BSEC does what it does best: bringing people in the information industry together. Beyond that, it needs some reworking of panels, formats and programming. And frankly, some younger blood in the whole mix.
On the industry sentiment level, I was surprised by the skepticism the info industry still has with using delivery vehicles like RSS. As I mentioned on my panel today, if the industry is about delivering information to the users, there is no better or efficient or flexible way than RSS. And again, the business models around RSS are as age old as media and information industry itself: direct advertising, or loyalty building which can be monetized in other ways, including advertising.
The info industry also gets blinkered by viewing RSS as a one way push vehicle as well...they know syndication as an old age business, and look at RSS as just another form of that, instead of viewing it as an information query and transaction environment.
Among the other surprises I had was how few information publishers were working or looking at open APIs. I may be slightly naive in thinking this way, but again, if information is about data and answers, let users and programmers plug into that data, and figure out creative ways to use the data, and in the end, help your business.
And yes, the Google griping is still going on in the industry, and will probably never go away.
Among the positive things, the information industry has definitely embraced SEO, and is looking at various ways of exposing content through search engines. There is interest in mobile, but still at a very early stage. Open licensing is still frowned upon in the industry, but publishers are becoming open to micro-chunking and unbundling (well, buzzwords, but useful ones at that).
The information industry should be the perfect marriage of media and software sensibilities...somehow that is still lacking.
Disclosure: The conference organizers paid for my part of my travel expenses.
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