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.