Went with Lox and Tom (and, it turned out, John) to see a lecture by Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing fame tonight. He's an extremely talented speaker, captivating a full house for over 90 minutes without budging from his lectern or throwing up a single visual aid. With a couple of high-profile speaking engagements looming large in my calendar later this year, this approach gave me definite food for thought.

Mr. Doctorow had a lot to say about the depressing state of media, business and technology, and the various visions that exist about where it might go instead, all of which has been widely covered elsewhere. He didn't say anything I hadn't read about before, but he did give renewed focus and clarity to my frustrations about this stuff. Added to my high-priority reading list: Creative Commons Australia, with plans to pledge my support in the very near future.

As any talented speaker will do, however, he put into words a couple of clear concepts that struck home with me. I want to paraphrase them here so I don't forget them:

• The biggest challenge facing content producers is not piracy, but obscurity. Of all the people who haven't bought my book, the vast majority failed to do so because they hadn't heard of it—not because they downloaded it from a file sharing network.
• Perhaps conversation is king. The opening words of my book (“Content is king.”) are outdated. This seems clear given the relative values of the telephone and movie industries, and given that any healthy member of society would choose his friends over his record collection to have along if stranded on a desert island. Today's breakout media success stories as often as not seem to be exploiting the audience's desire to ask questions and share opinions about what they have paid to see/hear/do. Thankfully, the rest of my book is not so fragile.