I’m writing this from the third day of the O’Reilly Tools of Change publishing conference, and I’ll have a lot to say in the coming weeks about ideas I’ve had here. I wanted to start with a theme from the opening keynote speeches: whether content is king, and if not, what is.

The latest issue of Wired has an article with the provocative title of The Data Wars about web sites built around data retrieved by “bots” doing “scraping”. I quote these because the article twists the terms a bit to make them and their subjects seem more dramatic, more cutting edge, and—you guessed it—more “Web 2.0”.

I keep a file of notes for ideas for potential postings in this weblog. Here are the notes for one idea:

You’ve probably heard that Yahoo has this new, drag-and-drop tool to easily combine and manipulate RSS and Atom feeds. (Forgive me for omitting the exclamation point from their name—speaking of which, shouldn’t the logo for yahoo.es be “¡Yahoo!”?) Tim O’Reilly called Yahoo pipes no less than “a milestone in the history of the internet.” Early reports mentioned load problems, and I was extra busy with work, so I waited a bit before trying it.

2007-01-19 update: It looks like Bitpass is going under. While there’s no mention of it on their website, I just got email from them saying that “due to circumstances beyond our control, we are discontinuing our operations.” If anyone knows of a comparable service or a service with different ideas about enabling small vendors to sell content on the internet, please let me know.

A few weeks ago I wrote about free personal data that was really just randomly generated names and contact information created for some tests. Coherent prose by knowledgeable people is something that you can’t generate with a python script, and it’s interesting to see the schemes that some people have made to find such content.