Open Password – Tuesday June 28, 2022
#1096
Open Password – Open Password Archive Plus – Michael Klems – Willi Bredemeier
Blogger Relevance Index -Top 50 bloggers – Facts Office – Claudia Tödtmann – Career Blog – DiabSite – Christian Forum – Recipe, cooking and baking ideas – Herzlieb – Michaela LührDaWandaBlog – Career, Religion and Sport – Felizitas Küble- Textile Offense – Stefanie Fiebig
Outsell – Global Standards Publishing – Tatiana Khayrullina – Standards Publishing Market – Widening Gap Between the Data Needs of Engineers and the Capabilities of Standards Vendors – Advanced Standards Publishing Formats – Standards as Data – ISO/IEC Project – IEEE Open – SAE International – OneQue Digital Standard System – Digitization of the Standards Authoring Process – ISO – IEC – ASTM – UL – Global Data Vision – Quality and Nature of Consensus – Meeting User Expectations – Discoverability – User Data- Standards as Part of an Ecosystem – Cross-Publisher Content – Unbundling Standards for Reuse – Essential Actions – Invest in Marketing – Upgrade Discovery – Ensure that New Standards are Workflow-Friendly – Curate a Focused Information Ecosystem – Leading Standards Publishing Bodies Organization
Final spurt
This is how Open Password becomes
the “Open Password Archive Plus”
By Michael Klems & Willi Bredemeier
For months, work has been going on in the background to transfer the contributions from the current “Open Password Archive” to the “Open Password Archive Plus” on the infobroker.de website. We would be happy to tell you how far the project has progressed and what will happen in the next few days until the final move on July 3rd.
All contributions from 2022 are currently stored within the “Open Password Archive Plus”. The links within the title lists will be set when this push service appears.
You can already access the “Open Password Archive Plus” via this address:
https://www.infobroker.de/open-password
The creation of the infobroker.de homepage and menu navigation will take place on July 1st. The domain “password-online.de” will continue to exist and will work as a redirect to the new presence.
_____________________________________________________
End of push services via email from July 1st
_____________________________________________________
The function of sending Open Password articles as an email newsletter will no longer be available from July 1st. To read current information (ticker messages, columns and event information), please go to the “Open Password Archive Plus” website. We strive to provide numerous current references and continue to create a touchpoint for the industry.
_____________________________________________________
Integration of older articles chronologically and upon request
_____________________________________________________
In the coming months, the contributions from the years 2021 to 2016 will be continuously created. Normally, the old push service would be created step by step chronologically. But the possibility of access evaluations to the “Archive Plus” and online dialogue create further interesting possibilities for importing content as needed.
In addition to the chronological availability of the articles, the clicks on the hit lists are evaluated weekly. These indicate where there is an increased need for reading. These contributions will be brought forward and integrated as quickly as possible. Technically, the evaluation is carried out using a contribution number, which is counted within the title lists with a click.
In addition, the early creation of a push service in the archive can be suggested using an online form. These “contribution requests” also receive higher priority.
For better orientation and understanding, the agenda for the coming days of “Open Password Archive Plus”:
June 27, 2022
The contributions from 2022 are stored in the archive and linked via the title list. The event calendar goes online. You are welcome to let us know your dates. To do this, please use the online form at https://www.infobroker.de/password-online/terminleitung .
June 28, 2022
The layout within Archive Plus will be further optimized and new content will be integrated. According to the results of an SEO evaluation, 54 articles from various years will be created with high priority.
June 29, 2022
The “high priority” contributions from previous years will continue to be integrated. This work will be completed on July 1st.
July 1, 2022
The move of the domain “password-online.de” is requested via the provider on infobroker.de.
July 2, 2022
Redirects will be made to the new presence via the domain “password-online.de”.
July 3, 2022
The previous provider is ending support for the domain “password-online.de” – the move to the new presence has technically been completed.
The inclusion of the class of 2021 will begin on July 4th. Priority contributions will be included with priority. The creation of PDF versions of the push services will begin in 2022.
We had already reported on the conversion work in a push service on May 31, 2022. The link to this is: https://www.infobroker.de/password-online/archiv/open-password-archiv-plus-wird-unter-infobroker-de-weitergefuehrung/
We use numerous technical options. But these also require a lot of clicking work. We want to keep interruptions as short as possible and ask for your understanding!
We are and remain open to suggestions and ideas. Write us!
Blogger Relevance Index
Germany’s top 50 bloggers
(Faktenkontor) Title defense successful: Wirtschaftswoche editor Claudia Tödtmann leads the ranking of the most influential German-language blogs by women with her career blog for the second year in a row. The independent diabetes portal DiabSite improves by four places and secures second place in the blog ranking. The “Christian Forum” site loses one place compared to the previous year, but remains on the winner’s podium in third place. This is shown by an evaluation of the Blogger Relevance Index for the 50 most important blogs by women. The analysis tool from the Hamburg communications consultancy Aktuellkontor evaluates continuously the appearance of around 2,000 blogs based on visibility, links, social media performance, activity and interaction with the community.
While topics relating to leisure, fashion and lifestyle were particularly popular in the female blogosphere in previous years, recipe, cooking and baking ideas will be very popular in 2022. About every fourth website in the top 50 blogs belongs to the cooking category. “Herzlieb”, Michaela Lühr’s food blog, is again best placed in fourth place. This is followed by “Sugar, Cinnamon and Love” in eighth place and “Baking Makes You Happy” in eleventh place.
Although they lost some of their importance, there will still be several blogs from the leisure, fashion and lifestyle sectors at the top of the ranking in 2022. The DaWandaBlog is in sixth place and amazed in ninth place. However, “Josie loves” falls from seventh to 22nd place compared to last year.
_____________________________________________________
Marginal topics: career, religion and sport
_____________________________________________________
Only one top 50 blog deals with the topic of religion. But it is all the more successful: Once again, blogger Felizitas Küble’s “Christian Forum” achieved one of the coveted top spots with third place. There is also a lone fighter when it comes to sport: Stefanie Fiebig’s Berlin football blog “textilvergehen” is among the five leading German blogs by women for the fourth time in a row. Other sports-oriented sites cannot be found in the most popular 50. The third blog outside of the classic women’s topics deals with careers – “Professions Pictures” by the publisher Simone Janson is alone in the top 50 and is in 14th place.
This is how the blogger relevance index works: The basis of the top 50 blog ranking is the Blogger Relevance Index of the Facts Office. For this purpose, around 2,000 blogs are evaluated in five disciplines. The categories are taken into account in equal parts when calculating the overall performance: the visibility of the blog on the Internet – the number of links to the blog, – the social media activities of the blog – the activity of the blog and the interaction of the blog with its community .
https://www.faktenkontor.de/blogger-relevanzindex/
Outsell’s June Contribution
Global Standards Publishing – Segment View 2022
By Tatiana Khayrullina, Consulting Partner
Part III
Tatiana Khayrullina
_____________________________________________________
Implications
_____________________________________________________
Standards publishers serve an end-user market that is rapidly moving to the digital realm. Their core audience consists of engineers engaged in technological transformation in industries increasingly relying on digital solutions to accelerate product design, streamline processes, collaborate across time zones, and grow market share. Outsell’s broader market intelligence reveals a widening gap between the data needs of engineers and the capabilities of standards vendors, bringing both risks and growth opportunities. Our research for this report highlighted two common themes among all conversations: investing in advanced standards publishing formats and meeting user expectations.
_____________________________________________________
Advanced Standards Publishing Formats
_____________________________________________________
Advanced standards formats effectively turn a narrative document into a data product, suitable for consumption by a machine. The impact of this transformation will spread both upstream and downstream of publishing, affecting the process of standards development and the ability of publishers to commercialize the content.
Standards as Data. The Smart Standards ISO/IEC project and a related initiative by CEN/CENELEC in Europe continued the collection of use cases to focus on standards that will resonate with users once transformed into the next-generation machine-interpretable format. The ISO/IEC project involves over 200 professionals, and some NSBs are preparing pilot projects in 2022.
The standards-as-data concept is at the core of IEEE SA creation of IEEE Open, a repository for standards, including open-source code as a normative requirement. The repository currently hosts 12 standards and has 500 related projects.
SAE International invested in its proprietary OnQue Digital Standards System, which rolled out in early 2021. The product is undergoing trials by early adopters, with six pilots in place at the time of writing, gathering feedback on the systems requirements on the customer side and the ability to integrate with third-party content, which is a crucial request from customers.
Digitization of the Standards Authoring Process . In parallel with developing advanced publishing formats, publishers are working on creating XML-native standards to avoid the expense of converting them later. They are also creating a digital thread from committee deliberations to publication and maintenance of standards. This area has seen an increase in activity from 2021 to early 2022.
ISO and IEC are one year away from rolling out a standards authoring solution integrated with commenting and editing based on NISO STS XML schema. The authoring tool relies on the automatic application of ISO and IEC directives as a document is created, such as normative and informative references and clause numbering. The technology in the backend of the ISO/IEC project is already used by Standards Norway, Austrian Standards, NEN, DIN, SIS (Sweden), and SFS (Finland).
XML-native authoring technology allows for real-time updates to a published standard and a direct feedback loop to the committee to improve the quality of a standard in real time and encourage development and member retention. A similar feature in authoring is now part of Standards Australia’s digitizing strategy.
ASTM and UL have also updated their authoring platforms. Newcomers to the market, like the ONE+ platform from Global Data Vision, allow XML-native authoring integrated with publishing and distribution platforms.
In Outsell’s opinion, the industry is approaching a milestone in creating a digital value chain from the inception of a standard through drafting to consumption and maintenance. Once the critical mass of participating publishers is reached, XML-native documents will open new avenues for cross-publisher content blending, potentially leading to new growth. However, while there is material progress, the standards publishing market is still several years away from mainstream adoption of XML-native standards development. In terms of barriers, we have noted the criticism of NISO STS XML as not being granular enough for custom content chunking post-publication and therefore not supporting user expectations in the long run.
Aside from the technological nuance, a transition to XML-native authoring — and later on, to machine-interpretable standards — brings fresh concerns about the quality and nature of consensus. This is a fundamental issue for the industry since consensus is essentially its main product. Standards developers had to tackle such concerns in 2020 when they successfully transitioned to the virtual development process. A 100% virtual consensus-building environment calls for different skills on the part of the standards publisher employee leading a technical committee meeting, and standards developers had to cope with this to keep with the publishing schedule. While there is now recognition that virtual standards development works well, there are still issues raised by members regarding the digital-first ways of developing standards and their impact on the nature of consensus. Standards publishers will have to address this need through focused communications with their membership and offering training on the new processes to both employees and members.
As standards developers continue to digitize their operations, they need to be prepared to demonstrate their commitment to the underlying principles of consensus-building and the rigorous vetting at every committee stage of document creation, all without sacrificing any agility in responding to industry needs and adding to development time.
_____________________________________________________
Meeting User Expectations
_____________________________________________________
Standards publishers recognize the need to support end-users in the application of standards to ensure their utility. They also face the reality of implementing fine-tuned marketing tactics to keep penetrating their markets — a stretch for most. Their core audience is practicing engineers, which is a highly fragmented market whose needs vary depending on industry, company size, and role. In addition to this core audience, other user groups — such as skilled trades and regulators — also pose challenges since their ultimate needs differ widely. Regardless of the audience, there are several common facts about the consumption of standards: They are complex to discover and interpret, they are rarely used in isolation, and they are living documents meant for reuse. Meeting user expectations for standards developers entails addressing these standards consumption issues.
Discoverability. Most publishers have invested in improving metadata and updating the search and browse functions of their websites to support discoverability. Usage data, whether obtained directly or through channel partners, remains a crucial source of market intel that feeds discoverability, among other features. Most leading standards developers can track their users’ journeys from discovery to consumption of standards and any related content. As an example, in 2021, DIN was scaling its AI-based digital marketing tool to its total capacity, while BSI relied on highly granular user stats it could obtain through is enhanced platform.
User data is a point of differentiation for the leading aggregators, which compete on the completeness and transparency of user data they share with their publishing partners in order to hone a common distribution strategy.
Unique to the standards publishing space, there is a concern about the real health and safety implications behind purchasing many standards, resulting in publishers’ reluctance to delegate 100% of customer interaction to a chatbot. We see more emphasis on customer service at the point of sale, support and training on the application of standards, and technical support for digital solutions and software products. Confirming poor discoverability as a persistent deterrent to purchase, consultative sales have remained a single key growth driver for several vendors whom we have spoken. Semantic search supported by human expertise will remain the winning solution for the near future.
Overall, standards publishers are in step with the rest of the STM market in empowering the individual end-user and creating a sustainable, meaningful relationship supporting users throughout their professional journeys.
Standards as Part of an Ecosystem . Connecting standards to an ecosystem of documents, standards, and non-standards is the area with significant progress to date and the most intense vendor activity in 2021.
Most advancements have occurred in linking documents within the portfolio of a single publisher to improve the interactivity of standards collections. For most NSBs and SDOs, standards-related products — such as handbooks and guidelines, impact assessments, and redlined standards — are already an essential part of the content portfolio, often exclusively available through the standards developer and not through aggregators.
The plurality of standards developers we have talked to are thinking about semantically enriching and interlinking their suites of products to contextualize the consumption of standards, enhance the user experience, and aid with discovery. However, cross-publisher content delivery is lagging. The nature of standards usage dictates that a certain number of leading publishers need to join a specific platform to reach critical mass and tip a solution into mass adoption by the industry. This is a promising area for near-term growth, but it will need cooperation between publishers that is still waiting to happen.
To complicate progress further, different industries call for a different minimum number of core publishers. On the bright side, cross-publisher content delivery is a well-known gap in the market, and in terms of vendor solutions, Realta Online with SL3, Global Data Vision with One+, XSB with Swiss, Copyright Clearance Center with RightFind, and S&P Engineering Solutions with Engineering Workbench all offer such capabilities.
Unbundling Standards for Reuse. In the field of engineering solutions, a marriage of content to workflows and facilitating the ingestion of third-party content into product design and product lifecycle management software are becoming mainstream. For standards publishers, an essential part of meeting user expectations is the well-recognized need to provide users with the information they seek in a standard, which is often just a couple of data points, not the whole document. The standards development space is still far from meeting the industry’s needs in this respect.
Unbundling content for reuse benefits the end-user, but the implications of serving content up in a granular fashion, as allowed by XML, came up often in our research. Standards publishers cite the following barriers to the adoption of this approach to delivering their content:
- Legal Implications : Some standards can be broken by parsing them out since all the related requirements must be implemented correctly. In the case of data, all the required pieces of data need to be present, tested, and accounted for to preserve the integrity of the consensus standards and a publisher’s accreditation as an SDO.
• Brand Equity Implications : Publishers are concerned that piecemeal delivery will erase their brands beyond any recognition in the market.
• IP Barriers : Publishers are concerned about the dilution of the copyright associated with entire standards once portions of it are sold separately .
• Financial Implications: There are tools available to corporate libraries to analyze their investments in standards resources versus their consumption. In addition, standards users will grow to accustomed searching within documents and will expect to be charged à la carte for the information they consume. There is still no business model that would support granular delivery of content as a standalone revenue stream.
These obstacles challenge the standards development industry to find a collective resolution. In Outsell’s opinion, delayed progress on the issues of unbundling standards for reuse will impede the implementation of standards as data — this is mission-critical for the industry to address.
_____________________________________________________
Essential Actions
_____________________________________________________
Standards developers cater to a market hungry for focused interactive data sources that integrate smoothly with workflows. Their vetted, expert-curated content remains mission-critical for modern engineers. However, they need to address the gap between their capabilities and the information consumption habits of their core audiences.
There is plenty of room for growth in serving standards users, with multiple avenues to follow, from improving user-centric features to expanding the range of available formats. Publishers have a lot to consider as they build on the learnings of 2021 and further integrate into the broader marketplace of engineering solutions, STM, and e-commerce. We recommend the actions below to focus on critical steps to support growth and not lose sight of both domestic and global opportunities.
Invest in marketing . Outsell’s research into the standards publishing market shows that the standards’ marketing investments bring tangible dividends. There is enough untapped demand from existing users and enough change in the market to generate new cohorts of users. Standards publishers have long complained about being a “best-kept secret” yet have historically been shy about promoting their products and services. In Outsell’s opinion, the next several years will be critical to up the marketing game as the generational changes and the nature of the remote workplace present growth opportunities for more agile players.
Upgrade Discovery. Poor discovery capabilities have implications beyond wasting a user’s time locating a document they seek. Inadequate discovery suppresses legal consumption of standards as it encourages peer sharing. It may also prompt an interest in pirated papers if those are more discoverable. New and inexperienced standards users will be frustrated if left to navigate the complex standards ecosystem alone, especially as part of a remote workforce.
Discoverability starts with the search and browse functions on the website, but it does not end there. Improved metadata, “explainer” videos helping with standards, and a well-trained sales team prepared to step in with guidance will add to greater discoverability.
Ensure that new standards are workflow-friendly. Standards are only one component of workflows, which are increasingly digital, especially in the context of “remote engineering” post-pandemic. The high rate of standards in PDF and the reluctance of standards developers to provide granular XML content spell inefficiencies in standards content compatibility with workflows. Most standards publishers have content libraries with thousands of documents, making digitization of entire collections a daunting and costly undertaking. However, it is critical to ensure that new standards be compatible with digital workflows to reduce the backlog of flat documents overall.
Curate a Focused Information Ecosystem . Users of standards have a varied information diet and an appetite for different types of content that they would consider mission-critical and use at least weekly. Curating such content for the user is a value-add in the current environment of information overload. It offers another way for standards publishers to stay relevant and keep user attention on their platforms. Industry news, vendor presentations, training materials, and data visualization are types of content that can be supplied by third parties, with standards publishers acting as vetted channels and limiting the number of resources that users need to monitor to stay up to date in their fields .
Appendix 1: Leading Standards Publishing Bodies Organization
Source: Outsell, Inc.
OpenPassword
Forum and news
for the information industry
in German-speaking countries
New editions of Open Password appear three times a week.
If you would like to subscribe to the email service free of charge, please register at www.password-online.de.
The current edition of Open Password can be accessed immediately after it appears on the web. www.password-online.de/archiv. This also applies to all previously published editions.
International Cooperation Partner:
Outsell (London)
Business Industry Information Association/BIIA (Hong Kong)
Open Password Archive – Publications
OPEN PASSWORD ARCHIVE
DATA JOURNALISM
Handelsblatt’s Digital Reach
MARKET TRENDS
Library Trends 2022
What are the key trends in the library market for 2022?
Online-Publications | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 | GPT AI SEARCH
Print Archive | 2016 | 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000
