The second day of Buying & Selling eContent was much more interactive, I think to everyone’s relief. We started with a new content technologies panel, which I moderated. Ross Mayfield picked up on some of David Weinberger’s technologies, but gave live demos rather than the screen shots David showed. It wasn’t a “gee whiz, look at this” type of presentation — Ross showed the self-healing nature of Wikipedia, commented on using del.icio.us tags for product reputation monitoring, and noted that Les Echos uses SocialText for collaborative editing. Gary Halliwell noted the problems that premium publishers are having. Static technologies are inadequate and manual data tagging is expensive. Although ZoomInfo uses NLP and text analysis in its summarization search engine, the companies business model is rather traditional — it sells subscriptions. Jeff Massa took an article from the previous day’s Financial Times, which was on everybody’s chair each day of the conference(which is why I love going to conferences where the FT is a sponsor!), and used it to show Yellow Brix’s technology. He showed that the technology can dedup or not, as you wish. His technology is messy, harking back to Weinberger’s talk the first day, and agnostic.

We then broke for roundtable sessions, where there were lively discussions around such topics as mobile content, pricing, repurposing content, and all those new technologies like blogs, wikis, and social networking. Nobody seemed very interested in discussing open access econtent or new business models, which seemed a bit wierd. Perhaps there were too many options.

In the afternoon, the static tables, chairs and podium for the speakers were replaced by more active arm chairs. This worked out well for the afternoon panel on threats and opportunities. Moderated by Jeff Cutler, the panel included Joe Kasputys (Global Insight), Don Hawk (TechTarget), Corey Johnson (Valeo IP), and David Mandelbrot (Yahoo). We saw the “future” of newspapers in 2014 in the EPIC video, which sees a world of ultra-customizable electronic news where printed newspapers have disappeared. Lots of talk about the Internet and the word quality started surfacing again.

It’s clear that many people in attendance haven’t integrated new technologies into their product line, some because they haven’t considered it, others because they’re not sure where it would fit. How many new business models can one have? Advertising. Subscriptions. These don’t seem revolutionary. Community created content is very interesting. I ended up wondering this: If the public is creating content and it’s published in an incredibly speedy fashion, and it’s of high quality, where does that leave traditional publishing? And where is the role for the information professional? This goes beyond buying and selling to the essential disruptive nature of new technology and new thinking about the very nature of econtent and the jobs/tasks/professionalism of its users.

It can definitely all be a bit overwhelming. In terms of becoming re-invigorated and feeling younger next year, this might make some feel old and tired. I hope not. It does give us all lots to consider.