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Open Content And Open Apps

  • Alan Rimm-Kaufman
  • September, 2005
  • Catalog Success Magazine
Recent trends in online marketing

Big changes are afoot online.

It’s still early, but I see two interesting trends which will have large impacts on online marketing. The first trend involves the sharing of content. The second trend involves the sharing of applications.

These two trends haven’t fully arrived. They don’t have well-established names yet. But their early glimmers are visible today in the growth of RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and the growing popularity of web service APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

These trends — let’s call them “open content” and “open apps” — are coming fast. Over the next few years they will revolutionize the web, and in doing so, revolutionize online marketing. This article describes why open content and open apps will matter to your business in the future, and how savvy catalogers can start using them today.

An expanded list of links can be found at the end of this article.

What is open content?

I’ll use the phrase “open content” to describe sharing your online content — articles, product information, specs, reviews, musings, customer feedback, etc — in machine-friendly format, usually XML.

The best example of open content today is RSS (Really Simple Syndication).

Using RSS, you can share information with customers, vendors, the media — in short, with the world. Because RSS is a computer friendly format, RSS makes it easy for others to search your data, fetch it, republish it, and use it in all sorts of interesting ways.

RSS and Blogging

Many people think of RSS as related to blogging. And indeed, blogging platforms use RSS to syndicate content across the web.

Digression: If you haven’t checked out the blog phenomenon yet, do so today. The blogosphere is growing at a phenomenal rate. Technorati, a blog search engine, reports the number of blogs has doubled in the last five months, reaching 16.4 million blogs in September 2005. For starters, check out www.bloglines.com, www.newsgator.com, www.feedreader.com, and www.blogger.com.

RSS beyond the Blog

But RSS extends far beyond blogging.

Here’s a grab-bag of some creative non-blog uses of RSS.

Newspapers use RSS to syndicate their articles (www.nytimes.com). Real estate agencies use RSS to list properties (www.citycrybs.com/). Coupon distributors use RSS to push coupons to shoppers (www.dealoftheday.com). News wires use RSS for releases (www.businesswire.com). Companies do, too (www.ibm.com/press). Schools use RSS to send information home to parents (http://www.udsd.k12.pa.us/rss/). Tech firms use RSS to distribute documentation (msdn.microsoft.com/aboutmsdn/rss). The State of Montana uses RSS for hunting advisories (fwp.state.mt.us/news/rss/hunting). The Red Cross uses RSS for disaster information (www.redcross.org/websites/rss/). There’s even RSS for tracking Britney Spears websites (http://www.iq451.com/music/rssfeeds/britney-spears-web.rss)

The list goes on and on. I’d wager more than half of all organizations with significant web content offer some RSS feeds today; and I suspect almost every such organization will do so within a year.

RSS as Open Content

As organizations publish mountains of great information via RSS, people search and read this information using RSS feed readers. This is all well and good.

But because RSS is a computer-friendly format, machines can read RSS too. That’s where things get really interesting.

With relatively little programming, you can build a software agent to watch for great real estate deals in your neighborhood. Or to see if today’s school lunch is something your child likes to eat. Or to monitor your key competitors.

This trend towards open content will happen with or without you. It can influence your brand even if you don’t participate directly.

Example: Open Content Can Influence Your Brand

Consider the case of Kryptonite Lock.

On September 12, 2004 a blogger described how the formidable black bike lock could be easily picked with a Bic pen. Within two days, other bloggers had picked up on this weakness, posting video demonstrations of the lock’s vulnerability.

Kryptonite issued some press releases, but the blog storm quickly spread. The story reached the New York Times on September 17th. By September 19, Technorati estimated that almost two million online blog readers had seen some sort of post about the vulnerability.

To quell the storm, on September 22 Kryptonite announced it would replace all affected locks. The incident cost the company $10 million in direct costs and far more in loss of reputation — and this blog storm blow up in just ten days.

The Effect of Blogs on Your Brand

There are many other cases of bloggers harming brands (Mazda,Captain Morgan). There are also many cases of blogging helping brands (Scoble at Microsoft, Zawodny at Yahoo). If it hasn’t already, the blogosphere will exert influence on your brand, too, both positive and negative. Realize that in the next two years there will be thousands more external voices with the power to shape your brand than there was two years ago. Be ready. Be aware. Be a good corporate citizen.

Using RSS Today

As a catalog marketer, how can you use RSS to help your business today?

Before anything else, make sure you and your team have some familiarity with RSS and blogs. Start reading before you start writing.

Consumption and Creation

On the content consumption side, monitor RSS feeds for intelligence on your brand and your competition. Use RSS feeds to syndicate fresh news relevant to your industry onto your website.

On the content creation side, provide customers the option to read your marketing emails via RSS. (Big advantages: no spam concerns, highly trackable, and free!)

Use RSS feeds to announce the arrival of new products, special offers, and price reductions. And set up a blog to let your experts speak to and with your customers.

What are Open Apps?

The second important trend online trend today involves “open apps.”

Most important web sites are front-ends to powerful computer applications. Consider search engines, e-commerce, online banking, online games, and online travel reservations. The exposed public websites are simply human-friendly input layers for the applications beneath.

As with open content, things get interesting quickly when computers start speaking to other computers. APIs let this happen.

Using APIs

In short, an API is just a technical specification, a written document which describes how one computer can ask another computer to do something. For example, using Ebay’s API, you could have your computer instruct Ebay to post a new auction, without having to click your way through all the web screens.

Sure, programmers can write scripts to interact with web sites without APIs. These scripts impersonate a person using a browser. The approach is called “screen scraping.”

Using APIs to Avoid Screen Scraping

Screen scraping isn’t fun for two reasons. First, scraping is often disallowed by a site’s terms of use, and breaking rules never feels good. Second, scraping is difficult because it is brittle. As it relies on the exact details of the HTML source, scraping code breaks each time the site owner modifies their screens.

APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) solve this problem. If a site wants to grant visitors access to their applications programmatically, they provide an API to do so.

Who Uses APIs?

Many of the most interesting sites online today offer comprehensive APIs: Google natural search (www.google.com/apis/) and Google paid search (www.google.com/apis/adwords); Yahoo! paid search (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/af/yws_api.php), EBay (http://developer.ebay.com/common/api), PayPal (https://developer.paypal.com/), Amazon (www.amazon.com/gp/aws/landing.html), Salesforce.com (http://www.sforce.com), and the United States Postal Service (http://www.usps.com/webtools/), just to name a few.

Some of these APIs are public, some are not. Some of these APIs are free, some are not.

APIs to Control Web Services

Why are these APIs so interesting? Just as RSS allows your computer to read content, APIs lets your computers control web services.

Instead of a human struggling to manage bids manually on your paid search campaigns, a well-programmed computer can do it faster, cheaper, and better. Instead of using a human struggling to track all your shipments manually, a well-programmed computer can do it faster, cheaper, and better.

Computers excel at repetitive algorithmic tasks. Smart people excel at exercising judgment and handling special cases. The best results come from pairing a smart person with a well-programmed computer, each tackling the tasks they handle best.

Building Your Own Integration Systems

Today, your organization probably doesn’t have sufficient business need (or available IT resources) to commit to the costly effort of building your own integration systems to tie into your vendors’ APIs. And your organization certainly doesn’t have sufficient business justification to even consider creating your own API to let partners or customers interact with your internal IT systems.

But your some of your agencies might have built this integration layer. Your search marketing agency should be using the Google and Yahoo! APIs (and, soon MSN) to directly manage your advertising on your behalf, with smart people and well-programmed software driving those APIs. (Disclaimer: my firm provides such services.)

And some of your software vendors might provide this integration layer. Expect that as you upgrade your operations software over the next few years — your apps for web, call center, warehouse and accounting — the software that you buy may start offering web APIs.

These APIs would allow you to permit trusted partners to access your back-end systems. It will take a few years for such APIs to arrive, and a few more for businesses to invent creative uses of them, but both will occur. APIs will bring you closer to your vendors, and your vendors closer to you.

Merchandising and Media Buying

Just as open content will change marketing communications, open apps will also change merchandising and media buying.

In September, Google began testing ad brokerage for print publications, as well as moving into VOIP (Voice Over IP) telephony. I predict the large search engines will morph into general business brokerages, changing the cost structure of entire industries: television media buying, real estate brokerage, travel, and telecom.

Conclusion: The Future of Open Content and Open Apps

Open content and open apps will influence your business over the next decade. Approach these new technologies strategically. Start getting ready. Start reading. Start testing. Use and offer RSS.). Watch for APIs.

Like the inventions of the 800 number the credit card and the web browser, these technical innovations will reshape the catalog industry. Best of luck!

List of Links from this Article

Comments

  1. […] to do with online advertising. But it does. Back in September ‘05, I wrote an article on open content and open apps, applauding the web’s motion towards openness. I used the tags “open content” for […]

    Pingback by Farewell, Google SOAP Search API — December 19, 2007 @ 1:16 pm

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