SuperHack/SuperHack CD.bin/MISC/MECKWEB.ZIP/MECKWEB.TXT

Text File | 1994-02-20 | 30KB | 576 lines

Mecklerweb: Internet publishing for bucks!


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Excerpted by permission from:

    The COOK Report on Internet -> NREN
    Volume 2, Number 11, February 1994

    Gordon Cook, Editor and Publisher
    [e-mail]
    [phone]

    [SEE SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION AT END OF FILE]

THE INTERNET AS A
CORPORATE MARKETING AND COMMUNICATIONS
PLATFORM,                     PP.1 - 5

 -----------------------------------------------------------------
Executive Summary:

This article is the first announcement of MecklerWeb, a very
innovative Internet publishing and communications service.

We describe Chris Locke's ideas about the future of electronic
publishing and the Internet.  Locke notes that most publishers
have so far thought only in terms of transferring the standard
Gutenberg hard copy paradigm to electronic format.  He is not
impressed by the ability to read Time or the New York Times
online.

He also describes the controlled circulation technical
publication as an endangered species.  Why?  Because as Internet
growth and technical capability continues to increase, companies
will so begin to question spending large dollar amounts for one
time non dynamic hard copy advertisements.  He foresees the
ability to mount text and visual data on an internet gopher or
web server at an order of magnitude less cost as an attractive
alternative.

We conclude with Locke's description of MecklerWeb the
commercial service he is launching for Mecklermedia.  This
service will offer companies a turnkey service for establishing
an internet presence via the ability to announce goods and
services on a World Wide Web based server accessible via such
browsing tools as Mosaic.  Additional services coordinated by
industry based coalitions are planned.

 ----------------------------------------------------------------------

A COOK Report Exclusive -

THE INTERNET AS CORPORATE MARKETING & COMMUNICATIONS PLATFORM

ANALYSIS OF WEAKNESSES OF TRADITIONAL PUBLISHERS' APPROACH TO
INTERNET USE EVOLVES INTO MECKLERWEB

New Service - Announced Here for First Time - Has Potential to
Change Commercial Use of Internet

Editor's Note: This article is the result of a conversation
begun at the Mecklermedia Internet World conference in New York
in early December and extended by voice and email over the next
six weeks with Christopher Locke, former Editor of CMP's
Internet Business Report.  While the basic ideas are Locke's,
many of the contextual interpretations are ours.  During the
course of these exchanges Locke developed some further insights
that very quickly grew into the plan for MecklerWeb announced at
the end of this article.  At the same time he accepted a
position as "General Manager, Internet Group" for Mecklermedia,
publishers of Internet World magazine presenters of the Internet
World Conferences.

Old Paradigms Don't Transfer Gracefully to New Media

As large companies and entire industries debate the strategy
that will determine the role they play in the Internet and in
NII, none has more to gain -- or to lose -- than traditional
publishing firms.  The strategic question is how they will
structure and implement their roles as electronic publishers.
Their record so far has not been impressive.  The software
companies that defined electronic publishing a decade ago failed
to demonstrate how their technology revolutionized anything
beyond procedure.  Most so-called electronic publishing
applications have continued to focus on the production of paper
pages.  And most of the core assumptions have been much too
closely tied to the Gutenberg era.  In many ways, electronic
publishing only masquerades as new technology while remaining
bound to the world view of the printing press.

In contrast, the Internet offers the potential for genuine
electronic publishing.  Rather than being focused solely on the
electronic production of hardcopy manuals and periodical
literature, the Internet additionally enables full electronic
dissemination.  This is a critical difference.  Why?  Not only
because it accelerates the delivery of information, but more
importantly, because of the global audience to which it makes
that information available.  Beyond the chronological accretion
of postings in USENET newsgroups, more selective and structured
publishing mechanisms such as Gopher and World Wide Web are
proliferating with amazing speed across the net.  And their
potential is not bound to just-emerging technology or vague
hopes about possible audiences.  While the technology will
undoubtedly get much better very rapidly from this point out, it
is perfectly viable today.  The audience, growing at a
phenomenal rate, already numbers in the tens of millions.

Locke sees the view of the Internet from the traditional
publishing perspective as falling into three major categories,
explored further below.  He points out that while any such
categorization is subject to over-generalization, these basic
groupings may form a useful first-cut analysis that can help
serious publishers -- indeed all companies considering an online
presence that will take full advantage of the trends just
defined -- to select more viable options than those they may
currently be considering.

Blind Arrogance

Some large publishing companies say, in effect, "We're so big
already that the Internet hardly matters."  They believe they
have discovered the winning formula for profitable publishing,
and see no reason to change that formula in light of new
realities.  This mindset could be called the General Motors
model.  It could very well replicate the costly results of the
automotive giant's blind arrogance in the early 70s.  There is
even a kind of denial operative in such organizations.  Because
top management of these companies is unfamiliar with the
technologies and markets involved, it can be dangerously career
limiting for "lesser" individuals to champion bold new
directions on the Internet.

More in keeping with the "vision" of which this class of
companies seem capable are bet-hedging alliances with
old-paradigm providers such as CompuServe, Prodigy and America
Online.  The alliances are bet-hedging in the sense that, if
electronic delivery ever does amount to anything -- which many
of these publishing firms strongly doubt -- at least these
online vendors offer far more recognizable business models, and
hence more comfort than does the Internet.  Online information
vendors such as CompuServe and America Online have leveraged
their potent public relations machines to try to prove they
represent the wave of the future. However, the pre-packaged,
"content provider" model they tend to adopt sounds a lot like
what we hear, ad nauseam, about how the new world of interactive
TV is going to give us everything we could ever hope for Real
Soon Now.

According to Locke, this disingenuous top down approach fails to
take into account why the Internet is so suddenly popular.  Its
popularity rests precisely on the fact that it represents the
opposite of top-down decisions by powerful media organizations
as to what constitutes "legitimate" knowledge, opinion, analysis
and perspective.  The New York Times' motto -- "All the News
That's Fit to Print" -- is a good indicator of this mindset.  In
contrast to the content provider model, the Internet is based on
a model in which subscribers and providers are often one and the
same, frequently "consuming" and "providing" information in the
same interactive session.

However, the content provider model plays well to large
publishing outfits who often recognize their own received wisdom
flatteringly reflected within its seldom explored axioms.  Core
to this approach to electronic publishing is the notion that
publishers can lock up market channels, and that such
positioning then enables them to make their real money from
advertisers. Publishers have an understandably hard time letting
go of this habitual pattern, for the simple reason that they
have profited so handsomely from it.

In the global marketplace, positioning for mass-market hegemony
misses the fact that, in most other business arenas today,
economies of scale have long since given way to economies of
scope.  The Internet is a perfect example of such a truly global
market.  It is entirely unclear how large publishers can profit
as advertising mediators to mass markets that don't want to pay
for such advertising -- and on the other hand, collect revenues
from advertisers who are quickly discovering they can establish
much cheaper and far more effective direct channels to specific
niche markets via the Internet (more on this point below).

Other than timorous alliances with non-Internet online service
providers, the most popular stance of this group seems to be
"wait and see."  The results are largely predictable.  The big
computing companies of the 60s and 70s were almost without
exception losers in the PC revolution of the 80s.  And for the
same reasons: the new paradigm failed to match the models in
which they faithfully believed and their consequently skewed
expectations.  Blind arrogance is not simply a turn of phrase.
Such firms literally cannot see -- they often cannot
psychologically afford to let themselves see -- the next
market.  Few if any of these publishers will win in the changes
that are coming, and many will be astounded to find themselves
fighting to survive after missing out on the critical learning
curve today's Internet presents.

Naive Optimism

This next class of publishers see the Internet as virgin
territory to be exploited as a means of expanding their current
business practices and spheres of influence.  Call theirs the
Conquistador mentality.  Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation
acquired Delphi, one would assume, not to explore the
contributions it might make to Internet culture, but to test its
revenue generation machine in a new medium (and one which
doesn't have teamsters or printers unions to attenuate
profits).  While these companies like to think of themselves as
more visionary than their arrogant brethren, described above,
their shared assumptions are more apparent than their
differences.  The "conquistadors" still believe that advertising
is how they will make their revenues; they simply see the
Internet as a way to quickly expand on their current subscriber
bases.  While subscription, in itself, may well continue as a
viable mechanism for building markets on the Internet, most of
these publishers are far more dependent on ad revenues than on
subscriptions or single-copy newsstand sales.

One of the primary factors these publishers seem unable to grasp
is the opportunity the Internet provides for advertisers to
reach their intended audiences without the need for the market
mediation that publishers have traditionally claimed as their
exclusive ability to deliver.  Say Company A pays Publishers B,
C, D and E a total of $5 million per year to reach its market.
Additionally, Company A must pay a non-trivial amount to
determine that these publishers do in fact, as they claim, have
the ear of their particular market, then far more to produce and
mail corporate communications to advertising respondents.  Now
suppose that Company A begins to realize that a significant
portion of its current market is either already online or fast
moving in that direction.

What happens when Company A decides that, for a fraction of
these costs, it can mount state-of-the-art multimedia
information servers directly on the Internet?  The knee-jerk
response from publishers is that this scenario will never come
to pass.  The real question is how much they'll bet on it.  Many
publishers today are betting their entire businesses on the
hunch that radical change is impossible in their industry.
Maybe they should look more closely at the experience of other
industries in which such bets have been disastrously lost in
recent memory.

High-tech trade publishers are especially at risk in this
regard,  since the demographic constitution of the net is
historically skewed toward the technical.  Everyone accessing
the Internet - regardless of how green -- is already using a
computer and a modem at a minimum.  The content of such
publications has often been a thinly disguised excuse for the
real content they carry: advertising.  Separated from this, the
editorial matter might not be worth paying for at all -- and
indeed is not paid for today in the "controlled circulation"
model so popular with the trade press.  Can such publishers
continue to offer their traditional high-dollar mediation to
"owned" market channels via the Internet?  No, because they
don't own the channel in the same manner that a databased
mailing list confers ownership.

Pragmatic Vision

A third class of publishers may find extremely viable avenues
ahead in continuing to mediate the presentation of advertisers'
products to online consumers.  There will certainly arise a new
class of "ad agencies," though what they will be selling will be
neither advertising nor channel access, but rather what might be
termed net-savvy and commercial rhetoric (in the original sense
of effective communications).

Such firms will enable companies to achieve powerful market
presence on the Internet by helping them to organize unique and
valuable corporate information, select appropriate delivery
modalities, and attract virtual communities of interest to their
servers.  The "advertisers" involved need not fit the Internet's
typical high-tech model, either.  Expect to see such market
presence established in the reasonably near term by many
purveyors of non-tech-oriented mainstream goods and services.
The winners here will be those publishers adopting the basic
attitude that this challenge is going to entail some very hard
work, but that they are building the ground floor of a whole new
industry.

Perhaps counterintuitively, the companies most likely to prosper
in this new arena are those with the least cognitive baggage
from the Old Boy School of Big Publishing.  Interestingly, it is
precisely these Old Boys, typified by Compuserve and AOL, that
want to be commercial Internet alternatives.  A key part of
their strategy seems to be to "lock in" as content providers for
the New National Data Superhighway Information Infrastructure
(drum roll, flag flourish) as many big traditional publishers as
possible.

In contrast to much of this criticism, traditional publishing is
exploring some very worthwhile directions involving online
editorial interaction with readers.  Publications have long
requested reader feedback, and some have actually paid attention
to it.  However, the hardcopy "Letters to the Editor" mechanism
draws far less response than might be imagined at many
publications.  The relatively few letters actually published
serves to discourage many who might otherwise share their views
on editorial content.  Also, the postal mechanism is slow and
involves the usual search for the proper address, and the
required stamps and stationery.

However having editors accessible online is a big plus, not just
for readers, but for publishers as well.  Wired magazine, for
example, has done a great job here, and because of that
publication's wild success, the formula is being emulated in
more mainstream publications.  Beyond e-mail, reader forums in
which editors and writers participate are moving in the
direction of genuine corporate presence -- the corporation in
this case being the business organization that produces the
publication.  As in any such online enterprise, active discourse
is the key to effective presence.  Participation generates
visibility while intelligent participation generates positive
visibility.  Sometimes reader feedback online can attempt to
correct editorial misinformation.

The Editor recently incurred an interesting example of how this
phenomenon can work when, on the Well, Dave Hughes, the
nationally known Cursor Cowboy, took on Philip Elmer-DeWitt the
Time magazine reporter who had recently written a major story on
the net in Time.  The debate between Hughes and Elmer-DeWitt
centers on the latter's acceptance of the assertion by the
National Science Foundation that it was getting out of the
business of funding the network when in reality the NSF is
preparing to spend far more money on the net than ever before.
Hughes actually embarrassed Elmer-DeWitt into coming to the
Editor. We tried to educate him.  He assured us that our message
had been heard.  The next few months should show whether his
public position on these issues has changed.

But, to return to more basic issues, Locke points out that we
should remember that these efforts are made for business and not
public service reasons.  Therefore the channel through which
they travel is critical.  While instituting such conversations
via CompuServe or America Online is certainly better than not
having them at all, the Internet is best suited to such
initiatives, because it interconnects almost everyone.  While
any CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, GEnie or Delphi user can exchange
e-mail with Internet addresses, the far greater population of
Internet users cannot access online forums on these commercial
services without first establishing a customer relationship with
each of them.

A so far missed opportunity, Locke says, is for a well-designed,
well-marketed commercial Internet "commons" rich enough in its
content and organization to attract high traffic from users and
a critical mass of commercial publishers.  (When we asked him to
define more precisely what he meant by this statement, he said
that we should watch what happens over the next several months
with the MecklerWeb project he is about to launch.)

Much earlier on in our discussions, he had pointed out that in
contrast to the Big Boys, truly viable candidates for success
look more like the small but agile players such as O'Reilly &
Associates (with its Global Network Navigator), The Internet
Company (with its Electronic Newsstand), and Mecklermedia (with
its roots in the genuine information world -- through its
library affiliations -- and well established beachhead in
Internet-related publishing and conferences).

World Wide Web Offers New Family of Electronic Publishing Tools

With the advent of the commercial Internet, one of the most
promising directions for development of electronic publishing is
the World Wide Web, with its SGML underpinnings and the host of
client software packages becoming available to serve up its
contents.  These clients include Mosaic from NCSA -- about which
John Markoff recently wrote several dozen column-inches in the
New York Times -- and the Windows-based Cello, developed by Tom
Bruce at Cornell Law's Legal Information Institute.  In
addition  to these fully multimedia-capable clients, there is
also Lynx, a character-based front end that can be used on the
lowliest of hardware and over even relatively slow dial-up
connections. Until a wider market has access to higher-end
platforms and bandwidth, Lynx will play an important role in
Internet publishing.

Locke believes that successful electronic publishers will use
these and similar tools to help companies orchestrate their net
presence in altogether new ways -- not as in-your-face
advertising, but as well structured value-added information
about products, services and issues of interest to specific
markets. By offering clients high-traffic cyber-malls in which
to present themselves to customers, these publishers will also
lower many current hurdles to commercial Internet development.
But success will not be assured to those who simply grasp that
this scenario constitutes a "Good Idea."  As in most new
businesses - especially in emerging industries -- solid
marketing skills will be required to forge the many
relationships necessary to create critical mass: a "publication
space" informationally rich enough to attract hundreds of
thousands of Internet users.

The firms we are describing here will be neither publishers nor
advertising agencies in the traditional usage of those terms,
though they will combine aspects of both.  Paradoxically
perhaps, the thin line between editorial content and commercial
message may begin to blur even more than it already has in the
trade pubs, where claims of objectivity are seldom entirely
believable anyway.  In this new mode, "advertisers" will not
increase their credibility through hyperbole; instead, they will
best serve their business objectives by demonstrating deep
understanding of issues affecting their markets, and helping
readers to make sense of developments in their respective
domains of operation.  As in the Internet as we know it today,
respect will accrue to those who are most helpful -- and that
respect should, in enough cases to count, translate directly
into sales.  Needless to say, caveat emptor will still apply,
but buyers should be more, not less, informed in this scenario
than they are today with a handful of advertising-based hardcopy
publishers telling them what's what.

Locke pointed out to us that he reminded readers in the premiere
issue of Internet Business Report, that A.J. Liebling once
remarked that "Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those
who own one."  It is unfortunate that Liebling, a staunch
defender of the First Amendment, could not have lived to savor
the delicious irony his words have assumed in the context of the
Internet.  The capital outlay of the the Gannets and the
Murdochs is no longer necessary to make this work.  Also
obsolete are the old-guard assumptions they bring to the
"party."  In contrast, the online publishers we end up paying
for "content services" will be those who have understood the
mind and heart of the Internet and have made common cause with
its best interests. Most of those players have yet to emerge,
but will earn their success the hard way -- and deserve every
penny of what they reap.

MecklerWeb - The Culmination of These Ideas

During the six weeks that has elapsed since we first heard his
ideas, Locke has put together a very ambitious and interesting
plan for accomplishing much of what he alludes to here.
Although  he says it is too early announce details, he shared
the following general description of what he intends to
construct.

A fair slice of corporate America is quite turned on about what
it's heard so far about the Internet.  However, when companies
begin to explore how they can achieve even entry-level presence
in this medium, they are confronted with a daunting, and
ultimately discouraging, set of hurdles.  Most firms cannot
afford to devote multiple person-years to investigating how they
can best get up and running on the net.  MecklerWeb will offer a
very different means of becoming a part of the commercial
Internet.

It will be a World-Wide-Web-based commercial service offering
companies Internet presence for a fixed fee.  No previous
knowledge of the Internet will be assumed, though counsel will
be available as to what kind of corporate presence is likely to
be most effective.  Mecklermedia business partners will assure
high-level network capabilities, professional system
maintenance, and fast conversion of electronic or hardcopy
documents (annual reports, to take one example).  Additionally,
since the CPU and storage on which MecklerWeb is run will be
co-located with a major Internet service provider, this
Mecklermedia business partner will provide corporate customers
with any level of physical network connectivity they may
require.

A minimal annual subscription fee will entitle Internet users to
access MecklerWeb and its contents, most of which will be freely
accessible at no additional charge.  Although we understand
Locke's reasons for doing this we urge him to proceed in such a
way as to not raise any barriers in front of individual net
users who may want to see what MecklerWeb offers.  This Web
space will be partitioned by topical domains of interest
moderated and facilitated by professionals in each area.
Existing professional associations will form the nuclei around
which corporations will group themselves (e.g., pharmaceutical
companies around the American Medical Association).  These
associations will share in revenues they help to generate by
attracting commercial sponsors that have a strong interest in
reaching their memberships.  (For example, to name an area close
to the Editor's interest:  a Russian partner could become the
intermediary for Russian businesses or individuals with services
they'd want to present on MecklerWeb.  In addition to data, that
organization would make available one or more talented
moderators to answer user questions and serve as intermediaries
between sources in Russia and users in the rest of the world.)

Joining Locke as systems architect in this effort is Keith
Porterfield. Former Technical Editor of Internet Business
Report, he was also Systems Manager at Avalanche Development
Company, a leading developer of software technology for SGML
(Standard Generalized Markup Language, the international
standard for electronic documents upon which the World-Wide Web
is based.)

Porterfield told us that he would play a catalytic role in the
creation and management of Meckler Web.  "We're not talking
about technological breakthroughs, because we're going to be
using existing systems. The breakthroughs will be cognitive.
Most of the Web servers  on the Net have been built by people
who are essentially programmers and have little experience in
building hypertext. As a result they are difficult to navigate.
With MecklerWeb we're going to be pulling together hypertext
expertise, a wide variety of domain (subject) expertise,  and
commercial interests. It's analogous to architecture, hence my
title.

I may not be doing the working drawings, and I'm not the
electrician, but rather I'm responsible for the grand design and
putting together the team that will erect the building. I don't
get very excited about technology per se, but I do get turned on
by what can be done with it."

We wanted to know why the choice of the Web tool.  He replied:
"There are essentially two ways of approaching network resource
discovery: searching and browsing. In order to search, you have
to know both what you're looking for and how it's going to be
classified. Now that's fine for doing a review of the
literature, but you're not going to create any new connections
that way.  Browsing, on the other hand, is serendipitous -- you
start seeing unexpected relationships between things.  What's
exciting about hypertext, and why we've chosen to use World-Wide
Web, is that it combines the best of both worlds. You can search
and browse within the same system, plus you've got transparent
gateways into all the other Internet tools (ftp, telnet, gopher,
etc.).  Moreover On MecklerWeb, you'll also be tapping into the
knowledge of the domain experts who'll be helping us structure
the information."

"The multimedia aspects of WWW are fascinating, and we'll
certainly be taking advantage of them, but it's critical to keep
in mind that the vast majority of Internet users are sitting in
front of an ASCII-based screen.   Far too many of the current
Web servers are set up in such a way that they're  only useful
to the guy who's running Xmosaic on a Silicon Graphics box with
a T1 Internet pipe. A little design effort up front can make
the  same information available to everybody without sacrificing
the bells and whistles for those with high-end client systems
and high-speed Internet connections."

According to Locke,  "The plan is essentially simple.  It offers
companies "one-stop shopping" for a commercially-oriented space
in which to test the waters of the Internet at low cost and low
risk.  It claims to be unique in only one critical dimension:
its approach to offering a nucleus of experts who can quickly
solve the full range of problems associated with Internet
marketing.  If the efforts we have seen to date represent the
best we are likely to encounter, then the prospects for
commercial Internet development are slim indeed.  The two
criteria that must be satisfied to make this work are corporate
credibility and critical mass.  So far, both remain standing
challenges that MecklerWeb intends to meet head  on.

Interested readers can contact Christopher Locke at
[e-mail].  He is currently negotiating with potential
business partners and actively signing up companies and
associations that will participate in MecklerWeb's projected
mid-year launch.


                         ###


The _COOK Report on Internet -> NREN_ provides in-depth monthly
coverage of the political and policy aspects of the
commercialized Internet and US Federal involvement therein.
>From time to time it includes detailed studies on new
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subscription rates: corporate site license $500; non profit
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