Pubcon 2006

Spent the past week in Las Vegas attending a convention called Pubcon. Pubcon is for web publishers - and suppliers to the web publising industry. Web publishers own websites. For me, a very interesting and exciting conference. Some general - and not very deep observations:

1. VERY entrerpreneurial crowd - this is still early days for making serious $ on the internet - the business models are many and varied
2. serious $ being made by web publishers who have found ways to 'monetize' their traffic - in many cases from advertising - whether through Google or through successful affiliate and/or referral programs
3. the heart of this crowd is programmers - entrepreunerial geeks who have shunned corporate jobs and bosses to do it on their own - and have found making serious $ is a realistic goal
4. corporations need to figure this stuff out and tap into these geeks - there's some serious marketing and advertising implications to what these people are doing - when forward thinking corporations tap into this crowd, they will create a lucrative competitive advantage
5. the crowd is limited - I foresee attracting and retaining people with internet advertising skills as a serious growth business
6. the high traffic web site mantra: content, links, links, links
7. most forward thinking and (at this point scary) web notion - destination sites - those sites you get to by typing in the url - will decline in importance with the advent of tools (called widgets) that will move site content easily to other community, personal and aggregator sites like Diggit and My Space
8. second most scary notion - success will be all about technologial innovation - new tools for making access to web content simpler, more usable, more accessible - where would YouTube be without the viewer??

All in all, very exciting space. Some key links to check out if this stuff interests you - and if you're a CEO - you should be interested:

• Webmaster World
• Digg Business
• John Battelle
• Danny Sullivan
• Matt Cutts
• Lawrence Coburn