Screenshot from Semantico's Dictionarium app

Semantico’s Dictionarium app is available for download from the app store now (short link at http://bit.ly/dictionarium)

We’re really pleased with how quickly we managed to get this live in the app store. The app was approved on first submission – a testament to our internal QA.

Creating a dictionary has given us the perfect opportunity to refine a number of important concepts we use when developing mobile apps.

Throughout the design process we’ve taken care to optimise the display for both the iPhone and the new iPad devices. Delivering an app for both devices is not only essential for publishers, who don’t want to develop the same content twice, but also for end users who don’t want the complication of downloading different apps in order to access the same content.

We’ve built the app to take us through some of the core concepts that publishers will need when taking their content to mobile devices, whatever the subject matter. The essential functionality of Dictionarium is that of a search engine with an integrated e-content reader. Text with hyperlinks allows the user to navigate through the the content and jump from one concept to another.

Semantico’s bespoke publishing platforms deal with large amounts of complex information: putting together the dictionary has allowed us to create and deliver an app with a large data set behind it of 107,757 headwords and 123,742 definitions.

Data compression and application speed optimisations are essential to create a great end user experience and an app that publishers can be proud of. By compressing the database we’ve halved the size of the app from 105MB to 51MB.

The Dictionary is designed so that the main way users find the information they need is through search. Search functionality is important for all online publications. Users expect to be able to find the information they want through keyword searching at the very least, and there’s been no problem with implementing this in the iPhone / iPad environment.

After a successful project it’s pleasing to have had 2,000 downloads in the first week of the app going live. Take a look at the work we’ve done – and make it 3,000! http://bit.ly/dictionarium

This will be good news for those librarians who are concerned that the figures publishers provide after the first year of compliance might be inaccurate. An annual audit should ensure that no software errors suddenly appear.

However this will be bad news for those wanting to see costs kept down in a sector which is already hugely challenged by budget cuts. Publishers must bear the extra costs of the annual audit, and it’s hard to imagine that these will not be passed on to libraries in some way.

The audit must be carried out by a professional organisation recognised by the COUNTER project. This includes ABC Electronic in the UK, who offer a fixed price for this service. I contacted ABC Electronic to find out their prices but I did not recieve a reply.

It’s hard to imagine a worse time for this change. Although the financial impact will be fairly small, costs and budgets are being squeezed from all sides at the moment. Lets hope there are no more changes like this in the pipeline.

Update: After I published this ABC Electronic saw this blog post and called me to apologise for not replying to my email enquiry, and I subsequently received pricing details for the COUNTER compliance auditing service they provide.

All of a sudden, a development that for too long appeared to be stalled by the chicken-and-egg problem of how website owners could be induced to tag their metadata looks to be in imminent danger of going seriously mainstream.

Marketers, it seems likely, rather than academics, will lead the charge to the VW campers from here on in. And in all probability, publishers and information providers who aren’t already waxing their boards in preparation for this particular wave of technologic change could risk being left behind as it steadily takes on tsunami proportions and thunders beachwards.

Google, Facebook, Twitter embrace semantic technologies

A recent article in New Scientist (subscription required) described how the giants of search and social media are making moves to actualize the semantic web.

1. Google’s recent acquisition of Metaweb’s Freebase, an open-source repository of structured data – or ‘entity graph’ as the company styles it – containing more than 12 million entities, will potentially enable much smarter searching. Entries in Freebase are tagged in such a way that machines can ‘understand’ what they are about and make meaningful connections between them. At the simplest level, computer searches would, for instance, be able to distinguish between David Mitchell the British Novelist and David Mitchell the British Actor, Comedian and Writer (not to mention David Mitchell the Tory politician, David Mitchell the retired American ice dancer, etc. etc.).
2. Twitter has recently released information about its new ‘annotations’ feature, which allows users to annotate a tweet with structured metadata. A tweet about a new book release, for example, might let you link straight to a ‘look inside’ book widget or the Amazon page for the paperback. Launch of a test version is apparently imminent.
3. Facebook is making changes to its Open Graph protocol that have a semantic element. Website owners can add a “like” button to their site, along with semantic tags that tell Facebook’s servers what the page is about. According to Facebook: ‘based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed’. So when a Facebook user clicks the ‘like’ button on a publisher’s site – relating to a particular title, or author, perhaps – a link is established between that site and their Facebook profile.

Advertising goes semantic

Any change in the way Google works has major implications for marketers. If using an entity graph changes the way Google delivers its search results significantly, the dark art of Search Engine optimization will have to respond and weighty volumes of SEO best practice to be revised.

But even more wide-ranging changes will have to be made to practice around online marketing, with micro-writing and metadata tagging becoming ever more critical aspects of the marketer’s art, as websites lose their traffic to Google’s interface, which now not only provides a place for people to enter search terms, but also a place for them to read the answers, with no further click-through taking place.

New Scientist speculates, however, that it is in the Facebook and Twitter changes that the main attraction of these developments may lie for advertisers. With the major players in social media on board, apps are already beginning to be written that can exploit the potential of semantically tagged data.

And – oh dear – here comes another water-based metaphor: mainstream adoption is likely to open the floodgates for such third-party development. This is because it solves the chicken-and-egg incentive problem of how you get website owners to tag their content. There is a clear incentive for any content owner to tag their content appropriately, providing structured metadata, if it means targeted, relevant access to Facebook’s 500 million plus user base.

Why should you care about this?

The implications for publishers are obvious. The opportunity exists, through semantic technologies, to massively improve the discoverability of their content online. But they also present a threat. Those who move fastest stand to gain a march on their competitors, while those who lag could well miss out.

This throws down yet another gauntlet to a traditionally conservative industry that may well feel it already has quite a bit on its plate to deal with. Even more reason, then, for publishers to embrace the world of online in a concerted fashion, if they are to reap the benefits and stay ahead of the competition.

Surf’s up!

If you’re investigating the use of semantic technologies, talk to Semantico first. We offer a Semantic Web consultancy service focused on helping publishers improve the discoverability of their content using the evolving semantic web. Contact us today.

Publishers know they have to innovate to survive in the jungle of online publishing, with the big beasts of technology such as Amazon, Google and Apple all too willing and able, it seems, to disintermediate traditional publishers out of existence.

But two conflicting models of innovation seem to present themselves. One is open, data-driven and responsive, the other more ‘walled garden’ and perhaps even hieratic in character. How should publishers decide which to follow?

This was one of the key points discussed at the inaugural Semantico Symposium, held recently in London to discuss implications of the shift to mobile for publishers and information providers. An invited audience of publishing industry leaders debated the issues under Chatham House rules, covering the following three themes:

• Devices and technology
• Business models
• Future strategy options

It was a stimulating event with a high calibre guest list, delegates attending from organisations including Oxford University Press, Nature Publishing Group, Macmillan Education, Wiley-Blackwell, CrossRef, CABI, BSI Group and the Institute of Engineering and Technology. To do justice to the discussion, we’ve reported it over three blog posts. This final post is on the theme of future strategy options.

Listen to your users

Publishers from a traditional print background have one notable advantage over the tech companies that dominate the online information environment, which is that having been around a lot longer, they know their market very well. As a result, they know a lot about the needs of their readers and their institutional users.

Added to this hoard of existing knowledge about their specific niche in publishing is the wealth of data now available to publishers through web analytics. Sales and attitudinal research garnered through focus groups and the like are no longer the only source of market information. Customer behaviour online can be studied in minute detail, across large data sets.

Amazon, the online retail behemoth, which from its inception has had the stated aim of being the world’s most customer-focused company, has made a business out of data mining at large scale. However, Amazon is a generalist. Publishers benefit from highly specific knowledge of their individual niches, a knowledge whose specificity is growing all the time. Surely it makes sense for publishers to play to their strengths by setting their sites on the customer interface, pressing home their advantage of greater focus and beating the behemoths of the tech industry at their own game?

Several around the table at our symposium were clearly of this mind, believing that the roots of true innovation lie in researching customer behaviour and attitudes ever more effectively.

The online culture of openness and its threats

If companies can expect more transparency from their customers online, the reverse also holds true. Publishers must operate with a greater deal of openness on the internet than they might previously have been used to.

This is not an ideological point but a practical one. Unpacking extra value from content may well necessitate making it more freely available, at a lower level of granularity and in an unredacted form – particularly where those information resources have the character of data rather than text. In order that a company can benefit from the highly connected nature of the web it might have to be prepared to let the user use that data in any way they want to; e.g. third-party use of data for mash-ups, open APIs, semantic web etc.

Guardian News & Media was cited as a company trying to build a whole new business online from the data they gather in the course of their normal activities, making it openly available in many different ways for third party use. Clearly, this is a very different view of the online world from that taken by The Times Online, whose experimental retreat behind the paywall is being watched with some interest by The Guardian as well as its many other competitors.

What’s the big deal?

In the academic world too there has been a call for more openness – openness in the way publishers deal with their institutional users. Librarians facing the prospect of further, deeper funding cuts are rebelling against the ‘big deal’, with confidentiality clauses in big-deal contracts often leading to big differences in what universities are paying for their information resources. This tends to make subscriptions prices dependant, to a large extent, on the individual library’s negotiating skills.  At least one of our delegates felt that this was unfair, as in his view, librarians do not have these skills.

This type of practice is not uncommon in the offline world, and no doubt many would see some of Amazon’s online exploitation of its virtual monopoly position as equally invidious. Both seem light years away from the more idealistic tenor of Jeff Bezos’s formula for customer-centric innovation:

‘There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you’re good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.’

Apple not in the buggy whip business

Not everybody agrees with working backwards. A counter to the call to watch the user in this way is the reflection that best practice keeps you alive, but doesn’t push you forward.

Apple, for instance, has innovated not by giving its customers what they want but by inventing new, cool things for consumers that they didn’t know they needed until they saw them. When this works, so cool are the things they produce; so pleasingly are they designed and packaged, that once consumers actually do set eyes on them, they quickly find them essential, must-have items. Soon they’re wondering what they ever did without their iPod/iPhone/iPad.

Apple has achieved its success in innovation not by watching and following customers, but by being one step ahead of them.  ‘You can’t go out and ask people,’ says Steve Jobs famously, ‘what’s the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse.’’’

Apple, allegedly, does not do market research. ‘We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.’

So who’s right?

Opinion was split around the table, with the term ‘Apple Fanboy’ (apologies to all female fans of the company) surfacing as the pejorative of choice – as in ‘I don’t want to sound like an Apple Fanboy, but …’

Others felt there was no inherent contradiction between the two approaches, and that they were both perfectly valid depending on exactly what you were trying to invent and what sort of company you were. A consensus view seemed to be that there has to be a balance between inspiration and observation.

Conclusion

One thing this part of discussion highlighted was how big a culture change publishing faces in coping with the raft of new competitive pressures brought about by the move online. Many around our table were among the vanguard of those bringing innovation to the business of delivering content online – but the picture over all is of an industry still struggling slightly to get off its back foot.

New understandings, new ways of working – and, to a degree, a whole new language – have to be taken on board. We hope that in some way this symposium has contributed to that effort.

Search should be clairvoyant: like a magical librarian who somehow correctly guesses what it was you were looking for; offering it up within a fraction of a second, along with a wealth of additional filtering options and navigational possibilities.

Without wishing to destroy the magic, here are my seven steps to improving findability:

1. Define what relevancy means in this context

Relevancy is a difficult thing to pin down. A set of search results is more or less relevant on the basis of how well the information retrieved meets the need of the user. Arriving at a definition of relevancy therefore means doing some fairly detailed analysis of your users and content. Some BIG questions need answering.
Is recall or precision more important? How do you go about catering to the competing needs of different user groups?

Clearly, discussions need to be had and decisions made. During this process it will be worth considering a range of scenarios where you might like to boost certain results over others:

• Field weighting
  e.g. results within titles are more relevant
• Recency of data
  e.g. results from recent data are more relevant
• Search phrase density
  e.g. results which contain the most number of uses of the search phrase are the most relevant
• Search phrase term proximity
  e.g. results where multiple terms are nearer to each other are more relevant
• Records which have been bookmarked, cited or linked to
  e.g. results which have already proved themselves to be useful to other users are more relevant

2. Provide lots of options, not just lots of results

Findability is not just about returning relevant results. A good search implementation will also provide lots of additional further options to the user, which they can use to hone in on exactly what they were searching for. Examples of this include providing:

• Meaningful facets through which the results can be filtered
• ‘Did you mean…?’ option – for alternative spellings
• ‘Users who searched for x also searched y’ option – for related searches
• Clustering of search results, e.g. by topic
• Sort options
• Hit-highlighting – to highlight the phrase terms in context

3. Enriching the data

Data not only has to be marked up consistently and correctly, it can often benefit from some enhancement before it goes online. In practice, this can mean additional classification processing or entity extraction through text mining. The goal is to ensure the content itself is rich enough to support the sort of advanced searching and filtering that we want to build within the site.

4. Measure relevancy

It’s worth setting up some relevancy metrics to monitor how search is performing over time. A good method is Mean Reciprocal Rank. To implement this you track click-throughs to search results, giving each click-through to a first result a score of 1, each click-through to a second result a score of 1/2, each click-through to a third result a score of 1/3, and so on. Adding all these together will give you the ability to track an overall relevancy score, with a higher score meaning that top links are performing better.

It is also a good idea to monitor searches that return zero results. A monthly list should be reviewed in case there are some sensible search queries in there which will have resulted in user frustration.

Regular reviews of search analytics are a vital part of ensuring that search is still performing well as the site and its content change over time.

5. Improving the user’s query

Normalising the user’s search phrase (and indeed the search index data) can help to improve findability. The following are all ways in which you do this:

• Converting all letters to lower or upper case
• Removing punctuation, accent marks or diacritics
• Expanding abbreviations
• Removing stopwords or “too common” words

Recall might also be improved upon in certain scenarios by converting the users query into a fuzzy query (to return results for close matches to the search terms in order of how well they match). It may also be worth expanding the user’s search to include synonyms using a thesaurus (to return results where matches have been found for the same or similar concept).

In these ways it is possible to enhance the input query before it has even been sent to the search engine.

6. Tuning the site for third party findability

Lots of users (yes, perhaps even MOST) start their search using a third party search engine. It is therefore essential that the site is Search Engine Optimised, meaning lots of quality in-bound links, the use of semantic markup, micro formats and much, much more.

It may also be worth creating an Open Search API – so that third party use of the site’s search facility is possible.

7. Finding also means re-finding

There is a very good chance that users will want to re-use the entries that satisfy their information need. Consequently, improving fundability should also mean making it as easy as possible for users to re-find what they found before. Helping users in this way can be done with features such as:

• Bookmarks
• Saved searches
• Direct exporting to citation software

So there you have it: seven steps to findability. It is a BIG topic and I’m certain to have missed out important considerations. Please do feel free to publicly rub my nose in some of them by responding below!

Some publishers choose to adapt an existing off-the-shelf journals platform to meet their needs for consolidation. However there can be technical problems inherent in this approach.

In a recent post to the CrossTech blog, publishing guru Geoffrey Bilder analysed the issues facing CrossRef members wishing to use the DOI system for non-journal content. Geoff’s analysis holds good for more than just the CrossRef DOI system, so I’ve taken it as a starting point below.

Reference publications and databases introduce fundamental challenges to any existing system designed around the journal article content model. These challenges fall into two areas:

• Structure. Reference works and databases can have complex nested substructures and there is a need for granular identification of these content substructures along with a mechanism for recording the relationship between them (e.g. “part-of” relationships between sub-section, section and chapter divisions, as well as “previous-next” navigational relationships between entries).
• Versioning. Unlike most journals, many reference books and databases change over time. To properly support archiving and perpetual access business models, there is a need to identify and maintain previous versions of reference content.

Both of these areas require support from the core architecture of any publishing system; without such support publishers have to resort to ugly work-arounds such as coercing all content into journal-article-shaped chunks. Such work-arounds fundamentally compromise the end-user experience and ultimately risk devaluing the publisher brand.

Furthermore the technology stack commonly used to build a typical journals system does not necessarily provide a good base to build support for the structural and versioning requirements outlined above. This is because the mixture of technologies used tends to match closely the typical structure of a journal article.

In an article the metadata and content are two separable parts which map nicely to a relational metadata store (typically SQL or RDF) plus a full text retrieval engine (Lucene/Solr, Autonomy, etc). Although the full text may contain semantic annotations such as chemical or gene markup, the homogenous nature of the content means that a single metadata schema can be devised which will fit the whole collection well.

However, when publishers want to add non journal content to the system this simple separation of content and metadata will no longer suffice. Reference and book content is much more demanding in terms of hierarchical structure and navigation. Many hierarchical structures in reference books cannot easily (if at all) be modelled using conventional relational metadata; these structures fit much more naturally and easily into native XML. Trying to create a single relational metadata schema capable of modelling all hierarchies across the full variety of reference and book content that publishers produce is an impossible task.

The structural problems of adding books and reference content to systems designed to separate full text and metadata can be broken down into two distinct areas:

1. Fragile schema problem. The problem of updating conventional database schemas as requirements (and the real world) change is often called the fragile schema problem. Because the design of the database must be fixed at the outset, any changes to the system, to accommodate extra metadata, new content types or changes to business process become costly and risk-laden. This is because assumptions about the structure or schema of a database tend to be hard-wired into the structure of all the software written to talk to the database.
2. Divorce of metadata from full text. Systems which use RDF or SQL databases for metadata suffer from a fundamental structural weakness as it is normally impossible to issue queries which examine both the full text and metadata within a single request. RDF suffers particularly in this respect as it has no support for XML mixed content; full text search plays no part in the RDF world view. Furthermore, such systems also often require content to be ‘loaded’ into several different internal content stores (e.g. once for full text index, once to ‘strip’ metadata to the RDF/SQL store). This builds a structural inefficiency into the system as content must be found, queried and updated in multiple locations.

When we design the architecture for our publishing platforms we like to think hard about these problems. Often we conclude that XML database technology (such as MarkLogic Server) provides the best solution because it allows content to be stored and queried in a single place. Using an XML database removes the artificial split between content and metadata inherent in conventional journals systems and allows us to build search queries across an entire collection of content. This in turn helps to drive discovery and usage by building deeper links between related content and combining and assembling content from an entire collection in new ways.

However we also realise that different clients have different needs and that it is critical to prioritise meeting business goals ahead of making specific technology choices. The motivation for our overall technical architecture choice in a given project is simple; to learn the lessons of past systems and ensure we choose the best possible technology basis for any new system. Understanding the problems publishers have faced in trying to adapt legacy journals systems to the more challenging world of books and reference helps us to make the most appropriate technology choices for future publishing platforms.

Publishers must widen their frame of reference in order fully to understand the change in business models that taking their content online might necessitate – looking beyond traditional pricing models and text formats within their particular field of publishing.

This was one of the key finding of the inaugural Semantico Symposium, held recently in London to discuss implications of the shift to mobile for publishers and information providers. An invited audience of publishing industry leaders debated the issues under Chatham House rules, covering the following three themes:

• Devices and technology
• Business models
• Future strategy options

It was a stimulating event with a high calibre guest list, delegates attending from organisations including Oxford University Press, Nature Publishing Group, Macmillan Education, Wiley-Blackwell, CrossRef, CABI, BSI Group and the Institute of Engineering and Technology. To do justice to the discussion, we’re reporting it over three blog posts. This post is on the theme of business models.

Business as usual?

Publishers putting their content online find a very different commercial environment from that which they are used to in offering their physical, print products. However in some respects, the issues with online are not always that unique, though publishers often need to look outside their own particular niches sometimes to see this – even where mobile is concerned.

One thing that is often held up as a major disruptor is the ‘freebie’ culture of the internet – the widespread expectation that information should be free; an attitude that is opportunistic in some quarters, profoundly ideological in others. Though there are obvious problems with this from a publisher’s point of view, the other side of the coin is that the interconnected, globalised nature of the web offers unprecedented reach for content that is easily discoverable and not sequestered behind a paywall. Mobile holds out the promise of intensifying this reach, since more people have mobile phones than computers. Free presents big opportunities as well as big threats.

How this trade-off between reach and revenue protection will work itself out is currently being watched with great interest in the news publishing market, with Murdoch’s Times Online leading the charge for keeping content behind the paywall. A wide variety of subscription models are being experimented with online, and mobile has slightly upped the ante here through the way it enables micro-payments (fairly seamlessly in the case of Apple). Apps are a micro-payment system, looked at from a certain point of view, and the fact that many apps are offered in both premium and free versions points towards a pricing model that will be familiar to many. Freemium/premium models, if they can be made to work, offer big opportunities for marketing, while safeguarding the value of core content – and in doing this many publishers will feel themselves on (reasonably) familiar ground.

As someone who has recently upgraded his shredder to a more industrial model partly to deal with the quantity of publisher offers that fall through the letterbox on a daily basis, I can testify to the many and various ways in which publishers deploy free and cut-price offers offline.

Free trials, forced free trials, freemium, premium, tiered subscription – all of these physical-world species of offer have their online equivalents in the age of the app; and seeing this point of similarity perhaps provides a more useful way of looking at the whole ‘free’ debate. In the end, it’s a case of plus ça change, perhaps.

Who pays?

One result of the internet’s ‘freebie’ culture, in consumer markets at least, has been a drive towards funding content in different ways, notably through advertising-driven models (Google being the most successful example, of course).

Clearly this is not going to wash in more specialized areas of publishing such as learned journals, but even there we have see something of a ferment, with the Open Access movement proposing a move to an ‘author pays’ model. Although this has failed to make serious inroads to date, nevertheless the issue of ‘who pays’ continues to be a live one in academic publishing, where many markets are three-cornered, involving institutions (or organisations) and end-users as well as authors. At least one of our symposium guests felt that in their view underlying market structures were not in revolution, despite changes in the way people pay for content: ‘basically, the same people end up paying.’

There’s no doubt that online does provide different ways to pay. It has enabled the Big Deal, still a dominant model in institutional sales, although coming under some pressure. Easier micropayments, and more sophisticated access management, hold the promise of a more varied and flexible future for pricing models – even though it is a future in which publishers are going to have to stay on their toes in order to protect the value of their content.

Greater convenience and sophistication in the way content is paid for may well be necessary, however, in order to cope with the way the content itself keeps threatening to transmogrify.

iPad and incunabula

Printed works in physical formats – be they monographs, journals, dictionaries or whatever – owe their form to purely physical constraints that do not obtain online. Why do we turn pages rather than unroll a scroll when we read a book? Because the codex, derived from the wax-covered tablet used by the Romans, supplanted the scroll sometime around the sixth century AD by virtue of its superior compactness, sturdiness, ease of reference and economy (i.e. it used both sides of the paper). On an electronic device, the choice to scroll or click to a new page is dictated only by latency, a restriction that is fast disappearing as bandwidth increases, so that eventually that choice will be a pure design decision.

As this point approaches, with the launch of the iPad, it seems likely that we are seeing new hybrids and evolutionary experiments in the form of text – the equivalent of incunabula.

Though e-books currently mimic the conventions of the printed book, it is not always so clear with other types of text how helpful it really is for a book to preserve its physical-world form. An educational textbook, for instance, looks a lot like a magazine. Would it make sense to format them as such when they end up on iPads? Similarly a learned journal can resemble a database in its essential form more than it does a magazine. With a proliferation of devices with which to access electronic information products, including smartphones, e-readers, touchscreen tablets, netbooks and the (now) old-fashioned desktop, will the device we buy end up being dictated by the type of content we want to access on it?

The choice also exists, with certain reference works, for example, to turn a book into a software application that answers specific questions or helps the user through a specific task in real time, such as diagnosing a medical condition – or finding the nearest Michelin star restaurant – or choosing the wheat crop to grow in a particular type of soil. In this new future, some books will really have very little reason to be books anymore.

New forms, new models

Clearly, new and changed content formats are likely to create a need for new pricing models, and by extension for new business models. But they also put pressure on the traditional fault lines that divide one niche of the publishing industry from another. It is a source of frustration for some ‘techies’ in the online publishing industry that these lines are still so rigidly drawn; that there is a monographs industry and a journals industry, for instance, and never the twain shall meet.

This seems all the more counter-productive as two things are clear from the discussion above. Firstly, that there is a lot to be learned from one area of publishing watching closely what is going on in another, since many of the issues being faced online are common ones for all information providers of whatever stamp. And secondly that the old divisions will increasingly lose meaning as terms like ‘monograph’ and ‘journal’ gradually become irrelevant to the way that information is presented and consumed online.

The debate continues

Tune in next time for a further report from the Symposium, as we move to discuss future strategy.

Queue for the launch of iPhone 4.0 in Brighton

Clearly not everybody knows about ‘The Apple Effect’. While I was taking this picture outside the O2 shop in Brighton, a bystander asked me what the queue was for. I told him it was for the new Apple iPhone 4.0, which is launched today in the UK. ‘So is that free or what?’ was his incredulous reply.

Er, no. There is no free lunch – not this year anyway – as George Osbourne, the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer was at pains to tell us this Tuesday, though perhaps not in so many words. In tune with the new spirit of austerity and restraint we also learned recently that O2 is putting a cap on data downloads, replacing its previous ‘unlimited’ data contracts, for all new and renewed iPhone contracts. Though the download limits are fairly generous, those eager early adopters queuing up for their new iPhone’s will be getting a marginally less good deal than iPhone users have enjoyed previously. Although they will of course enjoy a more richly-featured handset.

O2, the first network operator to have offered the iPhone in the UK has introduced the measure following serious overload problems in 2009 that brought the network to its knees, necessitating a costly emergency upgrade.

It seems that the runaway success of smartphones and smartphone apps is putting serious strains on network infrastructure. And the situation is only going to get worse, with sales of smartphones, internet-enabled mobile devices and mobile apps all on steep upward sales curves.

If O2’s data cap catches on with other network operators it could be one to watch. Together with the Digital Economy Act’s punitive measures on illicit downloading, which if they remain unaltered look likely to seriously curtail the spread of wi-fi coverage, limits to mobile data could seriously slow the growth of the mobile internet, which is currently forecast to pass internet access from desktop computing as early as 2013.

John Scott, Earl of Eldon

Rushed into law in the dying days of the Labour government, The Digital Economy Act has been described by Guardian Columnist Cory Doctorow as establishing an unprecedented realm of web censorship in Britain.

This is not what the Act seeks to do, ostensibly at least, but it is seen as an inevitable if perhaps unintended consequence of a badly framed, hurriedly passed piece of legislation.  The Act has many aims, not least among which is combating illegal
file-sharing.

Critics have pointed out that Sweden’s similar attempt to legislate in this area recently suffered an epic fail due to that pesky law of unintended consequences. An initial 30% dip in internet traffic was followed within months by a surge to yet higher levels– only now much of the traffic was encrypted and untraceable, presenting the authorities with even bigger problems than before.

In researching previous blog posts on the history of copyright, I came across an interesting earlier example of the law of unintended consequences leading to outcomes directly opposite to those which had been intended, in the area of copyright and censorship.

Enter Lord Eldon.

Lord Eldon was Britain’s Lord Chancellor between 1801 and 1827, and also took on himself the role of ‘Licensor of the Press and Censor’. This was an edgy time for the British establishment, with the fall-out from French Revolution to contend with abroad, and the Romantic one at home providing a source of sedition and revolt in print. Though his ardour in attempting to suppress ‘pernicious’ literary works could not be doubted, Eldon’s efforts often proved counter-productive. Three times during his career, efforts to censor works by Southey, Shelley and Byron backfired on him badly.

How censorship helped the pirates

The first of these disasters occurred when Southey, who by 1817 had renounced his early revolutionary sympathies and was courting respectability as poet laureate, attempted to suppress publication of Wat Tyler, an early unpublished play of radical taint. Southey sued the publisher for breach of copyright. Unfortunately however, because both the poet and his counsel chose to characterise the work in question as wicked and ‘injurious’, Lord Eldon felt unable to grant them the injunction they wanted. The rationale behind Eldon’s decision was that if he, as censor, judged the work to be pernicious, he could not grant it the necessary license for publication: it was therefore unlawful and could not be afforded copyright protection.

With no copyright to protect the work, the pirates had a field day. The resultant sales for the play were spectacular: Wat Tyler outsold all Southey’s other works combined by two or three times.

On very much the same point of principle Eldon went on to perform the same service for Shelley’s Queen Mab and Byron’s Don Juan, both of which subsequently enjoyed huge readerships. ’By withholding intellectual property protection from books he considered pernicious, he was in theory penalising their authors. In practice, though, the chief effect of his rulings was to ensure that the books he disliked were given a huge circulation.’ (Ian Gilmour, LRB). Despite the absurdity of this situation being pointed out to him, Eldon stuck to his guns. He certainly wasn’t the last public guardian of morality to find himself acting as an inadvertant publicist for the very works he was trying to suppress.

Conclusion

This parable shouldn’t be read as a counsel of despair. Printed works certainly need copyright protection, but it has to be done properly. Legislators as well as lawyers know that the law of unintended consequences is a perverse and irritatingly pervasive thing, and one to whose bad effects rushed-though legislation such as the Digital Economy Act tend to be particularly prone.

It may be a while before any of these bad effects are seen. Writing in April, The Register’s Andrew Orlowski provided a user’s timetable to the Digital Economy Act describing how it could work itself out. He doesn’t expect any technical measure to be put in force until Spring 2012. Sooner or later however, it’s a fair bet that the legion of bloggers and columnists who have predicted disaster are going to get their I-told-you-so moment.

Sources

The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period by William St Clair
Cambridge, 765 pp, £90.00, July 2004, ISBN 0 521 81006 X

Out of Bounds
Ian Gilmour: why Wordsworth sold a lot less than Byron 20 January 2005
Article in the London Review of Books (subscription needed)

Digital Economy Act: This means war by Cory Doctorow
Guardian.co.uk

Originally held as a means for informing customers about the technical development of Semantico’s products, the event has since grown to become a forum for knowledge sharing and debate about a wide range of issues around online publishing.

S3UG 2010 focused primarily on project management with a secondary theme on the growing importance of mobile devices and the future of publishing.

If you were unable to attend but would like to view the slides from S3UG or were present but would like to do it all again, we have provided a link for you to view the slides for each of the talks below.

From all the Semantico team, we look forward to seeing you at next year’s S3UG Event.

Richard Padley – Keynote and company update

Gareth Bish: Business Models

Liam Sheerin – Agile Development

Andrew Grimes: Waterfall vs Agile – Project Methodologies

Richard Padley – Choices in mobile content delivery