Electronic Commerce Semester 2 Term 2 Lecture 4

Online Publishing Approaches There are four contrasting content publishing approaches: –The online archive approach –The new medium approach –The publishing intermediation approach –The dynamic and just-in-time approach

The Online Archive Approach This includes bibliographic databases and full-text search/retrieval services It is one that appeals to corporate publishers and, to some extent, commercial publishers – such as academic or journal publishers who have an existing digital archive that they want to deliver over the Web as well as on paper, CD-ROM or other media

The New Medium Approach This includes real time news delivery, personalised news delivery, and edutainment It aims to create new material for the Web – to treat the Web as its own medium, one deserving its own material This approach will have most appeal to commercial print publishers, such as magazines that view the Web as an alternative, not a replacement for print publications

The Publishing Intermediation Approach This includes online directories and exploits new service opportunities for intermediaries For example, in the growing market for educational material such as customised books, companies offering material owned by more than one publisher face the daunting task of obtaining permissions New organisations that specialise in the management of copyright clearance are emerging as key players

The Dynamic Approach Online content is no longer static information Content can now be created in real-time and transmitted rapidly in the format best suited to the user’s location, tastes and preferences More importantly, the content engine recognises repeat visitors to a site and configures the Web pages to match the individual’s known preferences e.g. a publisher planning to deploy a large product catalogue will no longer have to author and update each individual web page

The Dynamic Approach (Contd.) Instead, the elements of each page – text, graphics, video and sound – are stored separately in a database and used to create individualised pages on the fly as each user browses the site The page content can be further customised to reflect which browser is being used, the user’s geographic location and modem speed

Just-in-Time Approach Another way of looking at dynamic publishing is that it is just-in-time publishing That is, stories, applets and content flow into the computer just as consumers need them, and then self-distruct after usage Having discussed the various types of onlien publishing paradigms, we turn now to the specifics of each paradigm

Full-Text & Bibliographic Databases This part of the online publishing industry represents one of the fastest growing publishing stories These databases contain trade publications and newspapers There are more new transcripts, professional journals, magazines and newswires going online every month

The Future for Full-Text Services Full-text services play an important role in the legal, medical and education industries The future of full-text publishers lies in their ability to create products to suit different customer needs To meet the needs of the busy professional, sophisticated information research facilities have to be developed The main complaint about full-text services is their high price

Personalised & Customised News News on-demand is in essence a personalised electronic news magazine that delivers customer- selected information on a customer-specific schedule These types of services deliver a large variety of news and information sources in real time to PCs and workstations; they automatically monitor and filter the news; and they alert the users to stories of interest to them

Requirements of Dynamic News Delivery All news-on-demand applications have a number of “dynamic” requirements that distinguish them from conventional “static” multimedia publishing efforts: Time-critical alerts Delivery control Aging and archiving Dynamic user preferences