I just finished a talk, along with Dave Toole of Outhink Media, at the fifth annual MediaX conference at Stanford, being held today and Tuesday. About 300 educators and business people in the audience. (Why oh why did they have to schedule this smack in the middle of the Web 2.0 Expo? I’ll be there tomorrow and Wednesday).
From the MediaX program:
More people on earth will purchase a cell phone for the first time this year than have ever used any other electronic device in history. Web 2.0, serving the “last mile” at the last outpost on earth, participatory media creation by “smart mobs” – the information age has indeed arrived. Emergent technologies and organizations stimulate new ideas and cause disruption, creating new tensions and opportunities. anticipating the unanticipated, reducing ambiguity to knowledge, focusing attention on the critical issues – all become essential ingredients for a world in transition.
MediaX was conceived with a strong belief that interdisciplinary perspective is crucial to better understanding and solution definition for these issues, coupled with a realization that nearly all academic research is conducted departmentally without involvement by either industry or other disciplines. our model is that MediaX industry partners provide crucial questions and modest funding for Stanford faculty and student scholar research that spans multiple disciplines. The resultant insights exemplify the best intersection of industry need and academic research,
accelerating understanding and progress on critical topics.Ourmedia, a partner with Stanford media groups, and in the Humanities and communications departments, is proud to sponsor media X for vBlog
team collaboration. Key factors that set ourmedia apart: 1) support for video producers as well as the grassroots media community; 2) specific support for the educator community. 3) an open-media, open-standards, open-source, open registry that supports remix culture to create a space for people to mash up and remix video, audio, music and images.
Dave and I gave a presentation about Ourmedia, digital media producers, and the opportunity for us to work together with — and provide resources for — the educational and business communities.
A fascinating array of speakers here:
You likely saw Scott Burns, producer of An Inconvenient Truth, on stage at the Oscars accepting the Academy Award for best documentary. He talked about making the ground-breaking film with Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore. It’s now the third highest-grossing documentary of all time.
Roy Pea, professor of education and learning sciences at Stanford, showed off DIVE, an academic effort that’s about ready for a real-world rollout. With DIVE, users point into a streaming video with a mouse-controlled camera
viewfinder to mark interesting frames or record a movie within a movie. DIVE is the clip collection with its annotations. By selecting and annotating video segments, a user authors a POV on specific video moments.
Interesting factoid from the morning session:
Intel, HP and Cisco have 1.4 million employees globally. Three out of four employees there work on a distributed team. One in five employees has never met her supervisor face to face. Two out of three employees work on three or more teams simultaneoulsy.
Paul Brown of Stanford showed off some fascinating 3-D imagery of
mummies as well as real-world applications — such as dental patients.
B.J. Fogg, who runs the Persuasive Technology Lab and put on the Mobile Persuasion conference here two months ago and who developed online voice service YackPack: "The more you use email to manage your closest relationships, the more likely those relationships will weaken or end. Email is a poor substitute for the emotional richness in our other interactions. … It’s an inability to connect emotionally to people because of its rigid structure."
Later: Pithy quotes from Paul Saffo, the big-ideas guy who left the Institute for the Future and who calls himself a forecaster and not a futurist:
“Most ideas take 20 years to become an overnight success in the media world. …
“You create it, you own it. That’s what personal media is all about.” Personal media, in one form or another, has been around for decades, says Saffo, who uses the term more frequently than anyone other than myself.
“Cherish failure and don’t chase success. … You want to look for short-term success? Look for something that’s been failing for 20 years. Something that when people hear it they say, ‘That’s an old, tired idea.’ … Silicon Valley is built on the rubble of cherished failure.” He cited Habitat, an early online game derided by skeptics who said people don’t want to talk to each other on screen as cartoon characters. Years later, up sprang Second Life, which millions of us now use. “People say they love change. Bullshit. They’re afraid of change, they don’t like change.” Resist that impulse. “Embrace change. Change is opportunity.”
“The next big thing is not movies on a handheld. The next big thing that comes out of nowhere and blows people’s minds is robots. … Consumer robots will be everywhere, and there are going to be lots of surprises."
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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