A while back I was interviewed by Rhod Sharp for the BBC Radio 5 show “Up All Night”. Tonight at the Berkman conference, I met Rhod in person. He was here for the Beyond Broadcast conference too. We had a nice chat about chatting and about the Blooker and about ibiblio and about “Up All Night”. Great fun to meet a voice I’ve chatted with a couple of times across the ether.
Day: May 12, 2006
Charlie Nesson is being introduced by Dan Gillmor. “totally wonderful conference” notes that only vegatarian meals were left when he went down to eat. Berkman will move from a Law Center to a Center for Harvard University as a whole.
These lawyers can really present. Charlie is quite a performer. Berkman will focus on open knowledge for education. mild rant against publishing enterprise now especially about scholarly publishing. “cyberOne – law in the court of public opinion” will be taught by Charlie this fall in place of evidence which he teaches now.
closes with the stategic inflection point and global awareness. charlie now rants on the military industrial complex (will he get to the NSA taps). props to downhill battle given. charlie misses the 60s. he sees this as a second chance (if not a second life ;->).
wild applause.
off to drinks and demos.
Panel IV: Surviving or Thriving: Beta Business Models in the New World
* What are the sustainability and business implications of these emerging models? What are the opportunities for new resources to support public-service media? Do commercial vs noncommercial distinctions map over to these new spaces of engagement? Is there a case for tax-based support or will a new mix of sponsorship, subscription, listener-support and foundation funding evolve?
Panelists include: Mark Cooper[1] (Consumer Federation), Diane Mermigas (Hollywood Reporter), Dan Nova (Highland Capital Partners). Moderator: Patricia Aufderheide (Center for Social Media).
Diane Mermigas. everyone needs to change their orientation she posts her Mermigas on the Media paper New Rules of Play which she says will last about 10 seconds, ha ha, so be ready for change. She is a propertyist on copyright and worrying about fragmentation and tribalism.
Dan Nova (is that his real name?) us a VC and up for web 2.0 but it’s complex. huge markets, attactive biz models, acquisitions are increasing. myspace chart. 50 unique visitors per month. youtube has 6.5 users per month, technorati took a dip in december but now it’s in space!
attractive model. if they build it, they will come.
low cost to acquire a customer
low cost to retain
low marketing costs
low content development
low tech costs
(unprecedented sitguation)
user value props – simple effecgtive, dynamic, participatory.
old media competes with new media to buy new new media. NYTimes and Google bid for a new company. New Corp vs Yahoo! say
later stage companies — team, revenue, margins, growth, etc etc
mark cooper – independent noncommercial video – consumer federation of america. attention vs distribution. but monitarization is the problem. you cannot be a one-way company in a two-way world (cluetrain).
importance of voluntary memberships like credit unions. how to fill the need for relevant news?
High Order Bit: Second Life
* Second Life is a massively multi-player 3-D world. It is an online world—virtually inhabited, built, and owned by its residents. John Lester from Linden Lab will describe what is Second Life, how it allows for new communities to be built, and he’ll talk about opportunities for collaborative video production.
Speaker: John Lester. To find out how to participate in this virtual world go here.
it’s john’s birthday! this is a what is second life talk. my ? is what is the diff between SL and the old Alpha Worlds? more creation by the user. 3 -d modeling at the client side. everyone can do this, he says. scripting language LSL (aka Linden Scripting Language)
playing wihth my avatar.
3:20PM – 3:30 – High Order Bit: Just a Pretty Face(book)? What College Students Actually Do Online
* Fresh thinking and research about what types of sites and online services college students are using and how their engagement differs by socio-economic background and user attributes.
Speaker: Eszter Hargittai Assistant Professor Northwestern University
She starts with digital divide and proposes a second-level digital divide — the less connected. overall framework is that skill might influence how people use digital media. a bit about socio-economic status. who does all this work to change people’s lives.
differences in web skills was initial reseach including health info, job search and gov docs done in observational studies.
paper and pencil survye from march 2006 on 1300 college students at UIChicago. skills and uses. mostly first years. “the wired generation”
blog/journal 60% ever 29% daily
looking at new services. facebook 78% myspace 50% ebay 46.7%
google 9.4%; 38.3% wikipedia
chicago trib 64%
chicago sun-times 63%
need to see her papers to keep up. not much facebook specific here tho.
background and activity. sig differences – web for fewr than others – basically the ones you’d expect but no measures.
http://www.webuse.org
now moved to surveys. higher educated folks have higher skills.
Tom Gerace (Gather.com), Thomas Kriese (Omidyar Network), Brendan Greeley (Radio Open Source), Rhea Mokund (Listenup.org) Moderator: Ethan Zuckerman (Global Voices, Berkman Center).
Ethan telling us that networked computers are all about communications. he talks about the IMP, the first listserv, the first BBS which he says is 1978. USEnet 1979. MUDs 1979. 1982 minitel and the chess program with a chat feature which became used for flirting. 1990 www at cern. 1997 weblogs (?). well i’m no sure of all these dates. 1995 wiki. 2001 wikipedia. why are we suddenly concerned about community (shows powercurve).
gather pitch including value proposition. content creation,. apply editorial oversight and content selection, guide the community engaged in discussion. see question tool.
Dan Gillmor has links to Flickr etc.
these computer and community mediated sites are stabbing at understanding social capital theory without having read or considered it as useful. what would happen if before acting on your assumptions independent of theory and research, if you first read and considered the vast existing work on social capital?
video production. listenup.org pitched. supported by archive.org
omidyar network. community self-management. 400$ M. omidyar.net community.
we ended up with only two of us an one moderator. yikes!
3 public broadcasters: David Liroff (WGBH Vice President and Chief Technology Officer), Terry Heaton (President, DONATAâ„¢ Communication), Bill Buzenberg (Senior Vice President of News, American Public Media/ Minnesota Public Radio). Moderator: Chris Lydon (Host, Open Source from PRI).
demo of stuff from APM and MPR including their MinniWiki and Gather.com, Public Insight Journalism “on any given story, someone in the audience will always know more then we do” bill kling. database of 18,000 people in their database of experts. MPR writes to interested people on each topic during story development. 2 analysts go thru the responses and give to reporters. economic stories as an example (whose recovery is this?). northwest airlines stories. education achievement gap (includes ranking of responses by participants). future of small towns. what towns are growing which are dying. state budget emulator used by 11,000.
Donata communications. personal media and wkrn-tv (nashville). he tells broadcasters to listen. quotes glenn reyonds from “army of davids” disruption examples kodak and digital models. value props. media is unbundled at the source of creation but also in rebundling for personal consumption. mediated people make their own media. “the deer now have guns” when that happens you get into the ammunition business.
wkrn. 15 websites including two aggregators and blogs. coming screensaver, local news start page aggregator, branded reader. their aggregator collects over 400 nashville blogs and has a database of bloggers and they manage an ad network for the bloggers. nashville is talking is the aggregator.
weather blog is a killer.
WGBH. the power of connecting online and broadcast radio. stuff about podcasting and about their shows being found on google. wghb.org/forum an extension to the 1830s lectures sponsored by the Lowell Foundation. create a more engaged and active citizenry. cell phones to facilitate a story on native americans. public media org. onm.org
accessiblity issues noted. ncam. national center for accessible media. wraps with andy grove’s “only the paraniod survive” stategic inflection point when change is unavoidable and action is desperately required. “we can’t broadcast our way out of this one” jazz hosts now have a jazz blog at wgbh.org and they are unvetted by the experts (GBH is Great Blue Hill the location of the station).
??s nod to craig’s list as the unexpected. business wants risk-free advice. but there is none as yet. is the internet the new public? yes says donata guy.
if the internet is the new public is it all white (asks a white guy) who is engaged and wants the digital divide addressed. feels uneasy that women have yet to be on the panel. a bit about black involvement and inclusion.
tv-ontatio guy. on any given story, someone will know more — but not everyone and not everyone who responds. how does the analyst work? minnesota guy responds about how they use their database.
one to few more likely than many to many or even one to many. broadcasters are just coopting the insurectionists?? donata is not a huge podcasting supporter. local innovation will be the place to work. (low power fm?)
you now relate to the public instead of an audience. so what is the new financial basis? subscription services? a bit about net neutrality. quote of mtv “it’s coming, it’s here, it’s gone”
rebecca mckinnon – digital divide including public media helping provide access to the internet. panelists say yes and cite how they used internet to get divided folks involved (tautology here)
cobert mentioned. flourished on the net. died in the times.
kennedy school guy pitches for literacy and even phones. lots of stats. and the question of what to be done: provide literacy and a giant wireless cloud by gubermint. macaddict magazine talks about translation. finally a ? what policies should and could lead to universal services. donata says that we need to learn more and to fix society. net is a great hope but is not the problem but a possible solution set.
changing revenue models, by shawn of npr, how about openning the database and linking back out instead of harvesting stuff and editting it? minnesota person defends.
michael of dotsub. says that the internet is not just white male americans. most of the net is outside the usa. pitches dotsub as a translation service. missed the ? here if there is one.
what will the future be for someone born literally yesterday? wgbh guy asks. no one knows. we need to engage kids.
Jake welcomes us, the room is completely full, power and wireless at every seat, streaming the conference (see site), second life version as well.
James Boyle is witty as you might expect. One quote: this is like putting a brink in your toilet to save the internet. Participatory media now. “How not to screw up the emerging participatory mediascape” Two propositions. 1) we are bad at predicting the future of any kind of technological innovation. cell phones were not to become widely used. push media failed. the principal of technological humbleness. 2) individuals are not rational reactors. people are more concerned about risks than about opportunities. rules of thumb are not accurate, but people follow them anyways. over and under estimating risks. proposes a cognative blindness in communications. why commons based production are valuable and good (benkler’s non-market production). why the unowned has value. the english is unowned. but law french was actually owned and controlled. while open is undervalued, it is not the only solution but it is the most underappreciated and misunderstood. whilst the closed or owned is overvalued.
a bit about the “broadcaster’s right” at WIPO now in the Rome Treaty.
Net neutrality explained. DRM damned. If folks comment, what will they say? (could be bad! Oh No).
So what is the brick to put in the cybertoilet? Leave the system design as open as possible for as long as possible. Where ever it is possible, extend openness. Not a religious ? but an emperical one.
Shava has the first question. Damn there’s a voice from the past. She’s now with TOR/freehaven. What about the current players fearing being at risk? They don’t want to lose.
Gio a documentary film maker who is doing “who is wearing the emperor’s new clothes?” during the french revolution those in revolt smashed the clocks. during the russian revolution, printers went on strike to be paid for commas (is this real?). what will the future say about us based on our social and legal behaviors? (Perfect grist for Jamie.) Internet is a perfect example of the black swan — evidence that not all swans are white afterall.
JJB writes in the dead of the night to say that the special .31 release of Lyceum is up for download. “[T]his is a special release for Lyceum, because beyond this point, all future point releases will include upgrade scripts and documentation. Administrators can now feel confident about designing a Lyceum deployment without having to worry about difficult upgrades in the future.”
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