Read my lips: Terrific post by Stuart Henshall. Conference organizers need to learn how to leverage conference bloggers, and presenters can contribute. PR firms should be the enablers. Stuart tells us why and how.
My favorite quote out of many great thoughts here:
"You are managing a community, not a conference". Conference organizers need to get this.
(via the FastForward Blog)
I'm whipping up a little presentation to help me lead a discussion on Social Media for Business at Podcamp this weekend. In doing so, I discovered that there is no solid definition for Social Media on the web. I've seen confusion around this term at live events as well. What is Social Media?
Let me clear it up once and for all.
Social Media: Any communications format where the users publish the content.
Is that clear enough? Yes, it can be multimedia - music, pictures, video as well as text. Yes, it can be a blog or a social network like Facebook. Open Source is social media, although they would hate to be associated with a term that traditional marketers are trying to hijack. Social media can even be offline - like New Moon Magazine for girls, the citizens' band in radio, even the op-ed page of the New York Times (although arguably so because pretty tightly controlled).
Social media is media by society - as opposed to the top-down publishing model where one person (company, really) with a controlling editorial voice is in charge of the voice of the publication or the channel.
The entire web is social media - webpage after webpage, published by whoever wants to buy a domain name. The only thing that can break it: destroying net neutrality and allowing carriers to prioritize their own content by providing better bandwidth for it, making content they don't favor slow as molasses for the end user. Let's not even go there.
Hope that clears it up!
Ad Age reports that Brazilians have started to ban billboards, starting in Sao Paulo. The townspeople are grateful and the newspapers are encouraging it (hoping their sales will rise).
Although four of the most beautiful states in the US banned billboards long ago and a few other US cities have explored the idea as well, the chief marketing officer of the “Outdoor Association of America”, a billboard industry association, says more bans won’t happen here because “There are very well-defined laws … on capitalism”.
What Stephen Freitas apparently doesn’t understand is that attention is a contract with the viewer, and billboards violate it. As “consumers”, when we view interesting content, unless we’re paying full cost for it, we understand there will be ads. We tolerate them because it’s a quid pro quo. We get nice content, we have to see some ads.
There’s no quid pro quo in billboards. We’re expecting a nice view, nature or architecture perhaps, and there’s a billboard instead. What do we get out of it? Nothing.
Now that there are so many product choices, potential customers can always choose “something else” instead. This has shifted the balance of power between advertiser and purchaser. Mr. Freitas, America is a democracy, and if enough people get behind the idea of not accepting outdoor advertising, those “very well-defined laws” won’t protect you anymore.
Outdoor companies in Brazil are already figuring out that building public toilets is a good way to get their advertising on the streets, and a Paris company is providing bicycles. Advertising’s forward-thinkers understand the concept of a quid pro quo.
I just accidentally clicked on the wrong tab: this
instead of this 
Since I just discovered the Compare People app on facebook: Who is more powerful, Facebook or Forbes? In February 06 Forbes.com claimed an audience of close to 15.3 million (MediaMetrix), which plummetted to 7.3 million in July of last year (ComScore). Meanwhile, Facebook in July of last year was already ahead of Forbes with 14.3, and had 26.6 million users in May of this year (ComScore). Facebook practically doubled in growth since last year and looks to quadruple in size within the year. In the latest traffic results released by ComScore for July 2007, Facebook is #17.
Today, Alexa gives Forbes.com a traffic rank of 479 and shows that the percentage of the web audience it captures is trending steadily down from around .2% last July to around .15% this summer. Meanwhile, Facebook traffic crossed Forbes' in Jan. 06 and has started the hockey stick growth, passing 3% daily reach in early August of this year.
If you're a "serious business" in the habit of publishing or broadcasting, it's time for you to start exploring the power of social media. My partners and I can help you, so please don't hesitate to contact us - isabel at isabelhilborn.com is a good place to start.
I decided today to have a peek into my spam folder in gmail, to see if I could find a password reminder gone awry. In amongst the cheap software deals and the medicine cabinet of must-have pharmaceuticals, I found... my Google Alerts! I'd forgotten all about them.
That's right, Google is spam filtering its own alerts.
I posted a couple more session notes and commentary on the Supernova conversation hub: One from the panelists discussing the Social Web and my strong feelings on the David Weinberger/Andrew Keen "debate" which I thought was one of the most interesting sessions. I actually think Keen is a sharp, fun writer and I can see how he would be "concerned" about the decline of culture and civilization. But it was so clear to me that there was something fundamental that he just doesn't get about what is happening with art and culture online.
Yes, there's a ton of worthless crap being published now. And yes, it's tough to sift through it all. But now, Andrew, Mozart's sister has a forum for her genius. And the garage mechanic who loves to draw, the airline attendant who loves to write, the teenage girl who wants to act, and the PR expert who moonlights as a photographer all have an audience. This means that great diamonds have a better chance to shine now, and that the little diamonds all of us occasionally come up with have a better chance of being worth something even though we don't dedicate our lives to following them up. There's more genius exposed now, not less.
Speaking of that PR expert, Renee Blodgett came up with some nice portraits of some of the more entrepreneurial Supernova attendees.
I'm now an official Supernova Blogger, at Supernova for the rest of the week on a press pass. Whee! Don't miss my two posts over there: A post about the rash of Web 2.0 Acquisitions. Some session notes. And, a cute little icon: 
Karen Colbron, WGBH
Karen talked about their Open Vault project.
It’s an archive of free viewable videos they’ve produced for PBS, such as President Carter on Salt II Treaties and Afghanistan. (1300 videos in total, if I heard her correctly). They have strong social media features such as "people who liked this also liked – euro-strategic missiles" and "Top Picks". They have a keyword search – data is also shown alphabetically by person, and by series. Longer-format interviews are available for purchase.
Jane Johnson – Library of Congress
Jane told us about the LOC's media search tool, mic.llc.com mic.loc.gov(pronounced "Mike"). It’s apparently new at the LOC to be able to limit your search to pull up only moving images. They have an archive directory, advanced search. It’s an outcropping of film, television and video preservation acts taken by congress in the 90’s. They will tell you what videos are available, but from what I could see, you can’t view the videos. I asked a question about this later and, yes, they are not a repository, but in some cases there is a link to view the video.
I did a basic keyword search and saw lots of metadata, such as copyright holder and carrier type, along with this message: "Audio and moving image materials in the collections of the Library of Congress can be reproduced only when all rights and restrictions have been cleared and written authorizations have been obtained. While M/B/RS Reference staff can usually be of some assistance in determining what permissions are required, the onus is on the researcher to obtain them."
They also have an "archive search" that tells you the other archives that hold movies – I got three results using the keyword "New York": The Municipal Archives of the city of New York, the New American Cinema Group, and the Fales Library and special collections.
They can draw on records with certain metadata schemas and export them with different metadata schemas. They have a mapping wizard allowing you to match your "title" with their "title" and then you can import their data. [This feature seems useful for some new kind of mashup, to me. Maybe pull some of this data into Dabble?] The purpose is to incorporate all metadata needed for using the media. It supports non-textual indexing such as facial recognition.
Andrea Kales, The British Film Institute
BFI's got a bunch of stuff going on: Sight and Sound magazine, an archive that they argue is the largest in the world, the London Film Festival, the Gay and Lesbian Film Feestival which started early in the mid-eighties. ScreenOnline.org.uk, for people looking for information about British film and television. They have a new project, funded by the UK’s higher education funding body. The theme of the project is to have a curatorial perspective on moving images, and bring them online to juxtapose them.
They’ve done some co-production with the BBC. Jane showed incredible film footage from what’s got to be 100 years ago. The footage was almost lost. It was a novelty for people to go see at carnivals, made by two men who filmed people with signs saying "come and see yourself later at the carnival." The local films were the most popular thing at the carnival. It’s from a collaboration called "The Mitchell and Kenyon Program" which got 8M viewers - a lot in the UK. The films are beautifully restored and, I’d say, well worth buying.
During the Q&A session after this group, Frank Moretti, host of the conference, brought up a point that got him on the receiving end of a lot of active audience protest and agitation. He asked, "What about this video is interactive? How do you learn from it?" Now, I may be paraphrasing him dead wrong, because I'm not sure I understood his question. So I invite him to comment on this blog with his point in his own words.
All I can say is to report that the rest of the audience was taken aback - those who spoke up seem to view video as a natural educational material, when taught properly - which means, when teaching the student how to view and interpret the media. It seemed to some that Dr. Moretti was questioning this point of view, in particular that he was making the point that students are evaluated on their ability to read, write and do math, therefore most of the video we've discussed here is perhaps not relevant to their education.
Of course he's correct that video is inherently one-way media, and video that's not "teaching to the test" won't be that valuable to the test. But once you start tinkering with the video, and teaching about the video, this changes. You could make the same point about books - "how can people learn from them? They're not interactive!" It would be interesting to continue this discussion on this blog.
After the coffee break, we were treated to a quick demo of dotSub. The website hosts videos along with their translation, apparently created via a wiki-like process where users can translate from one language to another and others can benefit. Looks like a really cool tool.
I’m impressed by how well-connected Peter is; the quality of the speakers, the packed room and the lovely catering presentation (low-budget while coming across as expensive) attest to great conference planning. The audience started out a little dead, but by the afternoon there were not only lively Q&As with the speakers, but also active discussions among audience members.
Continuing on with a few notes - and please, errors are mine:
We heard from Margaret Drain from WGBH, which produces much of the PBS content. They designed "we shall remain" project to engage young native Americans. " The citizen storyteller." Give them new cell phones that you can record and edit on.
Name of the project comes from this touching quote, which practically brought tears to my eyes: "The Master of Life has appointed this place for us to light our fires, and here we shall remain" – Tecumseh.
We saw an attractive presentation, reviewing efforts on sharing climate and astronomy data online and making it interactive, showing simulations, etc. This was given by Thomas Lucas, an independent producer working with the NCSA.
Curtis Wong from Microsoft Research "Next Media" spoke next – runs a small group developing services 4-6 years down the line; in his spare time he does educational technology work. 20 years ago he worked at Voyager. Standard DVD stuff. Then Corbis. He shows a trail of his work at these places over time.
What is he working on now at Microsoft? Using the "world wide telescope", hopefully to be released sometime this fall, Curtis showed us how you can browse satellite pictures of the sky much the same way you would zoom in to satellite pictures of your neighborhood on Google Earth. The data comes from the Sloane Digital Sky Survey and the Hubble Telescope. Very cool.
The sessions before lunch at Peter Kaufman’s CCNMTL conference, given by folks from different universities, are pretty interesting. For Columbia’s portion, CCNMTL got all the footage from CNN to create a Vaclav Havel website when he came to Columbia. Diana Kleiner discussed some of the issues Yale needed to address as they put video online.
Scott Shunk from the Visualizing Cultures class at MIT spoke eloquently. The course is not only a class, and part of MIT’s open courseware, but also a platform for media and content that examines history through the images that were created at the time. I find it really cool stuff, where you take text and pictures and line it up in a manga-style way, like a graphic novel, or really, in the case of the Japanese art, a scroll. Read, in this case, from left to right.
Mike Cubit spoke from MediaVision, the video conferencing facility at Case Western Reserve – They have produced 250 projects in the past year. Encode 100 hrs of video per week with 13 full-time staff, 4 people dedicated to video production. They’ve made a content management system to do it automatically. Delivered 250,000 streams to campus community since July of 06. 450 MBpS connectivity.
93% of students at Case Western use laptops, 96% brought their cell phones, and they have high expectations regarding technology services.
They’ve produced telesurgery with 2 cameras and a laparoscope, to show the donors how the surgeon was performing the operation, and it was very effective. They webcast a premier into Second Life with 1500 avatars attending virtually.
They’re offering the content to alumni, they’re incorporating automated uploads for a live 24/7 webcase channel, and are doing a number of other interesting projects. 75% of students say they watch the videos to help clarify course concepts. The athletes who are traveling for their sports appreciate not having to go to class. 95% of students surveyed have watched a lecture online. 79% said they felt they did better in class because the lectures were available for review. And 98% of them would recommend MultiVision as a tool to other students.
