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Media Vent
By Bob Sacks
About Bob
Bob Sacks (aka BoSacks) is a printing/publishing industry consultant and president of The Precision Media Group (BoSacks.com). He is also the co-founder of the research company Media-Ideas (Media-Ideas.net), and publisher and editor of a daily international e-newsletter, Heard on the Web. Sacks has held posts as director of manufacturing and distribution, senior sales manager (paper), chief of operations, pressman, circulator and almost every other job this industry has to offer.
Pub Talk
What Exactly is 'Publisher's Own Data?'
Jan 22, 2010Anyone who uses products like Alexa, Compete.com or Quantcast for anything but a friendly way to compare one Web site...
Get Your Head Into the Clouds
I've been thinking lately about the "cloud." Not the clouds in the sky, but rather the workings of "cloud" computing where you store all your data files and software on a distant server on the Internet and not on your laptop or desktop. This is going to be the latest shoe to drop in the way we work and play on the Internet. It is a meaningful and different approach as to how we relate to our machines and our friends.
This next step will happen when Google announces in the very near future the "GDrive." A storage service which could eliminate the need for any physical hard drive -- ever. I have recently been dabbling with the "cloud" and it works very well for me. I travel quite a bit and I use one desktop, two laptops and any other computer that I am near to do my daily newsletter, blogs, e-mails and other assorted columns. I can now write my articles or collected thoughts anywhere and store them in the cloud on Google Docs to be retrievable from any Internet-connected machine. As a reporter/columnist, this makes my life much easier.
My advice is to keep your eye on "cloud" computing. There is no software to buy, no storage or local hard drives to worry about. All you need is an Internet connection and hardware platform. It is worth noting that there are collaboration tools as well. You can share whatever you like and keep private what is worth protecting. I cannot at this time predict what the full impact to the publishing world cloud computing will have, but the fact that it is important is indisputable.
This next step will happen when Google announces in the very near future the "GDrive." A storage service which could eliminate the need for any physical hard drive -- ever. I have recently been dabbling with the "cloud" and it works very well for me. I travel quite a bit and I use one desktop, two laptops and any other computer that I am near to do my daily newsletter, blogs, e-mails and other assorted columns. I can now write my articles or collected thoughts anywhere and store them in the cloud on Google Docs to be retrievable from any Internet-connected machine. As a reporter/columnist, this makes my life much easier.
My advice is to keep your eye on "cloud" computing. There is no software to buy, no storage or local hard drives to worry about. All you need is an Internet connection and hardware platform. It is worth noting that there are collaboration tools as well. You can share whatever you like and keep private what is worth protecting. I cannot at this time predict what the full impact to the publishing world cloud computing will have, but the fact that it is important is indisputable.
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This trend is especially useful to sole practitioners or small enterprises. It is more problematic, at this point, for information enterprises that are desperately trying to overcome decades of fragmented and siloed methods of storing and organizing content in order to preserve or enhance its value.
Enterprises need to find ways to unify their content schemas and production methods so that they can extract greater audience value from their cumulative efforts.
Technically how this is managed, stored, produced, and distributed is less important than that it be done in a way that increases value to an audience, and profit to the enterprise.
Whether in front or behind the firewall, tech solutions are evolving that require as much attention as content stewardship and front office financial management.
There is always software to buy, systems to engineer, storage to manage, and technical risks/costs to balance. The cloud doesn't change that for the enterprise.