I attended the Content Management Summit yesterday and had a good time. Learned some interesting things. Among them:
~ The Internet is still a learning space. Different media sites have vastly different concepts of the best way to make money and present information. Marketing ploys are still widely created and debated. Ye olde Web is still a nascent sales venue.
~ Of the presentations I saw (from Technowledge, eMeta, and others), few actually said much about the products being hawked. Lots of explanations were given: here’s why you need this service. With the exception of Microsoft, no one explained how said service would help my business.
~ The term du jour these days is “pay per drink.”
~ No one can really agree what the heck a weblog is, and lots of people still haven’t heard of them. John Hiler actually had the chutzpah (naivete?) to declare, “Weblogs only cover interesting things,” using “interesting” to mean “technology and terrorism and not much else.” Hiler also described his company, Xanga, as attracting “a lot of [age] 50-plus people because they have nothing to do.”
I also enjoyed catching up with Cam and meeting scores of new people, including Nick Denton and several folks who thought I was the other David Wertheimer.
Jason Calacanis throws a good conference, and I am looking forward to Brian Alvey’s next Meet the Makers assembly in November.