It's like the good old days in B2B press with personnel leap-frogging from one pub to another. Patrick Mannion six months ago jumped from his post of editorial director of TechOnline at United Business Media to go take the newly created post of director of content at Hearst Electronics Group.Well, UBM thought that was a pretty neat idea and created a similar post for EDN and the Designlines. Who would best fill that post then.... wait for it.... Patrick Mannion?

That opens a whole in the staff over at Hearst that's being filled temporarily by Murray Slovick on a consulting basis, while they look for a permanent replacement.

Director of content is a fairly new concept developed to handle the flood of information on the internet. Where an editorial director sets policy direction for the editorial staff, the content produced by that staff is also under the supervision of the content director, whose job it is to coordinate and weave together that content with hundreds of blogs, white papers, contributed articles and outside news. it's a daunting task and something worthy of talking about.

Patrick, you up for it?