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.