Here’s my gameplan for my unkeynote at the Syndicate conference on Tuesday. I’m eager for any help and suggestions you can give me.
After getting everyone to agree that conferences, panels, and keynotes suck, I’m going to lay out a few choices for what we should talk about; the choice is the room’s. Then I’ll do a quick intro to the discussion and away we go, with me darting around the room like Oprah (or, considering the color of my hair, Phil) to bring out the ideas, questions, needs, and concerns of the room, who know more than I do. Those topics:
1. Media and syndication.
* This is about the yin and yang, the great mandala of distribution and aggregation in media: You have to be distributed (aka syndicated) and then you have to be aggregated if you want to be found. Big mediA have to learn to both share and promote others’ content.
* Feeds, I think, become the new networks; networks are becoming fluid (more on that later) and so links and feeds from those you trust become the new networks.
* Tagging enables reverse syndication — see Edgeio and the idea of tagging ads or restaurant reviews anywhere on the net and then collecting and organizing and sharing them (see Edgeio).
* TV networks are starting to syndicate (see network shows on iTunes and on the web and see Warner Brothers on Bittorrent); what is the implication for big media (and for P2P)?
* I’ll tell my standard Powerpoint story about Jon Stewart on CNN vs. on the web and what’s bigger — and what networks should do about it.
* We can talk about BBC 2.0, the unnetwork and where that should go.
2. Money and syndication.
* If anyone wants syndication to get ad support so it will (a) be free and (b) get tons of content, then we’ll have to figure out how to collect metrics: views, users, usage, and such via cookies and reporting.
* Is advertising working on feeds? (To my surprise, my Feedburner ads are yielding about $200 a month.)
* Can we put wrappers on feeds and P2P — as Warner Brothers put a wrapper onto Bittorrent — to enable measurement, tracking, and ad serving? Should we?
* What about paid-subscription feeds? Is this the new newsletter, the new magazine, the new cable channel? Good idea or bad?
* I’ll plug my notion of an open-source ad marketplace.
* Insert discussion of digital rights management here.
3. Technology and syndication.
* What’s new and what’s needed? Have we seen much development in syndication lately (and, for that matter, in blogging)?
* I’ll push the notion that feeds should serve as the information architecture of news.
* I wish for flexible RSS that is smarter, killing feeds I don’t use and adding feeds those I trust believe I should have (e.g., editors picking a World Cup feed for me for a month).
* Dave Winer’s Shared OPML as a means of recommending feeds (though I wish for some segmentation — tech feeds, media feeds, etc.).
* Two-way RSS (Ray Ozzie and SSE) and the possible uses.
* Multidevice RSS (feeds to my phone, TV, refrigerator…).
* Bandwidth issues (the problem of constant pings).
4. Conferences suck.
* We could talk about that, too.
5. N.O.T.A.
* None of the above. If they pick this, I just sit down and let anarchy rule.
We’ll see how it goes…
Perhaps you could actively encourage the event attendees to submit their questions/topic ideas to you in advance of your ‘unkeynote’. This could help you avoid the cringeworthy, annoying problem of the time waster who gets the mic and asks a really lame question or who wants to give a boring monologue instead of a question or topic.
I am interested in knowing what constitutes fraudulent clicks. Havin heard that blog advertising has a problem with this, what makes up the content here? Would love to hear what your conferees think.
It will be interesting to see if anyone, such as Feedburner, can work out a way to distribute advertising / sponsorship over audio and video podcasts, in the Google Adsense fashion. This will be web.30.
And yes, conferences do suck, which is why we have blogs and tagging so that we don’t have to go to them, but can take part in the discussion online.
A good Keynote will give us insights into what you have learned from blogging and the issues you have dealt with will give us all something to think about.
We need to talk about fraud - blog networks exaggerating numbers and manufacturing consensus.
OT, but not really: Searls today [http://doc.weblogs.com/2006/05/15] expresses some grief about the new Treo 700p saying, “As long as the Net remains a premium feature of cell phones (or cable or telco service), rather than the natural habitat for every form of electronic communication, we’ll remain stuck in a world of walled medieval city-states.”
I’d like to hear both you and Doc speak tomorrow, but at $1400, isn’t that a little feudalistic? Why not a meetup at the CUNY Grad Center–isn’t it time to open up the garden gates? Doesn’t the bazaar vs cathedral meme require free access to all interested?
I agree with Bill K. on this. Isn’t it all about the conversation?
I have to apologize for being extra cranky about this.
I took umbrage at the suggestion that Treo users were somehow contributing to the fall of civilization.
Doc is a good soul, and so are you Jeff, and I know you both are promoting a better use of digital media.
But I do think you should open the doors, invite everyone, make it a messy, unregulated event, something like a marketplace.