Back now from Digital Hollywood in LA. Met a lot of great folks there, like David Gale of MTV New Media, Eric Forst of Visible Technologies, Alex Nesbitt of DigitalPodcast.com, Ann Greenberg of Sceneplay, James Segil of Edgecast, Brenda Garcia-Wierzchucki of Archos and Mark Rotblat of TubeMogul, among others. And saw a lot of familiar faces. It was a quick trip, so here are a few notes from today’s panels:
User-generated media, social networks and traditional media
Enjoyed this panel quite a bit.
Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Azureus (a very smart P2P media-sharing and website) talked about the difference between people-centric and content-centric social networking sites.
Eric Alterman, founder and chairman of KickApps, talked about how message boards were adopted by only a handful of large sites like AOL but soon became ubiquitous, and the same thing is now happening with widgets and video players. He also pointed to the power of online contests; a magazine site saw 80,000 people sign up for a contest in just a few days, far more traffic than they had seen before that.
Robert Tercek, founder and president of PeopleJam, talked about two "value control points": profiles and content, the challenge that websites face in bolting them together. If you’re a media company and you just "bolt on the community functions," he said, "you’re missing the point."
Dmitry Shapiro (a friend), the CEO and founder of Veoh: "Facebook is partly open but it’s not open enough. The Web is the platform."
More Shapiro: "Web 1.0 was about media companies pushing content to us. Web 2.0 was about consumers connecting with each other. Web 2.1 is now about consumers connecting with each other around content."
Shapiro said Veoh started as a client like Joost or Azureus but found that it was hard to get people to download the application, so it created a video on-ramp and tried to distinguish itself from YouTube by giving people publishing tools, striking deals with content providers, and giving users the ability to publish to multiple sites: YouTube, Google Video and MySpace.
Tercek: If I were a media company, I wouldn’t want to try to erect a big portal. I would try to distribute my content to as many social networking sites and niche sites as possible. Go where your customers already are.
Personalized media platforms
I spoke on a panel wrapping up the afternoon with Leonard Brody of NowPublic, Eric Newman of Pluck, Jason Oberfest of the LA Times, Venu Vasudevan of Motorola and Chris Adams, head of Orbit Media and formerly with Participant Productions. The panel went pretty well and was a bit all over the map, given the wide-ranging topic.
Leonard Brody: We made mistake in trying to look at Facebook as a publishing platform and it’s really about personalized news.
Citizen media sites as a whole, he said, are "shitty content packagers," and that’s something traditional media is good at. But he said that ordinary people were just as capable of reporting on an event or telling a story as trained professional journalists are. "I hate the term ‘citizen journalists.’ You won’t find that term on NowPublic. Do we talk about citizen dentists?"
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.
Thanks for the briefing, haven’t seen a lot of writeups on this.
It was good to meet you, too, JD. This was a really great panel..thanks for recording it so well. Your panel was engaging,too. A thought on Dmity Shapiro’s statement about Web 2.1: You can also look at it as content connecting with consumers via other consumers, can’t you?