"startwithxml" entries
When it Comes to Search, How Low Can You Go?
Discussing futurist Paul Saffo's observation on search.
Respond to the StartWithXML Survey Before It Closes on Friday!
We are very pleased that over 125 people have already responded to our StartwithXML industry survey, which you can find here. We will start blogging a bit about the results later in October. Complete results will be published in our Research Paper, which will debut at the Forum on January 13, 2009 at the McGraw-Hill Auditorium. There's no attempt to…
The Future of Chunk Sales … Today!
The blog PersonaNonData pointed us to a new model that might bring the future into tighter focus for some publishers. At AcquireContent.com, a new Web site from Gale, they have made their content available for sale through "customer pull" transactions. We have tried to make the points that new revenue opportunities will be small dollars and we've suggested that XML-structured…
Balancing the Benefits and Costs of XML for Book Production
O'Reilly engineer and XML guru Keith Fahlgren kicked off a lively conversation on an internal mailing list this week by asking whether (and how much) we're "eating our own dogfood" in terms of Tim O'Reilly's recent post about IT. Along the way, XML.com editor Kurt Cagle weighed in with his thoughts on the importance of an XML workflow (specifically one…
What We Talk About When We Talk About XML (Apologies to Raymond Carver)
Acronyms and initialisms are mysterious and potent, and frequently hide meaning and become shorthand for larger concepts. Just as ONIX became shorthand for "metadata,, XML (at least in book publishing land) is becoming shorthand for … well, a lot of things. Repurposing content, creating templates for book design, tagging — all of these are encompassed in the term "XML workflow."…
Why You Should Care About XML
There are two places to look for useful clues about how XML will actually fit into a publisher's workflow: Web publishing and the "alpha geeks."
XML and APIs: Perfect Together
This week's formal announcement of the first three APIs for Google Book Search provides a frame for the "why" in StartWithXML: Why and How? Although Google has confirmed just a few APIs, or application programming interfaces, the firm has clearly opened the door to making book content more easily searchable and findable and, through the use of some standard identifiers,…
Visualizing the Advantages of StartWithXML
Here are two ways to think about why a StartWithXML workflow can be important and valuable: 1. Until very recently, we lived in a world where the book was the sun and everything else orbited around it. Now the CONTENT, the IP, is the sun, and the book is relegated to one of the satellite bodies (still often the biggest,…