The Urgent Need For Better Search

There's nothing like pending doom to motivate you.

For years most online publishers adopted an incremental approach to technology adoption, often waiting to see what competitors were doing before committing to any direction. But now, as the online advertising business has imploded, incrementalism is being replaced by urgency.

At a Web 3.0 panel in New York City, Tim Musgrove, founder and CEO of TextDigger, explained why his company has picked up more media clients this year than last.

"Their pain is driving them to be our customers," Musgrove said. "They are in such financial pain" that they need to explore better ways to leverage their content.

TextDigger offers clients a number of semantic web tools designed to help make their Web pages more findable via both external search (Google, Yahoo, etc.) and within the client site. TextDigger says this can increase inbound traffic, extend visitor sessions and grow revenue.

Of course, selling the top media brass on the need for more effective search tools is one thing. Getting ego-driven journalists to buy in is something else.

"There's a great level of hubris in newsrooms" that made some media customers initially resistant to intelligent automation technology, Musgrove said. Hubris in the media? Ya think?