It was another excellent conference at the Camelback Inn in Scottsdale, Arizona this year, with great speakers and strong discussions on how content providers can learn how to thrive in an online content market that has more dynamic forces for change acting upon it than ever before. Where last year talk of weblogs, wikis and other leading content technologies was mostly a rumble from outside the gates of major content producers and consumers, this year marked the first availability of real-time weblogging from the conference - including from those at the dais! - and demos of how wikis and wiki-like services are redefining how content is organized and shared. As Tom Hogan Sr., President of Information Today, Inc. noted in his opening remarks, the headlines of Parisian papers on Napoleon's escape from the island of Elba were pretty derogatory when he was far away, but as his mounting army was reaching the gates of Paris the press was welcoming him with open arms. The armies of technology-driven change have consumed the content industry in recent years and left it little choice but to accept that the barbarians of change now inside the gate are there and to be assimilated as fast as possible into their own publishing cultures.

But as highlighted by keynote speaker David Weinberger, Berkman Center Fellow at Harvard University and author of ground-breaking books The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined, the barbarians have habits that mix with the established content industry about as well as schlumpy Oscar matched tidy Felix in "The Odd Couple." "Messiness is in," noted Weinberger, outlining the power of Wikipedia to have readers define their own indexing and topics with no intervening editing and the success of categorization tools that postpone the implementation of taxonomies as closely to the moment of content consumption as possible. Instead of taxonomies used to build long-standing Aristotelian trees of structured knowledge, Weinberger sees the rise of ad hoc taxonomies, devised as close as possible to the time of content consumption and that pull together individual leaves of content from unorganized piles to solve problems in specific contexts. Weinberger highlighted user-driven tagging services such as del.icio.us and the Flikr photo sharing service as examples of "folksonomies", content organization systems developed by networks of individuals that may be less than scientific but highly responsive to changing needs for content organization. In his presentation as a part of an industry analyst panel paidContent.org founder Rafat Ali also underscored the rise of the individual as a key fulcrum for content value today and of the importance of highly focused content services to become the "center of gravity" for highly targeted topics.

This focus on the importance of individual users in the evolving content universe seemed to be at odds at times with the traditional view of the institutional buyer that was presented at the conference. There were valuable presentations by a number of leading information professionals working at leading corporations and organizations, but it's clear that a role in licensing premium content no longer equates to a leading role in defining the ultimate value of that content in those organizations. Increasingly major content vendors use content licensing only as the start of multi-layered relationships with content vendors that include technology components and more direct relationships with users via virtual libraries and direct Web access to publishers' resources. At the same time users shaping both content creation and content usage at major institutions becomes an increasingly important component in how content is packaged and sold. We're sure to see leading information professionals at this conference in the future, but it will be important to see other players in buying and selling content come forward on the institutional side to further enrich the discussion.

Underscoring the conference was the impact of no-show Google and other online ad-driven services that continue to make content available to individuals in institutional settings. Sophisticated taxonomies still drive content collections successfully in relatively closed groups of users, but the ability of content to be monetized on an ad hoc basis from contextual ads makes it easier than ever for content that doesn't necessarily fit into traditional collections to make its way into the hands of professionals easily. Publishers and aggregators are wrestling with these suppliers in the institutional space and finding no easy answers to dealing with their pervasive presence. Yet again, when your competition is so easily accessible to individual users in most all work environments, it's not business as usual in any sense.

We'll have more entries here in our Industry Events weblog and in our weekly News Analysis on the conference. The Buying and Selling eContent conference remains a valuable and elite conference for those wanting to ponder the most important trends in the content industry, an industry that is getting used to the barbarians being not only past the gate but important business partners in their ongoing success.