Milking the news
Jinfo Blog

24th June 2008

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Information isn’t gold dust; it’s milk. If you don’t use it quickly it goes off. Wise words that I remember from a presentation of many years ago. And if information really is milk, then the non-pasteurised, non-homogenised, non-UHT variety – the stuff that goes off quickest – is news. Which may be one reason why Dow Jones Factiva has just made it easier for its customers to share news stories with others. An enhancement to its Factiva Reader – a facility specifically developed to allow users to share valuable copyrighted news legally http://digbig.com/4xbqa – now extends the service to people outside the customer’s organisation, including clients, business partners, investors and extended networks. It seems like a commonsense response to the fast growing phenomenon of corporate social networking, as profiled in a recent Outsell report (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e6950). And according to an article by Russell Garland of Dow Jones Newsletters (reproduced in Smartmoney magazine – http://digbig.com/4xbqh), FedEx and even the secretive Central Intelligence Agency are among those now embracing social networking corporately. Sooner or later, most corporate information sharing is likely to involve proprietary, copyrighted material, something that has been exercising the news organisation Associated Press, a co-operative owned by 1,500 newspapers. Last year, it took action against real time news provider Moreover for allegedly republishing its reports without permission (see http://www.vivavip.com/go/e780) – and now it seems to have bloggers in its sights. Blogger protests after it sent a legal notice to Rogers Cadenhead, the author of a blog called the Drudge Retort (itself a parody of the widely used Drudge Report) prompted AP to call a meeting with the Media Bloggers Association. It was part of an effort to create standards for online use of AP stories by bloggers that would protect AP content without discouraging bloggers from legitimately quoting from it. However, as AP acknowledged http://digbig.com/4xbre even that seems to have outraged some bloggers, who may have suspected that AP would try to go beyond what was legally permissible under the existing (admittedly unclear) copyright law about ‘fair use’. Conciliation does seem to be the goal though. AP's director of strategic planning Jim Kennedy said that he hoped to give bloggers ‘a little more leeway’, and Media Bloggers Association president Robert Cox responded that he thought ‘the desire is there on both sides to get this sorted out’. Just as well, really. If more evidence were needed of how seriously corporates are now taking social networking, there’s news http://digbig.com/4xbrh that the most successful business social network – LinkedIn – has just secured $53 million of funding from Bain Capital Ventures to help finance its rapid growth. As AP must be pondering, it’s not just independents that will matter in the blogosphere from now on but big corporations too.

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