Skip to main content

Context is King!

By
John Blossom's post on traditional portal strategies resonated with my recent thinking about aggregation sites (Shorelines: portals Passe). I made his post into a silly slogan for my subject line, but he is making a good case that even in the "piling things up" business, there are potential problems with actually piling them up.
Reading it, for a minute, I had a pang about Tizra. You might be able to read it as saying that it's not worth building your own content collection at all, but I don't think that is the practical point for publishers. I think that the notion of stressing context and tuning product offerings to user groups is exactly what we enable with our product and content management tools. You need to have a branded presentation of your content to all your different audiences, and make every audience an offer that they want to buy. That takes a lot of flexibility, which is what we've concentrated on. That flexibility should be on tap, not the endpoint of a 6-figure software development project, and control should be with publisher, not the vendor, so that you can make lots of offers and keep software development out of the picture.
Any branding, content organization, or product definition change that you have to rely on someone else to make is a potential lost opportunity, especially in a world where context is king.
... Of course this doesn't mean you shouldn't hire a designer, just that all of your communication loops should be as short and non-technical as possible.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

More Eggs in More Baskets: How the AWS Outage Made Us Stronger

By
Like a lot of web companies, we learned some hard lessons from the Amazon Web Services outage of a few weeks ago.   We didn't lose a single byte of data, but we resolved never again to put one service provider—no matter how large and diversified—in a position where its failure could cause a serious interruption in service for our customers. As promised, we 've now finished setting up automated data backup and redundant server infrastructure in facilities maintained by a completely separate company:  Softlayer Technologies .  Like AWS, Softlayer maintains the high security and reliability standards we require, including SAS 70 Type II Certification and PCI DSS Compliance.  And their Texas location adds geographic diversity to the Virginia and California regions Amazon gives us access to. This is in no way the end of our efforts to improve reliability and security.  We'll keep refining backup, failover and recovery processes to ensure not only that our customers' dat
Post a Comment
Read more

The Satisfactions of Matchmaking

By
As a company with a newly launched service we're naturally looking for partners whose services complement ours, and who can recommend us to their customers. At least that's how we assumed it would work. But recently we were in the fortunate position of being able to turn the tables by playing the matchmaker between Bibliovault, a leading provider of highly complementary digital conversion and archiving services, and one of our newest customers, New York Botanical Garden Press. Founded in 1896, The New York Botanical Garden Press has one of the largest publishing programs of any botanical garden in the world, and, as you can imagine, unique print titles waiting for online exposure. Tizra had already been accepting bulk transfers of book content from Bibliovault on behalf of Duke University Press, making the uploading and data management process seamless. So when The NYBG Press talked to us about their need for a reliable partner to facilitate print and digital distributi
Post a Comment
Read more

Take-Aways From The Digital Einstein Papers Project - a Tizra Webinar

By
Learn How Princeton University Press + Tizra Collaborated to Create a Revolutionary, Researcher-Friendly UI For Complex Online Publications!  Join us Friday, December 15 at 1pm ET for a quick, behind-the-scenes webinar tour of Tizra's new search technology developed for the Digital Einstein Papers and learn...  How hybrid search technology helps users find relevant content faster.  Deep search tools that uncover the value within large, complex publications.  How to manage the metadata within your publications.  This webcast focuses on  THE DIGITAL EINSTEIN PAPERS – a collaborative project powered by the Tizra platform that enables readers to experience the writings of Albert Einstein in unprecedented ways.  A newly developed search tool improves discoverability by allowing users to perform hybrid searches of full-text and structured metadata across volumes containing thousands of articles, letters, lectures and other writings, with easy navigation between original
Post a Comment
Read more