John Blossom remarked during his panel discussion that we keep coming to these conferences and it seems as if we talk through the same things year after year. For the most part I have to agree with him. And at Tuesday’s lunch another remark was passed that the schedule for the non-session time hadn’t changed in years – cocktail reception the first night, Mummy Mountain dinner (with the band playing “Rawhide”) the second night, buffet lunch Monday, wraps served at lunch on Tuesday.
Despite the similarities from one year to the next, the 2006 BSCE had the usual excellent networking and handful of interesting sessions. Monday: Ernst & Young’s Mike Stelzer moderated a session on The New Aggregators: Content Integration Trends with Cynthia Hill of Sun Microsystems, Greg Reinacker of NewsGator and Beth Jacaruso of OneSource. Beth remarked about the need to “regulate the content spigot,” which I thought would be more of a theme this year, but wasn’t really mentioned again. Tim O’Reilly’s keynote Web 2.0: The Architecture of Participation was the highlight for me – extremely articulate, plenty of foresight and successfully practicing what he preaches. Tim’s first slide had William Gibson’s famous quote “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet,” which described the businesses attending BSEC pretty well. Another slide: “If users aren’t surprising you by the way they’re using your products – something is wrong.” I sat in on the annual Google Friend of Foe Roundtable which this year was called The Google Effect: Re-Thinking Content Delivery, Licensing & Interfaces. Without a participant from any of the search engine companies it lacked juice. It was unfortunate Bob Wyman of PubSub was a no-show for The Next Wave: Content Technology Meets Web 2.0. It seemed more people understood Ross Mayfield of Socialtext this year than last; wikipedia and social software has been pretty well publicized in the past 12 months. It was unfortunately a little difficult to follow R.J. Pittman of Groxis from the back of the room.
Tuesday: Andrea Broadbent of McGraw-Hill did a nice job presenting a case study during The Subscription Dilemma: Is It Time to Move On – Or Not. Adam Bernacki, recently installed as VP of Sales & Marketing at Alacra partner Leadership Directories recounted the difficulty of shifting business models at his previous employer D&B. Hal Espo did a good job moderating a somewhat mixed bag of panelists in a session called The Quest to Know Your Customers – Lou Celi of EIU, Rand Schulman of WebSideStory and John Blossom of Shore Communications.
What do to different next year? The opening Monday morning session needs to be killer. Esther Dyson is brilliant but the conversational format lacked energy and didn’t get the conference moving. I think there needs to be well-vetted, engaging speaker from the information industry that can frame the two days and succeed at getting everyone (or almost everyone) on the same plane. Outline the challenges and opportunities with the knowledge and understanding of what the panels and keynotes will be touching on. It’s a tough act to find, but it will lead to a more rewarding experience for all.
For other blog coverage, see Alacra’s VP of Product Management Barry Graubart at Content Matters, Rafat Ali at Paid Content, David Scott and John Blossom.
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