Content Matters

There's not enough time to blog everything, so if you missed any sessions check out John Blossom's blog or David Kaplan at PaidContent.  Next week, the video should be up (courtesy of Scribe Media), so I will post links to that when available.

The Information Industry Summit is always a worthwhile event, if for no other reason than the crowd it attracts.  The midtown location (Cipriani) allows senior executives to come to select sessions without having to jump on a plane and commit to two or three days.  So, the networking is always good. The format also works fairly well, with a mix of panels, interviews and keynotes (disclaimer: I am a member of the planning committee and was involved in speaker selection).

It's always challenging to put together a program that meets the need of both old and new media.  Yet this year, I was pleased to see that the disconnect seemed smaller than in years past.  I'm not sure if that's because we steered clear of the bleeding edge (we did) or whether the SIIA attendees are at least aware of many of the new strategies even if their companies are not ready to embrace them.

The Previews Day remained the most interesting to me and I was surprised that few of the regular attendees come to that event.  If you want to know where you'll have to be in 18-24 months, you can get a real sense from Previews.  It's not just geared toward investors.  Maybe they should think about repositioning the messaging next year.

A couple of ironic moments from the conference stand out in my mind.

First was the Previews presentation by Bambi Francisco, where she had five minutes to do an elevator pitch for her company, Vator.tv (a company that allows entrepreneurs to do elevator pitches).  Shockingly, during the Q&A, Bambi seemed flummoxed by the question of how she would monetize her business.  If your business is built upon allowing entrepreneurs to make their pitch, surely you must have given some thought to your own. 

The second came at the very end of the conference.  David Eun, of Google, had just finished his closing keynote.  One of the major themes from that presentation was the idea that the traditional publishing model of a "false scarcity" of content would no longer hold up.  Content should be ubiquitous and publishers should try to push their content out to numerous platforms.  Nothing wrong with that -- I agree completely with his premise.  It was what came next that I found ironic.  As he wrapped up, I heard one staffer mention to another to "pull the Google presentations off the website" as Google did not want users to be able to download their decks.  I guess it's only other people's content that Google thinks should be ubiquitous.