Last year I got invited to liveblog the SIIA Information Industry Summit, and have been invited to liveblog the event again this year. I'm really excited to be part of this event again: last year, I learned a great deal about SaaS (software as a service,) the "content creation" business and about guys in white dinner jackets and black ties, who take your coat at the entrance to the conference (needless to say, that was something like a "well, I've arrived" moment...not to mention all the austere middle-aged men in black suits...)
The SIIA--Software and Information Industry--is an organization that few outside the B2B content, SaaS, and other B2B services know all that much about. Yet it is an incredible organization of C-level and other high-ranking executive types. Their openness to bloggers has been great: I've never been given restrictions nor have I been treated as if I were a barbarian storming the gates. In fact, I've felt very comfortable in this group.
Go figure ;-)
This year's keynote will be New Yorker communications columnist Ken Auletta. I read an article sometime ago that Auletta wrote about when Sergey Brin and Larry Page first went to Washington D.C. to meet with our fearless leaders and were summarily dismissed as kids playing around. It was a story I'd never heard, and I was totally boggled by the ways that Brin and Page were dismissed.
It left me thinking--"well, just because some people have all the power, doesn't mean they're all that knowledgeable nor that gracious..."
So I'll be looking forward to what Auletta has to say in his keynote, and whether it will differ in any way from Jeff Jarvis' views on Google.
Henry Blodgett, CEO and Editor of The Business Insider will be speaking again this year. I don't know what it is that I like about Blodgett--maybe that he still seems to ruffle the feathers of the status quo--but I found his talk at the '09 IIS to be one of the most informative. Blodgett also gave a fantastic answer to my rather direct question about the NYT/Gatehouse suit that had yet to be settled. Here's my re-cap of his '09 talk, which remains one of the best I've heard about online journalism to date.
Along with liveblogging, I scored an opportunity to interview Tracey L. Armstrong, President and CEO of the Copyright Clearance Center. In all the discussions I've heard regarding copyright, I was totally unaware of this organization and the amount of information they provide to help understand and protect copyright. I'm very curious to know what they think of copyrighted works on the web....and perhaps what they might think about paywalls around newspapers...
The SIIA Information Industry Summit takes place in NYC (my favorite city), Jan. 26 & 27. If you happen to be in NYC around those dates, and want to chat, just email. And thanks, to the SIIA for including me in their liveblogging crew.
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