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.

Database.com - Makes Sense

Kudos to Marc Benioff @ Salesforce.com on launching another cloud product - Database.com (read the WSJ article here). Great job of packaging existing capabilities into a broader offering.

It's simple and it makes sense. Considering everything else that is being offered in the cloud, it is surprising that a fundamental building block in an IT stack - a database - didn't get there first. The traditional companies probably didn't want to ruin their existing license and support revenues by pushing a cloud offering. The newbies probably didn't have the capital or market nous to create a buzz. Marc has both and right now he is running laps around the competition.

See the intro video here.

The other reason I like the announcement - we get a chance to help our customers move their content into database.com, or out of it, or reference it without using any of it. The federated content model is here to stay and database.com will simply help customers store their content in logical repositories - across different public and private clouds. It will be interesting to dig further into the capabilities and limitations of databse.com. The data model under Salesforce.com has been evolving fairly rapidly from supporting simple SFA applications and to supporting fairly complex enterprise processes and content structures.

However, the primary challenge for enterprise today is dealing with the unstructured data they own and all the relevant content that is generated outside their control and outside their systems.
It doesn't matter whether database.com is the answer to all of this today or ever. Salesforce is facilitating the massive migration of cloud based applications - and that is good enough.

As we move forward, accessing and virtually aggregating these content sources - without physically moving the content - will become the norm. Would love to understand what Google is thinking about all this. They have taken a very clever route to capturing enterprise content with Google Docs and Google Apps - all searchable and all seemingly liberated from legacy "database" norms.

Looking forward to 2011 and more content in the cloud...

WTD about TMI?

TMI - Too Much Information, Too Much Content, Too Much Data - are all here to stay with us. There will be more of everything that we will pull and more of everything that will be pushed to us.

On my BART ride last week (yes - very green of me), I read an interesting article (http://bit.ly/cHG21g) in Bloomberg Businessweek magazine on RIM CEOs failing to communicate their vision/strategy to the market. 99.9% of all the CEOs in the world will come out 2nd best when compared with Steve Jobs, but there was a particular comment made by Jim Balsille (RIM Co-CEO) that made me realize that RIM's market share and mind share in smartphones could erode faster than Motorola's or Nokia's:

Balsille thinks the world is wrong about apps. Many are just
glorified bookmarks, he argues, that aren't necessary if you can connect
customers to the Web.

Apple has 250,000 apps because most of them are serving a critical need of presenting content in a form that can be consumed very easily - especially on a mobile device. Yes - you can browse the web and search for whatever you need - but that does not help the TMI syndrome. If anything it exacerbates it. The apps are making it easy for iPhone, iPad or Android users to filter and consume the content available all over the Web. Even Google has embraced the app paradigm - even though "googling" for content is good for Google's ad revenues.

Gus Hunt, CTO for CIA, who is building a "peta" scale infrastructure to handle the data and computing requirements said at Cloud Expo last week that he wants any data to be used by any application. He does not want to invest in building applications that are dependent on a particular data set or a particular data set being created for a specific application. The days of consolidating all the data into a single repository are long gone and never coming back.

Question is What To Do about TMI?

First - Leverage technology that can reference data from any source in any format. It isn't feasible to try and standardize the legacy content repositories. Data will stay federated, so your content integration strategy should account for it as well. Speed and agility in accessing new content sources is a competitive advantage for today's businesses.

Second - Ensure that data cleansing can be automated. This will allow you to work with incomplete or partial data - especially when working with a large number of data sources.

Third - Focus on normalizing the aggregated data, so that the consuming applications can work independent of data sources. This will allow you to serve content to a variety of consuming applications and end devices - especially the constrained mobile devices that need additional filtering or formatting. This will also allow the content creators to focus on creating content and not to worry about the device/platform battles that are being waged on the other side of the value chain.

More to come on the innovation in these areas.....

Not your Father's Feds: Taming the Widening Scope of U.S. Government Content Initiatives

As everyone knows, there's a new administration at the controls of the federal government in Washington, D.C., one that came into power in part thanks to a presidential campaign's mastery of new online publishing tools and one that is looking hard at how content technologies may be able to help transform our government. In some ways the new administration is picking up where it left off at the end of the election, using online publishing as a way to advance programs for political change. Web sites such as HealthReform.gov and Recovery.gov are White House-sponsored information sites that are as much about promoting the policy positions of the new White House team as they are about public information.

But at the same time, the new administration is championing initiatives to spread Web 2.0 technologies throughout the federal government as tools that can help to both disseminate and gather content from and for the public. During the transition period the Obama transition team used the Web site Change.gov to collect information from people about what they wanted from the incoming administration, information that was used as input into policy-making decisions. Similar initiatives are working their way into all parts of the Executive branch of the federal government, significantly increasing the breadth and frequency of content being made available by the government. In addition, members of Congress are also discovering the abilities of social media technologies to enable them to communicate more directly with their constituents, using tools such as weblogs, Twitter, online video services and online forums to cast a wider net of interaction with the public outside of traditional media.

Beyond the political side of the U.S. government, the incoming administration technology team is promising more open access to government information for the public, as well as supplementing the ability of national security and law enforcement professionals to collect information from across the spectrum of government and public resources. Our recently announced relationship with Capgemini to enhance the ability of law enforcement agencies to aggregate the right content at the right time for law enforcement officials is but one example of where MuseGlobal is able to help governments make sense of a sea of information resources far more rapidly and efficiently than ever before.

All of this adds up to a profile for government information services that is far different than what we were encountering even just a few years ago. Yes, the events of 9/11 triggered a massive onslaught to modernize intelligence gathering technologies, but today we're starting to see that the government as a whole is being transformed through both the ability to collect information and the ability to generate it as well. It's just not possible any more to monitor a few of the traditional publications and government information services to get a handle on what is going on in the government: literally hundreds of information initiatives are each crying out for the attention of both the public and professionals - and creating an enormous challenge for those who need to stay on top of both information and changing technologies at the same time.

As usual we're seeing that our Smart Connector technologies are going to help play a big role in sorting this out for both government initiatives and for enterprises that are trying to stay on top of the latest government information sources. You see, although much of what's new in federal information services rides on top of standardized Web technologies it's difficult to say when and where these technologies are going to be deployed next - and what impact those changes in deployment may have in your ability to track government information sources. Today an agency may be putting out information in a simple Web page format or have a legacy database interface that you've been processing for ages. Tomorrow it could all change in a heartbeat - and change again as newer and better technologies come into place at those agencies.

In an era in which new technologies are going to break more than a few eggs on the way to making great government information omelettes, our Smart Connectors are an enormous help to enterprises trying to keep the distractions from these changes to a minimum. Since our Smart Connectors are maintained automatically as a part of MuseGlobal services, interruptions to your ability to retrieve information from these sources are kept to an absolute minimum. They could change their formats and platforms every day of the week and still you'd have the best content source connector team in the world ensuring that you'll be in touch with their information. Best of all, since MuseGlobal Smart Connectors support two-way update flows, government agencies can collect information from thousands of sources and enable those sources to reflect the knowledge that they have collected as well. With the preponderance of social media initiatives under way now in the federal government, ensuring two-way updates will be more important than ever.

So if you were hoping for more openness and access in the U.S. federal government, the good news is that it's coming in buckets. The bad news is that you have lots and lots of new and changing buckets to sift through to make sense of it all - even, and perhaps especially, if you're the government. Well, it's clear to me that our ability to unify thousands of different types of content sources on the fly to deliver fresh content reliably in whatever format suits people is entering a new phase of usefulness in the face of this onslaught. Thank goodness that it's nothing new to us. Just another day at the company that unifies everything, as we like to say.

Is Twitter a Serious Threat to Google? (Should You Really Have to Care?)

The Google search engine has become such a major part of our lives for the past several years that in the minds of many people the debate over who's king of the hill in search on the Web was ended long ago. With recent media ratings showing that nearly two-thirds of all searches in the U.S. are initiated through Google, it doesn't appear that its position as the pre-eminent destination for everyday searching will be in jeopardy any time soon. Or will it?

In recent days there's been quite a bit of twittering in the news about search features surfacing in test mode on Twitter, the broadcast messaging service that's been

skyrocketing in popularity over the past several months. In fact, search on Twitter is not really new at all: they purchased the search engine assets of Summize about a year ago and have since supported a separate search of messages with real-time updates - in effect a customizable real-time filtered message feed. The search features surfacing now on Twitter in test mode are largely the repackaging of these already existing capabilities. But with Twitter having the wherewithal to make its search capabilities more visible and integrated with its core messaging service, the question of what happens at the intersection of broadcast messaging and search is becoming more interesting to many people.

Why is the ability to search Twitter messages so important to many people? Well, as the only highly scalable broadcast messaging service currently in play on the Web, Twitter has become a de facto source of breaking news and opinion monitored by many people - including enterprises wanting to understand what's happening in their market sectors. Is there an earthquake in China? You'll hear hundreds of first-hand reports about it first on Twitter, including links to photos and videos snapped by people equipped with mobile access to Twitter.

Want to be the first to hear of news being reported by major media outlets and corporations? Increasingly Twitter is becoming the channel that gets the first headline and link out on the Web from traditional sources of news. How are people reacting to major events? Searching the opinions found on Twitter is now occupying more of marketers' attention in determining where they stand in the battle for influencing their existing and prospective customers. Think of Twitter as the largest and most intelligent sensor network in the world, keeping people in touch with physical, social, financial and professional realities being broadcast for the world to tune into on a moment-by-moment basis.

But as powerful at Twitter may be at delivering the right-now view of the world from hundreds of thousands of points of view every minute, it is in fact just one input that people need to make decisions in their lives. If I want to know if an earthquake is actually happening, I may turn to Twitter for first-hand accounts. If I want those first-hand reports assembled into a cohesive story, I may want to look at mainstream news outlets. If I want to know how I can send aid to the victims, chances are I may turn to Google to research what resources are available. If I want to consider how my corporation is going to be impacted by it, I will turn to my intranet database, email and file management resources. If I want to study emergency preparedness in detail, I may search on Amazon for current books by leading experts. Each input may be important to me on different levels for different purposes.

So if your question is something along the lines of "Who will be the champion of search a few years from now, Google or Twitter?" you're asking the wrong question. The real question should be, "How can I profit from all of the searchable information sources available at any time, no matter where they come from?" Information from Twitter searches and feeds will be most valuable when it's available alongside all of the relevant information sources that can add depth to the insights that its short messages point towards. Having searchable real-time messages from Twitter is a great feature, but if you don't have all of the other information resources available that relate to those inputs, you're only halfway down the path to making great decisions.

That's where MuseGlobal comes into the picture, of course. Our OEM Smart Connector technology can comb through Twitter content as easily and as rapidly as it does more than 6,000 other types of Web and enterprise content sources and search engines, performing data normalization, categorizing and integrating it all on the fly into whatever technology platform, program interface or application that suits your needs. Most importantly, MuseGlobal Smart Connector technologies are not just for listening: your software and services can publish content to Twitter and other platforms as well via MuseGlobal Smart Connectors, enabling a cycle of monitoring, evaluating and responding that can make the most of all of the well-filtered inputs available from your MuseGlobal-connected content sources.

So who will have the best search engine in the world a few years from now? You will - if you have deployed MuseGlobal's highly scalable Smart Connector technology to enable your platform to be configured rapily and reliably to take advantage of whatever searchable and updateable content sources matter most to your audiences. No need to put any guesswork into it; just deploy the solution that's been working at thousands of locations worldwide for our hundreds of OEM clients for nearly a decade. Now that's something worth twittering about!

Doing the Heavy Lifting: Where the Brands are Building at the SIIA IIS

The SIIA 2009 Information Industry Summit was a great event for MuseGlobal. Maybe it's our improved messaging or maybe it's just good timing, but people who we were speaking to at the IIS really seemed to "get" our positioning as a company that can connect content sources to software applications and platforms more efficiently than any other OEM supplier. To some in the publishing and content industries this may not seem to be the most glamorous side of the business, but it's what is really creating enormous value for our enterprise, government, and media-oriented clients.

Certainly the IIS provided a lot of the more glamorous side of publishing in its presentations and panels. From the opening keynote from Marjorie Scardino, Chief Executive of Pearson, to the ending keynote from Stephanie George, Executive Vice President of Time Inc., I heard a lot of good speakers - and some pretty flashy ones, too. Stephanie George's presentation was capped with a very dynamic slide deck with lots of multimedia showing how Time brands were being strengthened on the Web through their investment in technologies that made it easier for their editorial resources to appeal to their audiences. Fun to watch, of course, and I don't doubt that Time is getting good mileage out of these efforts. But in our experience, the brands of MuseGlobal customers that do best are the ones that focus on what a brand really does for its customers.

The presentation by Kristian J. Hammond of Northwestern University on "Frictionless Information" captured this "doing" brand concept pretty well for me. His "Make my Page" concept was nothing radically new, but it was a good example of how to pull together highly customized pages assembled automatically from numerous sources of content on the fly on a topic into an aggregated document. This "content is as content does" approach to publishing may lack the pizazz of many traditional brand publications, but it seems to be where the real action is with our clients. Yes, publications finished by an editorial team certainly still matter in a big way, and we supply content connectors to many of the publications that do this, but the more efficiently that you can do the heavy lifting to assemble and to integrate all of the content sources that are needed to satisfy them, the more that you'll be able to focus on delivering the exact content and features that can build your brand's unique value.

Enterprise publishers and technology companies certainly understand the importance of this "heavy lifting" for their brands, but it's easier said than done. Most I.T. teams are either way too busy to focus effectively on building enough connectors to the content sources that can really make a difference to their clients or will find that to do a robust job of connecting to content sources will turn out to be far more expensive and time-consuming than they can afford to do in a tight economy. Everyone's customers are pleading for more and more content from published sources and from their own sources that's well-organized, integrated, and all in once place, but it's just not that easy to pull it all together cost-effectively.

I guess that's another way of saying that MuseGlobal is going to be very busy this year, because our highly scalable Smart Connector OEM technology is the most cost-effective and reliable way to get the heavy lifting done for connecting content to brand-name content and technology services. Instead of having to say "no" to clients and senior executives, MuseGlobal gives our clients the ability to say "yes" more quickly to getting new and better content into their products. If a brand is all about saying "yes" to your clients - then it's clear to us at MuseGlobal that fewer things can help to build a brand better than the ability to connect to content rapidly through our Smart Connectors. Be it in online media, enterprise subscription services or content integration services, I think that it's worth us chatting with you about how your brand can benefit from the heavy lifting that MuseGlobal technology can put in place for you today. I hope that you enjoyed IIS. SIIA conferences are great value, and MuseGlobal will be at SIIA's NetGain in San Francisco in May.

Unifying Content in the Enterprise with Google, MuseGlobal and Adhere Solutions

MuseGlobal has been an OEM partner with many of today's leading enterprise search engines and search infrastructure providers through more than a decade of developing advanced technologies for content integration. Partnerships are at the core of our value in the content marketplace, after all, making it possible for companies to use our content integration technologies to make their own platforms shine. I must say, though, that our new partnership with Adhere Solutions to enable content integration for the Google Search Appliance is one of the more exciting opportunities that we're encountering in the enterprise marketplace.

Everyone knows Google, of course, including the millions of people in enterprises worldwide who use Google every day as one of their primary "go-to" resources for information found on the World Wide Web. For this reason sometimes Google is seen as "the enemy" in enterprise I.T. and knowledge management circles, the interface that keeps on getting attention as they try to engineer their own solutions from in-house and subscription content sources. In many of these institutions you can find the Google Search Appliance as a tool that departments or whole enterprises are using to unify external Web content with some internal content sources. It's a powerful concept, but one that needs every possible source included to gain everyone's attention - otherwise the GSA becomes just one of a number of searchable sources.

This is where the All Access Connector comes in. Using Adhere Solutions' extensive background in integrating the Google Search Appliance into enterprise environments MuseGlobal now has a partner that can help enterprise partners to leverage the full power of the MuseGlobal's content integration capabilities through the most popular search interface around. The All Access Connector enables over 5,400 different types of content sources to be integrated rapidly into the GSA. Subscription databases, internal databases and document repositories, Web content, feeds, content harvested from intranets and external sources, multiple search engines - all these and many more can be made available through one search interface and returned in whatever format accelerates your productivity the best.

The response to this product launch has been extraordinary. All of a sudden people who had not quite seen the potential for federated content are beginning to see the light now that the "G-word" has entered the picture. It's really quite a simple concept when you come right down to it: if people like using a particular tool to solve their problems, why not make that tool work better for them? Apparently this resonates loud and clear for many who have been frustrated with powerful solutions in enterprise markets that just don't seem to get used as much as they should. If Google is the platform that users want, and you can deliver content from all of your searchable sources and feeds through that platform, well, why not make all of your content available through it? With the All Access Connector, we're finally able to make "all" mean "all" - and in doing do we get people making the most of all of their investments in searchable content.

We're very excited by the response to the All Access Connector and we expect to be very busy this year helping people to make the most of it. It's a concept that MuseGlobal can make work through any platform, of course, not just Google - including your platform as well. Something to think about. In the meantime our thanks go out to to Erik Arnold and all of our new friends at Adhere Solutions who are making the All Access Connector a reality using our content integration technology. It's a great partnership that we expect will provide our customers with extraordinary returns on their investments in our joint capabilities.

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.

Dow Jones and Generate: Making the Most of Web Harvesting Services

Kudos to Dow Jones Enterprise Media for announcing their acquisition of Generate, the online business information harvesting service that has been a center of much buzz for the past several months. What made Generate such a hot topic of discussion? While there are a lot of companies out there involved in harvesting content from the Web, Generate was taking this content, brushing up its quality and enabling it to shine in high-end business applications that help sales and marketing professionals to understand quickly how to translate Web content into sales and business development opportunities. Instead of focusing just on the mass markets Generate was the first company that tried to turn harvested Web content into a high-end business information application.

A great story, but if it was so great why go the acquisition route now? I see two factors that made this a good time for Generate to cash in with Dow Jones. First, Dow Jones brings the Generate team a much larger and entrenched sales force already selling Factiva and Dow Jones feeds, products which have proven themselves but which are not likely to make huge new sales strides in a rougher economy. Adding Generate to their sales kit will enable them to penetrate more accounts more quickly without the "will this startup survive or not" question hanging over their heads. The second factor, though, is probably more important: having corralled all of the Web content that they could get their hands on through Web harvesting, how was Generate going to add more value to the product? Well, inevitably the answer would have been to add more content from licensed databases and from client databases.

Adding Factiva content to the Generate quiver of content sources is certain to give a boost to their value-add analysis capabilities. The question is, how many more sources can be integrated quickly with Generate's platform - or any other Web harvesting platform, for that matter. Web harvesting is a highly potent way to gather great business information - it's something that MuseGlobal does as well - but it's hardly the end point for making a great workflow application for today's enterprises as quickly as possible. Internal databases, subscription databases, file management platforms, Web site content management systems - all of these need to be sources for enterprise applications that are going to deliver the most valuable answers to today's professionals. Web harvesting is tuned to do just that - to get the most important content out of Web pages as efficiently as possible. Integrating content in from other sources, including real-time feeds, is not necessarily Web harvesting's strength.

Web harvesting engines are essentially Web search engine crawlers with special processing to extract specific fields of content from Web pages. That's great for what it is, but that's not necessarily going to get you timely content from other sources such as document servers, databases and datafeeds. Access methods, protocols, update cycles, security and logins, proprietary data formats - all these and more can make it difficult or downright impossible to use the same software that you use for Web harvesting to access other content sources and return the freshest information available. Our ten years of experience in developing content integration technology shows that it's a far better approach to let Web mining do what it does best and to use other techniques to integrate content from other sources into applications driven by federated content sources.

This is where content integration technology from MuseGlobal can help Web harvesting applications to shine. Instead of trying to get Web harvesting software to integrate other sources, why not use The Muse Content Machine to let Web harvesting do what it does best in a content integration architecture that's already able to integrate both Web harvesting and thousands of other types of content sources? The Muse Content Machine will enable you to take search engines, subscription databases, Muse Web harvesting or your own Web harvesting technologies, client databases, real-time news and data feeds and any other content source you need and get them to produce rich, federated content for your Web sites and client applications quickly and effectively. We can configure The Muse Content Machine to integrate all of the content sources that you need and return results from a single query into a single or multiple streams of updates or alerts tailored to your specifications - or build front-end applications with easy-to-use Muse application development tools that can federate content from all of your key content sources into rapidly developed user applications.

So our hats are off to Dow Jones for picking one of the most valuable up-and-coming companies harvesting insights from Web content. Generate's Web harvesting and semantic analysis combined with Dow Jones databases is sure to accelerate the power of business information in today's major enterprises. The Muse Content Machine can help these kinds of integrations of Web harvesting to move from concept to reality far faster than you may imagine. Then again, if you're familiar with track record as the leader in OEM content integration, perhaps you can imagine it.

Comprehensive Federated Search for Enterprises – Tomorrow from SAP and Oracle, Today From Muse

As we make the rounds with analysts and platform partners there’s more chatter than ever about federated content for enterprises. It’s not that federated search in enterprises is any thing new, of course – Muse has been doing it for ten years in thousands of enterprise installations around the world. But the position of federated search as an enterprise solution is beginning to shift. Years ago we started introducing federated search to enterprise libraries – the specialists in search for their organizations – to bring together collections from across an organization into a common electronic library interface. But as search engines became more popular in enterprises as the “go-to” starting points for finding content in a wider variety of enterprise repositories all of a sudden search engines began to trigger a turf battle with the major player in enterprise content integration.

It’s all about desktop and server room dominance: whose platform will be on top as the one into which everyone else’s content and services integrate? It used to be that vendors such as Oracle and SAP were the key content repository builders for enterprises through applications built around the capabilities of their platforms. While search engines from FAST/Microsoft, Autonomy, Google and others have gained a lot of popularity as one-stop shopping for search needs, there’s a comprehensive list of sources and interfaces that enterprises want to see integrated into search services.

It’s not just a matter of breadth of sources, either: many tricky issues such as database and network security, being able to assemble the most relevant content and being able to build a wide variety of outputs rapidly and cost-effectively all are major factors in getting a federated search environment working properly. There’s a long list of items that your customers will want checked off before they’ll take your solution seriously.

In theory this should play into the hands of platforms like SAP and Oracle – and in fact both have been moving to develop federated search applications for their current platforms. But when they say “yes” to being able to do federated search, just how broad is that answer? Does it include being able to manage security and access issues on the widest array of enterprise and Web databases possible? Does it mean being able to traverse any kind of network configuration to bring together and disseminate federated search results – including even the latest mobile platforms and legacy network protocols? Can they assemble not just raw search results from each source but also just the right content that makes sense in a given context?

These are hard questions for any content platform vendor to answer – unless they happen to be one that uses content integration solutions from MuseGlobal. With a decade of experience in developing successful solutions using federated search Muse has integrated more kinds of search engines, feeds and databases with more kinds of configurations for more kinds of content platforms than any one else. Muse federated search solutions are designed for optimal maintenance with a minimum of administration and hassle-free security and network management for the widest possible range of configurations.

Best of all, you can decide just how to integrate Muse’s capabilities around your platform – as a “back end” solution that can feed in the results of federated searches into your own platform or as a framework that can enable your platform to provide well-organized federated search results from both your own platform and other platforms combined into your own custom front-end solutions. Either way your clients will see it as your solution all the way – and keep you in the driver’s seat as your clients choose who is best at federating whom.

So whether you’re using Oracle, SAP, FAST, Microsoft Sharepoint Server, Google, Vignette, EMC/Documentum or another content platform to provide federated search solutions there’s one partner that you can call on that’s been there, done that and got just about every t-shirt there is to wear in content integration. It your time to spend trying to come up with a winning solution for federated search – why not spend it signing up more customers who will keep you on top? We’re glad to help you do it, too.

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!