Free Information?

Recently the New York Times announced that they will begin charging for access to news on NYTimes.com. Starting in 2011 users will be able to access a set number of news articles per month and there after will be charged. This announcement has created many discussions about this new policy. I believe that if the information has a value, then it should not be free. We pay for information subscriptions every month including TV cable, home internet connections, and broadband connections on our mobile devices. This pays for the infrastructure to deliver the data and there should also be a price for the actual data as well. The Times new policy will allow them to balance their advertising revenue with access fees.

All publishers have been facing the dilemma of fees for online access for a number of years. The Wall Street Journal has been providing electronic information for years now, even before the internet came along. When the internet made distribution to consumers possible they never even considered not charging for it. In an interesting interview of Gordon Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal details this to Mark Logic CEO, Dave Kellogg.

The important distinction here is that the information has value, so it should not be free. Scholarly publishers have also been charging for access to information for years, first on CD-ROM and now the internet. Certainly the pay-for-access will remain and we will continue to pay for the valuable content that the publishers provide.

Enhanced eBooks

I am somewhat of a Techno Geek so I always look forward to news coming out of the CES (Consumer Electronics Show) each year. As expected, eBook Readers were one of the spotlights at this years' show. Clearly eBooks are catching on, due in large part to the success of the Kindle and the Sony Reader. Being the Geek I am, I was interested in a new reader from Spring Design named the Alex. Its unique design includes 2 screens; one for reading the book and the smaller one for browsing the web. The designers of the Alex are betting that authors will want to integrate the text of the book with other multimedia content and the web through hyper linking from the eBook.

I have been very tempted to order a Kindle in the past year, but have come to the conclusion that I don't need nor want yet another device to carry around. Do I really need another device that reads just like a book. Don't get me wrong, I like reading eBooks. I just don't like the idea of carrying another device. Now with the introduction of readers like the Alex, authors and publishers will have to take another look at enhanced eBooks with video, audio and web links. I only hope that these new enhanced eBooks truly add value to the book and not just multimedia bling.

State of XML

XML has quietly established itself as the foundation of publishing content on the internet and throughout the publishing content workflow. The standard makes it possible for diverse content such as scholarly journals, newspapers and magazines to be distributed, searched, accessed, and linked over the internet. In addition to these materials the various XML schema now available make it possible to utilize XML to publish information in wide-ranging areas such as news syndication, mathematics and financial data. This wealth of unstructured content is now structured and discoverable thanks to these XML standards.

Another vast amount of unstructured data that exists today and affects each of our lives is the mountain of health record data that up until now was available in paper format only. With the leadership of the HL7 (Health Level 7, Inc.) which has created standards for health information, these XML-based markup standards are leading the way to personal health records being available online for all of us in the near future.