I’ve spent most of the past few days either listening to presentations, running around the Buying & Selling eContent conference room with a microphone to hand to people asking questions of those giving the presentations, and schmoozing with attendees at Buying & Selling eContent. Which means I didn’t have much time for thinking. Others at the conference contributed on the fly, real-time commentary, notably Ross Mayfield who was actually blogging from the podium while sitting next to me and was then praised/chastised (depending on how you viewed it) by David Scott on his new blog. If Rafit Ali is at a show, you know he’s blogging it, and so he was.

Thinking back, here are the things that struck me. The word “quality” was thrown around a lot, but nobody looked at what it meant to their various business models and constituencies. Saying you’re in favor of quality is sort of like Mom and apple pie. But data quality, product quality, and value to the customer aren’t the same thing. In the preconference on Sunday, Bill Noorlander made the excellent point that you should buy for value and that value was not the same as how much money you spend.

Tom Hogan Sr. opened Buying & Selling eContent. He hoped that, by the end of the two days, attendees would have renewed enthusiasm and feel “younger next year.” I do, Tom, I do!

Then it was on to David Weinberger, who told us that everything is miscellaneous and described newer social networking tools (wikis, blogs, Flickr, tagging), urged us to get over the mentality of scarcity, and noted that messiness is in the ascendance. To him, value comes from individualism and group action. That combination is messy in itself. Now if he could only spell Dewey’s first name correctly, it would be nice.

Then we went into intros where everybody had to say when they were first on email. Some amazing answers! Joe Kasputys was the earliest early adopter.

Joe Bremner introduced the morning panel that was to set the framework for the rest of the conference. He called it “the state of the value chain.” John Blossom cited four trends: cooperation, commercialization, containerization, and consolidation. “You don’t go to content; you meet needs where they are.” Jeff Dearth’s hot new stuff: new vertical aggregators, SEM/SEO/affiliate networks, vertical search/local search, rich media, bloggs and RSS, and business/financial data. “Customers and in control and there’s search engine disruption.” Janice Liggett talked about the challenges to the buyer regarding cost and price structures and finding scholarly materials in institutional repositories. “Buyers need to provide information in new ways.” Chuck Richard showed Outsell Inc. statistics about the size of the information industry and pointed out how powerful generational demographics are. “The role of the internal buyer is not command and control.”

The afternoon was filled with the perspectives of the various buying/selling/distributing segments of the econtent landscape. Interesting were the parallel presentations of Cargill’s Maribeth Basig and Ernst & Young’s Mick Stelzer. Here are two companies of similar size with very different information needs and approaches to buying information. The publishers came from very different organizations, Bob Bovenshulte, American Chemical Society, made the point that buyers weren’t the users. Lou Celi announced that the EIU Web site had relaunched that very morning and answered a few of the criticisms that Maribeth had made of it only a few minutes earlier. That was definitely not scripted. The key change he sees by 2010? Extracting knowledge for on demand decision support. Alacra’s Steve Goldstein and IEE’s Erica Mobley, explained how they gathered, aggregated, and distributed information. Max Schireson, MarkLogic, and Bob Weiner, CCC, presented their takes on management of information after it’s been delivered. Summing up for the (very long and tiring) was Bill Noorlander who picked some common themes. Users are global. Many different sectors are involved. Buyers want simplicity, easier access, and a loosening of the rules about usage. Vendors should strive to be partners, not sellers.