BuzzMachine

Yesterday when I led a panel at the Personal Democracy Forum, I gave props to Dave Winer as I told the room that they were the panel — that’s what Dave told me quite firmly at the first Bloggercon — and so I was taking the microphone to the room — the people formerly known as the audience — to involve everyone in the discussion and to organize the discussion not around people (I’m on the panel, you’re not; it’s my turn in the line…) but around threads of ideas. I now see that two days ago, Dave told the story of that Bloggercon. He taught me how to be Oprah and I have used that ever since and, indeed, his has made me a better moderator/discussion leader.

Today, I’m relieved and happy that the PDF leaders have decided to also come into the audience and play Oprah. Perhaps I should have called it playing Winer. A snippet of his story of the beginning of the format:

We reserved a suite of five classrooms and recruited Discussion Leaders (DLs), and tried to explain the format on the phone. I asked the DLs to think of the entire room as a panel. Two of them, well-intentioned, had recruited a few people they knew and asked them to come to the front. I rotated between the rooms, when I saw this, I asked the people in the front to take seats in the body. I made the DL stand in front, and lead the discussion. I remember the instant Jeff Jarvis, for example, understood what I was looking for — he ran with it, as far as I could tell everyone had a grand time (Jarvis is a fantastic DL). By the time the day was over, the format had been worked out, and get this — the hallways were empty! The conversations that used to happen in the hallway were now happening in the conference.

Thanks, Dave.

Amy Gahran and Steve Safran are headed for a group hug as they try to stop the us-v-them time wasting of too many conferences. I agree (and Jill Miller Zimon is right, I am tired of making the point). At the conference I’m holding at CUNY on Oct. 10, I plan to have a gong and the first attempt to attack MSM or blogs gets gonged off. This conference is about action, taking next steps, not about sniping, which is where too many conferences do turn. Wish us luck.

Below, I complained about a conference — I’ll now say it is Streaming Media — giving out my email address without my permission to vendors. And it’s worse than that: Three of them called me at home! I was irritated but now, reading the comment from conference organize Dan Rayburn, below, I’m pissed. He said:

We allow any press member not to have their name included on a list that we give exhibitors, however we don’t allow that for speakers. Since speakers get a free conference pass, get to promote themselves, get to mention their websites, and get in front of thousands of people at the show, on the website and via the webcast etc… we expect them to also give back and allow companies to contact them who may want to meet them at the show. The networking is a big value of the show.

The problem we all face as one person pointed out is that too many PR people send out e-mails to people who are not targeted to their topic. That’s a problem that no conference organizer can do away with unless they just stop allowing people to network with one another.

What crap. They get free content out of us panelists. I didn’t attend a single session. And I have to put up with spam and invasions of my privacy at home? Bullshit.

I don’t think I’ll be streaming media with them again.

: LATER: In the comments, Rayburn, in my view, digs his hole deeper. Here’s his comment. My reaction:

This shows exactly why so many conferences are so screwed up and worthelss. His attitude is that everybody who’s speaking is speaking to sell shit and then he sells tickets to people to be sold that shit on top of more sponsors who sell more shit.

Gee, I thought people went to conferences to learn things.

Why did I go to the conference? Because Rayburn asked me. I viewed it as a favor. He clearly did not.

Why didn’t I go to any sessions? Because I didn’t find anything of interest. I can now see why.

And I find it pitiful that he’s now dragging in the people who joined the panel — as a favor to me. Yes, I made clear before and at the panel that IdolCritic was a production of my new company but there’s no business to be done for it now that the season is almost over. When I invited Black20, I hadn’t invested in it; I knew that J. would be good on the panel. I invited Fred Graver, a real visionary from Vh1, but he couldn’t make it so the conference added someone. I now feel bad that by inviting them, I opened these people to the spam email and calls from the conferences shills.

It is time for conference speakers to go on strike. No speakers, no conferences.

I didn’t attend any of the Streaming Media conference, except the panel I moderated with talented people who are remaking TV online: J. Crowley of Black20 (disclosure: I’m an investor), Mary C. Matthews of IdolCritic (disclosure: she’s making this for my video company) and 39Second Single, Adam Elend of WallStrip, and Robert Scoble of Scoble. I ran into Steve Safran of Lost Remote and asked him how the conference was and he shrugged a bit and then explained that he likes the fact that at this conference — as he later said on his blog:

there is no arguing. There is good debate, to be sure. But there is no “us vs. them,” no “blogs are death,” no “that’s not real media,” no “that’s not our core competency” arguments. The open-mindedness of companies here is terrific. Broadcasters need to learn from the entrepreneurial spirit of these folks. They look at emerging tech and see the possibilities, not the limitations.

That’s what we need at newspaper and TV journalistic conferences: A big banner at the door that says:

NO ARGUING ALLOWED. LEAVE YOUR KVETCHES AT THE DOOR.

I’m going to put a new requirement on conference speaking and attendance: no conference spam. I’m at a conference today that clearly gave my email address out and I’m getting tons of unsolicited email.

I’m learning that making videos is a great way to get virtual attention. My video post for Comment is Free was shown at yesterday’s Guardian and my McCain PrezVid show on today’s presentation (see the post below). Gee, maybe I can stop going to conferences and attend virtually. But then, I wouldn’t have heard the laughs I got today. Gotta have an audience, eh?

Rich Skrenta of Topix throws in the towel on we media — way, way, too soon, I think. Because people at the latest We Media conference — just like the last one — couldn’t agree on how the various tribes of news can and should work together — once they ever stop baring their teeth or beating their breasts at each other — Rich says it’s not going to happen. I’m guessing he sees no hope for global warming, either. Says Rich:

The problem is that the hopes that Dan Gillmor raised for the media industry in his book — which kicked off this whole business — have largely failed. . . .

There is actually a media revolution in the works. So what’s going on here? By implicit definition, participatory media is non-commercial. If it’s commercial, someone owns it, and it’s not “we” anymore.

There we disagree. That’s the problem with PayPerPost, not with commercially supported media, big or small. And we have not even begun to plumb the possibilities of commercially supported networks of small media. Rich continues:

Furthermore, as soon as a new media venture crosses the line and tries to become a business, it either becomes a successful business or a failed one. Businesses aren’t about ideology, they’re about getting a job done and earning revenue to keep the thing going. Even wild success tends to leave ideology behind. Ideology is the realm of nonprofits and failures.

And here, too, we disagree. First, the definition of business success depends on the business. And I’d argue that journalism has been driven by ideology — by the desire to make the society more open and the world a better place as a result. More:

There is still a power law to success, and the few continue to reap disproportionate rewards, as they always have. Pub media turns out to be a farm league for big media. The bloggers who “make it” look more and more like regular media than “us”. They graduate to to the A-list, and start to get lumped in and criticised along with the establishment. Success looks like a sellout to a big media company, or a good business doing job boards and conferences on the side to pay the bills.

And there we really disagree. It is a mistake to judge success by the standards and old assmptions of the old media economy. Not every blogger wishes to be big media and not every blogger who doesn’t shouldn’t be judged as a failure. (I’ll spare you the reprise of the there-is-no-A-list argument.)

What Rich is leaving out, I think, is the network model: working together both journalistically and commercially. I believe that’s possible and I don’t believe we’ve even begun to scratch the surface of possibilities.

I do agree with Rich that conferences need to get past arguing. I say they need to get to the job of innovating. But more on that later.

It is way, way too soon to throw in that towel.

(Disclosure: Rich’s company, Topix, is a competitor in some ways with the company I work with, Daylife; he lists both in his post in a collection of new-media news startups.)

: And amen to Richard Sambrook on what should be next:

Enough of conferences going over the same ground, enough of bloggers (several of whom make their living from consulting with big organisations) saying big media doesn’t “get it” and only they have insight, enough of big media publicly agonising over how to respond to the huge disruption the internet has brought. Enough of the fallacy of thinking there is some kind of power struggle going on. It’s about integration, not subsititution…
For me this year has to be less about talking and more about doing.

Nick Denton accused me of being a panel whore for doing this. Guilty. But I look good in black, don’t I? I get back from the World Economic Forum in Davos late last night and this morning, where am I? At Tony Perkins’ Always On conference in New York. Perkins is webcasting the whole thing, good on him.

Tim O’Reilly announces a new conference: Tools of Change for Publishing. That’s a good idea; publishing needs to better grapple with and embrace these new tools and the new architecture of information and media. But I have two reactions: First, most of the tools that matter are lite and open and easy and the people who create them, use them, and know them best are not the big-iron technocrats of the media industry. How will you get them to share what they know on and off the stage? They’re not going to pay thousands to come to a conference to do that. Second, I was stuck by the West-Coast hubris of the announcement: “We’re the originator of the term Web 2.0.” I think the time has come when I wouldn’t brag about that. And: “San Jose? Why not New York? Because we think that Silicon Valley, not New York, is the epicenter of the changes that are driving publishing.” No, there is no epicenter. The internet obsoletes epicenters.

: LATER: Tim O’Reilly tried to post a comment and my damned spam filter zapped him and then zapped me when I tried to do it in his place. So here is his comment. Sorry for the delay, Tim…

Jeff –

A couple of responses:

1. I completely agree that “most of the tools that matter are lite and open and easy,” but I explicitly noted in my post (and in our thinking about the conference) that many of the things that seem so obvious to those of us in the tech industry are actually NOT obvious and easy to people in publishing. At the Stanford Publishing Course, I had a debate about the Google Library book scanning project with a big name literary agent, and in the course of our debate, as I was trying to explain how a book search index was just like a web search index, I discovered that not only did she not know what an index was, she had never even tried Google! Now that’s an extreme, but in my dealing with people in publishing, I have found that many of them fall into two camps: the *very* clued in (like Brian Murray at Harpers or Timo Hannay at Nature) or “confused and slightly dazed.” Even those in the middle are looking for best practices. In fact, part of the reason I do a conference like this is to learn myself. If you’ve ever heard Mitch Kapor’s talk on what works about Wikipedia, you realize that there’s far more to wikis than you realized. They may be quick and simple, but the reason most wikis don’t work as well as people hope is that people don’t really understand some of the social and architectural factors that make the best wikis work. Ditto blogs. There *are* best practices, and a lot of cool new tools that have been applied on the web but not to more traditional areas of publishing. (For example, I bet even you haven’t thought through all the implications of SEO on book search — that’s still a story in the making, and nobody has figured out a lot of what will be common practice a few years from now.)

I also agree that “the people who create [these tools], use them, and know them best are not the big-iron technocrats of the media industry,” which is why I find it puzzling that your very next point is “Why San Jose and not New York?” You just gave the reason.

And as to “getting [the innovators] to share what they know,” that’s what O’Reilly events are known for. Anyone who’s been to a conference like OSCON or etech knows that we’re darn good at that.

I’m not saying it’s a slam dunk to get established publishers and the new breed of publishing technologists and publishing innovators together and make magic happen, but it’s definitely worth trying, for all the reasons I cite in my original post.

I’m sorry you’re a skeptic, but I’d love to have a chance to convince you. Let’s talk, and I hope to get you involved.

P.S. You say that you wouldn’t brag about being the originator of the term “Web 2.0?” I don’t consider it bragging to mention it in the context that I did. But in any event, why not? In 2003, we set out to reignite enthusiasm in the computer industry, which was still reeling from the dotcom bust, by doing some storytelling about why we were still bullish on technology. It worked. A lot of people have benefited. Yes, there’s been some hype, but I think the good far outweighs the bad. And I’ve heard from a lot of entrepreneurs that the ideas at the heart of my What is Web 2.0? paper have been incredibly useful to them.

Scott Karp liveblogged the heck out Mesh. And boy, are his fingers tired.

I’m at the Syndicate conference in New York. Just did the unkeynote. Have no idea whether it worked. You tell me.

: The meatiest thing that came out of it was a lot of confusion and complaint about the state of tagging. It’s time for taggercon.

: Richard Edelman, who’s becoming known as the most clueful flack, says that they are getting rid of the “message triangle,” the old, accepted wisdom of media training that taught the speaker to keep coming back to three points no matter what the question is. He says the John Kerry failed in his debates because he was too-well trained; he kept coming back to those points. Too much training reduces credibility, he says.

He says that PR people in the future should be “chief listening officers.” Yes, but that should be the job of all execs, no?

: Thinking about it, I’d do the unkeynote differently, modeling it more on the unconference. It needs to start with a goal — a question to answer, a problem to solve, a debate to surface or settle, so people try to pull together to some end and the conversation isn’t random … and so the unkeynoter can bring the conversation back on course when it veers off (as this one did). Lesson learned.

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…