Nearly anything that is trustworthy and profitable has cheesy scammy alternatives that follow the path they created. In many trades the associated conferences bring in more ad revenues than print adshttp://blogs.mediapost.com/research_brief/?p=1422:

According to a report from American Business Media president & CEO, Gordon T. Hughes, the face-to-face events industry is a rapidly growing, critical part of today's integrated business media environment. Face-to-face revenue has surpassed that of its print counterpart for the first time: In 2006, business media trade shows accounted for 36% ($11.3 billion) of industry revenue; magazines accounted for 35%. Events are the third-fastest growing segment of business media, surpassed only by digital and custom media.

Simon Chen recently posted about how unimpressed he was with the pich fest that was the first day of Ken McCarthy's 2007 seminar:

You see, when you come to “trade shows” like these, the speakers (or Faculty) are featured and marketed as leading practitioners in their field. You would like to think that if folks are forking out good money on the actual tuition or entry fee, airfares, hotel accommodation, average coffee and time away from their family, that the seminar organiser would insist that his faculty deliver content.

But this is where the basic model of these events is flawed. You see, the speakers all need (or want) to be compensated. So their sessions are platforms whereby they are supposed to deliver content to the audience and then gently mention that there are options for investing with them - by either buying their product or service.

In true US capitalistic fashion, some presenters get carried away. Instead of following the creed Content Is King, they get out of the gate quickly and go straight into sales mode. Hard. Pushy. Aggro. All the things that are old sell.

That conference is well known and Simon said the second day was better, but even amongst good content providers there are people who sell without mercy and without intent to provide any value, which is sad.

As bad as that may be, some people take it one step further by creating conferences that actually charge the speakers to speak. Talk about guaranteed sketchy content!

Scams emulate the format and structure of things that are real. Any format has its associated ups and downs, but anything that is wildly successful will also have outlier questionable versions pop up.

Paul Kedrosky recently mentioned a report about how all markets are a bubble. In the report it states that the two conditions that cause a bubble are strong liquidity and a great outlook. The report also talks about how success kills itself

There is nothing that suppresses the success of a brilliant new idea more completely than having 12 nearly identical start-ups.

Everything is a bubble. If you are successful people will emulate it. If you create and aggressively market a half dozen sites in the same vertical you not only compete with yourself, but you also create a new type / system / format / category of spam that others will emulate and authority systems (such as search engines) will work to reduce.

Just how people learn to ignore ads, they also learn to ignore abused content formats. Andy Hagans destroyed Digg.

What keeps Google strong is not their search relevancy, it is their ad formats and their ability to shape public perception.

Search engines also redefine what they are looking for by benchmarking information quality. Do search engines really want to promote a bunch of thin content sites that are easy to spam? Not likely. These sites act as testbeds for features that search engines clone, but eventually most of them will die.

Content and advertisement formats are not the only types of information bubbles. All of this rides on how people use language, from spam filters, to ad targeting, to the perception of fair use, to syndication guidelines, to deceptive offers:

Stanford Group this week issued its own bulletin, stating "we believe the FTC is investigating deceptive Internet advertising by several companies, particularly relating to offers claiming or implying "free" products."

right on through to general public deception, ala Frank Luntz:

Luntz was quizzed on his prior advocacy of the term, 'climate change' as opposed to 'global warming', given the emotional nuance of the latter term.

You'll see that both terms are used by Australian Internet users, but 'global warming' is by far more referenced. Further search analysis is telling, revealing that searches for 'climate change' are more likely to result in visits to News & Media and Government websites; while users more commonly visit Education and Environment online industries when they search for 'global warming'. Could it be that 'climate change' is in fact now the more emotional term, given its prominence in the media?

If you know everything is a bubble, and are building for the long-term, it might make sense to look beyond the current fashion.

Stock market was BIG... everyone became a broker trainee... it crashed.... real estate was BIG...everyone was a realtor/trainee/mortgage broker... it's crashing....what's next?

What is out of favor now will likely come back in fashion at some point, as noted by Alan Meckler:

I still contend (even with the heavy push for user generated content) that high quality, wholly owned content still has a major role to play on the Web. When you own content as we do, then opportunities continuously present themselves. Great content also provides an environment to create new lines of related business.

If you improve the value of another service based largely on their infrastructure or data, it usually doesn't take much for them to roll your offering into their well known brand, and kill your market position. Alexaholic was praised by Alexa for being innovative, right up until they sued when the creator failed to sell them the domain name. It took a year for Alexa to clone Alexaholic.

AuctionAds created an easy way to syndicate auction listings. Frank Schillng mentioned eBay to Go offers a similar interactive service. eBay to Go came out within months of the AuctionAds launch.

I helped launch ReviewMe. ReviewMe extended its model to include allowing advertisers to create a marketplace of review requests that bloggers can chose to accept. Text Link Ads also recently announced post level text links as a product under their flagship TLA brand, which is sold using a more profitable business model (since it has recurring ad costs). Patrick Gavin ensured I got a good deal, but without his dedication to making ReviewMe a success it could have just become a test platform for TLA that didn't make much money.

Tim O'Reilly wrote data is the new Intel inside. If your success is based entirely on another network's reach / brand / information / platform it is hard to have enough of a core asset to be profitable or a purchase target. It is hard to stay ahead of the value curve since the core brand has inertia and fatter margins. The reason most Web2.0 companies will fail is that they are creating entire companies based around a feature to another product, while having no market leverage.

Google plans to announce today that they are partnering with state governments to help make their public records more accessible:

J.L. Needham, who manages Google's public-sector content partnerships, said at least 70 percent of visitors to government Web sites get there by using commercial search engines. But too often, he said, Web searches do not turn up the information people are looking for simply because government computer systems aren't programmed in a way that allows commercial search engines to access their databases.

As more of this content comes online, industries such as real estate and insurance will get uglier as commercial players are forced out of the SERP and into buying AdWords. But on the upside, if you gain editorial access to one of these trusted websites it should be quite easy to rank for virtually anything.

If you are not nepotistic in your marketing some of your best content will go unnoticed, especially if you write at a level that is beyond most of your readers. Many of the people who are popular are not popular just because of content quality...there are so many nepotistic partnerships that go unspoke of that it is quite scary. Anyway, here is a brilliant post by Andy Hagans about how to sell a site for a million dollars. He is a friend, and the link may be nepotistic, but I am surprised that it got so little traction for how great it is. I guess more bloggers want to be told their blog is worth a million than want to learn how to get those million dollars in hand. To each their own.

You can tell that he is writing from his experience and learning while he is actively doing what he is talking about. That is typically where the best ideas come from...when you escape ideals and theory and talk about the trends you see right now and what is working for you right now.