At the Idea Festival

I spoke this morning at the Idea Festival in Louisville, Ky., on the panel The New New Media, with Debbie Galant, Kevin Smokler and Buck Ryan. Talked about the changing media landscape and showed off a new video, Flavors of Participatory Media, which I hope to post online next week. 

Great to spend time with Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices and the Berkman Center (we ate at the Bristol Bar & Grille); I’ll be conducting a citizen journalism interview with him in a few minutes. Also great to dine with Debbie Galant (at The Pub yesterday for lunch) and Peter Sulyok (at Joe’s Crab Shack) and to share drinks with Kevin Smokler, Elizabeth Spiers and Rob May at the Red Star Tavern.

It’s always a pleasure to attend conferences with Ethan, who does the heavy lifting of blogging the panels. Here’s his recap of the New New Media panel.

Some other takeaways from the festival:

– Of the 150 people attending our session — business people, educators, marketing professionals — only 10 had ever blogged before. All had heard of blogs, however, and two-thirds had heard of podcasting.

– The citizen media site Barista.net, covering Bloomfield, Montclair and Glen Ridge, NJ, has had 4,400 editorial posts and 72,000 comments since it launched in May 2004. It charges about $200-$300 for an ad to run for a month, and site co-founder Galant is making twice as much as she did writing free-lance for the New York Times.

– Best company name: Elizabeth Spiers’ Dead Horse Media.

– Ethan Z. on virtual worlds: "This technology sucks, even with a fast broadband connection," because of the demands an interactive game places on the servers. Of course, Ethan often jacks in from places like Zimbabwe (two weeks ago), where the entire country’s broadband connection was cut off because someone didn’t pay the ISP bill, so they had to use dial-up out of South Africa.

– More Ethan: A billion people now have Internet access, and a billion more will come online in the next five years — chiefly from places like India, Russia, China, Brazil and South Africa. "We’re suddenly going to be having conversations with a billion people that we’re not used to listening to."

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.