Final presentation of the day is by Rex Hammock who is a magazine publisher at Hammock Publishing but who is also well known as the author of the Rex Blog. In fact, his first slide is a joke "Oh, you're that blog guy". He's going to talk about Business-to-Business publishing and lessons applicable to scholarly publishing. They do consumer, association and B2B publications. He's encouraging his clients to embrace conversational media (wikis, blogs, podcasting, etc.). They have a small-business site (smallbusiness.com) which contains a variety of resources for that business sector.

"Business Information" is the new name for B2B; verticals dominate the sector and it entails more than publishing -- web development, research, consulting, etc. There are few publications in this sector have large circulations; less than 50 have circulations greater than 100,000. They are highly dependent on the Long Tail. Magazines, events, data, online, rich media are the ways in which they stake out a niche and establish a brand. Now however while those aspects are important, they are looking at customers and the markets of buyers and sellers and saying "Let's take the interaction that occurs at a trade show and move it online." They want to use those elements or aspects to strengthen their service to individual readers and the network of buyers and sellers. Revenue is derived and will be increased through advertising and registration data via both online and print presence.

Moderator MaryAnn Liebert is asking him how does he create that stickiness that keeps the individual on the site? He suggests that business information inserted into the workflow is high-value content because such content helps with decision-making. Hence it's not that hard to keep the visitor on their sites.

He is asked about his blogging activities and how that activity might be applied to scholarly publishing requirements -- that is, how might publishers benefit from this activity. He notes that blogging is a very personal, individual activity. He suggests that someone must have a reason for blogging. It's just a publishing platform and it can serve different purposes for different people.

Has blogging helped his business? He says that there is a correlation between the growth of his business and his blog, but again reiterates that the format of blogging is just one of many available channels for communication. (I think it's interesting that this audience is so hung up on the concept of blogging as a practice. It does seem very threatening to them, but really Rex is right -- it's just a publishing platform that is useful for communicating with some segments of the population, whether you're talking about Blogger or Facebook.) He predicts that books in five years will be published with wiki accompaniments. He is talking about adding digital components to print products; it's just a technology that may be used for successful delivery and dissemmination of information).

Steve Abram makes the point that you have to actually use these tools in order to properly grasp the function and use. Judith Turner is sitting beside me muttering in disagreement. (This really is getting to be a fun discussion.) How do you leverage the value of these tools in this business, whether Twitter, Facebook, Second Life? Geoffrey Bildur is backing Steve Abram up and noting that many businesses are blocking these services which is counter-productive.

What a pity; this was really heating up and they just called time. Time for the evening reception...