GoingOn and Innovation Summit wrapup

Just uploaded to Ourmedia this video of the smart, amazing, terrifically talented Valerie Cunningham talking yesterday about the announcement of the coming launch of the new social networking site GoingOn.

Following are my notes from yesterday’s AlwaysOn Innovation Summit at Stanford University.

Tony Perkins and Marc Canter announced what I believe is a major step forward for social networking: the GoingOn Network. Click the video above for a fuller explanation.

Said Perkins: "We think what makes great communities is content."

Yes, Tony, yes!

More Tony Perkins: "The world is breaking into millions of little media brands. A couple of years ago there was a fear that all roads lead to Rupert Murdoch. … Individuals now have to think of themselves as media brands, because IBM is not to going to promise to employ you for the rest of your life. … The media world is where the music world was six years ago. … The customer always gets what he wants. … I believe the media world will ultimately succumb to open media and allow for more participation."

Venture capitalists tend to see spaces like social networks as a horse race with a maximum of three winners in the end, Perkins said. The GoingOn gang offers a different vision: The most effective social groups will have no more than 100 to 200 people. So GoingOn will be a network of networks. Added Perkins: "It’s not about closed silos. If you want to have it reflect our lives, you need thousands or millions of these things with 200 members each."

Tony’s got the religion. Seriously.

Marc Canter explains a bit of what GoingOn is about here. And he finished up his talk with this simple retort to a questioner: "Dude, I’m deep into this shit."

Matt Marshall of the San Jose Merc today had this:  GoingOn aims to be social `network of networks.’ "Perkins and Canter said they want the company to be a “network of networks” — a platform open for integration with other social networking players, such as Tribe or Friendster, and other large media companies, such as Yahoo, and even other corporate sites. All these players could create their own networks on GoingOn."

Later: Marc has some not-so-gentle corrections to Matt’s article.

Panelists’ musings

David Sifry, CEO of Technorati: "The blogosphere has been doubling in size every five months for the past 30 months." Tuesday, I thought Dave said the blogosphere had grown to 12 million blogs. Tonight, he cited the latest stats: Technorati is tracking 13.6 blogs. Eleven posts go up every second every minute of the day. Blogs are taking off in various languages around the wsorld: Chinese, Korean, Japanese, French, Portuguese.

Dan Gillmor: "Blogs are a proxy for something bigger. Increasingly things that are not text are very interesting. People won’t have time to go through 10,000 photos from London or 500 comments on a Slashdot thread," so we need to find better mechanisms to save time.

Dan also made the (correct) observation that journalism does not belong to a professional caste of players. Instead, what’s important is what you write and how you report the news, not who you’re reporting it for. "Every one of you in this room can commit an act of journalism."

Sounds to me like random acts of journalism.

I’ve been writing for years about how the term objectivity should be retired, as has Dan, who said Thursday: "I’ve been liking the term objectivity less and less.  Thoroughness, accuracy, fairness and transparency — if we have all of those, I don’t care if you call it objective or not."

Venture capitalist Allen Morgan worried that bloggers will be penalized in a generation or two for what they wrote on their blogs when they were in high school. I agree with Dan’s response: "We’re gonna learn to cut each other some slack. If we don’t, then we’re screwed."

Ned Desmond of Time Inc.: "Editors love the tryrannical control over they have on what goes on the cover, the headlines, the placement of stories." My hat’s off to Ned. Not many editorial execs who’ll cop to tyranny.

Jaron Lanier, who coined the term "virtual reality": "Within this world of the Silicon Valley and Banagalore elite, we’re scaring the rest of the world. It’s helping drive an anti-science, anti-technology fear. I’m scared of of society losing faith in science and technology."

Paul Safffo asked the 400 people how many of us were optimistic about the future of technology. All but about eight people voted yea.

Bill Joy pointed out that the earth hasn’t seen a global pandemic since 1918. "A biological pandemic would be far worse than a single act of nuclear terrorism." It’s unique to this century that a single individual, a rogue actor, could unleash forces that could kill millions of people."

Pitch Awards

One of the best parts of Always On has traditionally been the  CEO Pitch Awards: This year’s top winner? Peerflix, a site under everyone’s  radar. In a one-minute pitch at the end of the conference, CEO Bill McNair described Peerflix as "a p2p training platform that lets peole trade DVDs with one another. Four billion DVDs are collecting dust on your shelves." With Peerflix, you create lists of DVDs you have and DVDs you want, and they do the rest. "Every household in America is our distribution network."

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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.