Buying and Selling eContent Conference

The BSEC conference is wrapping up today in Scottsdale, Arizona. This is the 6th annual conference that is aimed at "thought leaders, executives, and global content buyers". A look at the list of companies and organizations attending past conferences is an interesting one, a combination of technology companies, business analysts, content aggregators, publishers...and as far as I could tell, only two librarians. Which is too bad. Here's why the conference organizers think people should attend this conference:

Buying & Selling eContent covers issues and challenges faced by top-level executives who are responsible for buying and selling electronic content, including:
- Industry outlook and analysis from analysts who study the trends
- Content licensing, contracts, pricing, and usage
- Copyright, rights management, and intellectual property
- New paradigms and technology for content creation, delivery, and use
- Business threats and opportunities, and how to deal with them successfully
- Insights into successful business models and why they work
- PLUS roundtable discussions where you can talk with peers about issues of common concern and interest.

Aren't library directors top-level executives who are responsible, ultimately, for buying content?

Dave Weinberger (Mr. Cluetrain Manifesto) was a keynote speaker and his presentation, Everything Is Miscellaneous: Uprooting the Old Information Order is available as an MP3 feed here (courtesy of Rafat Ali, from PaidContent.com). The entire thing is about the organization of knowledge. "As we digitize the world's information, we're discovering that the fundamental principles by which we've organized the real world don't apply very well. These principles have a long history, going back to Aristotle, and have determined the traditional shape of knowledge as a tree of categories or concepts." Some of the key ideas in the audio are also available here in Weinberger's e-zine Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization, including the whole tree/leaf idea of taxonomies.

The first mention of Dewey is at about minute 8 of a 55 minute presentation.