Content Matters

This week was NetGain, where the three divisions of the SIIA (Content, Software and Education) conduct concurrent conferences. While the Information Industry Summit is tailored towards C-level executives, NetGain is a bit more tactical and blends content with technology. As with most conferences, attendance was down a bit this year, but that led to better networking and more face time.

The conference content was stronger than last year. Monday morning focused on innovation with a keynote by Judy Estrin (author of Closing the Innovation Gap). While she could have been a bit more dynamic as the opening keynote, Estrin's message was clear - we need to cultivate more innovation in our organizations. And while many organizations focus on incremental innovation, it's the breakthrough innovation and orthogonal innovation that are truly disruptive.

Judy's keynote was followed by a terrific panel moderated by Teri Mendelsohn and featuring panelists Paul Pluschkell, CEO of Spigit, Thomson Reuters Chief Scientist Peter Jackson, PARC President Mark Bernstein  and Ubercool trend analyst Michael Tchong. The panel was terrific, with Peter sharing things we didn't know about Thomson Reuters, such as their cell phone app that enabled Indian farmers to get more fair prices at markets. Michael Tchong was provocative, stating that our current tools are old and ineffective. Tchong also had the best quote of the session: "When I say jerks, I don't mean they're bad people."

The semantic web panel was a pleasant surprise. Having spent four-plus years in the semantic technology space (ClearForest), I'm accustomed to seeing semantic presentations as full of future hype and not grounded in current reality. Darrell Gunter, CMO of Collexis moderated the panel which featured Daniela Barbosa of Dow Jones, Peer39 CEO Amiad Solomon and Steve Nathan, CEO of Parity Computing. Rather than laying out the lofty Berners-Lee vision of a comprehensive semantic web, each focused on the smaller semantic webs which are working today. It was a refreshing look at a compelling space.

By far the best part of day one was the Brewster Kahle keynote. Brewster is a legendary entrepreneur, of course, who today leads the nonprofit Internet Archive. The basic theme of Kahle's speech was that "Universal Knowledge is in our grasp" - from a cost and manageability basis. A few examples:
* Library of Congress is about 26 million books - would be 26 TB of storage - a few thousand dollars of hard drives.
* There are about 2-3 million published works of audio - and it costs about $10 per album to digitize.
* It costs $15 per hour to digitize moving images.

Internet Archive built a data center as a shipping container, which holds 3 Petabytes of information. So, right now, the entire Internet fits into a single 20'x20'x8' box.

The Internet Archive has demonstrated that you really can collect all this information. There are many legal and administrative issues, but technologically you can do it and if you can demonstrate that you are working to help, rather than to gain commercial benefit by doing so, you'll find many key players are cooperative.

The first panel discussion of the day at SIIA was entitled "Sink or Swim: How do you Grow an Information Business Now?"
The moderator was, somewhat ironically, Kevin English, SVP at Satyam, a company that is doing more sinking than swimming right now. The panelists were Vanity Fair writer (and Newser co-founder) Michael Wolff, Time Inc's Vivek Shah, CQ President Bob Merry and Oakeigh Thorne, co-president of b2b publisher Blumenstein Thorne.

The panel was chock-full of good lines, but failed to really answer the question posed in its title - how do you grow an information business now?

A few of the more interesting lines:
Vivek Shah:

"Traditionally, news orgs focused on getting the story first. But, on the Internet, that’s gone away as it’s hard to tell who had story first. Voice, personality matter a lot more. Points of view matter."

Michael Wolff: "as recently as 15 years ago, the cover of Time & Newsweek were powerful – they were able to set the agenda for national discussion. That's a void today."

Wolff: "the foreign (news) bureau, as we know it, has largely gone away. But, in some ways, we have much more info coming from foreign markets than we had before. We now have instant access to newspapers and other information sources in those areas where we were previously dependent upon foreign news bureaus."

Shah: "As you go from PC-based web to mobile, the real estate devoted to advertising is pretty small. What happens then to the advertising $?"

But, perhaps the most telling comment came from an audience tweet from @lfschwartz: none of these guys runs a successful online business so why should I care?