I’m here at the University of Miami at the WeMedia conference put on by iFOCOS, the Institute for the Connected Society (formerly the Media Center). Fascinating mix of people here. Here’s the program.
There’s a live chat (top right of the conference home page) today and tomorrow.
Last night I attended a bloggers dinner organized by Scrapblog. Among those on hand there: Shel Israel,
David Parmet, Jay Rosen, Robin Miller, Tish Grier, Rory O’Connor, Jeremiah Owyang, Andy Carvin, Bob Cox and about 40 others.
I’ll be one of three facilitators at 6 tonight showing off and talking about grassroots video. I’m sitting next to Mike Tippett, co-founder of the citzen media site NowPublic.com. On stage now: Lisa Stone of BlogHer, Jan Schaffer of J-Lab, Rich Skrenta of Topix.net, Ian Rowe of MTV.com and Shel Israel, author of Naked Conversations, with Merrill Brown, who just became chairman of NowPublic, as moderator. A few nuggets:
Jan Schaffer: “What we’re seeing from hyperlocal, user-generated web sites are not so much acts of journalism as acts of community building.” She says lots of what’s happening in the user-led media revolution today is “outside the comfort zone of journalists who don’t enter that passion space very comfortably. … The robust architecture of participation happening at the local level is less about citizen journalism and more about a notion of news and schmooze. … There’s such a hostile response by mainstream journalists who are not taking the opportunity to pick up the threads of community.”
Mark Glaser: “The corporate owned newspaper don’t really understand what’s happening in my community. They’ve kind of failed in their job.”
Ian Rowe: “It takes a top-down bottom-up approach. At MTV, we call it 360.” There’s still an element of top-down element involved but “you’re honoring stories that come from young people.”
Shel: “There’s an enormous social revolution that hasn’t culminated yet.”
Jan: “What we see rising to the top are missed opportunities that a citizen raises and a newspaper brings added value to. … Maybe you need a social relationship entrepreneur in your organization.”
Others on hand here: Andrew Nachison, Dale Peskin, Gary Kebbel, Steve Rosenbaum, Eric Alterman, Rosental Alves, Roger Black, Jim Brady, Bob Cox, Marc Fest, Fabrice Florin, Nic Fulton, Jemima Kiss, Bill Mitchell, Elizabeth Osder, Geneva Overholser, Laurie Racine, Adam Powell, Scott Rafer, Michael Rogers, Donna Shalala, Chris Tolles, Jim Kennedy, John Zogby.
Later: At a panel on social media/new media investments, there was a bit of mixing it up with the audience. Chris Nolan of SpotOn related the resistance her company has been getting from venture capitalists with its syndicated content model, given that the site doesn’t rely on advertising. (Scott Rafer’s response: “The guys up here are very, very, very lazy” and want to place only sure bets.) Robin Miller challenged the panelists to discuss how they planned to reward content producers for their work (to applause). Jeff Taylor, co-founder of Monster.com and Eons, raised the interesting point that they had been paying contributors $300 per article but found that those articles weren’t being read as widely as articles written by passionate and prolific experts on a given subject.
Steve Rosenbaum asked for examples of small companies in this space that are doing well. Panelists offered: Paidcontent.org, perezhilton.com, RealClearPolitics.com and Glam.com.
I’ll have photos tonight.
More posts about the conference by others on Technorati and photos on Flickr.
One complaint: I wasted more than an hour this morning and this afternoon with the tech team trying to get my Mac laptop connected to the Net by using the brain-dead system that UofM, like so many universities, relies on, with a top-top approach that keeps an IT team scurrying around to deal with others who couldn’t get online and only one person at the very top who could generate a magic password to make this work. It’s a waste of everyone’s time.
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.
At the WeMedia conference