I’m at iSummit, Content That Pays, a new media conference in Toronto with about 400 media execs and members of the technology community. I’m speaking on the We Media panel in a couple of hours with moderator Barnaby Marshall, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress, David Jacobson of PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Bob Young, founder of LuLu.
This morning, Norm Bolen, exec vp of content, Alliance Atlantis, was one of the more forward-looking members of the Convergence panel: “You’re going to be seeing huge, massive uptake of user-generated video that we can’t even imagine yet. … Young people are much less interested in a passive experience.”
His son, a college student, visited the site in New York where John Lennon was shot. He came home, visibly moved, and posted a three-minute tribute to Lennon on his blog, including snippets of Lennon’s music. I told him, ‘What are you doing? You don’t have clearance to post that.” He said, “What are they gonna do to me? There are millions of us. I don’t even have an allowance.”
Bolen’s the exception, though. A questioner suggested that any unauthorized use of copyrighted content was illegal and improper, even if done for artistic, noncommercial purposes. Most of the other speakers agreed. Maria Hale of CHUM Television went so far as to say when she was a kid, she felt guilty whenever she recorded commercial music off the radio onto a cassette tape recorder, “And I knew that it was wrong.” Wow.
Just bumped into Jim Griffin, whom I devoted a chapter to in Darknet, and who’ll be moderating the lunchtime session on The Copyright Conundrum.
Later: Also bumped into Andrew Michael Baron of Rocketboom, another speaker here, and Nathon Gunn of Bitcasters, a member of the Ourmedia Advisory Board, who’s moderating a panel on online games. There’s a blogger dinner tonight here that I’ll try to get to.
We just finished our hourlong rap on We Media. Six people came up and said they enjoyed it, so I guess it was a success. The moderator held up this week’s cover story on Newsweek (above), about MySpace, YouTube and Flickr, as an indication that We Media was breaking into the mainstream.
I began with a seven-minute presentation that laid the foundation for the panel, outlining the idea behind We media (pick you name: participatory media, citizens media, Media 2.0, open media and my least favorite, user-generated content), suggesting the differences between traditional media and these new media forms, letting people know about Ourmedia, showing off a mashup, and projecting where all this is going.
It was a wide-ranging hour (it was videotaped, and I’ll post a link if I get one), with everyone getting in equal shots. I encouraged the publishers in the audience to atomize and unbundle their content, making it available (for a fee or for free) for users to mashup, re-create and recirculate. Matt and I also made the point that while Heavy.com is making $20 million a year in advertising revenues, personal publishers should be cautious before rushing to plaster ads all over their sites.
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.
Leave a Reply