It’s pretty. But that is not why it’s great.

Anyone who has anything to do with distributing online content has been in “the” meeting where “the” question gets asked: “What should the site look like?” Or, in its more common form, “How do you like the look of our site?” Then there’s my favorite variation, “What do you think of our Web site?” As absurd as these questions are, we all field them constantly. And, to be honest, I was asked all of them several times at the CNN event.

There’s a saying, “If you ask the wrong question, you’re guaranteed to get the wrong answer.” The question is not, “How do you like the look of our site?” Who cares what I think? The proper question is: “What do our users expect our site to do and, when they visit the site, do we satisfy their expectations?” The question is not, “What do you think of our Web site?” The proper question is: “Has the site met or exceeded its conversion goals or, have you been able to measure and profitably package your audience to your clients?”

The New CNN.com not only does exactly what you expect it to do, it does it brilliantly! And, because they have consolidated the technology and done some very efficient back-room, black-box stuff, you had better believe that it is a tour de force in best practices audience measurement and packaging.

Like I said, it’s pretty, but that’s not why it’s great. What I was most impressed with was the time and energy that went into creating the right mix of graphics, stills, text, audio and video for each story and feature. The New CNN.com takes the concept of user experience to a level that you have not seen on a rich-data site before. In fact, you have rarely seen this kind of emotionally satisfying content-manipulation in a rich-media site. Windows expand and contract in place and, while doing so, cause text to rewrap and graphics to re-form. The site seems to breath with the user and it reacts as you interact. The layout allows for different things to matter at different time, even while you’re on the same page, and there is a very strong sense of “above and below the scroll.”

The site is clean, simple and empowers you to find what interests you and get back to it easily. It may look like a bunch of boxes, but, “nothing easy is ever simple and nothing simple is ever easy.”

Free food and a bunch of smart people — who could resist? Pat Mitchell, who runs the Paley Center, framed the debate as billed. The Wall Street Journal has much of their online content behind a pay gateway. It seems to be working for them. The New York Times used to do something like it with Times Select, but when Vivian was there, she convinced them to make all of their content free and accessible online. That seemed to work for them.

Steven Brill agreed that payment gateways were probably not a good idea, but he suggested that there may be other ways to incentivize heavy users of content to pay for it. He outlined his theory of getting people who are used to getting free milk to buy cows.

To me, listening to this conversation was as absurd as listening to two people on the Titanic argue about the music the band was playing while they were loading the lifeboats.

There are only three business models: I pay, you pay or someone else pays. That’s it. I pay means that I (the publisher of the content) am willing to fund the creation, production and distribution of the content for my own purposes. You pay means that you are willing to pay me for my content. Someone else pays means that a third party is willing to pay me so that you can consume my content. Some of my KPMG friends have pointed out that, from the content producer/publisher’s point of view, there are really only two models: I pay or I get paid. I like to include the idea of third-party involvement, because it is so common to the media business.

In practice, we see three adaptations of the three models: Ad supported (broadcast), Subscription/Pay Per View (premium content) and the dual revenue combination of ad support and subscription (cable/print, etc.)

The common thread to all of these approaches to getting paid is the transfer of the currency of “cash” from one party to another for good and valuable consideration. Again, I pay, you pay or someone else pays — cash, credit card or check (with two forms of ID) please.

This is how business has been done for as long as anyone can remember. But it has very little to do with how business needs to be done now.

Cash is the currency we are all most familiar with, but it is far from the only one. Information is a currency. Knowledge (curated and filtered information) is a currency. Imagine a cab driver on West 38th Street in Midtown Manhattan driving aimlessly looking for a fare. If he had a device in his cab that told him that there was a fare waiting on 38th and Lex, he could almost immediately translate that information into cash. If several cabs had that information, it would be less valuable. If every cab had that information, it would simply be a business methodology with only commodity value. Any Wall Streeter will tell you that information (especially exclusive information) is cash. But a housewife living in the suburbs with knowledge of a sale at a local store or with an electronic promotional offering can translate that information into cash just as easily.

The key concept here is that a contemporary business model needs to “translate” the value of one currency into another. In the example above, the currency of knowledge is translated into currency of cash: you can’t get cash directly by distributing the information, it must be translated.

Information is an easy one, how about the currency of attention? Attention is such an established currency that it is written into the grammar of the English language, you “pay” and “receive” attention. In the online world there are a couple of other currencies that are key: Intention, Fame, Passion, Respect/Street Cred.

Google translates the currency of “intention” into about $16 Billion a year. They know that when you come to Google, your “intention” is to find something. They delight in telling you that in .02 seconds, they have found 2,374,345 things that you may have intended to click on. They offer all of their services for free. Why? They know that if they pay off your intention with valuable information that you will keep coming back. Like any good casino, they assume that if you show up often enough, you might click on something they get paid for. It’s the best currency of intention to cash money translation engine ever created.

I could spend a few hundred pages explaining how one might translate the value of the currencies of fame, passion or respect/street cred into the currency of cash. But I think you get the idea. Is it about promotional videos or selling t-shirts, concert tickets and merchandise? No, of course it isn’t. But a holistic approach to the doing of business is often an excellent way to translate disparate currencies into cash.

Will this work for a commodity like emergent or local news? It depends upon the originality and quality (in the eyes of the consumer, not your definition of quality) of the content. No one is going to pay for something they can get free of charge or easily do without. Newspapers, filled with yesterday’s news delivered to the outside of your house isn’t a good product in the 21st century. A wireless electronic delivery system that notifies me of relevant, emergent news is more in keeping with informational needs of today’s consumers … oh, wait, that’s what I get in my BlackBerry, on my iPhone and online.

Can a free online product ever make money? Yes, absolutely! You simply need to understand the currencies of the Internet and build models that translate the value of those currencies into wealth.

Want to have a really good time? Try getting through the other 81 pages of the “Federal Trade Commission, 16 CFR Part 255, Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.” It’s a page-turner!!!

If this wasn’t the driest document I have ever forced myself to read, and, if this document didn’t illustrate one of the biggest problems that brands and consumers are going to face in the 21st Century, it would actually be funny.

Let’s review. Five years ago, including VHF, UHF, Low Power, Cable, Radio, etc. there were about 25,000 broadcasters in the United States. Today, let’s pick a number … there are ~55,000,000 entities and organizations that, at the touch of a button, can broadcast a message worldwide.

You will now push back and say that there are really only six major media companies that can broadcast worldwide, and the best everyone else do is make their content available to a worldwide audience. I’m fine with that distinction. It will not have any impact on the thesis of this writing.

The currency of the advertising business is attention. We “pay” attention to things that interest us and we “receive” attention from things that are interested in us. You do not need to use any complex mathematics to illustrate that the number ~55,000,000 is much larger than the number 25,000. Even if every individual only pays a little attention to something other than the original 25,000 broadcast entities, the shift in their attention will be very large.

This is the simplest way to describe what has happened to communications in the 21st Century, but the impact is being felt in much more subtle ways across all of the related disciplines. For advertisers and marketers, consumers seem to be more in control than ever before. For broadcasters and advertisers, audiences now seem atomized rather than fragmented. For consumers, there is simply too much to choose from, too much to pay attention to.

The FTC has noticed that people are paying attention to lots of different things. They have also noticed that they are not really set up to deal with ~55,000,000 purveyors of information. It’s not just a problem for the FTC, it is an endemic problem of our time. They have a mission. They work for consumers to prevent fraudulent, deceptive, and unfair business practices and to provide information to help spot, stop, and avoid them. But the tools to deal with this in the information age simply do not exist.

Let’s say I’m a blogger, a micro-blogger, someone with 5,000 Facebook friends, a large group of LinkedIn contacts, a huge MySpace or Twitter following and I get a free camera from a CE manufacturer … shouldn’t I have to disclose the freebee? Would a new, young mother seeking advice from a semi-professional mommyblogger think more or less of the information she gets about a particular brand of stroller if she knew that the mommyblogger was getting paid to tout its virtues? Wouldn’t it be great if everyone (because there is now absolutely no distinction between professional and amateur journalists) that wrote about stuff had to make a full disclosure as to their particular motivations? It would also be great if there really was a Santa Claus.

The FTC guidelines are wonderful. So is the Golden Rule. But that doesn’t mean people will apply them. There is absolutely no way that this problem gets fixed; in fact, there is no probable future where it doesn’t get worse. How much worse? We are witnessing the very beginning of a metaphoric tectonic plate shift unlike any thing we have ever experienced.

“I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the ‘Law of Frequency of Error.’” Said Sir Francis Galton (Natural Inheritance, 1889) as he went on to describe the Central Limit Theorem. “The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it. It reigns with serenity and in complete self-effacement, amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob, and the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason. Whenever a large sample of chaotic elements are taken in hand and marshaled in the order of their magnitude, an unsuspected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to have been latent all along.”

Central Limit Theorem or Law of Large Numbers, which ever one you like to apply to this kind of problem, you’re going to get the same general result. The millions of random bloggers and neuvo-broadcasters can create as chaotic a world as they like, but the trend is going to come out in the wash — more attention will be spent on lots of little things and less attention will be spent of few big things.

One probable outcome of this trend is the self-assembling of small trust circles around individuals who can pay and receive attention only to known entities that have earned and kept their trust. Can big media play a roll? Can big brands? Can big anything work its way into your trust circle?