For starters, I liked the description of publishing. How’d I miss that one?

Publishing means connecting a community through the art and science of communication.

But the the passage that sparked the digital thought was the one that reinforced the economics of digital publishing and newer models of reaching and serving customers online.

In the digital medium, Brands can embrace the core tenets of publishing without the operating costs of traditional publishing approaches. In fact, by rethinking the approach to traditional marketing and customer service spending (including CRM and direct marketing budgets), Brands that become Publishers can finally integrate  large portions of their business that were once in disparate silos. And that is a very big deal, indeed.

Refreshingly, most of the companies I speak with are retooling various customer touch points to not only be more adaptive to the social web, but integrate better with existing processes. It’s that integration that can reduce some of the silos mentioned in the Battelle piece.

No offense to John Yemma, editor of the CS Monitor, but besides the SEO optimization and its experimentation with a “weekly,” I didn’t see much related to how his publication is innovating. There’s a ton of folks I see saying the same thing. You need a hybrid model. Know your audience. Experiment. The list goes on. What’s lacking is real evidence of what works. And why is that? I submit that a big reason is because it’s early folks. Just like radio and television evolved, the commercial internet is less than twenty years old and the reality remains very few (if any) have been successful monetizing content.  

It’s convenient to be dismissive of the pay wall when you view it as a huge Wall of China blockade. OK, maybe that’s a bad example with Google’s current backdrop, but the point is that pay walls will likely exist in many forms — micro-registrations, metered sections, or daily and weekly subscriptions.

The weekly and monthly charges aren’t any different than what cable and other providers charge for just “accessing” content. As the demand for relevancy (think search) continues to occupy more of our time, quality journalism will demand a higher premium. That’s why it’s so important for media companies to be experimenting — now. Yemma’s right, however, about where differentiations will come from: timely delivery and putting the audience first.

How are we using technology to create a more relevant product? We’re not going to “save” media by out-featuring each other. We can and will re-cement media by using the technology to deliver the experience consumers want most: intelligent, meaningful news that’s accessible where they are in the moment.

If publishers execute on those two things effectively, pay wall variations become a hell of a lot easier (and transparent) to climb. When media companies figure out the right formula for assembling teams that can produce and deliver quality content to any platform at any time on any device, hide your wallet.

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It’s easy to dismiss MySpace when folks discuss the big social portals but with the music biz in upheaval and with MySpace’s leverage there, the next six to twelve months could be telling. As streaming takes hold, [video, music] it looks like MySpace is pretty well positioned with iLike and iMeem already in the acquisition hopper.

What’s more interesting will be how the ramifications of Facebook Connect play out as millions of users look to it as the de facto "roving profile" if you will. I did see MySpace is letting users use Facebook Connect, which is smart, but how it handles overlapping apps and services will be challenging. And don’t forget, Murdoch owns MySpace and there’s some big battles brewing over pay walls and monetization.

Think of the implications if Murdoch had some success circumventing Google and yanking his content out from under the Google algorithm. That would make MySpace way more attractive to other media companies and even Bing.

Below is the excerpt I pulled from TechCrunch, clearly amplifying the continued push to focus on its core.

We’re hearing that the cuts are part of a restructuring of technology and product that’s being conducted by Chief Product Officer Jason Hirschhorn and Chief Technology Officer Alex Maghen. Both are still fairly new to the company — Hirschhorn joined last April as part of the massive MySpace top management reshuffle, and Maghen joined in September. Hirschhorn, in particular, has made no secret of his desire to kill off products that no longer fit with MySpace’s core strategy.

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I spent a few days in Dallas a few weeks back working with a Telligent client on some community strategy stuff. As expected, a lot of the conversation focused on the effect third-party social networks have on website traffic.

But more importantly, we tried to hone in on how social networks can stimulate online conversations. One of the things I’ve noticed is the relationship between forums and things like Twitter. I grabbed the screenshot from TreeHugger to show how they’re using Twitter to “lubricate” content that exists within some of their other online properties.

I put lubricate in quotations because it’s a word that Twitter’s Ev Williams uses to describe how Twitter excels at delivering multiple pathways to existing information. In that context, I don’t think  there’s a better way to describe it.

As far as my client work, the way I articulated it was to package your experts and present them online as visibly as possible. It’s not just about linking to your existing content, it’s also important to catalyze the opportunities to engage with your customers. Many describe that last piece as market conversations.

As I mentioned to my client, what better way to have your expertise on demand than having a Twitter List or widget displaying one of your brand’s experts ready to respond to forum posts or FAQs? It’s really a matter of augmenting what you’re already doing with your forums. Forum MVPs or purists will always stay close to some of their old habits, but increasingly users’ methods of interacting with you (and your content) is more free-form. In other words, your customers’ clicks aren’t always tied to your core brand content.

Today it wouldn’t be unusual for one of your customers to visit your site and quickly be whisked away to one of your employee’s Twitter accounts.
If that’s such an increasing use case, why not bring that closer to where your brand’s conversations originate? In a sense, I think this points to an increasing expectation on companies to have some level of curation expertise.

I’d even go a step further. Is it that far-fetched to hear that one of the deciding factors in selecting a vendor was how many of its employees were deemed as industry influencers or luminaries? Of course not, it happens all the time. But nowadays, the variables for how our customers come up with their observations are much more visible. With things like Twitter Lists, blogs and Facebook fan pages, expertise has never been on such public display.

A big part of my argument in citing the “Forums” use case has a lot to do with curation. What fascinates me the most is bringing curation closer to the business. It seems like Forums are one of the obvious candidates.

Any company that provides better ROI for media buys will certainly garner some attention these days. Peerset’s approach makes a lot of sense as another way of targeting users. The company pulls streams, profiles and other clusters of data together and applies its "targeting algorithm" to render relevant matches.

"Peerset scrapes data from millions of sites, profiles and status messages and compiles a series of word clusters. While seemingly unrelated, Grey’s Anatomy, John Mayer and Starbucks coffee are clustered together simply because a large number of users have expressed interest in all three topics."

The time it would take to pull together this type of data would seem to easily justify the expenditure. You could hire an analytics or media services firm to try and aggregate this type of data but in the end you still have to make sense of it — which brings you back to algorithms, metadata and other analytical tools. That’s a big reason I like Peerset’s approach.