Just released at the end of last week is a blog devoted entirely to the Buying & Selling eContent show. It had kind a stealth launch, but already there have been some thoughtful observations posted on BSECBlog about the future of publishing. It’s not just a shill for the conference, though it’s certainly meant to help promote the observations and ideas of the speakers and organizers. Worth taking a look at — and I should, in the interests of full disclosure, say that I will be contributing some blog posts to it as well as blogging here.

When the Buying & Selling eContent conference was at the Camelback Inn last week, it coincided with Bill Marriott’s 75th birthday party at the resort. For those of you who attended the Sunday night SLA reception at Kokopelli, that party in Peace Pipe was the birthday party. I mention this because information professionals who think they are alone in the blogging world (along with a few million citizen journalists interested in politics) might want to check out Bill Marriott’s blog. He just posted about the history of Camelback, a very personal and delightful essay.

It’s thrilling to read a corporate executive who’s blogging as a person rather than having a PR guy masquerade as the CEO in a splog.

What Bill Marriott is doing fit well with BSeC. Both buyers and sellers of information need to look differently at their business/library models, involving users and designing products that incorporate communication and collaboration. I moderated a panel on Tuesday morning that, when I set it up, I was a bit worried about. The three speakers, Mike Stelzer from Ernst & Young, Jim McGinty from Cambridge Information Group, and Cindy Hill from Sun Microsystems, were describing very different things, pulling on their individual work experiences. I worried that the audience wouldn’t see any common thread among EW’s repurposing of content, CSA’s deep indexing, and Sun’s entry into Second Life. Indeed, after reading the evaluations, some in the audience criticized the session for exactly that.

I had another takeway, that we desperately need to find a new way to train and teach people entering the profession. We need to make it more interactive, involve more means of discovery such as collaborative technologies and gaming techniques, and make it fun.

Speaking of fun, that’s what we had during the other session on Tuesday that I put together, the pirate session. John McDonald, Corilee Christou and I stormed the stage in pirate costumes to deliver talks on who’s a pirate, why what looks like piracy might not be piracy, and what to do about the real pirates.

Next year’s conference will be back at Camelback, in mid-April, so we’ll miss Bill’s 76th birthday at his favorite Marriott hotel.