Beyond that, discussion lists and newsgroups are now content sources in and of themselves. Many the competitive intelligence specialist has stumbled on important bits of information inadvertently revealed in a chat group. Communication has become content. Creating content is something that not too many librarians thought about two decades ago. Today, content creation for the intranet and even for sale on the Internet is not outside the job parameters of information professionals.
Legal issues continue to bewilder, concern, and aggravate information consumers and producers alike.
How to protect intellectual property rights when that property goes digital, how to educate the public about copyright infringement issues raised by Internet access, and how to sort out who owns what are not new dilemmas for information professionals. They are, however, gaining visibility and even notoriety as econtent exponentially increases. The distinction between content and search engines is blurring. Search engines identify content, but content must contact search engines to be included in their indexes. Thus, to truly follow the econtent space, you can't separate search engine technology into a distinct box of its own.