Thursday, March 04, 2010
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The media industry has faced big challenges in the Information Age. The old business model does not yield as large revenues as it used to. Ad and subscription revenues from print media are diminishing massively, but online media has not yet achieved the same level of revenues as its predecessor.
The newspapers’ publishing industry is naturally concerned about this well-documented trend. One area of where some of its representatives want to limit everyone else is the right to link to the content that newspapers publish online.
That would mean that neither Google nor other search engines nor content aggregators could link to the content of the online media anymore, despite the fact that they actually drive traffic to these websites. That could lead to the situation where, for example, Twitter users wouldn’t be allowed to provide short links to some interesting articles in the online media anymore. That is what some advocates of restrictions on Internet want to do in the United Kingdom and elsewhere.
We in CyberWatcher believe it is a dangerous precedent, not only because we ourselves index the web content and provide links to it for the companies worldwide (and essentially tell to people to go to the websites of the newspapers). We also believe that this hampers one of the major rights available on the Internet – the right for freedom of information, without infringing the copyright of the content owner. If someone refers to a book, categorize it as a novel - and gives the information on where the book is available to buy / to read – does it make sense to restrict this person from doing it? Of course it’s then up to the author of the book – or publisher – what are the terms of reading the book or news article.
Obviously, the news publishers need to justify the costs they incur. However, we believe that once the content is put out freely available in Internet, everyone should be given a right to refer to this content – be it by indexing and structuring the data or simply by providing links in email.
Hence, we support the campaign initiated in the United Kingdom called Right2link.
Thursday, February 04, 2010
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Tourism is the 3rd largest industry in Norway, and in 2008 Norway was visited by 4,4 million international tourists. But how can we get to know what visitors think of Norway as a tourist destination? What do tourists particularly like about the country? What leaves them cold or unsatisfied, while visiting it?
Internet provides tremendous opportunities to track opinions, views, and rumours that people share regarding visiting particular destinations. There are many travel-related blogs that have outpaced major tourism magazines in their visitor numbers. In addition, many dedicated bloggers, who normally write on different topics, tend to describe their experiences with travelling publicly.
Norway as a country caring about its external image and investing heavily into the development of its tourism industry is naturally concerned about its image in the social media. One bad rumour of an unsatisfied visitor can have a long-lasting negative impact on people deciding whether to visit Norway or not. Therefore, CyberWatcher signed an agreement that assists the Norwegian tourism industry to deal with this challenge – now it will be possible to listen in to tourists commenting on Norway throughout Europe. Besides finding key signals, there will also be developed a social media portal presenting feedback and search opportunities.
We hope that this will become a good-case-practice for representatives of a tourism industry anywhere in the world – how to capitalize on social media in order to improve the external image towards potential visitors.
The area often referred to as ex-YU (ex-Yugoslav countries) is a significant region in Europe – covering 6 countries with a total population of about 22 million. Slovenia is economically the most developed nation among ex-Communist countries in Europe, a member of the European Union since 2004, with Croatia being close to the membership, and Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro having made significant progress in this way. This gradual integration into the European common market will undoubtedly increase trade between ex-YU countries and other European nations.
CyberWatcher aims at assisting exporters from Balkan as well as companies in other countries wishing to establish business in the region. Timely and relevant information is perhaps one of the most crucial components of commercial success, when entering a new market.
By now, no one monitors the online media in the Balkans as extensively as we do – even compared to local vendors. Throughout all six countries, CyberWatcher covers almost 1200 online news sources, crawling for updates every second hour. We also keep a research capability, covering search backwards for the last 12 months.
Four regional partners have already signed up to act as resellers for our monitoring service, with its integration into their product portfolio – situated in Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia and Macedonia: contact details here. All of them are already established vendors of monitoring and research services, while the partnership with us has enabled them to gain a new strategic advantage.
Within 2010 we will establish specific monitoring services for exporting industries as well as for political monitoring and research. We will invite anyone with an agenda to strengthen the trade in the region to contact us to see how we can cooperate for the best of the region.
The CyberWatcher team has, for quite a while, felt the need for a space to express our views (e.g. on what is happening in our market) and to post some news from our own company. Simply sending out press-releases and publishing corporate news at the corporate website started to feel somewhat impersonal and too rigid a way to communicate our opinions and happenings.
Hence, we decided to keep our own blog. We hope that it will help our partners, clients – both actual and prospective – as well as anyone interested in our company and in the industry we work in to understand better who we are, what we do, and what we believe in.