Every now and then you get an opportunity to go to an industry event that's doing something really unique and fun. This year's SIIA NetGain event in San Francisco is going to be just that. In addition to a great day of speakers and experts from B2B and consumer media laying out today's best practices in content services, the second day will take participants on a tour down Highway 101 to some of Silicon Valley's leading companies for "up close and personal" interaction with the leaders in content technologies. And when we say leaders, we do mean leaders - try Google, Apple and Adobe, for starters. If you want to rub shoulders with the greats of the content industry from both the East Coast and the West Coast and do some real business while having a great time, get hopping and register soon. Frankly, for the price they're charging it's an absolute steal. Early bird registration ends Monday!

Labels: 2010, adobe, apple, conference, events, Google, NetGain, San Francisco, SIIA, silicon valley

It's always been fun to be a part of ASIDIC events, so I was very pleased to have been invited to moderate a Q&A period at this year's Spring ASIDIC get-together at the offices of Lyrasis in Philadelphia. It's a bit more low-key venue than for previous ASIDIC events, which reflects in some ways the challenges that many enterprise-oriented publishers have faced these days, but also the degree to which their business models are trying to catch up to the value points in publishing that revolve around metadata and search technologies. The good news is that the ASIDIC meeting pulled together some excellent case studies demonstrating how publishers are moving away from "pull up a document" styles of electronic publishing towards using sophisticated semantic processing to get their content ready for battle for use in contexts driven by metadata. Here are some links to the panel-by-panel posts that I recorded on Google Buzz (no login required to view, login required for comments):

Labels: 2010, ASIDIC, collexis, conferences, enterprise, events, mark logic, search, Semantic Web, Taxonomies, temis

Yes, there is a future for the content industry in media and enterprise markets, and the Software and Information Industry Association Content Division has been charting it for several years now at its Information Industry Summit events in New York City. This year's IIS is drawing more than 300 executives from leading content and technology companies, a good crowd in the middle of a dismal economy. No surprise, given the star-studded line-up of speakers that was assembled by the Content Division this year. You might say that these people are documenting a future that people have been talking about for many years and that finally arrived - a future in which the Web dominates the dialog on profits and products on a daily basis, even as high-value premium products punch through to define new opportunities for value in enterprise and media publishing. Key to that trend is the rise of technology companies that are driving change in major publishing organizations, which enable publishers to define new relationships with their clients. Are all of these publishers ready for this ever-present "future?" Let's see what these experts have to say. I will be posting on our events blog throughout the day and linking the posts to this entry. You may also find my conference Twitter messages (and retweets) here.

Labels: authors, books, conference, content, enterprise, events, First Research, information industry summit 2010, media, Publishing, SIIA, Social Media, speakers, Technology

I've had the privilege to have moderated many great SIIA panels over the years, but the 24 June Brown Bag Lunch mid-day event at the McGraw Hill building in New York City (online video available) certainly ranks among the most important topics that I've had the opportunity to moderate with some excellent panelists who will stimulate your thinking on how best to monetize content on today's hot distribution platforms. Please register soon, the last Brown Bag Lunch event was a sellout both in-person and online. If you have suggestions for questions that the panel should address, please add them as comments to this post. A panel summary and a list of our truly distinguished panelists follows. See you there!

Labels: Amazon Kindle, books, brown bag, busines models, crovitz, events, Google, iPhone, journalism online, magazines, Monetization, newspapers, Oxford, profits, Publishing, settlement, SIIA, thomson reuters

Last week's Social Media Club meeting was great for any number of reasons that I covered in my Content Nation blog post, but it was capped by one of those moments of serendipity that come along only so often. As I settled in to my train seat on the way home, I noticed that my friend Jim Hirshfield was sitting in the seat behind me. Jim and I had last seen one another at last year's Cluetrain@10 celebration in New York City, just as he was looking to re-enter the startup space. Today Jim is VP of Business Development of Zemanta, a European startup with development offices in Slovenia that has developed a nifty platform that enables publishers to enrich their online content via their semantic language processing tools.

Zemanta technology operates via a plugin for popular blogging and Web CMS platforms and with popular brower-based email services such as Yahoo! Mail and Gmail. As with other semantic processing services that parse documents to suggest related links, tags and content, Zemanta semantic processing technology pumps text that's being typed in by a document author through its semantic filters to come up with relevant rich content that can be inserted into these documents. This in and of itself is not terribly revolutionary: publishing platforms have had similar tools for years to facilitate the development of rich content that can attract search engine traffic and keep audiences engaged in their content. What's highly interesting about Zemanta's approach is that it is a free download that can be integrated within seconds into platforms that are popular with both bloggers and professional publishers. A "pro" model is available that can be tailored for a publisher's own content on their own platforms.

Best of all, the stuff just plain works. As you type along, Zemanta's suggestions for images, links, tagging and related content pop up in convenient spots near a page's editing window. This real-time analysis is quite impressive and remarkably effective: it seems to take only a few sentences to get going and it gets only better as you type in more. A quick click or drag of the mouse and rich content is integrated into a blog post or article easily. It's giddily easy to enrich your articles: virtually every link, image and tag in this article was implemented with Zemanta. Zemanta's free download links into 10 million-plus items of content from free sources, including rights-cleared images from sources such as CrunchBase, Flickr and Google Maps, articles from key bloggers and Wikipedia as well as information posted on social networking services and content from Crunchbase, Amazon, YouTube and other popular sources. "Reblogging" content to other sites with trace linking to the original source is applied automatically to each post.

High-end services may provide more features, content and functionality for semantic content integration, but for publishers that don't have the time, money or project bandwidth for such solutions and that need to get more enriched content quickly Zemanta offers remarkable power in its free version - as well as the ability to upgrade to the premium version that enables publisher-specific sources to be integrated easily as well. This can be particularly important for a publisher that may have blogging or open-source CMS platforms that will not be so easily integrated into some of the high end semantic services. Zemanta allows these publishers to make rapid integration of content from their existing sources a very short project. In a world in which publishing platforms with 80 percent of what one would expect from a professional package now dominate the bulk of content being generated on the Web, Zemanta gives those platforms yet another "pretty-darn-good" asset that can help their content to compete effectively in online content markets. My thanks to Jim for being in the right place at the right time with a great tool for publishers of all sizes.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Social Media Club NYC meets Content Nation Author John Blossom (socialmediaclub.org)

Labels: content nation, events, Flickr, Google, Google Maps, Publishing, Slovenia, Social Media Club, Yahoo, YouTube, Zemanta

After a challenging drive in to Manhattan with boxes of "Content Nation" in the back seat, Marjorie Scardino, Chief Executive of Pearson, was starting her keynote as I was plugging in to blog. What I heard was a good presentation of the typical promises and challenges facing the publishing industry as the rapid change fomenting through new generations and new technologies. What was nice about Scardino's perspective was that she spoke as both a CEO and an adult facing her children as well as the market research. In a sense, our empirical experience of the rapid pace of change due to publishing's impact on society is catching up and surpassing many of the fundamental presumptions of the publishing industry faster than they can reposition their assets to engage these changes.

That said, it is a hopeful sign that the SIIA Information Industry Summit this years has robust attendance and a great lineup of executives and experts who are wrestling with the changes impacting the information industry. These professionals are engaging many of the key "sink or swim" issues aggressively: resting on past assurances is a thing of the past. I will be blogging throughout the two-day conference (when I am not signing books) and trying to capture the essence of the conference. I will post links to individual "live-blog" posts here as they are up and available. Stay tuned!

Sink or Swim: How can you Grow an Information Company Now?
Interview with Glenn Goldberg of McGraw Hill
Mark Walsh with Lessons from Politics
Licensing Digital Information: Satisfying Customers While Protecting Assets
Frictionless Information - Adding Value in the Age of Google
What's the Value of Value Add in Enterprises?
Thriving on Chaos: Profiting from the New New Era of Political, Economic and Technology Change
Henry Blodgett, CEO, Business Insider
Profiting From Video: NYT, Beet.tv, CNN, AllBusiness.com
CTO to the Stars! The Shifting Role of CTOs
End Keynote: Stephanie George, EVP, Time, Inc.

Labels: events, siia information industry summit 2009

As a company that has as its tagline "Where Content, Technology and People Meet" Shore can only applaud the SIIA's decision to combine sessions for software and content professionals at its annual West Coast conference into one event this year, now dubbed NetGain. Seeing companies like Salesforce.com and Deloitte Consulting in one set of rooms and companies like LexisNexis and Wolters Kluwer in another room at this conference always seemed like a huge lost opportunity, only the moreso as Software as a Service begins to transform the face of enterprise I.T. services and content providers move more towards workflow applications and content integration technologies to build their market value. At the same time services like Google have long demonstrated that a technology that provides highly valuable context for content can be a publishing platform unto itself. So in many ways the software industry and the content industry are chasing the same high-value market opportunities and need to recognize that they have to speak in the same forums together for enterprise markets as much as for media markets.

I did not live-blog this conference, in part to participate in the SIIA's experiment in using Twitter to cover the event (see LiveTwitter's events page and look for NetGain updates). Larry Schwartz, President of Newstex, LLC, provided a consolidated collection of people's Twitter messages here for those wanting a more blow-by-blow account of the proceedings. I also posted earlier a piece reviewing presentations by Salesforce.com and Google that underscored the importance of "cloud computing" in delivering enterprise content services.

On one level NetGain was such a perfectly natural blend of conference attendees from the SIIA Content and Software divisions that one wonders why this wasn't done earlier. This was underscored by the similar product themes brought out in the conference sessions. When software providers talked about "Software as a Service," what it really seems to say in many ways is that software companies are not succeeding as much as they used to simply by licensing their software as intellectual property and need to adopt licensing models more akin to those used for many years by enterprise subscription database services. When content providers talked about the importance of "workflow applications," What they seemed to be saying was that they cannot survive just on licensing intellectual property that gets commoditized unless it's put to work through really useful software services. Either way both software publishers and content publishers are chasing the same value proposition in the enterprise increasingly.

And for that matter, how different is "cloud computing" from the decades-old content services provided in the financial services industry by securities exchanges and companies like Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg? Certainly the Web has accelerated the development of client-server content services beyond any scale of earlier enterprise services but at the end of the day software and content services have been in a merging industry for a long time. Alacra, which won a CODiE award at NetGain for its ability to integrate content into enterprise workflows, has been working diligently for more than a decade on its powerful AlacraBook content integration services. Eventually trends catch up with long-established realities, I suppose.

The big difference today seems to be the influence of the one key ingredient that was somewhat under-represented at NetGain: social media services. Clay Shirky delivered his usual great speech about how social media services are revolutionizing publishing and ecommerce and there was a very good panel discussion lead by Dave McClure, but the increasing preponderance of social media publishing services both outside and inside major enterprises just didn't seem to register with most of the NetGain attendees. We're moving rapidly towards a predominant publishing environment in which the audience is seeking out and defining the value that it needs from content far more rapidly than traditional I.T. and publishing services are defining it.

This raises the question: what is the platform for today's and tomorrow's publishers? Certainly Salesforce.com and Google, along with other presenters, raised a compelling case for the applications programming interface, or API, being the platform of choice for the forseeable future. Being able to plug in content and functionality into one or more platforms via APIs enables people with both content and technology services to put their capabilities into the contexts that audiences value most very rapidly. Certainly the flourishing success of Facebook's APIs has helped to fuel its growth even as Google's OpenSocial API promises to bring content into social media contexts more universally. If a platform does not have the ability for content and functionality to grow through the efforts of third parties then it's going to be hard to fuel growth efficiently.

But the real platform of today and tomorrow is the community built around a platform. Bloomberg and Reuters proved this out years ago as their messaging and conversational dealing services enabled securities market traders to communicate with one another more efficiently and to contribute valuable content that resulted in the execution of securities trades. While much of the financial industry's technology and content services have shifted towards more automated functionality, the heart of what provides the firms using these services with a market advantage is the ability of people to collaborate in marketplaces through publishing. Today a new generation of business information services is emerging, highlighted at NetGain by Hoover's and ECNext, both of which are focusing on how to lock in content value through their audiences providing valuable content in the context of their platforms. A publishing community is a community that can become the heart of any platform's value. Looking at how Salesforce.com itself is moving towards integrating social media functionality this concept is hardly a secret.

There were also a lot of interesting exhibits by CODiE candidates at NetGain, which allowed people to get more "hands on" with their products before voting - sometimes literally. I especially enjoyed J.J. Keller's Safe.Sim truck driving simulator, which although it did not win in its CODiE category was both a very powerful training and evaluation tool as well as a "sleeper" software hit. With a little bit of repackaging and some consumer marketing know-how this could be a huge software hit. Truckers and truck fans around the nation and no doubt worldwide would jump at the opportunity to have a multi-player online version of this, complete with their own customizations. As for me, well, I guess I have a few things to learn about backing a semi into a loading dock.

In the paid exhibitors area I was especially impressed by a couple of offerings. Mzinga is an OEM social media community development service for both enterprise and consumer markets, enabling the collection and sharing of valuable content that builds value inside and outside the firewall. Well worth a look if you're considering stepping into social media more deeply. Vitrium Systems enables PDFs to be turned into intelligent content payloads that track audience behavior without requiring plug-ins or downloads and can also provide DRM for PDF content. For those still emphasizing print-formatted content this is an interesting play, especially for those interested in getting more play out if eBook content.

On the SIIA Previews agenda two later presentations stood out clearly. Watch Zuora, a company that promises to enable subscription models for practically everything, including content and technology to be sure but also just about any business model for any fungible product or service. Model-wise I think that they're on to something big and I plan to highlight them in future writings. It's a spinoff of ideas from Salesforce.com using telecommunications technology, Keep an eye on this one, it may take a while to take off but I think that it has the potential to hockey-stick.

Another strong Previews offering was SlideRocket, which combines powerful presentation tools, graphics development and community content to create a new way to develop and share presentations that can capture metrics on how people look at them. I think of it being to tools like PowerPoint and Photoshop and Flash what Salesforce.com and Facebook were to enterprise software and online publishing - services that defined their own categories as a new kind of publishing and in the process of doing so redefined several market segments at once by focusing on owning user content. I can't wait to get my hands on the beta.

So it was a great event, though I would hope that next year we get to see more participation both by more West Coast local firms and more major East Coast and overseas publishers. I would say that the only real disappointment that I had from the event was the rather quiet audience, which seemed in many instances to be of the opinion that while things were changing rapidly in the publishing and software industries the changes that many tout as revolutionary are not going to sweep away long-standing business models any time soon. There's more than a small grain of truth in that outlook, of course. Yet looking at the news industry, now reeling from the effects of having largely ignored the need to transform themselves radically in the face of a decade of online publishing, I think that it's safe to say that NetGain represented in many ways the admission that later is sooner than many may think.

Labels: 2008, events, Google, J.J. Keller, livetwitter, Mzinga, Salesforce.com, SIIA NetGain, SlideRocket, Twitter

The Marriott Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, Arizona has been the site of the Buying and Selling eContent conference for nine years, now, usually a most beautiful spot that lets your cares melt away so that you can focus on good people, good food, a bit of sun and great presentations. But Camelback was not its usual self this year, stuck in the middle of a major construction project that had the revitalized conference halls in good shape but much of the rest of the facility in turmoil. Rumor had it that Bill Marriott himself showed up over the weekend and flipped his lid when he found out how messed up and behind schedule the project hd become.

This turmoil seemed to reflect the unsettled nature of this year's Buying and Selling eContent conference, an event that brought together some very good speakers overall but which had some crashing lows to go along with its resounding highs. Attendance was off from last year's healthy showing but still had a good collection of both content vendors, technologists and institutional content buyers. Some of the presentations were downright brilliant and spot on: Y.S. Chi, Vice-Chair of Elsevier, gave a fantastic assessment of the content industry, underscoring his belief that the content industry was going to have to move towards providing experiences and not just content.

I had to smile at Y.S.' use of experience as a focus for content's value, having made experiences part of our definition of content five years ago: "Information and experiences created by individuals, institutions and technology to benefit audiences in venues that they value." I posted it on Wikipedia not long thereafter and there it remains in somewhat modified form (my thanks to Wikipedians who helped me to refine it). Y.S. demonstrated briefly what appeared to be a bog-standard MediaWiki platform that Elsevier is using to enable qualified medical practitioners to develop a medical knowledge base - an important step forward for Elsevier to compete with other scientific publishers experimenting with social media and one which I am sure will not be their last foray into social media as they begin to focus on building knowledge community experiences from the expertise available in their client base.

But this was counterbalanced by Andrew Keene, the self-professed "Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley" whose keynote rant on the "Cult of the Amateur" repeated his performance of vivisecting social media at the SIIA Information Industry Summit earlier this year. On Content Nation I go into this presentation in more detail, but the nut of his argument - or shtick, as the case may be - is that people creating social media are a bunch of monkeys typing on PCs who should step aside to let the established media be the professionals in charge of content creation and curation. I imagine that the doctors contributing to Elsevier's wiki project would take exception to that label - as would many professionals of significant insight who contribute to social media publications globally.

The thing of it is, though, is that there were more than a few people at the conference who were glad to side with Keene's point of view. Certainly there is a need for professional content creators and curators but overall we should be glad that so much additional value is being created through social media. If there was anything that I found to be particularly disappointing and disturbing at the conference it was the number of people who were not only invested in traditional content buying and selling models but who were on some levels downright hostile to emerging and highly valuable concepts such as social media. I was very pleased with the presenters in my own panel who tried to explain how Jigsaw, ECNext's Manta and the Near-Time social media platform were creating mission-critical business information, but for some reason their leading-edge efforts seemed to be greeted with some skepticism.

The low point for this "rear guard" action, though, was the Special Libraries Association-sponsored panel, in which Janice Lachance, CEO of the SLA , led a well-presented but utterly stale list of complaints about content vendors that could have been written from ten-year-old slide decks. I know Janice, and she's a wonderful person who has great insights, as do the people who presented: I expected far better. I think, though, that it's really not a matter of personalities or presentations but more a core factor with which SLA members need to wrestle.

Having come through many years of upheaval, in which more than a few SLA members have seen their careers shuffled from one part of their organizations to another, it seems that too often SLA members have been disconnected from much of the "experience"-oriented generation of content in their organizations that drives much of the value of content for their patrons. If they allow themselves to focus too much on licensing agreements their careers are going to be tied ever more more closely to their vendors, whose main revenues continue to come through licensing content. As long as there's content to license then they have a job, might be one argument, which tends to chain their organizations to ever-weakening vendor business models.

I don't think that this unfortunate symbiosis really has to be the full truth of the matter, and I know that for many progressive SLA members it is far from the truth. Certainly Bill Noorlander's panel on win/win relationships helped to show some shadowy outlines of more progressive thinking. But the vendor "dance" on licensing has been stalemated for far too long, a stalemate that's been dragging down both the vendors themselves as they drown in complex licensing deals that slow down and reduce sales and service, but as well their clients as they try to justify pricing schemes that seem to have little bearing on the ROI required by the line managers who need to justify content acquisition costs in their budgets.

Put simply, it's time to get the lawyers and the fiefdom-builders out of the way and to come up with a new and more highly automated regimen for content licensing that will meet the increasingly "just-in-time"demands of institutional content buyers. The manufacturing industry came up with computer protocols that helped to automate materials acquisition from suppliers nearly two decades ago: why has it taken the publishing industry so long to invest in similar techniques for enterprises? Perhaps increased competition from new sources of valuable content will stimulate their thinking. In the meantime I think that it falls upon the SLA to become far more visionary and to start participating in the development of standards for automated licensing already being developed commercially to help their institutions to use premium content far more cost-effectively as they adapt to the ROI requirements of institutions trying to survive in a real-time economy.

Stephen E. Arnold gave a well-polished and insightful presentation on the state of the search industry's place in the content game as old models for charging for content come up against the ability of search engines such as Google creating ever more sophisticated ways to aggregate and organize content. As Steve pointed out the enterprise search engine market is booming but failing to pull together all of the content resources that their clients need to create the most valuable and comprehensive content collections that their clients need. At one surveyed institution two thirds of users were dissatisfied with their search engines. Steve sees federated content services as one key solution to this problem, but in the broader picture with a new global audience for content growing up around devices such as mobile phones and an ever-wider array of publishing services from technology providers it's not clear that solving the role of search engines in their marketing is going to be that much of a solution for any content provider. There are far too many things in motion to which publishers simply haven't reacted.

I don't mean to short-change the other good panels that the conference had, which all provided some great examples of how best practices are being applied today for content, but I was not taking my usual by-the-blow notes in the middle of launching Content Nation, so some of my recollections are now sketchy. Suffice it to say that most presenters provided some good examples of how content value is being created more from value-add services such as better content organization. Collexis, for example, demonstrated powerful new ways in which content categorization can be used to discover people's expertise in highly specific areas that help to accelerate research in medical and research fields. I think that Collexis CMO Darrell Gunter's best example of this capability's power was when one scientist discovered something that he never knew - the fellow in the office next to him was working in the same area in a key line of research!

Mike Orren, President of Pegasus News, uses user-contributed content and networking to enable marketers to target offers that have a more than 60 percent response rate and zero opt-outs in some instances, driven by very careful matching of opportunities to audiences based on content analysis. And Cengage Gale demoed an online book club that helps people to drive book downloads and sales based on building communities of book enthusiasts.

But whatever the particular focus of the conference's presentations, the same theme seemed to pop up again and again: the increasing polarization of publishing inside and outside the enterprise based on the rise of social media. There are some publishers such as Karen Christensen's Berkshire Publishing Group that try to balance both very traditional forms of publishing while exploring the development innovative social media outlets. But for many publishers the need to balance traditional revenue streams while investing in social media technologies, which push their business model ever further away from their core expertise, is proving to be quite challenging.

Social media's rise seems to be just as challenging to content experts in enterprises, who see the rise of social media content uncurated by information professionals as a challenge that stretches their expertise that much further from being interfaces to licensed content providers. Jeff Cutler, now an independent consultant, pointed out in comments how the rapid rise of Answers.com's WikiAnswers online Q&A community is one example of how social media is creating powerful "social knowledge," aggregations of expertise that are increasingly competitive with traditional sources and likely to eclipse them in time. Steve Arnold pointed out how Google's Knol project, meant to assemble reference articles on key topics, is as much about creating definitive topic mapping from social media to empower its search engine as it s about attracting people to social media itself. Any way you look at it, the elephant in the room was Content Nation - the ability of millions of people to influence others through highly scalable online publishing.

Social media is more than just a generational divide: it's a cultural divide as well. While I might be a bit greyer than the average Twitterer, somehow I was one of those willing to cross the divide and to agree that social media has become the emerging center of publishing, much as the Web itself became that center several years ago prior to many publishers being willing to accept that fact. But unlike their initial transition to the Web, social media challenges both publishers and institutions to come up not only with new skills but entirely new inventories: you can adapt news, book, magazine and even audio and video content to the Web but there's nothing in most publishers' quivers that can be repackaged into social media.

Social media certainly helps to enhance the value of many publications and in many instances can create premium content to drive very valuable new content products and services. But in most instances what we're seeing is the rise of a new parallel content industry whose rise in a medium now familiar in some ways to most publishers has caught them yet again by surprise. The divides created by social media are far more profound in many ways than the divides created by the Web. Most people of an employable age have an email account, perhaps even a few. But there are few in senior positions in the publishing industry today who have a Facebook account or even seem to want to have one - while younger people may not even see an email account until they get their first job.

One familiar and vocal person at the conference tried to downplay social media as "nothing new." And she was right, of course: social media has been with us for thousands of years. But the scale of social media's influence creates a social divide that seems to be leaving many publishing experts flat-footed in their responses to the marketplace. That's a problem that future iterations of this conference will have to address more fundamentally. The events industry, the social knowledge industry, the technology industry and the media industry are merging in ways that are helping to create a new real-time knowledge economy that cannot be responded to easily by many.

I am hoping that the next iteration of this conference will bring back both some more healthy crowds and more of a focus on the value propositions that people are seeking in the content marketplace. From buyers, I hope to hear more about how they are creating value from content in their enterprises and what they need to do to achieve ROI from internal and external content. From sellers, I hope to hear more about how they are leaving old licensing models behind to find new ways to respond to the real-time needs of their marketplaces. And from the Information Today, Inc. staff I hope that we get a return to a commitment to the thoughtful assembly of topics and presentations that drive people to more provocative thinking about the future of the content industry. Let's hope that both Bill Marriott and conference attendees will return to Camelback next year to find both a familiar place and a place transformed by a new outlook on its mission.

Labels: 2008, buying and selling econtent, events, Licensing, sla, Social Media, Trends

When I arrived at the the ABM Digital Velocity event Tom Cintorino, SVP for Digital Media for PennWell Corporation was chairing a panel on revenues at the ABM Digital Velocity conference, which focused on how to drive revenues in the digital era. The key factor that struck me in listening to this panel was that the margins found in online B2B media - approaching 85 percent in some instances - are becoming a very attractive incentive for publishers to sell online ads and services far more aggressively.

Yet while Tom put out a hypothetical 1/3-1/3-1/3 ideal for a current revenue mix between print, digital and events few in the audience raised their hands to say that they were anywhere near that mix today. So although publishers are moving rapidly to push online revenues and starting to combine print and online sales forces aggressively the traditional dominance and allure of print for B2B publishers has hardly disappeared.

Yet I heard a lot of hopeful trends from the panelists and people in the audience which indicate just how much velocity towards digital services is entering B2B trade publishing:

• One publisher talked about how they were in an interesting quandary - they had to change their sales incentives plan for selling print advertising because the sales force was focusing so much on online sales. It may be kind of ironic to be having to subsidize flagship print titles to keep sales foces interested in them but it's really about leaving no money on the table - publishers can't afford to have advertisers say "Well, you're our online strategy, we'll use your competitor for ptint." That leaves to big a door open for competitors to expand from their print base into online sales later. So print will be a decreasing revenue stream but one which publishers simply don't want to let go of as a strategic investment for some time to come.
• One person in the audience noted how in construction services print titles are still very important to architects who still need and appreciate the high quality of graphic presentation that print affords them - and that appeals to their clients. However, when it comes to finding suppliers and solving specific problems in their trade they go online aggressively. So even where print services the lifestyles of specific audiences in specific modes, online is the focus for advertising and marketing that captureds people in a mode that advertisers will value highly - and that provide concrete and detailed metrics of campaign performance.
• Sales lead generation is becoming a key strategy for B2B publishers, so much so that one panelist noted that that sometimes they will have to tell potential clients that their ad campaigns really won't work on their platforms. The good news for those marketers though is that the ability of online B2B publishing to return great sales leads is proven and strong - a campaign that returns 300 leads for high-end B2B products may result in around ten percent of these suspects being converted into prospects.
  
• Converting print sales forces can be challenging: looking at the third-third-third revenue mix suggested by Tom is also a roadmap as to how many in traditional sales forces might not be able to make the leap to online sales. But publishers were offering stories of veteran salespeople who they thought would never be able to make the leap into online sales working off of laptops on wireless connections doing online presentations. Thinking of many of the great veterans from the early days of financial trading technologies who had to make the leap from "ticker" sales to sophisticated system sales it's a hard transition to manage for many. But in industries where relationships are built up over many years these transitions may be needed at times to ensure stability at major accounts while still enabling more online sales. Nevertheless, one of the major pain points for publishers is to realize that they are not in business to keep a sales force but to solve their clients' needs.
• This panel highlighted that one of the problems in making the transition to online sales is to recognize that it's no longer a brand sale as much as it is a product sale. Marketers are looking for vehicles that produce results: it's no longer as ephemeral as the appeal of a print title that is based on many intangibles and relatively few advantages in the product platform itself. This is very hard for publishers raised on the mystique of print brands to accept. The product is now not just what's on the editorial side of the wall.
  
• This need for looking at publications as products was highlighted also in the next panel on new technologies, where eMedia consultant Mitch Rouda highlighted the need for traditional publishers to embrace a concept that's familiar to many other industies and still somewhat foreign to them: product management. Who is to fulfill that role today in publishing? Editors to some degree, perhaps, but whatever the solution the "throw it over the wall" solution to technology hasn't worked for digital native publications for a long time and print publications are struggling on this cultural divide.
• A B2B and Media Business indicated that investment in print for B2B publishers was expected to decrease for 45 percent of respondents in the 2008-2009 time frame, with just a handful expecting an increase. A marketer's panel pointed out that this isn't automatically mean that marketers are getting what they want for online: they're less interested in CPM and other online concepts than they are in lead generation. Increases in online investment, though, are still fairly conservative according to the B2B survey, with increases of 10 percent expected. Granted that's a good chunk, but with the open-ended investments being pursued by private equity players in online-only publishing one wonders if it's really going to make enough.
  

The gaps are closing between what B2B publishers need to do and what they are actually doing to build stronger revenues from online media. But it's safe to say that many publishers have a legacy of old methods and outlooks that are still having a hard time making the transition to a more client-oriented and market-oriented approach to publishing product developmtn. In the final panel of the day the questoin was raised about how marketers could place an industrial video in an online publication and provide a new form of content and community just didn't register with this crowd. The discussion shifted rather rapidly to how to manage print sales.

I am more hopeful than ever that major publishers will be able to thrive through this transition but the small to medium portfolios of trade magazines who may have a harder time reinventing sales, technology, events management and editorial staffs all at once are certainly at risk in this transition. Here's hoping everyone gets their digital velocity souped up as soon as possible. You may have "ink in your blood" but it's time to start breathing the same air that your marketing and advertising clients need to breathe.

Labels: ABM, B2b media, Digital Velocity, events, revenues

The seventh Information Industry Summit from the Software and Infomation Industry Association comes at a time of both great optimism and great worries for the digital publishing industry, Transformative technologies have made more content available from more people and organizations for more audiences than ever before and the ability to monetize content in more contexts than ever before is truly unprecedented. This is great news for publishers and technology companies that are a part of this transformation and quite a challenge to publishers and distributors who are locked into older cost structures and marketers who are slow to adapt to new opportunities to reach their markets online. With a soft economy it's not always easy to make the most of new opportunities. But with the ability to target buyers and sellers through contextual advertising services and to target users of high-value content services more effectively through easily accessed online services there's the hope that marketing can be so focused as to help both publishers and marketers weather leaner times more effectively than ever before. SIIA President Ken Wasch underscored this with a summary of an SIIA report that indicates a combined content and information industry that is continuing to grow in the face of the tougher 2008 economy.

We'll be posting coverage of the Information Industry Summit throughout the event, with links to individual items posted here as the event unfolds. Our thanks to the SIIA and its fellow members on the planning committee for putting together a rich and engaging event.

• Survey Research Results
• Opening Keynote - Tom Glocer, CEO, Reuters
• After the Froth - How the Financial Markets Will Affect Information Companies
• Interview - Caroline H. Little, CEO and Publisher, Washingtonpost, Newsweek Interactive
• Luncheon Keynote - Andrew Keen, Author, The Cult of the Amateur
• B2B Social Networking - Content Provider Strategies
• Search as an Editorial Tool - New Forms of High-Value Content Aggregation
• CEOs Outlook - The Tipping Point for Old and New Media
• Morning Keynote - Gordon Crovitz - Embracing Change in the Digital Age
• What's the Business Model for Video Aggregation and Distribution on the Internet?
  
• Fair Use or Foul? - William Patry, Sr. Copyright Counsel, Google Inc.
  
• Case Studies - Information Industry Innovators
• David Eun, VP Content Partnerships, Google, Inc.

Labels: events, siia information industry summit 2008

Three years ago Dr. Shalini R. Urs, the Executive Director of the International School of Information Management at the University of Mysore, contacted me about speaking at the Infovision conference, a new event that was focusing on how leading content technologies and services are changing enterprise, media and personal publishing in India. At the time I had to say no to her generous request and likewise last year. But when her third request arrived earlier this year it was clear to me that the time to say yes had come. Long known for its support of global publishers through development and production services India is beginning to come into its own right as a major media powerhouse, becoming ever more adept at servicing both global and domestic markets with increasingly sophisticated content services.

The Infovision 2007 conference chaired by Dr. Shalini Urs certainly bore out my perception of India as a nation on the move. Peppered with leading thinkers from Google, Yahoo, Thomson and other international electronic publishers the conference was also thick with insight from domestic companies and universities who demonstrated that India is developing an assertive outlook on its ability to innovate, as well as to automate, in the delivery of leading content services. This was a world-class conference filled with world-class thinking.

Yet this move towards innovation comes against a backdrop of India's economic and demographic realities. Dr. F.C. Kohl, Vice Chairman of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), lead off the two day event with a recap of how India's exclusion from much of the industrial revolution creates urgency for its emerging transformation in the current information revolution. Sometimes referred to as the father of the Indian software industry, Dr. Kohl was quick to remind the conference-goers that India had only a handful of PCs - some estimates would place it at about 14 million - for its billion-plus population. In some ways this is good news, as the domestic marketplace has a tremendous upside, yet Dr. Kohl claimed that India lacked basic industrial infrastructure that would enable India to make low-cost PCs for themselves.

But just because PCs are a relative rarity in India does not mean that there is not an enormous penetration of electronic information services into the world's fourth largest economy. Go down the streets of Mumbai and one of the most common sights that you'll find is the local mobile phone dealer sandwiched in to any number of storefronts. According to the Indian government 90 percent of mobile phones in use in India are made domestically, with the total population of phones expected to soar to around 250 million by the end of this year, powered by the burgeoning wealth of India's rapidly expanding middle class. This is stimulating vigorous growth of domestic content services taking advantage of domestically produced mobile platforms - a strong combination.

The technological know-how to power these changes was highlighted in data on patent growth presented by Dr. Hsinchun Chen, the McClelland Professor of Management Information Systems at the University of Arizona. Dr. Chen's data showed India to be the world's fastest growing source of patents, much of it via foreign investors who hold those patents but through which the domestic Indian economy is certain to benefit from this nation's re-emergence as a major center of innovation.

Jayanta Chatterjee PhD, a Professor at the Industrial and Management Engineering Department of IIT Kanpur with deep experience in commercial IT services, highlighted at the conference how deeply this revolution in mobile services will penetrate - and how much that it's required. Professor Chatterjee noted that India needs to double its rate of agricultural production growth in the next five years to keep up with the demands of its population, a challenge and a time frame that makes it impossible to rely on literacy efforts alone to educate and inform the 900 million people in India who speak hundreds of native languages and dialects but not English.

Professor Chatterjee's hopes for these people is expressed through the Agropedia project, a repository of agricultural knowledge and know-how sponsored by IITK that uses farmer-created ontologies and insights to help people contribute and benefit from front-line experiences. Currently the Agropedia interface requires villagers to travel to computer-based koisks for access to its resources but IITK is moving to introduce a voice interface to Agropedia that could allow voice access and contributions via mobile phones. Instead of waiting for knowledge to be normalized into a standard printed language the voice-activated Agropedia will enable knowledge systems to be built upon the rich fabric of languages that make sense to the people most responsible for agricultural production in India. As Prabhakar Raghavan, Head of Yahoo! Research put it at the conference, we are moving to an era in which our identities are being built around the concept of "I share, therefore I am." While Arun Ramanujapuram, head of the Advanced Technology Group at Yahoo! Bangalore and other panelists pointed out the usual drumbeat of how Web 2.0 is being used in India for marketing and branding efforts the Agropedia project seems to be indicative of the kinds of publishing tools that are more likely to have a significant economic impact for this complex nation closer to is real economic roots.

I would be misleading you to say that the conference at the ITC Maratha focused only on such macroeconomic matters, for in fact there was a great deal of industry-leading insight at the very edge of he content industry throughout the Infovision 2007 conference. But the confluence of the leading edge of content and everyday Indian life informed many of the insights inevitably. For example Rohini Srihari, PhD, CEO of Janya, a U.S. company specializing in multi-language text analytics, highlighted the emerging importance of proximity-based mobile content applications as helping to drive the value of user-generated content. But she also noted that of the world's webloggers 39 percent were blogging in English, 31 percent in Japanese and 12 percent in Chinese. If most of those 300 million mobile phones in India are being used by non-English speakers then there's a large gap to fill in getting people creating social media content in native languages and dialects.

L. Venkata Subramanian PhD of the IBM India Research Lab noted that the power of the collective wisdom found in weblogs was already so strong in Pakistan that blocking them was one of the first priorities of Pakistan's government during the recent state of emergency in that neighboring nation. He also reminded people of the "hole in the wall" experiment with a PC embedded in a wall available for public use in a poor New Delhi neighborhood several years ago. The most avid users were children aged 6 to 12, who learned how to collaborate with one another to surf the Web and to use software without any instruction. When asked how they liked using the computer, they said, "What's a computer?" In many ways the universality of microprocessors in our daily lives has many people asking that very same question in many venues. Humanity is learning a great deal from one another how to publish at least as fast as we are learning from experts. Teachers, mentors and innovators are still needed, but the innate ability and desire of people to communicate is the most potent power in publishing today.

It's hard to do justice to all of the great presentations and discussions at this conference but I would be remiss if I did not mention Noshir Contractor, PhD of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His excellent keynote presentation highlighted many of the learnings he as attained from studying firms such as Proctor & Gamble trying to leverage knowledge networks in enterprise and media environments. Looking at publishers such as LinkedIn which are developing tools that are extending social networks into knowledge networks Dr. Contractor offered the term "cognitive knowledge networks" to describe this complex interplay found in peer-driven relationships that is driving many of today's most valuable insights in enterprise and media content markets. The cognitive power of these networks lies oftentimes in their diversity, as opinions that would otherwise be lost in "groupthink" get a fair audience that can help to change the direction of decision-making processes. This ability to focus more efficiently on the weaker or contrasting ties in one's network that can yield deeper insights. As applications that can mine physically proximate people come into play in the near future this concept of cognitive knowledge networks is certain to become a key cornerstone for those trying to maximize their value in publishing.

When you invest 14-plus hours each way in a coach plane seat you're hoping for good return on your investment; overall I must say that this was a conference that paid off handsomely for me. I was also glad to have a day to explore Mumbai itself beyond the posh comforts of the ITC Maratha and to get some street-level perspective on how India is absorbing the changes driven by its strengthening media resources. More on those adventures later. For now suffice it to say that so many of the key innovations that are driving publishing today combine the leading talents of India with those found in Western markets that it will become increasingly important for Western publishers to tune in to India's insights through venues such as the Infovision conference more frequently in the future.

Labels: bombay, events, india, infovision 2007, mumbai, Trends

A reminder that I will be chairing a great panel this Wednesday, 5 December on how users acting as editors via social media platforms are creating excellent content and establishing the best practices that will be guiding user-guided publishing for years to come. We have a strong attendance list already as I am told by the SIIA, so sign up soon for in-person or online participation. Late-breaking news: Bruce Smith, Chief Strategic Officer at Answers.com, will be joining the panel to give insights as to how their contributors on WikiAnswers are creating excellent reference content. Join us at the McGraw-Hill building at noon on Wednesday for a great session with Wikipedia, Newsvine, Answers.com and Wikinvest!

Labels: brown bag, events, Newsvine, SIIA, Social Media, Wikianswers, wikinvest, Wikipedia

There are any number of people highlighting pop music superstar Madonna's jilting of her contract with Warner Bros. Records in favor of events producer Live Nation, the loudest of recent label signoffs that include pop bands Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails. Music publishers have been squirming desperately to keep consumers from dropping their habit of purchasing copyrighted content from them with lawsuits, DRM and any other types of mechanism they can manage, but sadly they have been unable to overcome the key factor in today's media: distribution is dead and relationships in the right venues rule.

To me the key factor leading up to this move was no doubt the bellweather Rolling Stones tour that recently completed with a record USD 500 million-plus in the bank. When creaking, croaking rock stars can pocket half an extra-large by filling arenas with little more than name recognition, why do they need allegiances to plastic disk distributors to reach people who love them?

I am reminded of our definition of content posted on Wikipedia in this regard: "Information and experiences created by individuals, institutions and technology to benefit audiences in contexts that they value." Events are content by any measure under this definition. We are seeing artists whose primary value comes to life in venues in which they can develop relationships with audiences discovering that music publishers are failing to help them build those relationships effectively in an era of Web-based content distribution. By focusing on protecting the unit sales of copyrighted materials music publishers lost the opportunity to negotiate a compelling position for themselves in the relationship building business that is at the heart of today's Web-powered content industry. Events producers know how to build a crowd and work it for maximum profit in the venues that matter most to an artist's audience.

This contextual approach to profiting from content is as old as artistic performance itself and one that is the dominant factor in the music industry yet again. Online venues such as social media sites that help artists to merchandise themselves to their fan base through videos and downloads and sponsored appearances help them to profit from relationships in valuable contexts as well. While the labels crow aoout six-figure copyright infringement suit awards and try to sue people for listening to someone else's radio at work these punitive actions only seem to decrease the value of their brands as credible venue sponsors that could build the marketable value for their artists.

Relationship marketing is all the rage on many levels of the publishing industry, including B2B trade publishing. B2B publishers are discovering that where once their events marketing was the tail on their revenue dogs increasingly events marketing and marketing through Cost-Per-Action pricing is putting more emphasis on conversational content and collaborative marketing efforts. Social media venues that are becoming increasingly popular in publishing add to the mix of content-as-a-marketable-venue plays that have little to do with yesterday's mass production publishing culture. It takes a different kind of producer to succeed in producing this kind of revenue mix - a factor that both music publishers and other publishers need to adapt to as quickly as possible. You can always make money selling copyrighted content, but today's money is in marketing what cannot be copied - the unique venues and the relationships that they foster built around valuable content.

Labels: CDs, downloads, events, labels, madonna, music, publishers

It was a great SIFMA show in many ways, but also one which took me back to its roots. I remember when it was in much smaller quarters at New York's Sheraton Hotel, instead of its current footprint across three floors of the New York Hilton. Back in those days content technology advances offered relatively few trading advantages to individual organizations on the desktop - it was more a matter of making sure that you had the right specialized equipment in the back rooms feeding the trading floor. Years later we seem to be back where we started. The drive to reduce the cost of trading transactions in the face of disappearing trading profits in public markets has made the SIFMA show a gathering with relatively few high-profile desktop trading solutions being touted to an ever-decreasing population of decision-makers purchasing them. Traffic was reasonable but clearly down from earlier years. It's a flat world out there in finance - except in niches such as hedge funds where information innovation still drives profitable trading strategies.

There were a few key themes that I saw taking shape at this year's show:

Everything old is new again. I enjoyed a few minutes chatting with Jeffery Wells, now VP of Product Management at Exegy, a provider of infrastructure for ultra-low latency market data feed processing. For several years the solution touted by Wall Street firms was to shove huge banks of standardized blade servers at trade tickers to be able to keep up with information surges. But with the cost of energy increasing rapidly greater single-platform efficiencies are beginning to look more attractive. Shades of the "minicomputer" revolution of the 1970s and 1980s - custom computing platforms are coming back, thanks to new economics in trading.

ASP financial content services are becoming a reality. While financial trading partners have long used private networks to communicate with one another the push for cost controls is leading to some interesting developments in networked services. Collabnet is a service that enables customers that include investment banks to collaborate on software development with outsourcing partners in Asia and elsewhere. What's interesting is that Collabnet provides this as an ASP-based service instead of installing it in-house on private servers and networks. Nothing new in the greater world of business but remarkable when you consider how reluctant investment banks have been to open their operations up to ASP services before. Also demoing at the show was Salesforce.com, an ASP-based sales force automation tool with financial modules integrated via its AppExchange service. Is Wall Street ready for a wider range of ASP-based content services? The push for economic operations seems to be pushing secure ASP content solutions to the forefront. Don't rule them out from your own product plans, but be ready to have your answers in hand for how you manage security.

Rapid development of executable trading strategies is powering low-latency data feeds. Automated trading based on high-speed data feeds has been around for years, but these days "real time" feeds need to have sub-millisecond delays for trading strategies to be effective. But equally important is the ability to tune trading strategies as rapidly as possible to take advantage of the speed of these feeds. Vendors such as Progress Software were demonstrating capabilities that allow new trading strategies for low-latency feeds to be turned around in a few hours. As important as the speed of feeds can be the ability to translate your knowledge of market conditions into automated decision-making seems to be fueling many boutique solutions.

Mining the Web and other sources is helping banks to build their own custom content. One of the more exciting types of tools highlighted at the show were packages that made it easier to mine and aggregate content from both traditional and non-traditional sources in interesting ways. FirstRain was demonstrating highly personalized research services that enable its clients to get information from many major published sources and internal sources tailored to their exact needs. Connotate was demonstrating Web mining capabilities that enable investment banks and other institutions to quickly develop custom research and data from any number of online and proprietary sources. While getting high-quality subscription databases is still an important part of the research equation for finance tools such as Connotate and FirstRain are allowing institutions to define custom sources of content that are feeding decision-making processes with unique insights that may give financial institutions an advantage in the marketplace. With the ability to define structured content dynamically these types of services are accelerating the ability of institutions to gain insights from any potentially valuable content source.

What happened to the graphs? For years you could walk down the aisles of this exhibit hall and be overwhelmed by the number of charting packages made available by content and software vendors. While charts were certainly a part of the mix, the emphasis on automated execution via low-latency feeds has placed more of the analysis investment for real-time content into algorithmic trading packages. However, a retail-oriented analytics package from Blocks combined a drag-and-drop financial modeling package with a charting package to enable retail investors to develop sophisticated trading strategies and to trigger them off of charted real-time data events. A nifty combination that would have been the envy of many a trader not so many years ago and now available for you and me. Graphing is still an important analysis tool for financial content but it's far from the cutting edge for most financial services these days.

Lots and lots of small companies. While SIFMA has always had its fair share of up-and-coming companies in its mix the show was notably heavy with startups and small innovators this year. Certainly Reuters, Thomson, Sungard, IBM and others had significant footprints this year but there were many more small companies working their way into main-floor and mid-floor footprints that would have been relegated to upper-floor boonies in past years. While not necessarily a good sign for the short run I take this as a good sign for the years ahead. Hopefully we're witnessing a new wave of innovation for the financial content industry that will begin to drive new products and services away from traditional data delivery platforms and towards more innovative forms of collaboration and execution. This is an industry starved for really fresh ideas right now, but with so many fundamental infrastructure issues sussed out in recent years expect financial institutions to begin to invest anew in fresh looks at the world of financial content.

So yet another SIFMA show sails into history. Let's hope that next year's addition features a little more buzz and excitement in the hall generated by something other than Sopranos stars, slot cars and scantily clad young ladies.

Labels: Business Information, events, financial information, SIFMA

The New York Hilton was again the setting of this must-attend conference for search professionals focused on implementing search in their organizations. Opening keynoter, Susan Feldman, Research VP of Content Technologies, IDC, framed the dilemna well. Search is hot, and the vendors happy with over 30% growth, busily rolling out new product features. But as the use of search within the enterprise grows, integration with other applications is more important. So enterprise search companies are repositioning as Business Intelligence platforms, rather than solely search. At the time time, other companies in the Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise content Management(ECM), Knowledge Management (KM) spaces are integrating more search capabilities.

For attendees looking to buy their first search engine, Theresa Regli, CMSWatch, described the infrastructure analysis that needs to be done prior to establishing the evaluation framework. She emphasized selection of a search engine involves more than a checklist of features. Jennifer Whalen, Portal Manager, Deloitte, spoke to lessons learned about working with a currently installed search engine (Sharepoint), and no budget for a replacement.

A common themes in the speakers was that search is more than technology. Content and business rules determine successful implementations. Content includes what should be indexed, as well as content types. It comes in the form of unstructured content created at the desktop, but also as structured content found in databases. And increasingly, content includes images, and video content (included in over 20% of current search applications according to the Shore/Information Today report, Enterprise Search, Deployment, Usage and Trends). This was reinforced by the booming attendance at the co-located Streaming Media Conference right next door to Enterprise Search.

Underlying search are the bigger issues of security and compliance. The implications of the new Federal Rules of Civil Procedures (FRCP) which went to effect on 12/1/2006 were clearly explained by Prudence Zalewski, Software Synthesis. The financial costs involved in the discovery process mandate risk management planning, particularly for email retention! These developments will force a more explicit role and responsibility for search and records management within the organization, and demand for experienced search professions....see you next fall at Enterprise Search West!

Labels: enterprise, events, Jean Bedord, search

Maybe I am getting jaded but as good as some of the events that I've attended and helped to organize have been as of late it's been many years since I've attended an executive-level conference that's had as much energy and buzz as EconSM. About five hundred of paidContent.org's closest friends decided to pop in at the Beverly Hilton to hear an all-star lineup of leading publishers, technologists and other industry heavies that you rarely find in one spot. The agenda for the day: every angle on making social media pay that one could hope to cover.

As usual, I'll post links here to the detailed coverage of each segment of the program that we post on our Events weblog. I'll be posting a News Analysis piece later this week covering this event and aspects of the recent Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

CEOs Speak Up

Social Media Meets Marketing

Social Media Meets Hollywood

Social Media Meets News

Social Media Meets Mobile Media

Social Media Meets Deals

Labels: econSM, events

We're back in San Francisco for the SIIA Content Forum, which promises to delve into the best practices for media, enterprise and personal publishing via an all-star lineup of speakers and panels. Online news, mashups, convergence, workflow integration, managing search engine marketing and other great topics are part of this program. As networking allows we'll be blogging during the conference and posting links here to our Events weblog as it progresses.

Keynote Address - Steven MR Covey on The Speed of Trust

Scott Moore, Yahoo! Media Group

Using Mashups to Deliver Business Information

"Undiscovered Genius" Ezra Ernst, CEO Swets North America

What Does Integration Mean to your Customers?

Publishing 2.0 Models - The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of Publisher Strategies

Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Second Life

Michael Schoen, LookSmart, Ltd.

Top Line - Who Pays for Content, Why and How?

SEO - Yours, Mine or Ours?

Vendor-Buyer Technology Showcase

CEO Panel

End-Note Address from Janice Lachance, CEO of SLA

Labels: events, SIIA Content Forum