Tools of Change 2007 Reflections
Here are some higher-level reflections on O'Reilly's Tools of Change conference June 18-20 in San Jose CA. My raw notes from the conference can be found at TOC07 Day 1 Notes and TOC07 Day 2 Notes.
This conference brought together for the first time the book publishing industry with the tech community, as embodied especially in O'Reilly's web-centric, open-source ideal. The result was a bit of a mashup of concerns and interests: XML, Web2.0, free culture/DRM issues, all oriented to a fairly conventional notion of publishing and the publishing industry.
There were about 300-odd in attendance, mostly from industry, mostly from the US (actually, an awful lot of them were O'Reilly employees, which isn't too surprising). Corporate sponsors included Ingram, Adobe, and Mark Logic (XML server vendor).
Without a doubt the highlight was the array of fabulous keynote speakers: publisher Tim O'Reilly, Long Tail author Chris Anderson, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen, among others. O'Reilly are a serious conference host, and so this aspect of the event (along with lunch and other amenities) was top notch. The rest of the program, in 4 tracks over 2 days, was less stellar, but still plenty interesting, hand-picked as far as I can tell. But an interesting tension played out here: where the big keynote speakers—O'Reilly, Anderson, and Wales especially—were singing the praises of Web2.0 and the free culture ethic, much of the rest of the conference was pretty corporate. I don't know how many times I heard the word "monetize," but if I hear it again I will throw up (it must have been at least as many times as "give it away"—I'll let you sort out how those two notions fit together).
General trends made apparent: first, lots of publishers are experimenting with Web-2.0 technologies for collaborative content development and audience involvement; there were plenty of mentions of in-house wikis. Second, the state of rhetoric around XML and its relevance ot publishing has not changed one iota in ten years. I attended a bunch of XML conferences in the late 1990s, and I can report that the pitch is exactly the same. The company names have changed (e.g., Mark Logic is the big server vendor now), but the basic ideas, techniques, and stumbling blocks are the same as they ever were. More than one person I talked to reported that 1990s-era FrameMaker is still the best tool out there for XML workflows involving print; and converting content to marked-up XML still remains the biggest, ugliest challenge. One commentator's advice: "offshore it."
And there was a fair disconnect between theory and practice with rights management. There's still enough fear and uncertainty to make DRM a required topic at TOC, but no one seems to be actually embracing it, many citing the sheer hell of implementation and potential to alienate one's customers. I think it was Tim O'Reilly who compared Sony's recent DRM fumbling, which caused enormous opposition and bad press for them last year, with Apple's relatively transparent and hardly foolproof approach. He recalled the scene in Star Wars where C3PO is beating a angry Chewbacca at a game, and Han Solo advises, "Let the wookie win."
O'Reilly's best line of the day was "Curating user-generated content is the new face of publishing." Publishers seem to be grappling with this concept—awkwardly in many cases, but at least they're trying. This general attitude I think goes hand in hand with many of the discussions we've had here at SFU, in which we've acknowledged that publishers play essential roles in the production and dissemination of information and culture, though the exact roles are perhaps different than what we've traditionally thought. Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen baldly predicted the "end of print," in mabye 5, 10, 15 years. But the next day, Make Magazine publisher Dale Dougherty sang print's praises. There's enough room in this debate to fit in everybody, methinks.
The ultimate message of the conference, which was uttered enough times in enough different versions that it started to sound like real wisdom was simply this: try a lot of things out, try to do it cheaply, and don't put all your eggs in one basket. So we're not so far off the cutting edge after all, are we?
"Curating user-generated content is the new face of publishing." --payer, Thu, 05 Jul 2007 09:55:34 -0700 reply
So it seems. Check out this magazine called Our Canada, which is a Readers Digest offshoot composed entirely of stories and pictures sent in by readers. It started in 2004, I think, and now has something like the 8th highest circulation in Canada: http://www.ourcanada.ca/aboutus/about.php