Northern Voice 2006 Blogging Conference Vancouver
General Comments:
A stimulating event that brought together big blogging names and tech gurus along with interested members of the general public. The first day was a series of relatively informal, self-organized sessions, followed by a more structured conference on the second day. Participants included XML developer Tim Bray, Microsoft blogging guru Robert Scoble, Technorati founder Dave Sifry, etc.
I’d say over half the 250 odd people present were banging away on laptops, blogging the conference in real time and uploading photos to Flickr. (Enter the tag “Northern Voice” to see thousands of photos of the conference.)
Due to time pressures, this report has a minimum of structure and formatting, and will tend to be a collection of rambling notes. Follow the URLs for more info, presenters’ blogs, etc.
Moose Camp, Friday, February 10, 2006
(Relatively informal small-group sessions)
Personal Media Outlets – We Are the Media
Presenter: John Anthony Hartman multimediame.net
We now have the ability to make and distribute media. We can create our own personal media outlets. We are redefining how we make and distribute media. Content on demand.
This shift is sending shivers down the spines of media executives. Afraid of material being stolen. But people don’t need to steal what is free.
Shift from major media monopolies. Major media outlets need to get onboard now. They no longer have a grip on media. People are looking to more sources.
The web is evolving into rich media. It is empowering individuals. The power of the web and individuals is unstoppable.
Time-shifted media is now available. Want to shift media because of premiums on time. Mass media caught in proprietary codecs.
Individuals now have power of editors. $100 MIT laptop project to give poor people everywhere hand-crank powered laptops with mesh networking built in.
Blogs are more than just the written word. Mashed up culture. Take stuff and repurpose it. Creative Commons copyright licensing means I tell you how you can share my stuff, not how I prevent you from using it.
Look up video blogs by Josh Leo, Jay Smooth.
Ourmedia.org puts up your content for free. “The Global Home for Grassroots Media”
Real Time Reporting
Presenter: Michael Tippet of NowPublic
“The News is Now Public”
Anyone can be editor, photographer etc. Stories ordered by popularity. Collaborate in building news together. Share news you’re reading, writing, etc. News as conversation. Can add your own photos and videos. Can send stuff in from camera phone. Had 2,000 people reporting on Katrina. Can comment on items that others have submitted. Or get permission to use other people’s material.
Relationship to “professional” journalists.
Dan Gilmour, Howard Reihngold are NowPublic advisors.
Traditional journalism is less important. This is reporting from a first-person perspective. Gilmour trying to elevate blogging into better journalism. Or educate readers. Is it really true? Learn to question the news. Take everything with a grain of salt.
Are there any copyright issues? Don’t cut and paste entire stories, simply point to them. Just take a snippet of a story and add your own value-added commentary. People are happy to get traffic.
Can post comments to stories and make suggestions for corrections. Are thinking about making stories Wiki-able.
We’re All Journalists Now
Presenter: Mark Hamilton, journalism instructor
Everybody is walking around journalizing their lives. I felt naked when I discovered I’d left my house without my camera on the way to the conference this morning. The whole world is being recorded.
We have this combination of professional and amateur coming together to create a new media world. Lone reporters can do text, audio and video. Walls are breaking down between print, TV journalism. Newspapers, TV stations do both on their websites.
Now individuals can do broadcast quality video.
No longer reliant on traditional media structure to talk back. But what does this all mean? What does it mean for journalism? What does it mean for how we are finding out about the world? Breakdown of one to many media to many to many media.
Every year it’s getting harder to filter and edit.
Professional journalist have lied all the time, we just never had the power to correct them.
Yet there is an education level and an access level to blogging that many don’t have.
Extensive coverage of niche topics now that were never covered before.
In terms of mass media we have never been as involved as we are now. Mass media still has a lot of flaws, but it’s not as bad as many people make it out to be. Some really good community journalism being produced. Going out and talking to people. Collectively people are smarter than any one journalist. The human voice is coming back into media.
Dave Weinberger (RSS/blogging guru) on tagging. Speaking a few years ago he said tagging was very messy. Mass media right now is messy. Newspapers are freaking because circulation is dropping. TV viewing is dropping. Movie attendance is dropping. It’s changing the metrics of the system. It’s messy. Dave said maybe it’s going to be messy forever. But is that so scary?
Non-Profits Taking Advantage of Bogging
Presenter: Nancy White
“A Place to Capture and Share Ideas and Links about Online Interaction, Community, Distance Learning…”
Online community is just another channel for face-to-face communities. Some are pure online communities.
Communities of like-minded people. Very powerful sharing. Levels of engagement change over time. Context is everything. See: shareyourstory.org.
Activists. Different rhythms of engagement. Activism is campaign driven. You have to have a core group. People self-select themselves. Get them involved in your project. All you need to do is support them. People are catalysts. Events are catalysts. Evoke a need to do something. What’s going to change my behaviour.
Katrina, tsunami, Pakistan, were responses by individuals. How can I be a catalyst for a network of individuals to respond?
We need to develop a new set of competencies to live in the online world. We’ve been perfecting face-to-face for millennia. It’ll take time to figure out this online stuff. It helps to have blogging buddies. Practice writing all the time. Read all the time. Just do it.
Getting away from a model of control over messaging. Online you can get your message out in diffuse ways. Your PR person may not be comfortable with giving up control over your message. Have to learn to let go. You might lose some control of your message but you’ll gain so much energy.
The official message isn’t an effective blog. Yet there are times when a top-down message is very useful. You can’t confine yourself to any one approach. Combine approaches. You need the dry research combined with human stories.
Organizations that use blogs have to be thick-skinned. You’ll get feedback that you have never gotten before. We can only see so much, feel so much, experience so much. You can hold much more sand in an open hand than in a fist. Be humble. Willing to be wrong. Don’t take yourself too seriously.
Get organizations more open to the craziness of the online world. Most non-profits are still in very early stages of becoming comfortable with online world.
What happens when you get too much negativity? Need to have it part of your communications strategy. What if people slag your donors? Need to have guidelines in place. You can’t argue. The world is a much more open place than it’s ever been, yet you need to monitor what other people are saying about you.
Tools for monitoring blogs:
technorati.com
pubsub.com
icerocket.com
feedster.com
Tools that help us to visualize conversations. You might have a constituency out there that you don’t know about.
If the object is to keep as much sand in your hand as possible, you keep it open, but you might need to shelter it from the wind a bit. There are negative people out there who will try to take you down.
Netsquared.org
“Remixing the Web for Social Change”
Knowledgegreen.com
"The idea is to share knowledge that we can use to support our work for social change and achieve greater work/life balance.”
Blogging and the Future of Media
Presenter: Kurt Cagle, Mercurial Communications
Things are changing dramatically, authority etc. Foundation of an entirely new way of dealing with social infrastructures.
Rebellious people at this conference. Undermining the infrastructure of authority. Changing the nature of media. Mass media are very scared. We are shifting the rules of the game. M. McLuhan – when he was writing there were few channels of communication. The way information is presented has a huge fundamental impact. The mechanism of passing symbols. That was 50 years ago.
Channel characteristics c. 1960s. In 1960 dominant media was still print. Minimally interactive. Expensive presses and distribution costs. Radio and records. Minimally interactive. Expensive… TV and Movies, minimally interactive, studios, distribution. All previous are 1 to many. Telephone 1 to 1, moderately interactive.
This resulted in the formation of privileged gateways. High entry costs. Ease of collusion. Centralized control. The gateway companies were able to create large, structured media.
Fast forward 50 years to the Internet. Is not just another medium. Complete and total change to old media rules. Ability to link, to persist, to establish relationships. Every single channel that was out there has migrated to the Internet. The old media still exist, but the rules are changing.
Gateways are disintegrating. Low barriers to entry. Evolution of open standards. Elimination of distribution costs. Production costs drop to labour costs. Networks reroute around obstacles.
Authorities are getting scared. When it gets down to lawsuits you know they’re running scared. The problem is basically one of copyright. We have to rethink what we mean by ownership. We are trying to use rules that apply to an old situation. Many new competitors. Markets are fundamentally different, kids are aware they are being marketed to and don’t want to be pigeonholed.
Blogging and Building Communities
Presenter: Nancy White
What does community mean to you? What is the language of blogs and communities? Community is linking.
Love the extended community. Know few people locally, feel closer to people who are geographically distant. It takes somebody to instigate to keep things going. The process of invitation. RSS is a sort of invitation. Community means you’re actually trying to understand the other people. Ephemeral micro-communities that come and go.
Corporations are turned off of blogging because of the community aspects. Too personal. That view is starting to change. With that mindset they are bound to fail. The tipping point came in 2005, when companies started understanding how to use blogs.
I will give you credit for being human even if I disagree with what you write about.