The registration desk at Gotham Hall was awash with tags at this year's well-attended SIIA Information Industry Summit in New York City, with many familiar names from today's leading content companies in attendance and a strong smattering of newcomers to SIIA Content Division events. The newcomers were not for the most part young bucks trying to make their mark on increasingly free-flowing funding for content ventures, but moreso companies that are learning their lessons a quarter at a time in a marketplace for content that favors profits and metrics over hype and vision. Investors were present in abundance at the conference, but they now tend to focus on making operating companies that will be fully capable corporate entities long before the acronym "IPO" is even considered.

We heard a lot of talk about a "tipping point" during the dot-com boom, a point in time when the content industry would move past "getting it" and move on to the business models that had promised to transform the landscape of publishing. Judging by the rather sour reception that the opening keynote from journalist and author Michael Wolff received, either there never was a tipping point or we passed one in 2004 and were too busy dealing with it to realize it. Overall I am voting for the latter. With online ad spending rising healthily in both gross monies and as a percentage of overall ad spends and with professionally oriented content increasingly enriched and valued by their own audiences, the electronic content business is going along handsomely, thanks very much.

Michael's soliloquy was entertaining but it painted a world in which "nobody believes [publishers] have information anymore," a world in which corporate content brands are being replaced by personal content brands via weblogs and other outlets, thus changing the content conversation fundamentally. Great stuff to talk about on a private jet or at a SoHo watering hole, and perhaps ultimately true, but it misses the point. As exemplified by today's conference panels there is a thriving content industry that is working its butt off to make money using the new realities of online publishing, an industry which recognizes that new sources of valued content are changing the equation of publishing forever but positioning themselves for success in it. It's hard work, detail-oriented work that differs radically from many of the careless and carefree binges of the '90s. Even today's webloggers, the stars of much media attention, are mostly hard-working content enthusiasts living simple lives with limited financial upside. In other words, Michael's mad because we're not pouting about having to work for a living. The ironic flipside of the "democratization of content" that media pundits herald is that we don't need to listen to them any more: individuals and institutions can build their own content channels to get the straight story. Good content will always create its own strong brand, but there's no resting on your brand's goodwill for more than a breath or two. Working hard to maintain and grow content brands online using lessons both old and new is the real tipping point at hand: survivors are now starting to thrive again because they were willing to forget about that point as a real measure of progress and could keep focused on profits and margins instead.

The brand issue was highlighted by an attendee who pointed out in the keynote Q&A that the Times of India is buying consumer products companies, in effect guaranteeing itself a share of their ad dollars no matter what. Kind of a Wal-Mart approach to ad-supported content: keep your suppliers' brands in the spotlight but get them to knuckle down to provide you adequate margins. This is nothing new to major title aggregators in the content business, but being able to manage content brands is getting only trickier as the value of those brands moves closer to the user. While publishers focused on content product brands get back to reasonable single-digit growth, Google today reported (WSJ - subscription) a doubling of profits based largely on ad dollar growth. That's money that Google will spend reasonably quickly on development, as opposed to companies like MarketWatch that sat on sizable cash reserves to the point where they couldn't spend on R&D without upsetting the stock holders (solution: get acquired by Dow Jones). The biggest tipping point the content industry is facing is the inexorable shift of content value to technology companies such as Google that are draining off visionary development investment by the content companies themselves. As search engines both public and institutional become the "Wal-Marts" of content, publishers will find increasing pressure to build brands that can thrive in this new environment or do much better with brands that thrive in profitable niche industries that don't scale well to mega-aggregators such as Google. Both are achievable, but neither guarantees the long-term survival of these brands. That's something that will take an enormous amount of investment - the kind that Google, Yahoo! and others can do easily now. The tipping point may not have been any particular point in revenue history as much as the point at which your competition will never allow you to thrive - just survive. Major publishers are betting against this equation, but we'll see how they stack up against competition that was born at the tipping point.

Should we party like it's 1999? Indeed, Dave Kellogg from MarkLogic said that the current environment resembles 1998, when Y2K fever increased the demand IT services and the dotcom bubble was nearly fully-inflated. There's lots of money available to be invested in innovative companies. The distinct difference between now and then, however, is that investors are smarter about where to invest their money.

Larry Kramer from MarketWatch already has reason to party, since his company was acquired by Dow Jones for $548 million just a couple of weeks ago.

Tom Clarke from TheStreet.com, a company that survived the dotcom bust, but is now on the block, emphasized that in today's market, a company seeking investors needs to have a "proof of concept" not just an idea on paper. Capturing eyeballs isn't a good enough business plan any more. One has to have a fully-conceived business plan--ideally with some existing customers who find value in the model--to gain the attention of most VCs.

Shoba Purushothaman from The Newsmarket added that companies should also be smart about whom they accept financing from. Some investors may understand the content markets better than others, but they may also want to have more control. Choose investors based on their track record with other companies and their fit with your outlook on how the company should grow and be managed. A lower valuation may be acceptable from an investment partner who allows you to run the company the way you want.

Overall the timeframes for investors is short. Funding in stages is popular to ensure that company is on the right track. Meet objectives and the next stage will be forthcoming. Fall short, and there may be a change in CEOs!

The crowd was still buzzing from Michael Wolff's keynote by the time the panel on alternative business models convened. Moderator Patricia Sabosik, VP and General Manager of Thomson Learning Labs, had no sooner framed the topic than Gordon Crovitz, President of Electronic Publishing at Dow Jones, raised a reply to Wolff's sharp critique of the Wall Street Journal as a brand that had lost resonance from its peak in the 1990's. Like a champion prize fighter stunned by an upstart in the first round, Crovitz dismissed Wolff's analysis as "very amusing if very wrong" and then launched a disciplined detailing of WSJ's online successes - most notably that online revenues are likely to be up 30 percent this year and heading towards a probable fifth of overall ad revenues for the WSJ family by 2006. Crovitz sees that "branded content is more valuable than ever before," enhanced by effective contextualization to provide value to both readers and advertisers in search of targeted audiences using content in that context. But audience reach is still critical to advertisers, so the recent Dow Jones acquisition of MarketWatch provided a significant addition of online eyeballs to provide a more compelling package. If all of this sounds pretty non-alternative to you from a business model perspective I'd be hard-pressed to disagree. Even though as Crovitz notes "You can change a business model for a week," as WSJ Online did recently with its "open house" free trial, there's nothing new about free trials except perhaps one's ability to learn about their effect more easily online via Web statistic analysis. Going subscription-only for access to online premium content was a great "alternative" business model when WSJ Online made its debut several years ago and is still a brave and largely successful experiment, but the price of keeping out the riff-raff via subscription may be trumped eventually by the price of not getting your content out to where premium users are looking for it.

Mitch Rouda, President of Hanley Wood e-Media, feels that "there's nothing alternative about what we do," but that may say more about how advanced the state of the art in business publishing has become than their properties. Their stable of online portals such as ebuild aimed at the professional construction marketplace incorporate a powerful, search-oriented combination of editorial content, company profiles and product profiles. Yes, it's built mostly by "data humpers" filling in SKU-level content in their database and the models of revenue are traditional, but it's somewhat amazing how many business-oriented publishers have transformed their products in terms of the content within those traditional payment models. But the threats are still evident: though Mitch challenged people to compare their capabilities to a Google search on "weather stripping", the actual results are pretty darn robust, with several effectively targeted contextual ads to boot - and pretty good ecommerce results on Froogle, also. This is where alternatives need to be considered carefully - providing access to content on-site and off-site effectively is a key requirement for database publishers.

Kelly H. Gay, President and CEO of KnowledgeStorm, heads a company that was born 100 percent online. Like many of the panelists alternative business models that make for their success have less to do with revenue models than with operational models. KnowledgeStorm uses the Internet itself as their primary research vehicle for their online directory of resources to help purchasers of institutional technologies. This allows them to get the latest info not only on products but on the context of purchasing that matters most to the institutional buyer - for example, try finding an inventory management system that can be installed and serviced in New Mexico on Google (don't bother). Payments are based on lead generation, also not terribly new in concept but brought into a new and powerful context via KnowledgeStorm's 80 sites covering markets around the globe. Gay's assertion that "all good business models have been thought of, it's just a matter of timing" is probably the real key to the discussion on content business models these days. We've had the same number of keys on a piano for centuries, but when and how you play them has changed dramatically based on new ways of looking at what creates value in entertainment at a given point in time. It's not that different with music than with any other form of content for creating successful value generation. When folk singer Bob Dylan played an electric guitar in public it was a seminal moment, as Corilee Christou of Reed Business Information noted in this session's Q&A, but at the end of the day he was playing the same notes.

Probably the closest thing to a truly new business model delivered from panel members was offered by Bruce Murray, Co-Founder and CEO of Corzen, Inc. Corzen's brainstorm idea was to crawl Web sites that posted job offerings and resumes,develop statistics and analysis of job markets based on those profiles - and then sell the stats and analysis back to the sites that they had crawled. It takes a certain amount of Moxie in someone to pull off this pre-fab analysis offer (as research and advisory companies can attest), yet Murray has done an excellent job of developing the package to the point where it's becoming an irresistible resource for many job portals and seekers of employment stats. Subscriptions are the key, though custom content is available, and corporate markets loom on the horizon. Corzen's shoestring budget in pulling this off also points to a new aspect in developing online content business models that needs to be monitored carefully: it's not just webloggers who can dream up content easily but anyone with a great idea, some marketing acumen and a little technology. The days of multi-million dollar funding to spring ideas like this from concept to basic revenues are largely behind us. Sweat equity can pay off pretty handsomely in today's content markets underpinned with highly affordable publishing technologies.

What's really driving the push towards experimentation in applying business models? Kelly Gay summed it up pretty succinctly when she said that "the inmates are in charge of the asylum." The real shift is towards models that work for users who are just a click away from giving up on your service for something that fills any number of immediate needs. Personalizing and changing models rapidly to meet the constantly shifting demands of today's content marketplace is probably the largest challenge that today's publishers and aggregators face. Think of it as "extreme marketing." Hope that you're in shape for it...

It was an honor and a pleasure to hear straight talk and common sense from Chairman Platt Majoras of the Federal Trade Commission. She described a major priority of the commission to be merger process reform, which will entail automating much of the current paper review process. In addition, she highlighted two key areas of concern to the SIIA where legislative action and/or FTC involvement may occur this year: the first is spam; the second is spyware. The FTC filed its first suit against a spyware firm last October. Chairman Platt Majoras cautioned that defining spyware too broadly can be a disservice to consumers, such as in cases where cookies are used to track patterns of usage in order to provide faster and improved service to consumers. The aim of the FTC is to balance the privacy needs of consumers with the need of companies to use technology to improve the products they deliver to consumers.

What a difference a year makes. At last year's SIIA IIS many major publishers were uncertain as to how to play with Web search engines and considering how to retrench their content exposure via open Web searches. This year's panel of industry leaders demonstrate that it's not a matter of whether to use search engines to promote and position publishers' content, but how. Azhar Rafee, Global Head of Reuters.com, focuses on driving traffic to their own ad-supported site using search engines as a prime channel rather than to rely primarily on traditional channel partners. From this perspective each search result that includes your content becomes an aggregation that points to an individual article as an entry into the Reuters-branded news portal. "You can find a Reuters article, and that's a home page," Azhar notes. Luke Rattigan, Senior Vice President of Strategy for Reed Business Information, sees the importance in this environment of developing content with search engines in mind, concentrating on tagging content more effectively, and placing sponsored links in strategic locations throughout the web to bring high-value "click-throughs" into their core business content. The key from Luke's perspective is to generate qualified leads for their core advertisers: "Not all clicks are created equal," he notes, pointing out the importance of publishers moving from facilitating audience value through distribution to providing audience value via contextualization. Reed does this also through its own search engine initiatives such as KellySearch, providing a company and product directory with its own contextual ad schemes, creating its own content contextualization.

These models work not only for traditional media but for core business database content as well. Jim King, Senior Vice President for Business Operations at The McGraw Hill Companies, Inc. provides deep content for verticals including, finance, construction, education and healthcare embraces the web search engines because they provide reach to professional consumers where they live their everyday lives. "We kid ourselves if we think that our clients are concentrating solely on our product," Jim notes. Yet this does not mean that the capabilities of search engines are going to replace effectively structured rich data. Jim gave the example of Google's Froogle shopping service, which can give business-oriented consumers a good idea as to what prices are on ceiling tiles but not data on how many times they've been used in specific kinds of construction projects. Yet interest in the tiles can lead to interest in the construction-oriented content as well, providing highly qualified leads. Jeffrey Herzog, CEO of icrossing inc. is one of the prime beneficiaries of this move by publishers, providing search engine optimization and search engine marketing services to publishers and other Web content sources. Jeff sees both search results and contextual advertising as key and complementary components in an intelligent marketing strategy for content: "One part is akin to PR, one is akin to advertising...the smart marketer wants to get visibility," and content should be no exception.

These are techniques that have been long accepted via other promotion and advertising channels, yet many publishers are still balking at the idea of building brand value for content through one of the most effective promotion and advertising channels available today. If somebody told a magazine publisher that there was a new kind of electronic billboard on a news stand kiosk that could show and ad for one of their articles any time somebody walked by looking for content of that kind, they'd pay unreasonable sums of money for placement on those billboards. Yet search engines are just that in a very real sense. More importantly the content product that more individuals seek is not a cover-to-cover content brand but content that fits specific needs at specific points in times, increasing the importance of "content in 'as is' condition" as Azhar Rafee puts it. Search engines as destination content allow relative brand transparency that helps to bolster the brands of the content supplier on an item-by-item level. When the aggregation that matters most to a content consumer is the aggregation that they choose via a search engine, publishers have no choice but to adapt to the contexts that matter most to them and use techniques such as this panel's leading suppliers have adopted.

Jim Kolleger, CEO of Genesys Partners lead an insightful panel which included three leading CEOs and a leading journalist who has covered many aspects of media throughout his career. Sir Martin Sorrell, Chief Executive of ad and marketing giant WPP, was just back from a rigorous round of skiing and hobnobbing at the Davos World Economic Forum summit. Sir Martin bubbled lukewarm thoughts about the worldwide markets for media that are shifting away from traditional outlets and markets in the midst of a softening dollar. He sees a shift from their traditional 40/40/20 percent mix between U.S., European and Asian markets moving towards a 30/30/30-ish split in the next few years as global brands based in China and India emerge. But more significantly Sir Martin noted along with other panelists that traditional media outlets are weakening in the face of the Web and devices such as the TiVo that are making easier to manage content in more user-controllable, surfable channels. Media in his mind is having a hard time getting around the "superficiality issue," he notes, with few readers having the patience to plow through 10,0000-plus word articles that are the specialty of many print magazines.

James Fallows, National Correspondent for The Atlantic magazine and writer of many highly recognized 10,000-plus word tracks, had to acknowledge that we're dealing with "perfected information markets," in which the buzz of Web delivery is shifting to an environment in which "many businesses will be destroyed, but many built." Daniel Lewin, Corporate VP for Microsoft .NET development, watches kids today and sees fundamental changes coming in content delivery, Key to this is the ubiquity of the Internet Protocol (IP) networking standards upon which the Internet is based. Lewin notes that IP is "the most broadly accepted standard ever," providing global access to content with and emphasis on facilitating that access with effective metadata and the evolution of search capabilities "still in the 3rd inning." Ted Leonsis, Vice Chairman of American Online, Inc. and President of AOL Core Service, is someone who served as the mayor of his town for a period of time and sees his role at AOL as being "mayor of the largest city in the world." The mayor is aware that "all politics is local," meaning from a content perspective that the masses providing the "wisdom" of crowds have to provide the core value of most content services today - from AOL's user-driven spam filters to search engine relevance rankings. "Packaging will be the art," he notes, pointing towards a future in which content brand management has less to do with the content than the way its package fits into the personal needs of users. In the eyes of Nancy McKinstry, Chairman of the Executive Board of Wolters Kluwer, this packaging for professional markets requires not just content delivery but also high precision in delivering the right content in the right contexts, as well as services that go beyond traditional models. For example, Wolters Kluwer runs the portal for the American Heart Association, one of its clients.

Content branding was very much at the center of this CEO discussion, but there were few easy answers offered. Major publishers, media companies and technology companies alike are wrestling with how to define marketable content value in an era in which the perception of its value is increasingly fleeting in the minds of its consumers. "Know who your clients are," suggested Nancy McKinstry, but that's easier said then done when content's value oftentimes comes from those users taking delivered content and providing it to others in new contexts. The content world in general knows that users are in charge of things and working hard to provide them with meaningful services, but they're hard pressed to say what this means to being a content brand. From our perspective a content brand means good sources and services regardless of their origin. That agnosticism and egalitarianism poses challenges that content companies are struggling to address in full. Perhaps Sir Martin had best enjoy the slopes of Davos while he can.

To quote Ted Leonsis from the CEO Panel, "Content doesn't yearn to be free; content yearns to develop ancillary revenue streams". This panel addressed how to develop and grow multiple revenue streams that complement, rather than conflict with each other.

Mike Marchesano from VNU Business Media talked about the marriage of print and online. Maybe that's a good word to describe the relationship, since there will inevitably be some conflict, but the union of the two can still be happy and beneficial to both parties.

Webb Shaw from JJ Keller and Associates described their transformation into a digital-centric publishing model. His key observation: the challenges may not lie where one expects. For Keller, technical issues in moving from semi-annual to daily updates went smoothly; the key challenge was in transitioning the sales strategy to selling a mix of online and print.

Ken Richieri of the New York Times Company thinks that publishers need to view managing the mix of online and other formats as an iterative process, and that the developments in one medium inevitably affect all other media. His advice: consider how new online channels can enhance existing channels. For example, leverage print material and pictures that were gathered for print but couldn't fit in the paper by putting supplemental material online. Create new interactive series, such as the recent firefighting stories in Boston.com that provide historical and contextual data that can energize your community of readers.

TechTarget began its corporate life as an online company, so Don Hawk and his executive team were able to establish itself with a clean focus on serving customer needs, without worries about reorganizing or changing cultures of legacy print businesses. TechTarget uses what ever medium best serves the needs of its reader-clients and advertising-vendor clients. In some segments, customers may prefer to read indepth analytical reports on industry best-practices and print may be the best medium. The appropriate medium may also be a function of where the user is in the buying process. For instance, when users have done some online research, and shortened their list of prospective vendors, they may be ready for face-to-face contact with key vendors. Consequently, TechTarget organizes conferences to bring buyers and sellers together to "close the deal". An interesting twist: although TechTarget unifies its advertising sales across media, they use separate editorial resources for various channels.

Closing remarks from this panel included the common theme that publishing companies cannot stand still; they have to constantly innovate to keep up with information consumption patterns of their audience. Today's readers and advertisers expect more from publishers: faster delivery in a variety of media, interactivity, metrics that demonstrate effectiveness, and distinct value compared to the growing availability of free information. The only way to stay competitive and profitable in this environment is to leverage your content assets across all appropriate media.

Bambi Francisco, Editor, Columnist and Correspondent for MarketWatch, lead a panel of institutional content consumers that are benefitting from many of the changes outlined at the conference. While the focus of each of these organizations was distinct, the common theme sounded by all of them was that it's oftentimes challenging managing widespread organizations trying to integrate internal and external content. Barbara Saidel, CIO for Russell Reynolds Associates, Inc., a global executive recruiting firm, sees the value of farming out contend needs to vendors, trying to keep only that which is uniquely theirs, but this is not without its challenges. She gave the classic example of a new hire in Europe who signed a contract for a Datastar database that had just the leads that they were looking for in their local markets, leads that the central U.S. office was not aware of. It's not easy to balance central control with local knowledge of what content works best for their own operations. Still, she manages to keep a fairly tight rein on spending in her $15 million budget for information services, trimming LexisNexis where she can and relying more on the capabilties of "Google-trained users" who have trained both themselves and their corporate information providers to give them easy answers quickly rather than relying on researchers. Ralph Barber, CIO for Holland & Knight, LLP, a leading legal firm, focuses on "keeping the planes and trains moving." With over 20 million documents in 30 offices it can be a challenge for Barber to organize this content and keep it available, citing the importance of understanding the value proprositions involved in delivering content from a user perspective and then making sure that senior management understands those propositions. Holland & Knight is using content from both LexisNexis and Thomson, and Barber sees them trying to understand the needs of their users equipped with content management software, but "the jury's still out" as to whether these vendors really understand their users' needs.

Adriaan Bouten, VP of IT and Business Development at USA Today, takes a publishers' view of infrastructure, emphasizing the importance of multimedia as an emerging capabiltiy requiring his attention and support, which keeps him embroiled in six content integration vendors rather than pursuing all-in-one content solutions. His timeframes for payback are notably shorter on average than his non-media counterparts, with solid ROI expected within six months in most instances. In this sence he's part of the product management team, plugged in directly to contributing to the profit equation with both products and essential audience measurements. These are goals which pay off in immediate product quality, but they're notably shorter horizons than Bouten's corporate-oriented panelists. Perhaps there's a story to be told here as corporate technologists get the lion's share of long-term content investment while tradtional publishers struggle along with infrastructure whose payback much be fairly immediate. It's great to be segregating audiences and providing precise measurements of ROI, but the short horizons limit how an organization can address their needs. In all of these examples everyone seemed to be far away from a perfect answer in managing their content. As Marc Strohlein, VP and Lead Analyst for Outsell noted, "Effective content software is still in its early stages," with most organizations still having to cobble together solutions from multiple sources. It's a varied playing field for institutional content these days, but one on which well-financed organizations are investing in solutions that can pay back both for the short term and the long run, even as content supplier patterns begin to undergo significant changes. Good luck to all of these panelsts, the game of providing the best content available is getting easier in many ways, but not necessarily any simpler.

Halsey Minor, a successful Internet entrepreneur, who is most well-known as the founder, Chairman and CEO of CNET Networks, delivered an energetic speech, despite the fact that he admitted he recently turned 40. He spoke of the youth culture that fueled the dotcom boom and the unbridled enthusiasm of the under-30 crowd who, in his view, are able to respond quickly to complex problems because they are not encumbered by an adherence to the status quo. I'd go further to say that some of the unbridled enthusiasm comes from having no substantial experience base on which to develop what I once heard Professor Woodie Flowers from MIT describe as a "wisdom filter" to weed the bad ideas from the good.

Minor's new venture, Grand Central Communications, operates on the principle that users don't want to own software and be responsible for loading it on a specific device. Instead, users want to access software where and when they need it. To paraphrase Minor: running software isn't a competitive advantage; how you put the software to work to help you gain a competitive advantage is where the value is found. The same holds true for content.

David Worlock, Chairman of EPS, chaired a spirited discussion of the key methods that are seeking out ways to grow their revenue models for premium content. David tried to prod the panel as to whether publishing as we know it is dead and whether pay-per-view was the big way of the future, but the panel wasn't biting. Paul Gerbino, Vice President of Content Licensing for Thomas Industrial Network, sees a world in which the name of the game is delivering content to clients demanding it "how I want it, where I want it, when I want it." Paul has created very powerful channels for delivering ad-supported core business content to its clients via weblogs, allowing their news-oriented content to touch their users where they need it and to draw them into their portal products. Shahir Kassam-Adams, Senior Vice President for Strategy & Development at Thomson Scientific & Healthcare is creating growth for their subscription content by tailoring it to precise user requirements - for example, taking very wordy scientific monographs and restructuring them into modular piece of content that can be repurposed in many contexts. This allows Thomson Scientific, like many other Thomson divisions these days, to create solutions highly tailored to specific workflow needs. "What you find in a good solution is good content," Sahir notes, underscoring the need for user-oriented technology that helps professionals to make timely and critical decisions to be a focal point for creating content value.

For Jim Kennedy, Vice President of Strategy at the Associated Press, being a not-for-profit service supporting major news organizations worldwide doesn't diminish the need to focus on user needs effectively. From Jim's perspective technology is important but it's just one factor in understanding the user's desired desktop or portable view of content and working back from that point to develop products and services that fulfill those needs effectively. "We're capitalized to develop news, not technology," Jim notes, underscoring a point that the other panelists touched upon: the changing role of editorial processes. Today's editors need to become the central players in developing rich content that meets and audiences needs, pulling together content from a myriad of sources that tell a story. Resistance to changing the editorial function comes not just from the old guard but also from young journalism school graduates prepared more for an era of media elites passing us by than today's multi-purposed content production needs. Funny to think that one of the biggest stumbling blocks to growth in publishing at this point is the human ego.

While all of the panelists seemed to be open to the idea of new payment models, it's interesting to note how each of these major and diverse suppliers of premium content have found significant advances in revenue generation not by changing revenue models but by delivering higher-value products and services within existing revenue models. The new models of success are diversifying in the "hows" of patterns that content suppliers know well already and that are extended and enhanced by greater knowledge of users and contributions from users into their client bases. With the success of rights-protected content on consumer platforms the search for effective revenue models may yet take a few twists in the months and years ahead, but for now the extensions to content value within and across existing models seem to be winning the day.

The mark of a great conference is how many seats are filled in the final panel session. With more than two-thirds of the seats still filled in the final panel session in the middle of Manhattan, where slipping away is an easy thing, it would be hard for anyone to call the SIIA IIS conference for 2005 anything but a rousing success. Mind you, the panel had something to do with it, as well. Kathleen Greenler Sexton, Chief Marketing Officer for HighBeam, put the "what's hot" question to the panel, but there were no clear gizmos or techniques that were surfacing as new leaders in content technology. Instead the panel noted that there were a mix of prominent platforms and techniques that were evolving and refining this year. Rafat Ali, Editor and Publishers of paidContent.org, pointed to a number of content technologies that are shaping the progress of paid content, including the increasing ubiquity of broadband services, the fundamental position of mobile content in Asia, home network appliances, weblogging tools ("tools [like Bloglines] are getting funding like crazy"), and audiobooks ("making more money than music online"). But most importantly Rafat worries about the "echo chamber" effect of the media's focus on technology when "adoption of technology is not as fast as you think." Or to put it another way (in my own words) it's the content, stupid. Shahid Kahn, Managing Director for BearingPoint, Inc., sees community-oriented content technology that focuses on the needs of specific sectors and users effectively is a winning card this year, including verticals such as online shopping guides (Froogle), horizontal federated searches for enterprises, web mining agents to meet highly tailored content needs and personalized search tools. Steve Wildstrom, technology columnist for Business Week, sees that weblogs are still hot and growing but will face an inevitable pulling back as the quality of output takes a beating in this mix. Steve pointed out the rise of "astroturf" weblogs - blogs that are supposed to be grass roots voices but are in fact quietly sponsored by corporations and political figures - as one factor in a weblog landscape that has as many problems with product quality differentiation as any other content sector online. With "99 percent of the public unaware of RSS," though, there's still a great deal of growth potential for weblogs. Steve also pointed out ironies in the improving overall quality of video content offerings: as the ability to deliver near-broadcast video quality comes online the need for higher production values from amateurs and small pro shops increases, except in high-demand situations such as the recent tsunami in Asia.

Probably most interesting, though, were some of the anti-technology sentiments coming from this panel. Rafat pointed to a "fatigue" factor setting in for some fundamental technologies such as instant messaging, while Shahid reflected on the relentless demand for business productivity through information technology and found it "sickening what it's done to humanity." In the final "what's important" question round Rafat observed "watch your kids and Shahid noted "watch your employees" as they opt for Web content. It's not that people want to get more distant from content technologies but they seem to be sickening of the inefficiencies and lack of thought that goes in to basic human needs in consuming content. Workflow tools, simple publishing tools and convenient form factors are just the tip of the iceberg in content technologies reaching out to people as human beings. We are in only the very infancy of a content technology revolution that is bringing people together through increasingly universal electronic content creation and consumption tools. As in the early phases of the industrial revolution the inhumanity of technology tends to reign as basic capabilities are developed, with human-oriented improvements taking sometimes decades to adapt to real human needs. We marvel at the engines of our ingenuity in the content industry, but we're just beginning to consider the real impact of a 24x7 information industry on humanity. So much to do, so much to do...

We hope that you've enjoyed our coverage of this year's SIIA IIS event. Please share our bookmarks liberally with your friends (click on the time stamp below each entry), and watch this space as Shore analysts travel the globe bringing you leading insights from the intersection of content, technology and people. Our thanks to the members and leaders of the SIIA for putting together a crackerjack conference. It will be a tough act to top next year.