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
Want to Know What's Really Going to Be the Magazine Killer?
Aug 25, 2010If you're spending more than 50 percent of your digital development resources on website functionality, stop!...
The Digital Market
Single Copy: The Sexiest Thing Going
Aug 5, 2010In the world of selling magazines to customers, newsstand is the unpredictable relative, the circulation no one wanted...
Byte Back
For Advertisers, Will QR Codes Blend the Print-Mobile Experience?
Jun 9, 2010Ignoring Harold Ramis’ (playing Dr. Egon Spengler) dire warning: "Don't cross the streams," advertisers are daily crossing the...
Get Your Head Into the Clouds
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.
Companies Mentioned:
 |
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.