Shore is at the Buying and Selling eContent conference in Scottsdale, Arizona this week and following all of the dynamic speakers and conversations via our Events Weblog. Check out the entries as the conference unfolds. Wish you were here! Then again, maybe you are here and reading this via the wireless... Key entries already posted include:
Buying and Selling eContent 2006: The Power of Users

Buying and Selling eContent 2006: The Power of Users Accelerates with Mainstream Publishers and Content Consumers

Buying and Selling eContent 2006: Content Technology Meets Web 2.0

Buying and Selling eContent 2006: Y.S. Chi, Vice Chairman, Elsevier, on the Publisher's Identity Crisis

Buying and Selling eContent 2006: The Subscription Dilemma

Buying and Selling eContent 2006: Licensing and Co-Branding

Buying and Selling eContent 2006: Search Engines or Content Players

Buying and Selling eContent 2006: Industry Outlook - The Road Ahead

So what does this all mean? Marydee Ojala chaired a panel of experts and observers trying to wrap up the conference. Key things that stood out in Marydee's mind: "chunking" content was big, collaboration was key. Michelle Manafy, editor of EContent magazine, notes that the road to success is not paved with zeroes and ones but with knowing the user and meeting your expectations. Chunks, unbundling, experimenting with pricing are concepts that have been around for a while but that seem to be driving many key changes in the industry now. Dennis Cahill of Factiva noted the changing value proposition moving towards supporting efficient decision-making and the Web 2.0 phenomenon being key to driving efficient application of content to drive business decisions. Text mining and visualization can also be key functions to support these goals.

Rafat Ali (egads! I am finally blogging Rafat!) noted that delivery platforms such as RSS are beginning to get information delivered more efficiently than ever before, allowing people to look at content value differently. It can take content beyond many existing models but he was surprised that few had taken this on as a topic at the conference.

Pam Rollo of the New York Public Library sees new ways in which people are sharing content and expertise that is placing pressure on buyers of premium content to justify the value of their acquisitions. She sees it moving towards validating "credentialed" content, which could include content coming from non-traditional channels in theory. This could have an impact on university presses as well as many other sources. From a public library perspective, tracking user interests to get the right content to surface to the top of the stack is something that most people aren't aware of as an issue. They just assume that the search engines are doing the right thing and are not necessarily thinking of the hows. Very few public library patrons have ever used a professionally prepared database to do research - not a good sign for many collection acquisitions.

David Seuss of Northern Light pointed out that it is a Google-centric world, one in which premium content appearing in organic search results next to contextual ads is sending a message that all of the content next to those ads must be free - it's a mixed message (don't agree whole-heartedly, but it's an interesting point). David sees in this concept a subversive doctrine that nobody at the conference questioned. "If you're hanging out with low-account friends you're going to be thought of as being low-account," David noted.

Michelle said that she gets a lot of content through trusted sources, oftentimes forwarded to her from colleagues. This also was not covered terribly well at the conference. "You can't force community," Michelle noted, and that we trust who we trust. Building that is a hard won victory (one that B2B publishers are trying to understand how to "re-win" in the online environment). Marydee noted that librarians have understood communities all along, even before services like Factiva came along to build early forms of online community around a content brand. Dennis sees that "online natives" are coming along and challenging aggregators to use new tools such as Web 2.0 tools such as mashups to get content into more contexts in which community can form - well beyond the librarian's model. "The amount of information out there is not bad. It's the lack of tools that are not able to bring together information into one experience that can support effective decisions is the future," Dennis notes.

Rafat sees a lot happening beyond Google and other search engines that are driving value. New tools may be discovered via search engines, but the tools themselves are moving beyond search as a solution. "The worse infoglut gets, the better," Rafat says, as it allows new tools and solutions to allow users and organizations to become aggregators in their own right (paraphrase).

Pam brought the discussion back to licensing, noting that there is a lack of effective solutions for enterprise licensing. David sees enterprise licensing being an issue when it's not distributed to the desktop but instead languishing on the desks of specialists who can support access by thousands of enterprise licensees entitled to access. Dennis sees integration at the desktop as the key solution for this problem, especially low-cost integration to make it easy for individuals to put enterprise-licensed content available in the most valuable context for their workflows. But still it's the "C" word - control - that's a key hot button from Marydee's perspective. Infopros don't want to give up control to access, she notes. Rafat notes that even he has problems with content being pirated by click fraud schemes to mask unsavory content. So control is a widespread issue.

Lots of other great comments, but this is the gist. It's been a great conference, and it's been a pleasure to have been providing some real-time notes on the proceedings. I will have my own wrapup posted later on today. See you next year!

Jeff Cutler of Answers.com kicked off by mentioning an analyst firm that claimed that search engines were going to put aggregators out of business. My thought: it's not the point. Web search engines are becoming more like aggregators themselves by the day. Jim Gerber of Google illustrated this nicely with his presentation, in which he demonstrated how subscription content is integrated in via Google News, which provides access to premium news content, Google Scholar, which enables premium content available in a local library-managed collection to get access to premium research content, and Google Books, which is able to support content sourced from partners and libraries to expose copyrighted and non-copyrighted content easily. The main difference between Google and traditional aggregators from this perspective is licensing: Google can provide access to premium book content in a view-only form online, but there is no license management function beyond this effort - yet. Jim highlighted some of the controversy surrounding Google Scholar, pointing out the excerpt management, links to purchasing points and library access points, underscoring from their point of view their position of supporting content monetizers instead of competing with them. It's careful navigation in a rapidly evolving field of services through content aggregation.

From an MSN perspective, Cliff Hawk of Microsoft highlighted the cross-linking and gradual merging of MSN and their Windows Live office automation online suite. The MSN side will become the pure media content, whereas Windows live is becoming utilities for personal publishing such as RSS feeds, email, messenger services, search, gadgets and other infrastructure to support users as content publishers and content consumers. Windows Live search will support ads but will also support specific instant answers services and services for publishers in books and other verticals that parallel roughly what Google is targeting. Cliff had an interesting part of his diagram labeled "April 12 = Mystery Vertical?" Cliff leaked that it will be academic journals, again paralleling Google's efforts. It's an interesting strategy, essentially stripping away all of the "old media" properties and trying to align Microsoft assets more perfectly for a world in which owning media properties becomes not as important as being able to extract value from media's contextualization in personal publishing and personal search environments.

Ryan Massie of Ask.com highlighted some of the changes in their approach highlighted earlier in our weblog. They decided also to be a company more aligned with Google, but with a twist. Instead of trying to make search something that it wasn't they provided search tools on the home page that would transform the home search page automatically into specialized searches by clicking on icons for people looking for images, weather and other specialized needs. The search results are positively Google-like, as shown in Ryan's slides, but it's interesting that 35 percent of people are clicking on images on the top of the page, whereas 45 percent click on the text links to pages and 15 percent clicking on ads. People can extract Ask content into RSS feeds that can be fed into a user's Bloglines page. At the same time the single box search line does still process natural language questions such as "Is it raining in Kentucky," but most people are used to formatting search queries. They also partner to provide content such as dictionary definitions from several sources, providing a fairly complete consumer reference strategy.

Question from Jeff Cutler: Do you prefer to license content? Jim mentioned that Google does license some content, though it prefers to drive traffic to existing sites. Ask.com will get key content such as stock quotes and then do their own aggregation around that source, whereas in news they tend to be more agnostic for users looking for multiple sources. Ask.com licenses where content can answer specific questions. MSN prefers working with many primary publishers where possible to maximize the value-add that they provide in their portals and MSN will work with aggregators to simplify relationships with small publishers.

Question from Jeff: Is there a "Chinese wall" for treating all content objectively in search results? The panel as a whole claims a high level of objectivity. Question from Jeff: is it premium if it's free for me, as in a controlled circulation model? How do publishers feel about search portals such as these making ad dollars around their content? Google asserts that they're ad supported and book partners are apparently accepting that sharing in ad revenues on their site is okay (N.B. - for not many yet). Microsoft will work with publishers to give them what they want and not to force them into any specific model. Didn't catch Ask.com's answer on this.

My question: how are you going to approach enterprise licensing beyond books? Ask.com and Microsoft didn't get the question, Google didn't answer it at all. I think that this is indicative of where we are today: in their own way Google gets the issues on a much more deep level than the other players, having skirted the old media relationships early on and getting more focused on servicing enterprises on many levels in an agnostic way. It will be interesting to see where this goes. Perhaps we will see some day a Google Enterprise portal, which will combine the most enterprise-ready content from the open Web with content from licenses sources. In the meantime enterprise content licensors are trying to move rapidly to define very focused relationships with their audiences to provide greater value-add into solutions that combine licensed and unlicensed external content with content internal to an enterprise.

At some point the war for aggregation supremacy will come down to two things: available capital and the ability to manage licensing on a user-by-user basis to reflect increasingly complex rights to content. Focusing on sectors and user roles can help overcome these two fundamental issues, and time for the moment is on the side of traditional aggregators. But as more content purchasing shifts to less centralized areas of enterprises and to small and medium businesses trying to compete with larger and more inflexible organizations the trepidation publishers have today about working with open Web search aggregators is likely to wane. It will be interesting to watch how these three players can run gingerly to the tough issues on licensing that can drive their full strategies forward.

Rafael Cosentino of Congoo noted in a kickoff address that in co-branded networks "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," meaning that partnerships oftentimes lead to unexpected relationships that turn out to be mutually productive. With technology techniques a co-branded site can be hosted online in a way that the relationship can look to be fairly transparent to the user and accessible to search engines. An example can be seen in a Yahoo search that shows how organic placements for partners of healthology get excellent search engine placement off of co-branded site presences. Although co-branding can be win-win, relationships can get cloudy (what happens when a parent company has potential conflicts with partners?) and others will catch on to dilute the uniqueness of these relationships. But the net effect is that online properties can collaborate to draw traffic away from other pools of competitors and help to reinforce the value of each others' properties to form an extended community of related users.

Matt Hong of Thomson Gale stressed two sub-themes: Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing and advertising, which combine to make content previously behind the subscription firewall to generate new revenue streams. He sees SEO/SEM strategy as the key to an effective marketing strategy which needs not scrap old strategies but opens up new opportunities for publishers to build multi-layered monetization techniques. Pam Springer of ECNext emphasized that you need a broad approach to SEO/SEM, noting that "you can't just sit and look at Google," especially when you're trying to get users beyond a site's landing page and using specific content targeted at specific audiences. Once you're there the user experience is all, making content highly usable and any purchasing experience efficient. David Scott observed that publishers need to remember that search is the one marketing technique that does not require interruption: it reaches people at the precise moment that people have a need. He sees good search engine strategies look for search engines that aggregate audiences, ones that aggregate buyers effectively. Instead of looking at it from a product-centric perspective, David sees good SEO/SEM requiring marketing that tries to get inside the heads of prospective buyers and to target their interests and behaviors - a marketing approach rather than a sales approach.

More sophisticated techniques are also in order. Pam notes that testing many different search schemes, pricing schemes, access methods, and balancing free access to convert pay-per-view. Sometimes pricing needs to go up in this environment rather than down to ensure that people take content seriously: "People are not going to take out their credit card for a two-dollar record of business information, but they will for a six-dollar record." And if it doesn't work? "Just turn it right off," David observes. SEM needs to be used carefully for content sales: "You don't want to be seen as being desperate," Rafael notes.

Paid search can work for individual pieces of content, David notes, such as an eBook that can demonstrate thought leadership on a given topic. But Pam Springer, who just published and eBook polished that point to make sure that you have both highly descriptive metadata and very careful selection of ad keywords on the "long tail" of paid search keyword inventories. This will help to maximize matches both on the paid search and organic search sides of the marketing equation. Breaking down content into subchapters, graphs and other sectioning of content such as research reports you also have an opportunity to get SEO/SEM to focus on even more ways to market premium content via search.

Jeff Cutler of Answers.com noted that co-branding can indeed impact SEO/SEM efforts by search engines finding duplicate content elsewhere and getting "blackballed" by search engines that are on the lookout for sites that take content from other sites to drain off ad revenues from other sites. Paul Gerbino of Thomas Publishing underscored this concern of partners taking content and getting the source site on the wrong end of search engine blacklisting. Search engine awareness of content licensing seems to be the key to solving the issue of blacklisting, but it seems to be a far-off mark for many publishers. SEO/SEM has transformed premium and free content marketing, but it's a transformation still under way in many critical aspects.

Is the subscription model dying? Hardly, if one believes this group of panelists, but certainly it's an evolving model. Jonathan Lewin of eMeta points out that the Online Publishers Association sees subscriptions representing about four-fifths of online revenues, but it's a more complex picture. Jonathan sees in their own client data that many people aren't aware of what it is that they are paying for a given subscription, which is complicated by sources such as The New York Times that made a decision early on to go ads-only with their online content. No surprise, then, that the NYT has reintroduced subscription content via their Times Select online package using eMeta technology. So even if you've gone free there are still ways to get back into the subscription model via tiered content offerings.

Andrea Broadbent of McGraw-Hill outlined how they went from a free to a subscription model on the Engineering News-Record site. ENR.com kicked off in the dot-com era as a brochure-ware marketing site, with a little teaser content to promote the magazine. Eventually all of the stories made it online, and as they did they were not aggressive initially in understanding how that content was being used, as opposed to sophisticated metrics available for the print publication. When the decision was made to get revenues from the online offering, they began to figure out how to turn "next-best" visitors into core customers to expand revenue. Making content freely available for thirteen days was one initial tool to encourage both subscriptions and pay-per-view access. Subscription models are varied, including monthly and annual. The juicier bait to make this happen were the "crown jewels" of data assets that had been unleashed in print only previously. By bringing these assets online there was key reference data added to encourage online subscription access. The other key effort was to work on search engine optimization via ECNext, so that freely accessible and premium content can be found more easily and encourage upgrades to premium services. With lots of new business from a 60 percent increase in traffic, lower renewal costs through online processing, lots of data on customers and much more paid content paying the bills, ENR.com has gone from an experimental cost center to a thriving profit center.

Adam Bernacki of Leadership Directories (recently moved over from Dun & Bradstreet) finds himself in a new setting, having been in the world of subscription databases for many years. D&B sold content on a one-off basis for more than a century, but then transitioned to an online database model. Subscription revenues tripled, becoming a major contributor to revenues. Leadership Directories by contrast is already heavily based in a subscription model, and has moved to start non-subscription revenue streams. Adam noted that there can be a lot of resistance to introducing new revenue models on either side of the subscription debate, which requires creativity in managing both the publisher culture and tailoring multiple revenue models to a publisher's infrastructure. Many of the bogies - channel conflict, cannibalization - are almost always offset by the move to new business models.

This theme of the fear factor was echoed by Andrea, who noted that "the freight train was coming" and that it was time to change the business model before the point of impact. It took nearly nine years to make that transition with the right partner, but the machine that is McGraw-Hill eventually came to bear on the problem. That said, the actual site development only took about 2-1/2 months via ECNext. Jonathan spoke about the fear factor with the Times Select model and other paid and registration models. He sees oftentimes that while there is oftentimes a drop in traffic initially in a registration model, but over an 18-month period it evens out. In the Times Select model, there was no dropoff, as most content in the package was new and represented only 5 percent of the site's content, but it has paid off effectively. Based on Jonathan's view expect 2-15 percent being willing to pay as an upgrade to premium.

All put in, subscription content is indeed alive and well, one level in increasingly sophisticated strategies to find, service and monetize audiences that are used to both freely available content and to paying for services that they value. Striking the right balance can be a challenge, but think of subscription as people saying that they value a long-term relationship that provides them with things that matter most to them. Focusing on the needs of these users is what publishing has always been about and only all the more so in an era in which audiences find content in any number of electronic venues.

Y.S. described the distress and disorientation from conflicting pressures and uncertainty about one's self and one's role in society that seems to be the identity crisis experienced by many publishers today. It's an experience that he likened to adolescence, and it's fair to say that we're in the adolescence of a new form for the publishing industry. When this change is fast, Y.S. notes, new players can emerge on top - such as the Web's dominant portals and search engines that have taken advantage of new market opportunities. When change is slow, though, Y.S. notes that incumbents tend to prevail. Elsevier does its best to navigate its market opportunities into the channels that are in their adolescence and into established channels that are trying to develop new ways to add publishing value in established publishing forms. Looking at the long history of some publications like The Lancet, Y.S. sees publishing as "An endless innovation that connects authors with readers." It's all a community of interest, and one in which it's harder than ever to define a successful role in publishing. From that perspective, Y.S. sees a true publisher as one who is willing to sustain their publishing capabilities. "As all of the leading bloggers can attest, publishing is hard work," Y.S. notes, and no less hard for other venues. Science magazine notes that there is only a 50/50 chance that a new educational Web site will last more than five years: that's about on par for any small business. Risk taking does not always pay off.

"It is critical to understand the sociology of our users," Y.S. says, which must be done now in a technology environment in which Web technology is changing many fundamental aspects of how people consume and relate to both content and to one another. He sees this requiring being "uber-innovative" to become "uber publishers," resources that allow people to overcome the lack of time, attention and energy it takes to absorb a world of content at their fingertip. The average online users has 55 seconds to "get" a given site online, so publishing becomes like goods vendors trying to get shelving slots in a supermarket of limited capacity.

The solution from Y.S.'s perspective is to focus on three main attributes: quality, productivity and community. Quality means different things to different people, though: Encyclopedia Britannica, on percentage of content, is only 25 percent more accurate than Wikipedia. At number 17 on the list of popular Web sites the quality of community-managed content quality begins to speak for itself. But in scientific publishing, the picture is more complex. Peer reviewed research provides a long-standing community filter for content, but new models are needed as well. Getting quality content is only taking longer, Y.S. notes, so finding quality content in a usable context is only getting harder - which he notes that Elsevier is addressing via productivity gains through its products. Its Scopus and Scirius search platforms provide portals through which people can make best use of their 55 seconds and get a "this worked for me" feeling when they use their products. Building communities is hard as well, with few having that "gotta go" quality that attracts genuine participation. It's a concept that works well for teenagers on Web portals, but professional motivations are harder to satisfy for many.

Putting it all together, Y.S. sees it as providing the "great stuff, right away, gotta go" combination that quality, productivity and community provides in a successful publishing venture. The good news is that it's not all in the hands of Web 2.0 fanatics: major publishers such as Elsevier can forge new paths if they can be nimble with new products and new business models. The business model aspects are most problematic. Y.S. noted in the Q&A that Elsevier has been slow to respond to pricing issues, as they are still dependent on enterprise and institutional subscriptions.

Elsevier is working on experimental models with key clients, which Y.S. believes could prove to be revolutionary, so more to come. He sees multiple models emerging and allow users to choose what works best for them, which he believes will net similar revenues for existing products in addition to more revenues from new products. With new models such as Open Access nibbling at the edges of major publishers' model, there are external challenges of a sort, but with Elsevier's size he believes that there are opportunities to carve out a portion of publications as experiments, with the successful ones serving as models that can be rolled out to others. Expect more experiments - and perhaps a little confusion along the way - but also expect that Elsevier will be aggressive in managing the results.

Ross Mayfield of Socialtext kicked off this report from leading content technology companies in Silicon Valley by noting that Web 2.0 has little to do with technology and everything to do with people who have social incentives to publish and share content. Contributions could be small or could be central to an online community, but all in all it's being driven by social incentives and not traditional contracts. Tools such as Digg and Memeorandum provide collective intelligence, but importantly they also provide constructive intelligence by being able to collaborate on content quality, ratings and feedback. Socialtext is working hard to get more friendly and enterprise-ready to make it easier to publish collaboratively. Licensing is a key factor in helping communities grow.

Wikipedia is the poster child for this concept, one that allows people to chip in to the pool at a very low threshold. When Wikipedia bought the old eHow community usage was slogging along until they went to a Creative Commons license, at which point the encouragement to share and collaborate with the content soared. So openness in social content requires thinking on many levels to encourage collaboration.

In the enterprise space, Ross sees the central purchasing and I.T. function of many institutions also stifling collaborative content. Instead of heavy projects Socialtext helps enterprise users to get small enterprise communities working, build enthusiasm from the core community outwards to include other users - and in the process bit by bit replace the long cycles required to get much enterprise content on the typical Intranet portal. Some organizations such as Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW), a major bank, flip this concept on its head and mandate one wiki infrastructure to encourage efficient content sharing. Simple software, yes, but with a major impact for organizations with enormous assets on the line.

Michael Walsh of Leverage Software demoed visual tools in Salesforce.com to help people collaborating on enterprise tasks to understand who has similar interests and skills that may help them to meet their objectives. Leverage also and licenses data that can help people to visualize how people in a community fit a given profile geographically. R.J. Pittman of Groxis focused on "Work 2.0," indicating their focus on mission-critical enterprise applications, Their spin on Web 2.0 is to focus on how content is socialized within a software product. Grokker is a content visualization tool that helps users understand patterns in search results or other collected data sets. R.J. demoed some interesting examples of how Grokker can be used to visualize content clusters into visual knowledge maps, which can be shared easily with other users.

Both the Leverage and the Grokker tools were interesting and valuable, but this is Web 2.0...how? The mismatch of these presentations underscores the dilemma that many have with the abuse of the Web 2.0 "movement." For many Silicon Valley companies Web 2.0 may nothing more than a source of bullet points that can be inserted into slide decks pushing what they were going to talk about anyway: their products. I can hear the notion of "connectedness and relatedness" that R.J. was pushing, and content visualization indicating the power of social collaboration is an important byproduct of social publishing. But these tools in and of themselves are not social publishing.

I think that Ross' important messages about how to build communities effectively using social publishing tools got a bit lost in the shuffle of the usual "this is my platform" spiels that software companies are likely to provide at conferences. Good stuff, guys, but keeping the focus on users as publishers is the core of Web 2.0: the rest is just ways to get in the door to talk with people about your software. Nevertheless, many publishers should consider content visualization functions as an important extensions of their product lines to make content more accessible on a human level - and many do already. Perhaps this is why so many companies have gone to variations on the "2.0" theme that seem more attuned to their real focus.

I started my news analysis last night talking about Publishing 2.0: little did I know that Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media, would decide to use that phrase to entitle his presentation of the conference (guess he caught our piece on Content 2.X after all). "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed yet." William Gibson. Listening to the leading-edge "alpha geeks" reading his books, Tim understood that there were enormous changes afoot for publishing, and began to adapt his own publishing to them and to explore the leading edge of publishing as empowered . Told an open source conference that it wasn't about the real killer apps were content applications like Google, eBay, Craigslist and other portals. With the Internet as a platform the power goes to people harnessing collective intelligence, Tim points out, pulling up the now-familiar mapping of Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 services Double-Click banner advertising to Google AdSense contextual ads, and so on. In Web 2.0 users add value, be it actively through user-generated media or by their selections of content that allow publishers and aggregators to add contextual value for those choices. Someone chooses a link on Google, that's user add-value. With more than 800,000 people make a living out of publishing into eBay's ecommerce community, it's a real and monetizable phenomenon.

This all happens largely with automatic participation, be it passive through cookie or click analysis or other activities that services can analyze when people opt to share content as a default. This default sharing brought down the early file sharing networks, but nevertheless people got used to sharing content with the entire world being a good and normal thing - and the rest is history to some degree via sharing services such as Flikr, LinkedIn, MySpace and Facebook. Flikr takes off like a rocket where non-sharing sites such as Shutterbug and Kodak, automation-oriented sites, flounder at a given level. (Perhaps that's the key differentiator which indicates that there's a valid social aspect - automated systems flatten out as a taken-for- granted utility). It's an era in which pubications like Wired, once the cutting edge of online content, are flattening out as well. Mainstream publishers are learning how to play this game, especially in scientific circles, where people in a collaborative atmosphere can identify important research. It's not juried publishing, but it's a jury of a sort.

A lot of the trick of making this transition revolves around packaging. Harry Potter books are in their own way a world of their own, but fantasy game worlds such as World of WarCraft outshine them in terms of total audience involvement. This is a world in which old line sources like Encyclopedia Britannica flatlines while Wikipedia grows by leaps and bounds, Craigslist booms with user-placed classified ads on the backs of 18 employees (see our coverage of the SIIA Information Industry Summit). It's also a world in which online experts have developed successful online reference publications that make it hard for book publishers like O'Reilly to persuade their authors to spend time on creating books.

This dynamic aspect of content creation is powered by software development techniques that favor people who can get services in beta in front of communities that can give them feedback as soon as possible via online services. This unhinges people from platforms and makes products content-centric - a concept that Tim labels "Intel inside," a favoring of unique content. A content-centric value layer favors producers that know how to leverage technology to
create valuable platforms that can join together loose pieces of content and users to get content in powerful contexts that matter most to users. Sometimes this manifests itself in mashups that combine content such as Google mapping data and Craigslist data, sometimes it's seen in RSS feeds that make it easier to implement Web services and other content consuming functions.

Wherefore all this and books? As a book publisher Tim sees the music downloading phenomenon as a good example of technology that enabled widespread access that eventually encouraged widespread legal downloads. In books it's harder: scanning books is a pain, and that provides O'Reilly with opportunities such as Safari Bookshelf, Safari U (see our recent weblog review) and Rough Cuts that allow digitized book content to be accessed by readers in pre-publishing form. That's good in the short term, but it's a matter of publishers learning how to let go of content with somewhat loose DRM and to enable digitized content to be found in the "long tail" of content and discovered in search engines and online portals. Tim flashed up an interesting slide that quantified this that showed a huge gain in less popular content over print distribution, with many titles that were far more profitable online long after their print popularity had run out. This runs down the long tail curve until you find books that aren't selling at all in print providing 8 percent of sales. With only about 4 percent of books being actually monetized in print, there's huge gains to be make with providing digitized content. So is looseness profitable and beneficial? If it's done right, to be sure.

O'Reilly's new Make magazine title is another example of how the cycle of publishing is being altered by the atomicization of content. The magazine is harvested from Web sources, including user-enthusiasts that push out blogs, photos and other content that gets packaged into a slick publication. The strategy includes RSS, podcasts, instant messaging alerts when new topics of interest to a user crop up and community tools such as Meetup to draw its publishing audience together. "You've got to think about the future," Tim reminds us, which requires publishers to aim ahead of the curve - something that may not come naturally to many publishers. But when obscurity is a far more dangerous phenomenon than piracy, the future is something that publishers are trying grasp more aggressively than ever before.

More on this panel coming...

One of the more interesting things about this panel was how so many of the techniques for generating value in publishing that were so cutting-edge at last year's conference have been assimilated so quickly into mainstream publishing. This year it's EXPECTED that there will be numerous bloggers at the conference, whereas last year it was still something of a novelty. David Meerman Scott's panel on user-generated content underscored this point. Rusty Williams of Prospero illustrated how user-generated content has made its way into numerous mainstream publications, including high-value niches such as woodworking in which custom cabinetry expert Steve Casey has a weblog for Taunton Press' Fine Cabinetry unwinds his insights into cabinet-making for high-end enthusiasts. I found this to be a particularly compelling example, as it targets a high-end market that is likely to pick up print content. But they welcome the contact with an expert such as Steve and have the opportunity to drop comments and participate in an online community. Larry Schwartz of Newstex highlighted their recent integration of weblogs with LexisNexis, in which Newstex licenses weblog content and pays back royalties from the use of their content by LexisNexis users. A very traditional arrangement, which is the point: webloggers are publishers, as Larry notes, and are viewed as quality sources of information by enterprise audiences catered to by LexisNexis. The point of user-generated media being quality content was underscored by Cyndi Schoenbrun of Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, who ticked off a wide array of media-oriented weblogs that she monitors to keep on touch of the publishing industry - a list that she uses to alert her internal users to key developments. Cyndi has a screening process that separates in her mind the "serious" weblog content from other sources, but the key is that she sees it as industrial-strength content that frequently breaks stories and moves markets.

So in a fairly short period of time we have gone from user-generated media being a fringe technical phenomenon to a key factor in publishing that has the attention of professional publishers and enterprises in full. User-generated media has not changed the fundamentals of publishing, and in many ways it has been absorbed rapidly into the publishing mainstream, but they have changed fundamentally the balance of power that leverages published content. Nothing is more valuable to people than relationships with other people that can yield value to their own lives and the lives of their organizations. It's where the center of content monetization and value generation is forming rapidly. Thanks for a great panel, David.

The conference this year has hit pre-crash levels in attendance, according to Information Today CEO Tom Hogan - more than 220 attendees, with the quality of attendees strong across the board. Especially encouraging is the relatively strong showing by "buy side" attendees as well as representatives from the Special Librarians Association. New attendees who raised their hands were about a third of the room. Keynoter Esther Dyson, Editor or Release 1.0, provided an informal overview of where content is headed from her perspective in a Q&A with Marydee Ojala, editor of ONLINE magazine. It was kind of a rambling discussion that's difficult to encapsulate, but in a nutshell Esther sees the opportunity for publishers to focus more on high-value content and to leave mass distribution to others and to focus on So much information, people will pay for filtering, refining and relationships. The most interesting example of how content based on relationships can differ focused on the contrast between a solo publishing environment such as weblogs or MySpace versus online role-playing gamers who build collaborative teams to reach new levels in their electronic fantasy worlds. The emphasis in today's publishing world is on building content value from the audience on in rather than the content product on out, a theme that seems to be becoming the center of the publishing industry far more rapidly than many may have imagined at last year's conference.