John Patrick of Attitude, LLC moderated a panel including Jason Calacanis of Weblogs, Inc., Jeff Pulver of pulver.com, Inc., Chris Shipley of Guidewire Group, LLC and Dr. Robert Sutor of IBM Corporation. Jason sees blogging as "the new business card," a repository of one's insights that shortens the distance between people trying to get to know your outlook and opinions. Jason doesn't see video weblogs taking off terribly well, though, as production values will probably make it hard for people to create a quality product (I am not sure that I agree with that, Star Wars Kid pretty much blows that out of the water, and there is a ton of truly fascinating amateur video on Google Video). John pointed out that the technology is pushing more easy-to-use tools into the hands of users, but Jason is right that there are lots of people who really aren't interested in being a global publisher. Yet when you come to think of it over the past few years we now have enormous multiples of people who have a dedication to works of public authorship than we did only a few years ago. It takes a while to mine that "Long Tail" content but the numbers are favoring quality diamonds coming out of the rough that appeal to a wide variety of focused audiences.

Jeff is focusing on the "purple minute", the ability to do things with existing communications models via Web technologies that get extraordinary value-add through Web add-on capabilities. SMS services on mobile phones that automatically send messages to family members that your plane has landed based on GPS data and other value-add services are only in the early moments of being defined. When you start knowing where people are and can transcend multiple communications channels, lots of things can happen. Chris will have more than 68 companies at her upcoming DEMO conference, many of whom will focus on getting the right piece of information channeled to the right users, adding great complexity that "may be bringing us to the point of diminishing returns." Chris sees the need to get technology more right-sized to people's real needs and simplify their lives rather than to make them more complex and exhausting. "The job of I.T. will be about maintaining reliability and will not be about defining applications," Chris notes.

On the standards front, Patrick noted that the State of Massachusetts is about to adopt the OASIS Open Document information programming standard that will allow content from office automation software and other sources to be defined in a non-proprietary format that will allow for long-term use of content. Robert noted that we are used to a very proprietary world of software and content, but now with weblogs and other Web tools people are getting used to the idea of having control over their own content, which is likely to raise many issues as to who will be protecting their intellectual property (and how they will do it).

It may be wishful thinking to imagine that three generations from now people will be able to open documents and enjoy them, but it's the direction that content creation and packaging needs to head if we're going to have effective and efficient management of intellectual property rights and cohesive archiving strategies that are in the public interest and the interest of major institutions. It's also the type of fundamental change that will make content technologies far more affordable in developing nations, a crying necessity if the economic benefits of content technologies are going to be realized on a global basis. So in a very important way open document standards and other open source initiatives are essential for both a global economy and global stability. With non-proprietary standards the push in value is towards building value-add services on top of more broadly available universal communications channels. The ceiling for potential value generation in content services is higher yet.

In the process of creating all of this universal content, John noted that there's getting to be more metadata that frames content in XML documents and online tagging services and directories such as RawSugar than there is core content. Robert notes that folksonomies do have great potential with "a lot of legs left in it." But when it comes to some premium content services, technology is not really up to snuff with basic consumer expectations. Jason dissed the limitations of DRM-enabled content on iPods and the maddening limitations of TiVos as not only inconvenient but also handicapping the development of content in "old media" countries that will slow down those nations' growth in comparison to nations that have less of an investment in intellectual property rights as conceived today. The implications of getting this right are possibly the most important industrial issue today short of managing a global oil-based economy more effectively.

There were lots of other great details but the bottom line is that the pace of technology change is leaning heavily on the very core of the content industry. 2006 will be a year in which these technology trends will certainly accelerate, but the train has already built up a very strong head of steam. It's a pace that many content companies seem to be resigned to try to run at their own pace to take advantage of them, which is fine from the perspective of taking a carefully-planned route but there's no guarantee that you won't be walking most of the way for some time to come. It was a fantastic conference and we were truly honored to be a part of it. Thanks for everyone's patience with my questions!