Cary Sherburne:  Hi, I’m Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I’m happy to have with me, David Zwang, who is a WhatTheyThink contributor as well as the President of Zwang and Company, and a lot of other things, but –

David Zwang:  A lot of other things. 

Cary Sherburne:  But, I wanted you to maybe because you do a lot of work in Standards Committee and involved technologies and so on, I wanted to have you talk to us a little bit about sort of what’s the infrastructure or how do you look at the process of doing cross-media publishing.  What’s kind of some of the infrastructure needs? 

David Zwang:  Well, I think that’s a great question because I think that as the demands and the requirements of the marketplace are changing, people really need to look at publishing with a big “P” and not little ‘p’.  And I think if you were to look at it, just to bring it down to a basic – it’s basic structure, then you’ve got content.  That’s really what we are publishing; we’ve got all this content.  We’ve got to manage the content, right, and there are the CRM’s that allow you to do that.  Excuse me, the CMS’s that allow you to do that. 

Cary Sherburne:  I was going to say, yeah. 

David Zwang:  Yes, that’s right.  But there are CRM’s also in terms of how you manage all of that with your customers.  But there are CMS’s that actually allow you to do that. 

Cary Sherburne:  Content Management Systems. 

David Zwang:  Absolutely, Content Management Systems.  And then once you’ve got that content depending on what you’re going to do with it, you’ve got to be able to package it.  And you’ve got to package it for that distribution medium.  And that distribution medium could be print, it could be the internet, it could be emails.  It could be social media –

Cary Sherburne:  It could be mobile. 

David Zwang:  Absolutely, it could be mobile and tablets.  Yeah, yeah, no doubt about it.  So you know as we move forward into the kind of the new world of publishing with a big ‘P’ and how that really begins to affect everything in terms of not just publishing for profit, but also for publishing for marketing support you really need to be able to build that infrastructure.  You need to be able to have a way to manage that content.  There are plenty of people creating the content; once you’ve got it, how do you manage it?  How do you tag it in such a way and manage it so you can utilize it for all of these other – these other needs.  How do you give it context?  Content usually needs context; otherwise it’s just more noise and more confusion. 

Cary Sherburne:  We’ve go enough of that going around. 

David Zwang:  Yes, we do.  So you need that context and once you’ve got the context, you’ve got different ways to package it, and then there are different types of solutions and systems that exist out there, and more coming every day that will allow you to take that and package that for the various channels, the various media channels. 

Cary Sherburne:  So basically you need some sort of web portal kind of thing that allows you to bring it in, you need some way to manage the data, you need some way to transform the data streams, right? 

David Zwang:  Yes, absolutely. 

Cary Sherburne:  And you need some way to get it out there. 

David Zwang:  Absolutely.  It almost sounds too easy. 

Cary Sherburne:  I know the of you have been doing a series on WhatTheyThink that kind of covers all of this, so I would encourage people to search on ZWANG and you can find David’s series of articles on WhatTheyThink.  And get some more in-depth information on this. 

David Zwang:  I think it’s a great way to start, absolutely. 

Cary Sherburne:  Great.  Thank you David. 

David Zwang:  Thanks Cary.