Appeared Monday at the Digital Hollywood conference in Santa Monica, CA — the second time I’ve attended (the first was a few years back with Doc Searls, who told me, "You should be up there." This time, I was.). Spoke on the citizen media panel about emerging trends in participatory media. Some random notes from the conference:
• Jason Calacanis, who heads up Netscape and Weblogs, Inc. for AOL: “If you want to be an A-list blogger, the formula is very simple. Pick the top story on TechMeme every day for 30 days and link to three other A-list bloggers who are blogging about the topic.”
Jason says Weblogs, Inc. and AOL have hired 500 bloggers in the past three years “and paid out millions,” more than any other company has ever done.
More Jason: The three main reasons why people blog (or at least bloggers he’s worked with) are, in this order: recognition (and passion), affiliation, and compensation.
And: Google’s text advertising has been “the most efficient advertising mechanism in history.”
And this final Jason nugget, which I wholly disagree with: “If you make something great, it’ll rise to the top.” I challenged Jason on this point, saying that lots and lots of quality works are lost in the cacophony today. He countered by saying that telling 10 people about it will lead them to tell 10 other people, and you’ve got a snowball effect. Well, sometimes, but not often. Ask anyone who’s written a first-rate book but can’t break through the noise of mediocrity in any bookstore’s racks.
Interestingly, Mary Hodder, CEO of Dabble, agreed with me on a later panel, saying that we’ll soon see services where your contacts will help point you to the 5 or 10 videos a day that you’ll find relevant, perhaps relying on the 10 percent of site visitors who are natural-born organizers. “People want someone who can filter interesting things for them.”
More Mary: There are 200,000 videos being uploaded every day to 270 video sharing sites.
Kevin Sladek, head of VideoEgg called Comic Life for the Mac “the last piece of software that absolutely gave me chills.” And: Quality will become increasingly important to amateur video makers because “nobody wants to make a bad movie.”
Sites mentioned during the day:
• thisnext, a social shopping site.
• Outhink and its SpinXpress p2p media collaboration application.
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.
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