a common, relevant format.

We still do that, to be sure, but since those earlier days Web technologies have matured a great deal and have changed the way in which people pull together content for viewing and analysis. With Web mining tools, XML site feeds for blogs and wikis, widgets and enterprise data solutions galore there are more than just search engines that need to be federated into content applications. Muse’s integration technology makes it easy to pull all of these and any other kind of content source together into a common format that can be consumed as a feed by your publishing platform or used to build any kind of Web page or other display filled with the freshest content available.

And federation has become just that – a process that enables all sorts of new content applications to be developed quickly using content that’s been pulled together on the fly by using services like Muse content integration technology. Search engines still help to deliver a lot of this content inside Muse’s technology but now the search engines are like specialized feeds that queue up raw content on an on-demand basis for federation and integration by Muse.

Management dashboards, competitive intelligence portals, ecommerce applications, collaboration platforms, enterprise search engines – all of these and many more can benefit from the federation approach. Instead of waiting for development teams to get information integrated into an existing database or having to look it up on multiple services you can move from wanting to get content to having it at your fingertips in your most important content applications rapidly and very cost-effectively.

Speaking of collaboration and enterprise search, hopefully you know that Muse already provides content federation for people using or considering Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft’s newly acquired FAST search engine platform. More on that in a later post on MUSEings.

I hope that this was a fun read for you, I’ll be keeping these entries light-hearted, informative and as insightful as I can manage, so please stay tuned for more from MUSEings. Next week: a few thoughts about what I got out of the Software and Information Industry Association’s Information Industry Summit. Have a great week!