Still have gotten almost no sleep this week (had an early interview this morning with Niklas Zennström, CEO and co-founder of Skype, for Engadget), so here’s a quick final entry on the Web 2.0 conference that concluded Thursday.
The highlight for me was meeting Jerry Yang (photo), the legendary co-founder of Yahoo! He was captivated by Larry Lessig’s presentation about the threats to digital culture, and so he said he was interested in seeing the manuscript of Darknet. In the coming weeks we’ll also be discussing the ourmedia project. (He was also impressed with my “throwback” WELL email address.)
Hour later I met another media legend, William R. Hearst III, at the Undergroundfilm.org party in another part of San Francisco. Will has a passion for grassroots media, and so he was intrigued by what I told him about ourmedia.
A couple of points worth surfacing from Thursday’s Web 2.0 sessions:
Funniest moment:
Yang: “If I had a dollar for everybody who came up to me and said, ‘I didn’t know you had that on your site! …'”
Audience member: “You do!”
Most interesting exchange about big media and blogs:
Martin Nisenholtz said during the “Media as a Platform” session: “In some ways we [NY Times Digital] are more restrained on the website than we are on the print side.” He described a section of the Times’ site launched two years ago that lets users tap into Times’ critics’ movie reviews, access imdb.com and buy movie tickets. “And people said, ‘Why would the New York Times sell movie tickets?’ Yet Yahoo goes out and buys Musicmatch, and nobody says, ‘What’s yahoo doing in that business?'” It all comes down to user expectations.
Nisenholtz also offered a revealing insight about the challenges media organizations face in surfacing all the rich content available — as well as an opportunity for the blogosphere and smaller websites. “Part of the solution is to expose our stuff by letting the Web expose it,” he said. The UI problem is an insuperable difficulty. In 2005, he said, “we’re going to be looking at this and let other sites pick up and show off our content.
Shelby Bonnie, CEO of CNET Networks, said, “We’re absolutely amenable” to the idea of bringing blog content into our service. He pointed out that editors have “a psychological control aspect and we need to do more education and take away those barriers.”
Moderator John Battelle asked Nisenholtz whether there will be a day when a woman living in suburban New Jersey will be able to write about the local school board as an official member of the New York Times’ suburban New Jersey blog network.
Nisenholtz suggested that, while there was clearly a place for opinion blogs and fact-based blogs, the vast majority of blogs are “rich with opinion” and thus can’t be “fully vetted all the time on the fact level.” If the Times were to allow a blogger to cover a government meeting and express her own views, it would be opening itself up to all kinds of potential problems. She could have an agenda, or dislike someone on the school board, and how would they know?
Battelle: “Dan Gillmor argues that’s now the reader’s job.”
Nisenholtz: “I don’t understand that. It’s a bit nuanced.”
Best insight:
Andrew Anker, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development for Six Apart: “What took blogs from an interesting low-end CMS [content management system] to this echo system we see now is the least appreciated part of the blogosphere — the RSS, the fact that the content has been separated from the presentation. That now enables the ability to track hundreds of blogs at once.”
Best quote:
Allan Vermeulen, Chief Technology Officer for Amazon Web Services: “One of the most important elements of the architecture of participation is just to get out of the way.”
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
OverMatter says
Quote of the Day: Jerry Yang (Yahoo Co-Founder)
Funniest moment from Thursday's Web 2.0 sessions: Yang: “If I had a dollar for everybody who came up to me and said, 'I didn't know you had that on your site! …'” Audience member: “You do!” (From New Media Musings: