New DAM White Papers Website

While too many other companies and organizations in the digital asset management industry continue to feed us DAM ROI infographics and other such nonsense, the DAM News team has once again built a resource that’s intended to actually help people. This time, it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet of DAM-related white papers, all available from a single (free) login. 

DAMWhitepapers.com

Some white papers on the site are not free, but my guess is that most that are uploaded to the site in the future will be available at no charge. That said, the for-fee papers up there now were written by DAM News team members, so at least you know they’re coming from a source of integrity. (It’s no secret that I think the world of this team because of their knowledge and willingness to always call B.S. when it’s warranted.)

My hope is that after all the me-too DAM vendors start stinking up the place with their 200-word “educational” white papers, the DAM News team will start reviewing them all. Given the team’s sharp skills and even sharper tongues, I think we’re in for an even better (and much more entertaining) resource in the future.

Kudos to DAM News for yet another wonderful resource! 

For the record, DAM News builds these sites from scratch. There is significant development effort (and expense) that has gone into this site, the DAM Vendors Directory, the DAM Glossary and DAM Projects. These are much more than just domain registrations.

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Lost in the DAM

While recording Berlin’s second record, we ended up with a few too many tracks. You know, albums and cassettes had their limitations. One of the extra tracks was called Lost in the Crowd. I loved this track because it was one of the few on which I played guitar. I was officially a keyboard player for the band; but I was actually a better guitar player than I was a keyboard player–go figure. (Somehow, it made sense at the time.)

Anyway, because this was considered a “throw away” track, we got to have fun with it. For me, this meant bringing out my inner Blue Oyster Cult. You can hear my guitar at the opening and during the outro (3:30). But the most interesting part is at about 2:15. Right after our real guitar player, Ric, finishes his solo, I sort of stepped out of bounds. The part I added ended up in a feedback-sustain that actually caused an argument in the band. Some argued that this wasn’t Berlin. They said it stepped on Ric’s “new wave” guitar part that was more who were were. Others saw it as being cool.

Ultimately, all my noise stayed because, after all, this track wasn’t going to be on the album or cassette. It would be only on the CD player thing, and no one had a CD player.

So, here we are, just a few years later. I find myself writing a new piece for CMSWire that discusses how mandatory metadata fields or having too many metadata fields, and a few others things, can actually lead to content becoming lost in the DAM. Now, I know that this is going to piss off some people who are believers in these things. But I’m getting used to this social media-staged warfare. In fact, the anticipation sort of put me into the same rebel mood I was in when we recorded Lost in the Crowd, back in 1984.

So, I’m ready for it. Tell me I don’t understand DAM policy. Tell me my experience is theoretical and not practical. Tell me all about it. All I know is that my guitar was howling that day. It was so loud that it was like a taste of World War III. And by adding this track, we didn’t know what to expect. Would our synth fans abandon us? Would real rockers make fun of us? I remember hearing it all.

But sometimes, you just have to turn things up to 11 and deal with the consequences. Sometimes you have to admit when something isn’t working and either be ready to fix it or walk away.

Read Lost in the DAM here.

And thanks to the fact that there are others who are willing to shake things up, we have YouTube, so you can actually hear my inspiration too. (And another thing, David, new-wavers aren’t supposed to have facial hair. So lose the Clark Gable mustache.)

A DAM is no place for an “image”
MP900442945

“This Adaptive Metadata stuff is nothing new. Our DAM can do this. Oh look, we just got support for a new file format!”

My most recent article on CMSWire resulted in a flurry of argumentative comments on various LinkedIn threads as well as below the article itself. The title, “Why Images Don’t Belong in Your DAM,” was intended to do one thing: Get people to click and read.

And it worked.

To be honest, this really is what the article is about, so there is nothing misleading going on. It’s just that people apparently expected me to write an article that literally explained—what?—why I thought that images shouldn’t be inside a DAM?

The primary point (which most sober and mentally functional readers got) was that the classification of “image” and the concept of file format-based management did not belong in a DAM. We remain too file-format focused in the way we do DAM. DAM vendors are even known to refer to the “asset lifecycle,” which always bothers me because people confuse “asset” with “file.” It is the content of a file that we care about; not the box (file) in which we store and share it.

With content-focused DAM, you think in terms of, for example, of the words in yesterday’s press release. You don’t think in terms of the press release’s Word and PDF files as being separate entities. They are merely disposable containers for the content. And it is the content that needs metadata, not the files. It is the content that has a lifecycle, not the files.

Yet, how many DAMs out there today that still force us to think in terms of file format? Does your DAM create a perfect PDF from a Word doc? Nope, that’s why you catalog both. Two files, the same content. Two sets of metadata. Two sets of permissions. You do the same with your InDesign files. And in some cases, instead of cataloging that single 500MB Photoshop master and letting the DAM create the derivatives we need, we create them ourselves. We have way too many reasons for why we do this, even though our DAM vendors tell us they are more than capable of doing it for us.

For these reasons and tons more, we end up with multiple files in our DAMs that each contain exactly or virtually the same content. And this means we have to manage each of those files independently.

Show of hands: Have you ever asked your DAM vendor to make it easy to copy metadata between records?

One of the many advantages of the Adaptive Metadata technology that Picturepark developed (and is now getting flack for from other DAM vendors who don’t understand it or fear it), is that metadata can be abstracted from the assets themselves. This means, for example, the metadata can exist entirely on the asset class definition. Those assets assigned to the class inherit the metadata while they remain assigned. (Yes, you can create local metadata values too. And yes, you can embed class metadata into outbound files.)

This is the foundation for being able to adapt metadata schemas between assets and, for a given asset, over time too. Recalling the example above, your PDF and Word files don’t need separate metadata editing sessions because you’ve added them both to the same asset class, and you’ve added the common metadata to the class.

What we have been seeing since the release of this article reminds me of the first time I ever opened an early beta release of the Mosaic Web browser. At that time, I think there were fewer Web pages in the world than I have today in this blog. I tried to like Mosaic, but I just didn’t get the point. (We didn’t even call it “the Web.” We just knew it by the application’s name.) Further, Gopher worked fine for browsing “online” information, and most people weren’t “online” anyway. (And spell checkers used to make us hyphenate “online” too. God, I’m old.)

The reason I didn’t understand the value in the Web when I first tried it was that I was evaluating it in terms of a few Web pages. I couldn’t see that the ultimate value came not from just a few websites, but from millions of websites that would each evolve over time.

Today of course, I’m almost embarrassed to admit that I didn’t see that potential. But this exactly what others are failing to see in this big argument over the value of adaptive metadata. You can’t just look at one asset and “get it” any more than you can look at one frame from a film and understand the concept of a motion picture. This is about metadata schema evolution, not metadata value updates. And isn’t this exactly the kind of thing that DAM professionals should appreciate? After all, the value of DAM is quite limited if you have only 3 assets.

I predict that in a few years, there are going to be many in the DAM industry who are eating a little bit of crow because they’ve been posting all over Hell and back that Adaptive Metadata is nothing new.

And, unlike my private humiliation of not getting the point to Mosaic, the Internet today never forgets.

Goodbye Ben
Ben Smidt

Ben Smidt

Just a few moments ago, I said goodbye to a Picturepark coworker whom I have enjoyed working with very much. Those of you who know Ben Smidt know what a good guy he is. During his time with Picturepark, he gave his all; I simply could not have asked for more.

On Monday, Ben starts up with another company that can offer him some opportunities that we could not offer. He leaves with our complete blessings and best wishes.

Ben, you were my partner-in-crime here at Picturepark. We did a lot of good things. We fought the machines and (usually) won. We conspired on what was possible and it often turned out better than we expected. From DSG to eDAM to the webinars to the website redesign to DAM Guru Program, #LearnDAM and that damned 7Steps in those “miserable” Kindle and ePUB formats. I think it’s safe to say that the combined efforts of every other DAM vendor marketing team on earth don’t begin to approach what we’ve done for the DAM community this past year.

Thank you for your tireless commitment to Picturepark. And for your dedication to always showing customers and the DAM community integrity and genuine concern for their interests and needs, even when it meant more work for us. Thank you also for surfing my “diva” moments with absolute and evergreen patience. Thank you most of all for the DAMMY. Had it not been for your nomination, I would not have it.

I hope you take with you one thing that we practiced as a team: Doing the right thing to the highest standard of quality is the only worthwhile goal—ever. And when that isn’t possible, we revise the plan; we don’t sacrifice the deliverable.

Thank you, my friend. It has been a pleasure.

– David

The DAM that can Cure Death
Are DAM vendors trying to construct software that can do anything?

Are DAM vendors trying to build software that can do anything?

It’s been more than 20 years since digital asset management software was known simply as an image database. In this time, DAM has evolved so far that we sometimes still call it an image database just to make it understandable to newbies.

There’s no question that DAMs have become much more than image databases. The question is why. The vast majority of DAM customers purchase their systems to manage images. And even those who do use DAM to manage Office documents, videos and more, usually have more images in their systems than anything else.

In straying from the focused, easy-to-understand (and easy-to-sell) image-database class of software, the DAM industry is now mired in a software discussion that is always too complicated. Worse, we have created an industry that virtually no one understands.

An Industry without a Market

If I tell you that I sell software that enables you to manage PowerPoint presentations, you’d understand the value of what I’m offering, even if you had no need for the software yourself. You could probably even explain it to others. If I tell you that I also sell software that automatically converts InDesign files into PDFs so people can preview them over the Web, you’d probably understand the point of that product too.

But if I told you that my software does both, you’d look at me like I’m selling an erectile dysfunction pill that’s also perfect for reducing all those bothersome symptoms of menstruation.

Who was today’s Digital Asset Management designed for?

Marketing has been traditionally been considered DAM’s low-hanging fruit, but Marketing is not the only tree in the forest. Museums and universities use DAM too. So do governments and countless other types of organizations.

But few DAM vendors are willing to carve themselves niches and then operate solely from within those niches. It’s not like MediaBeacon has raised its hand to be the DAM provider for Education, while Picturepark takes on museums and North Plains cozies up with governments. All DAM vendors think they’re perfect for all segments.

In fairness, the digital asset management use case for many of these segments is similar. But in trying to address the needs of all segments within a single software genre, we provide products that are too horizontal. The fact is, today’s DAMs offer virtually no segment-specific benefits unless, of course, you’re willing to pay for API-based development services. We have pardoned our unwillingness to focus on specific markets by saying that our DAM software has evolved into a panacea “platform” that’s perfect for everything. One size, color and style fits all—like it or not.

Make no mistake, there is an absolute need for the functionality we expect from digital asset management software. The question is whether this “everyone, everything” target market we’re collectively imagining is willing to put up with plain-wrapped DAM, when the makers of CMS and other adjacent technologies are offering DAM features that fit neatly into digestible conversations: Here is your website; here is software to create the content on your website; here is the menu item you’ll use to manage the images and movies you use on your website.

When presented in this context, digital asset management seems as obvious and necessary as electricity. But we DAM vendors don’t present DAM in contexts this simple. It’s not enough for us to design DAMs to cure a specific illness, we strive for DAMs that can cure death.

Targeting the Luxury-Camping Segment

What’s wrong with this picture?

Imagine a 1960s Jaguar E-type—cherry red, convertible, stunning. Now imagine adding a canopy roll bar and mud tires so big and thick that you could climb a mountain. Now that you have a sexy/safe vehicle that can take you anywhere you want to go, you realize it should also have a camper shell for those times when you’re just having too much fun to go home.

What you’re imagining right now is what DAM software has become.

When you have an “automotive solution” that’s as clearly defined as the Jaguar E-type, you ignore the feature requests of Ranger Rick and the Soccer Moms. Successful car makers understand this but DAM vendors just can’t say no. Whatever we’re asked to do, we do. Then we do whatever some other vendor was asked to do, too, just so we can say we offer it all.

We have collectively delivered the Terrafugia of enterprise software and we wonder why our industry doesn’t grow at the pace we expect.

A Creative Burst of Limitation

The DAM industry has fallen victim to our medium—software. We aren’t bound by the physical restraints that challenge automakers. We are free to do anything, and that’s exactly what we have done.

But when it comes to the design of anything, limitations can be an effective seed for creative inspiration. Without them, we can lose focus. Limits keep UPS branding brown and they keep Joni Mitchell from releasing her Death Metal debut.

When limits are not imposed upon us, we must define them for ourselves. It is the mature thing to do. And in doing so, we might even find ourselves redefining Digital Asset Management into something people actually understand.

Images via FreeDigitalPhotos.net

DAMMY of the Year!
2013 DAMMY of the Year

I won the DAMMY, Bitches!

Imagine my confused delight while in Aarau, Switzerland, in the middle of the night, jet-lagged beyond my wildest imagination, I get word that I had won the 2013 DAMMY of the Year Award from Createasphere.

It all started a few weeks before that. My colleague, Ben Smidt, whom some of you will recognize as the manager of DAM Guru Program, asked me if Picturepark should enter anything into the DAMMY award competition. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the categories, but they’re pretty specific. And being one to take things at face value, I didn’t want to pretend we had something that fit when I knew we didn’t—that’s not the Picturepark way of doing things, and it’s not my way either. I told Ben that I didn’t think we had anything that was a good fit and we left it at that.

Fast-forward a few days and I get an email from Ben with a subject line that reads, “I hope you don’t think I’m sucking up.” Attached was the DAMMY nomination. I just sat there for a few minutes and stared at it. I couldn’t believe someone had done this for me. Further, I couldn’t believe the nice things Ben had written. I thanked him for the effort, but told him not to get his hopes up. (Then I think I thanked him a few more times.)

Createasphere told me that the judges picked me because of the contributions I’ve made to the DAM community, including DAM Survival Guide and DAM Guru Program. (Yes, DAM Guru Program was my idea, but Ben is the one who keeps it humming along so nicely, and Picturepark is the one who pays for it all to happen.) Anyway, these are exactly the sort of reasons I would want to win such a thing. Much better than being chosen because I was the most adorable person in DAM (duh) or that I’m getting to that age where I deserve a lifetime lack-of-achievement award (also duh).

A giant heartfelt thanks to Createasphere and the DAMMY judges. Between this and my time with Picturepark, it’s difficult for me to believe now that I wrote DAM Survival Guide with the intent of leaving the DAM industry after Canto fired me for being “too difficult to work with.” I would have missed out on DAM Guru Program, our killer DAM webinar series, being able to write for that wonderful Picturepark website, meeting my Swiss coworkers, homemade Swiss fondue, getting with deal with Hector again and, of course, working with Ben.

Thank you, Ben. Thank you, Picturepark. I might be too difficult to work with, but you are not.

DAM Guru Program Members Amaze Me
Digital Asset Management Help - DAM Guru Program

DAM Guru Program connects DAM professionals with others who need their help.

Throughout this month (October, 2013), DAM Guru Program is hosting a job fair to connect Digital Asset Management professionals (and those who would like to become DAM professionals) with employers.

That’s great, and if someone can get connected with a job before the holidays, it’s even better. But really surprises me about this is the caliper of individuals seeking new positions. Seriously, there is some amazing talent in there. People with 10 or more years’s experience, people who have worked with three or more DAM systems, people with library science backgrounds, DAM/IT experience and more. Lots of people with Xinet, MediaBeacon and Cumulus experience looking for new positions.

I’m really impressed by the varied backgrounds of DAM Guru Program’s members. It’s no secret that Picturepark sponsors DAM Guru Program or that I work for Picturepark. But I don’t manage the program, so I don’t see its daily operations.

New job profiles are being added almost daily, as more people hear about it. If you’re looking for a DAM job, employee or intern, check it out. It’s totally free for everyone on both sides of the employment contract. If you’re not in the market for a new employer of employee, please at least share this link with others in your social networks. It isn’t often we see a truly free and no-strings-attached resource for targeted job hunts.

See all the DAM professional job profiles: http://DAMGuru.com/mashup

Meet the Mother of DAM
https://vit.picturepark.com/Go/oPolHCOE/V/17073/1

Meet the Mother of Digital Asset Management in her first-ever live webcast.

You can’t see me right now, but I’m jumping up and down. Why? Because I get to interview the woman who virtually invented the Digital Asset Management industry! Jennifer Neuman founded Canto in 1990 and built the company into the biggest name in DAM at that time. Among her most significant contributions to the DAM industry were not the first-ever Web interface to a DAM or the first cross-platform DAM system, or even her foresight to see that digital cameras were the next big thing, or that DAM’s needed to offer real, tangible solutions and not just be “a platform with hundreds of pages of documentation and our best wishes for success,” as she once described Cumulus.

Nope, Jennifer’s most important contribution to the DAM industry was…wait for it…me! 🙂 Just kidding…sort of. (Do you see how giddy I am?) It was Jennifer who pulled me into this industry. She hired me to re-write the Cumulus 4 user guide, and she finally convinced me to take a full-time job with Canto. And the rest is history.

Speaking of history, join us on November 5, 2013 to find out all about the early days of DAM, what went wrong for her at Canto, what the DAM industry should be doing today to become stronger, and where DAM, SharePoint and related technologies are headed. If you knew Jennifer’s track record with regard to accuracy of prediction, you’d know that this is one live webcast that will be well worth your time.

Free registration: http://picturepark.com/jn

Everyone is welcome to attend! I would especially encourage all those Canto employees who haven’t been around Canto (or DAM) for very long. It would do you good to hear a side of your company’s history that I’ll bet isn’t discussed much.

Kudos and thanks to Picturepark for seeing the value in hosting this.

Why No One Trusts Your Content
You can trust me; I'm a writer! If I say it, it must be true.

When you think a vendor’s white paper sucks, tell them. Better yet, review it on a public forum. Force vendors to produce better content.

In writing about a white paper entitled, Better Lead Yield in the Content Marketing Field, released by the CMO Council, author G. David Dodd got me thinking about why most content that’s released by vendors, well, sucks. (Read Mr. Dodd’s blog post here.) It doesn’t surprise me that only 9% of the respondents surveyed for the white paper said they valued content that came from vendors.

Nine percent is a slap in the face that most vendors actually deserve. I can recall many (many) years ago when I was hired as a freelancer to write a “white paper” for a company. I did my research and turned in what I thought was a fair and balanced assessment of the product. They were horrified. To avoid a lengthy story, I will say just that I learned what they actually wanted was an 8-page brochure that was written on a white paper template.

To make matters worse, I have learned over the years that most–MOST–readers don’t want actual white papers either. Perhaps we’ve been conditioned to not read more than 140 characters at a time, or our minds have been softened by too many infographics. Whatever the reason, I’ve found that few people read beyond the first few thousand words of anything. When I was first asked to write for CMSWire, I was told that “around 600 words” was the optimal size for a post. So each month, as I sit down to write my article, I keep that number in mind—you know, as a multiplier for how many words I’ll actually write. (600 x 2, 600 x 3, etc.)

Picturepark is the first employer I’ve had who has permitted me to produce content that is not Sell! Sell! Sell! in nature. I think that shows under the Digital Asset Management menu our website. I think it also shows in our “Enterprise DAM Checklist” white paper, which easily passes Mr. Dodd’s test of credibility in that without the branding (and the last paragraph that mentions Picturepark as the publisher), there are no clues throughout the paper’s 45 pages about who wrote it or what it’s trying to sell. In fact, the paper is so software-neutral that any DAM vendor whose product is based on technologies that are standards-based, non-proprietary and less than a hundred years old could share the paper with its own prospects. (No, that is not a license to do so, you silly DAM vendors! Do your own work and stop copying off my paper!) 😉

I think the main problem we face as content providers and consumers is three fold:

  1. As I mentioned above, most people don’t read larger documents, which gives content producers an excuse to avoid writing them.
  2. Most content providers are marketroids who haven’t a clue what they’re talking about, but were taught last week in marketing school that “content is king.” So they write their “5 steps to becoming a better human” articles and white papers and pat themselves on the back when the leads come rolling in.
  3. And that leads to the big problem: It seems that for 99.9% of vendors, content’s main focus is to generate leads, not educate. They don’t care whether what they offer is valuable because once the download form has been submitted, they have what they want. Worse, their main audience is the GoogleBot, not the reader. So they stuff blog posts with keyword terms designed to get them ranking higher in search engine results placement (SERP). Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with legitimate SEO tactics—after all, there is a lot of noise on the Web. But when “SERP” and “lead-gen” are goals for content—content that should be designed to educate—you get numbers like 9% when you ask how many readers trust it.

I encourage you to read Mr. Dobb’s post and spend some time in his blog. There is some good stuff in there.

A year’s worth of bitching and moaning
It's not easy always being cranky about DAM, but somebody has to do it!

It’s not easy always being cranky about the state of Digital Asset Management, but somebody has to do it!

CMSWire recently published my 13th article with them, marking a year since I started as a regular monthly contributor for them. Given the cranky tone of most of what I’ve written for them, it honestly surprises me when they ask for more each month. (It doesn’t surprise me that I never run out of things to complain about, though. After all, that’s why Canto fired me.)

So, with a nod of thanks to CMSWire for offering me a pretty high-visibility place to repeatedly tell the DAM industry to get off my lawn, I offer this list of those articles.

And for the record, I don’t bitch just for the fun of it. I want this industry to survive, and I don’t feel like enough people are pushing it in that direction. In fact, I think too many people are pushing DAM toward extinction simply because they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about, yet they keep on talking.