Hit some sort of trifecta today—three separate events in just under eight hours. In the middle slot, SIIA Previews featuring demos by content-related companies interspersed with a couple of sessions. VC Fred Wilson used the keynote to explain his vision of free content, asking “if information’s becoming free then where’s the money?” His answer: in attention. Anyone who’s been paying attention to Wilson should be familiar with much, if not all, of the ground he covered. But the context within an afternoon devoted to ways to make content pay and to protect content added some resonance. I could see people nodding as he mentioned a quote he likes from cognitive psychologist Herbert Simon: “What does an abundance of information create? A scarcity of attention basically, right?” Many of the companies showcased today specialize in managing that abundance of information. But “attention” in this case means more than standing out from the crowd. In Wilson’s parlance and that of others including Steve Gillmor, attention is what you get out of what you do. Provide your blog for free and you’ll get paid in other attention-based ways.
—What are the leverage points in an attention-driven model? Discovery, navigation, trust, governance, values. Wilson: “The future of this whole business … is micro-chunking the content, freeing it for anybody to use, syndicate it … empower its syndication and then monetize it by putting data systems into the micro-chunk.” Make it possible to see who has your attention and use it.
—Ways to monetize: “Advertising is the most seamless way to publish free information ... subscriptions may work but without overhead of copy protection.”
—Wilson uses a feedburner ad to court readers for his blog. 
—Borrowing a phrase, he talked about Freemiums—give away the baseline product for free and charge for the layers; generate network effects/data value with the free model; monetize with advertising; upsell a premium product with subscription model.
—“The latest buzz is machine tagging ...I think that everything we click on is a tag, a vote, implicit saying we’re interested. ... We’re tagging information when we look at something whether we like it or not.” He said he still thinks user-generated tags are critical but the reality is only 5-10 percent are actually creating tags. “Users are better at tagging than publishers.”
—“I think DRM is dead and if it’s not dead, it’s going to be dead soon. Number one, it’s hackable ... number two, it’s not user friendly.”
Speaking of context, presenting after Wilson, Cranium Softworks offered an example of a service based on micro subscription management. The example was of a customer trying to renegotiate a deal with a corporate subscriber. The subscriber told the salesman the publication wasn’t getting much readership internally; using this software that tracks subscription use via IP address (see the description in the comments of how it really works from Cranium president Amir Khosrodad), the salesman was able to tell him his 12 users had been on over 350 PCs in the last 24 hours. The deal went in the salesman’s favor.