Really Strategies Blog

"Barbarians at the gate?" NFAIS Conference

I was highly interested with the title of the upcoming 51st Annual NFAIS Conference.  Quoting from the brochure: "Barbarians at the gate?  The impact of digital natives and emerging technologies on the future of information services"  Essentially the gist of the subsequent write-up is that those who were born in the digital era and have almost exclusively known digital communications, are getting ready to storm the world and start driving the information technology revolution from inside companies and organizations (presumably the way they have with consumer communications). 

How perfect.  This is what all of us in the publishing technology community have been waiting for and have started to see out there in the last few years.  It means that it is less and less important for the publishing technology revolution to be driven by the visionary technical whizzes.  Less problematic to convincing companies to adopt more and more advanced digital workflows and systems.  As the 'digital natives' come into their own, demand for better systems is beginning to drive things.  What a great thing to happen in publishing technology!  Of course this process proceeds differently in different publishing verticals, with more scientifically oriented (e.g. technical) companies already there.  But now we can expect the non-science oriented publishing to come aboard. Magazine and book publishers should be coming around, and goodness knows, we have been waiting for this moment in educational publishing - the slowest of publishing verticals to change. 

Word 2007 add-in for NLM DTD

Something to keep an eye on for STM publishers . . .

Microsoft released a add-in for Word 2007—called the Article Authoring add-in—that assists in creating XML in the NLM DTD.  You can also import a NLM DTD XML document and load it into Word. It seems to be targeted to the authoring point of view, that is, the add-in is designed for the authoring stage, as opposed to the production/editing stage, where  more common (and robust) Word-based tools, like Inera eXtyles, live.  I assume it could also fit into the editing stage, which seems a much more likely place for this thing to happen.

But before you jump in too quickly, realize that even Microsoft warns that the add-in is a beta and not production ready.  And Inera has some cautionary words about Word 2007.

Other links:

• Download the plug-in  
• A blog from Pablo Fernicola, the Microsoft product manager, overseeing the project.
• A video demo of the add-in (from the blog)
• I'll be bookmarking anything I see on my del.icio.us links

Nature and companies that matter

I've enjoyed following Barry Graubart's running series on the "50 Content Companies that Matter."  It does seem a little top-heavy with the "cool" Web 2.0ish type of companies, like Del.icio.us and  Flickr, but I guess those type of companies are the ones seen as most innovative, or at least the most interesting.  It's also a list that goes beyond publishers (it is that "information industry" label of content) and includes companies like Netflix and Sirius.

I'd agree they are all important content companies, but was glad to see that the most recent entry was a company that one may put in the "traditional publisher" camp, Nature.  I've used a lot of labels here and am not really sure what any of them are supposed to mean, but Nature is more than a century older than any other company on the list, yet they are doing some cool things with technology and content. Read Barry's post for more specific information on what Nature is doing that makes them innovative.  I've only known Nature through their adoption of PRISM and RSS and from discussion with other publishers who keep an eye on where they are going. It is a good publisher to watch.

P.S.  I went back and looked at the list again and it does include some other more traditional publishers like Consumer Reports and Morningstar.  It really is a good and interesting mix of content-related companies and well worth following.