After the VC breakfast in Mountain View, I drove up to San Francisco for the final day of Syndicate. Some interesting tidbits from the sessions I attended:
Scott Gatz of Yahoo! pointed out that The Washington Post just launched a Votes Database that lets citizens subscribe to an RSS feed of their representative’s votes on nearly any bill. What a fantastic idea!
(It’s being called the US Congress Votes Database, including an RSS page. I missed this in Susan Mernit’s blog the other day mentioning the Post’s move.)
Gatz: “Consumers are moving from mass media to my media. They want to subscribe to blogs, new, commerce, services, audio, images, video, text. My media is what I want, how I want it, and where and when I want it (mobile device, laptop, all platforms).”
Scott showed off the Yahoo Mail Beta, which combines email and all your RSS feeds on one page. Very cool! (I could never use NewsGator because I don’t like Microsoft Outlook.) You can easily forward a blog post as if it were an email, staying within the “mail experience.” You can also save an RSS feed page into a folder for later retrieval.
There’s also a new RSS Alerts service, letting you, say, receive an alert every time your dad blogs.
More Gatz: “Discovery is evolving, becoming social, search, community filtering, recommendations, reputation, popularity. The community can tag information.”
Three members of Microsft’s Windows Live development team showed off the beta of Windows Live. It looks like it has very cool customization features, so much so that I’d consider signing up for their beta.
I asked them a question about whether those useing Windows Live will be able to see a rich media item (a video or audio) in its native format (QuickTime, DivX, etc.) rather than in Windows Media Video. The answers? While Microsoft won’t incorporate other players as native elements of their platform, there’s nothing to stop you from incorporating gadgets. Check the Microsoft Gadgets page.
In response to PubSub’s Bob Wyman, who asked about the role of newspapers in the new info ecosystem, Ross Settles, VP, Strategy & Business Development, Knight Ridder Digital, said: “Five years from now you will see newspapers think of themselves much more broadly as content creators. There’s an investment to doing deep kind of journalistic coverage. Next step down, there will be more coverage of local news like the city council or parking meter laws. The third piece is data. There’s a lot of data in a local market. … In San Jose we have more journalists at the Mercury News than every other local enterprise combined. The fourth is advertising information. What’s on sale at Fry’s?
“The other role of the newspaper is our presence as an institution. The duration of physical presence in a market gives us credibility to sell things. You’ll see us become much sronger institutions locally.”
I would have added some additional areas. Newspapers still play an important role in providing synthesis and analysis and context of the flood of data pouring forth every day.
A second essential role is as a community hub, gathering place or townsquare for civic conversation about community, regional or national matters.
Chris Tolles of Topix.net: “Reuters was started by stringers. The Oxford English Dictionary was started by a bunch of amateurs. The Encyclopaedia Britannica had very humble beginnings.” So professional publications usually don’t spring fully formed from the head of Zeus.
I asked the panelists about why citizen journalism, at least so far, pales in comparison with citizens media (user-generated content). Is it because the former is hard work?
Yes, said Tolles. Unless we make it easy and fun, people aren’t about to go out of their way to do it. Just as important, he said, is giving people psychic rewards for their volunteer efforts, by showcasing their work on a site with a sizable audience (just as quite a few people would write freebie articles if they appeared on the front page of the San Jose Merc). Paying them a freelance fee probably wouldn’t make much of a difference, if past experience (such as the free directory project Tolles headed up) is any guide.
Later: I would have liked to see Chris Nolan’s stand-along journalism session, but I opted for the tagging session with Mark Pincus, Mary Hodder and Caterina Fake of Yahoo! A few high points from the well-done panel:
One problem with open tagging, of course, is that if you let strangers tag other people’s media, the spammers will arrive within minutes. Sometimes they’re easy to spot: They’re so unimaginative that they merely copy the 50 or so most popular tags on a site like Flickr and use those keywords as tags for their own photos. (Lame.)
I asked Caterina (yeah, I’m pushy at these things when I’m not on stage) about the upsides and perils of allowing strangers to tag your own media. She surprised me by saying there’s a strong benefit to allowing open tagging — you’ll get more traffic if you allow compulsive taggers (you know who you are!) to have at it. Flickr allows you to decide whether only you, your contacts, or anyone can tag your photos.
A number of sites have followed suit in permitting community tagging, such as 43people.com. Caterina also cited Consumating, “a people tagging site for those on the make.”
Mary Hodder cited a new effort to make tagging accessible to the masses. Just yesterday, the I-tags spec went live.
I had to leave during Doc Searls’ closing keynote, but it was a gem as usual, Renee Blodgett relates.
A final note: I was pulled aside by Irina Slutsky and camera-person Jennifer Myronuk for a 5-minute interview for GETV (Geek TV) about Ourmedia. No air date yet, but soon.
Technorati tags: syndicate, syndicate 2005
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.