Publishers and advertising agencies have a very difficult challenge ahead as traditional “horizontal” media like newspapers, TV channels and magazines see their traditional demographics and advertising revenue streams fragmented by the increasing preference of consumers for online access and the huge presence of Google eroding their audiences and potential future revenues.

Perhaps they should remember the words of Sun Tsu, who once said “When the enemy is too strong to attack directly, then attack something he holds dear. Know that in all things he cannot be superior. Somewhere there is a gap in the armour, a weakness that can be attacked instead.” Google’s major strength – the clean search box and the ease of use, commoditised ad revenues, perhaps masks its principal weakness. As media content and advertising revenues fragment to serve thousands and thousands of “vertical” online communities based on lifestyle or profession, Google may suddenly seem standardised, commoditised and lacking a sense of unique community. Is Google becoming Wal-Mart, while vertical communities may prefer Harrods?

Whilst “horizontal” media companies are similar to supermarkets, specialist professional “vertical” publishers are very specific in serving niche communities with totally relevant content and requirements. However, the publisher’s principal operating difficulty in becoming adaptive to this asymmetric Web 2.0 opportunity is that most tend to run each of their print, exhibition and online titles/businesses as separate profit and loss items on their balance sheet. As a by-product the vast majority tend not to have a centralised IT infrastructure or the human IT skill sets to manage a large scale data centre or web spidering facility – the prerequisites needed to datamine and aggregate open source, user generated and blog content to create vertical slices of the Web that are relevant for their audiences. Publishers will also need to integrate this content into the online extensions of their print brands and thereby allowing advertisers the opportunity to target high value communities. In addition, the datamining, crawling and hosting to identify relevant open source content will also need to be a continual process due to the continual growth of user generated and open source content.

Convera have two very large data centres, an extensive web spidering capability and a web index. Convera are now partnering with a significant number of specialist B2B publishers to create a range of vertical websites for specific professional communities. The first example of this is Searchmedica.com with UBM.

In building the deep vertical search portals, the key is to reach into the specific professional community in a number of ways. First, you can combined the trade publisher’s knowledge and contacts in the profession with community appeals that engage the specific audience in a way that general search cannot, and also by taking special care to use the taxonomies common to the targeted profession in organizing search results so that the user feels more at home and among peers. Building a good vertical engine can be costly and time consuming, and getting a critical mass of users to de-Google their search habits into more specialized engines is potentially a tough sell. However, in tests with focus groups from different professional communities to test these vertical search properties against Google, the results are hugely encouraging.

In building the beta test sites, the specialist publishers are providing Convera with “white lists” of data sources online and websites that would be most relevant to its readers so that the searches are restricted to reliable and trusted information. Publishers are also securing agreements with owners of key proprietary content not normally crawled by Google by leveraging some of its contacts and resources so that Convera can crawl and deliver some of their proprietary content. Another key consideration is getting the user community engaged in the process as co-developers. No matter how bad the results at Google or Yahoo may be for a given professional segment, the interface is familiar and the destination is always at hand. Getting users to think of a specialized brand as the go-to place for business information is the challenge.

A number of publishers are actively assessing the potential of adding social networking to the mix in order to get professionals interacting with each other and adding weekly podcasts by industry experts on issues affecting the community – these additional services will create more community loyalty and also additional advertising and sponsorship opportunities.

The publishers can also use their print titles to drive the audience to the new online areas and this will also assist the transition of their high value print ad revenues to online. Publishers also have exhibitions, seminars, events and email newsletters to assist this transition – and recent research suggests that professional communities will actively attend seminars and events to meet peers and other members of their community. The theory goes that once you get some professionals involved then the viral mechanism or behavioural “Hive Mind” also kicks in and professional workers start referring to the vertical portal as a community source. It is also allows advertisers and public relations organisations access to a clearly defined, affluent, influential and stable audience.

Google does not allow you to have a beer with a potential business partner - it doesn’t have that sense of community. But Google is fighting back – the recent launch of Google Custom Search and acquisition of teenage social network sites indicates they are aware of their weakness – but specialist publishers see this as a Trojan Horse. Social networks for teenagers are highly transient and target a demographic that is volatile, unpredictable and has a low level of disposable income – whereas a social network alongside a vertical search service for 22,000 bio-chemists, 55,000 UK GP’s, 55,000 insurance risk assessors or 120,000 US psychiatrists is stable, affluent and attractive for advertisers.

I’m about to get on a flight so this is short, but wanted to let you know that we do support OPML! Just go to “My Content” and click “Add a URL / RSS / OPML feed”, and enter the URL of your OPML.

Any feeds from the OPML file will be entered as being in your network.

Thanks for commenting.

The network feature is exactly what I had in mind, it doesn’t rely on others joining Lijit for it to work for “you”…perfect.

Plus, you say for every person on my blogroll, in the next release, you will somehow be able to harvest their other profiles eg. bookmarks, photo’s…all this without them even having to know what Lijit is.

I was wondering if you could include OPML import, instead of a feed at a time.
The option to import an OPML file…or to be able to import an OPML URL, this way when ever I add a feed to my blogroll it will automatically be added to my Lijit Network. In this sense Lijit is subscribing to my blogroll.

Being able to import my OPML, almost extends to sharing OPML’s like SYO…when I click on Stan’s profile, http://www.lijit.com/users/stan/profile
I see his content section, but I can’t seem to click on his blog or stumble upon to add it to my network.
I see his network section, but I can’t seem to click on an item here to add it to my own network, I’d also like to click on his OPML to include his whole blogroll.

Another thing is that you can add another Lijit user to your profile, but this adds in the network section, shouldn’t this add in a friends section.
When you do add a friend that you trust, does this mean your search engine will now include their content, network and friends…you may want to add a friend you can trust but exclude their blogroll (Network), you might just want their content section.

This brings me to browsing, I’d like to browse a directory of the content section:
- show me all blogs on Lijit, show me all del.icio.us on Lijit, show me all Stumble Upon on Lijit

I’d like to browse network limited to blogrolls:
- show me all blogrolls and who they belong to, and then click on an OPML to subscribe to this blogroll

I’d like to browse people:
- and add any section or any item from a section to your profile

One other thing, in the content section I’d like to see a heading for “comments I post on other blogs”.

OK, one last thing, can I get a bookmarklet like the Rollyo Rollbar, this way I can search My Lijit from a bookmarklet, and like the Rollbar have a drop down menu so I can search my content, or just part of my content eg. del.icio.us, or search just my blogroll, or just a friend, etc…
Just like the widgit’s you offer, it can also be portable as a browser offering.

It seems you are not going the Ziki way to actually stream content, even though you are archiving it to be able to search it, I guess this is what you mean the difference between a destination and a service site.

Congratulations on Lijit, I believe this to extremely appropraite for the moment we are at…scattered profiles, the need for social filtered searching, etc…

Cheers,

John

Thanks for the kind words about Lijit. We just did a big release last night so be sure to take a gander at what’s new.

I totally agree that the key is to draw value from people who aren’t (yet!) Lijit members. With our release last night we get much closer to that ideal: We will automatically sync your search with your blogroll, and include content from those blogs in your search, as well as people on *their* blogroll. And in the next release, we’ll automatically pick up any delicious/flickr/LinkedIn/etc accounts for those other blogs too. So for example, if you have Fred Wilson in your blogroll, his blog, tags, and photos will all be automatically included in your search engine as well.

Is Lijit like Ziki? We both allow you to identify other places where you create content, but that’s where the similarity ends. Most importantly, Ziki seems to be aiming to be a destination site whereas Lijit is aiming to be a service. We don’t expect you to send your friends to your profile on Lijit, rather, we hope that your friends will find value in using Lijit’s features on your own blog.

Also, Lijit is committed to not being “yet-another-social-network” site. We will use the relationships that you’ve already published rather than ask you to explictly make connections again. Your blogroll is one set of relationships, your delicious network is another, your LinkedIn network yet another.

And lastly, I agree that in the end this is all about attention: For searchers, wanting to give your attention to what’s relevant. For publishers, wanting to understand what of your content people are paying attention to. I’m proud of the work that I did for AttentionTrust.org last year writing the Attention Recorder, and Lijit is yet another step to putting attention-givers back in the driver’s seat!

-stan
Founder and CTO, Lijit

The feedburner guys are great and in the near future we will expand those searches out to the individual publishers networks as well. Look for more good stuff.

Take a look and give us your feedback.