At WeMedia 2005

I’m attend­ing the WeMe­dia con­fer­ence today and will be live-blogging in this entry. Watch the site for con­stant updates as I will keep adding to this entry.

It seems there are two clear camps here: the new media adopters and the tra­di­tional crowd. They can eas­ily be iden­ti­fied based on whether they have lap­tops in front of them or not. It cre­ates an imme­di­ate delin­eation line as the blog crowd obvi­ously has a backchan­nel to use whereas the tra­di­tional media crowd does not. That’s another facet of WeMe­dia: always con­nected, enhanced knowl­edge through imme­di­ate shar­ing of data.

We News Panel

The AP showed a few famil­iar cit­i­zen gen­er­ated clips of the Tsunami, the Lon­don bomb­ing, the WTC bomb­ing and said they started to use con­tri­bu­tions as a way to get speed to market.

“Tech­nol­ogy is fun­da­men­tally chang­ing the busi­ness and if we don’t adapt, we will loose that audi­ence” — Richard San­brook, BBC

Dis­cus­sion of class dis­par­ity and avail­abil­ity of access to the inter­net chan­nel. The United States are behind on this and it seems that there is lit­tle lead­er­ship in terms of mov­ing for­ward on this.

Keynote: Al Gore

“TV dom­i­nates the flow of infor­ma­tion in Amer­ica… The most promi­nent casu­alty [of changes in the mar­ket­place] is the mar­ket­place of exchange of ideas…

It is the destruc­tion of that mar­ket­place of ideas that accounts for the strange­ness of our times.”

He sees three basic tenet of the mar­ket­place of ideas:
1. Open to every indi­vi­did­ual with no bar­rier to entry
2. Depended on mer­i­tor­cracy of ideas
3. Accepted rules of dis­course pre­sumed that all speak­ers were try­ing to find gen­eral agreement

Talks about how tele­vi­sion is not a two way con­ver­sa­tion (lead­ing up to current.tv pitch, I’m assuming).

“News divi­sions are now seen as profit cen­ters and used to pur­sue the agenda of the cor­po­ra­tion they are owned by” He then goes on into media manip­u­la­tion by the White House and cur­rent state of cov­er­age (no real news but rather entertainment).

He now is talk­ing about how pri­vate con­trol of the TV air­waves is a prob­lem for democ­racy (gives exam­ple of moveOn being shut out because adver­tis­ing is the only way to get one’s voice on the air(because their ads were not accepted while the White House’s ones were).

Current.tv is about enabling a two way con­ver­sa­tion in television.

He stills see TV as the dom­i­nant medium of the next few years and closes with a plea to ensure that Inter­net access remains free and open.

We, Inc.

Dis­cus­sion of busi­ness and media. There is a lot of dis­cus­sion about the poten­tials of the Inter­net as a new chan­nel but, as Scott Rafer, of Feed­ster, points out, they are “on a higher socio-economic bracket… Peo­ple aren’t able to find the tools to hear inde­pen­dent voices.”

Craig For­man, GM of Yahoo!, is asked by Jason wether Yahoo! is a media con­tent cre­ator or an area that con­tent pro­duc­ers can work with. He talks about the hot­zone, which is inde­pen­dent con­tent and flickr (also owned by Yahoo!) and how the com­mu­nity self-organizes around new tags.

Jen­nifer Feikin, Direc­tor of Google Video, sees it as organ­is­ing infor­ma­tion based on user-generated con­tent. Sees it as “just the begin­ning”. Lots of talk about Google Video and how it makes video con­tent more read­ily avail­able. Google’s long term aspi­ra­tion is to also facil­i­tate video on demand and be able to charge for it (this seems rem­i­nis­cent of the ini­tial Microsoft model (circa 95–96) of try­ing to get a vig off every trans­ac­tion on the Internet)

Andrew Hey­ward, pres­i­dent of CBS News still sees the Inter­net as not on par with TV right now. “There is no 60 min­utes of the inter­net. There are very few stars, no com­pelling storytelling… ”

There’s dis­cus­sion of a gen­er­a­tional divide. Accord­ing to Hey­ward, the main rea­son tra­di­tional media is slow to react is that they still have very large audi­ences, ie. the peo­ple who are over 40. He also believes that opin­ion from jour­nal­ism on the blog is prob­a­bly anti­thet­i­cal to the phi­los­o­phy of CBS news. It’s not some­thing he wants his jour­nal­ists to engage in.

The most suc­cess­ful writ­ers in the blo­gos­phere, accord­ing to Rafer, are the peo­ple who are will­ing to come out and tell where they stand before cov­er­ing a subject.

Cit­i­zen media rev­enue oppor­tu­ni­ties: Scott Rafer sees it on the same size as Ebay. Jason Cala­ca­nis sees it as 20% of tra­di­tional media. Craig For­man sees the rev­enue oppor­tu­ni­ties as a medi­a­tor between cre­ators, adver­tis­ers, and audiences.

We, Invest

Brad Burn­ham, of Union Sq. ven­tures, sees the real money being in the coör­di­nate of activ­ity, not in the activ­i­ties themselves.

Brad Feld, of Mobius Ven­ture: “Com­put­ers and soft­ware suck… from a ven­ture per­spec­tive, there doesn’t seem to be a fore­see­able end to it… The chal­lenge is… how to find out what peo­ple are inter­ested in and how to orga­nize all this. ” He talks about how Google has demon­strated the value of automation.

Brad Burham coun­ters that Google (and also goes into Skype) is partly based on automa­tion but also based on an under­ly­ing human net­work. The next ques­tion he has is whether you can sell a network.

Brad fol­lows up in agree­ment that scal­i­bil­ity is essen­tial to the model. User atten­tion is an essen­tial part of mon­e­tiz­ing traffic.

Fol­low­ing on a view from Rafat Ali that con­tent is not an invest­ment play for VCs, Feld fol­lows up that money is in things that are not eas­ily reproducible.

Burn­ham: “It is so easy to get to mar­ket [for a media com­pany] on the net… that is hard to find some­thing that is monetizable.

A lot of the value within the tool is in the com­mu­nity. It’s get­ting to be very hard to see the dif­fer­ence between a media and a soft­ware co. As the cost come down, the price of deliv­er­ing a ser­vice is so low that you can sup­port it with adsense or another ad model. A media busi­ness paid for by the per­son who wants to have a con­ver­sa­tion with the per­son receiv­ing the service. ”

Feld: Pays credit to web 2.0 and the web 2.0 con­fer­ence as a geek gath­er­ing; “On the east coast, we have a con­fer­ence where peo­ple are talk­ing about some­thing that I, as a tech­nol­o­gist, really don’t under­stand. You have a dynamic where you think they’re com­ing together but cul­tur­ally, they’re diverg­ing more than ever.”

We, Mar­ket­ing

Rick Sken­tra, topix.net CEO, talks about the value of word of mouth and how the mes­sage for the blog world must be dif­fer­ent than the mes­sage for other tra­di­tional media.

Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads.com, talks about how there is no more We in the WeMe­dia. There is now a per­sonal rela­tion­ship between blog­gers and their audi­ence. Mar­ket­ing mes­sages in that chan­nel are counter-productive.

John Bell, cre­ative direc­tor of Ogilvy PR, talks about the chal­lenges of mov­ing away from a control-focus message.“What we’re see­ing is an oppor­tu­nity for com­pa­nies to be more trans­par­ent and there is still a great split within our customer-base… Some clients are ner­vous but at the same time, they’re see­ing things change and want to get there…”

Fer­nando Espuela, CEO of Voy, is tar­get­ing the latino mar­ket with com­mu­nity empow­er­ment tools and mar­ket­ing it through a non-traditional approach by launch­ing the brand before launch­ing the product.

I asked a ques­tion on push­ing mes­sages instead of work­ing within the mes­sage from the cus­tomer. Copeland men­tioned how jobs are at risk. Sken­tra looks at using the peo­ple out there as a large focus group. Bell likes the idea of com­pa­nies that will engage in such a way.

Dis­cus­sion now goes to Dell-Hell and the Jarvis dis­cus­sion. Sken­tra looks at it as an oppor­tu­nity for com­pa­nies to adopt a human face and responds to mar­kets. Rubel ask whether com­pa­nies are aller­gic to this. Bell says size has noth­ing to do with it. “… and it goes beyond blogs. For exam­ple, BP did a good job when they relaunched their brand as beyond petro­leum but they made sure they were not only more trans­par­ent but were also walk­ing the walk.”

In Us We Trust

This dis­cus­sion is focus­ing on trust and how to get it.

Richard Edel­man, CEO of Edel­man PR, has been talk­ing about how lev­els of trust in insti­tu­tions has fallen. How­ever, one has to won­der whether this trust has eroded as a result of greater trans­parency which showed that the trust in those insti­tu­tions was based on very thin ice to start with.

Col­lab­o­ra­tion Café

The goal of this ses­sion is to fos­ter dia­logue (think blog­ger­con for tra­di­tional media types) and dis­cuss the con­cept of col­lab­o­ra­tion. Some of the ideas that were cov­ered included active lis­ten­ing, dis­ci­pline in car­ing, demon­stra­tion of pas­sion, and gen­eral engage­ment, allow­ing for vulnerability.

Last Thoughts

The con­fer­ence was very inter­est­ing and I got to meet a lot of fas­ci­nat­ing peo­ple. The most inter­est­ing thing to me, sit­ting here as a media out­sider, was that most of the peo­ple at the con­fer­ence still believe they can have full con­trol of the mes­sages dis­trib­uted online. This, in my view, is a major fal­lacy in their think­ing as it is becom­ing clearer and clearer as time goes on that there is very lit­tle one can con­trol on the Inter­net. The only way you can impact the direc­tion of a dis­cus­sion is engag­ing into it.

See Also

See also the Tech­no­rati Tag weme­dia, the We Media tag weme­dia and the WeMe­dia blog for more cov­er­age of this conference.