Here’s my gameplan for my unkeynote at the Syndicate conference on Tuesday. I’m eager for any help and suggestions you can give me.
After getting everyone to agree that conferences, panels, and keynotes suck, I’m going to lay out a few choices for what we should talk about; the choice is the room’s. Then I’ll do a quick intro to the discussion and away we go, with me darting around the room like Oprah (or, considering the color of my hair, Phil) to bring out the ideas, questions, needs, and concerns of the room, who know more than I do. Those topics:
1. Media and syndication.
* This is about the yin and yang, the great mandala of distribution and aggregation in media: You have to be distributed (aka syndicated) and then you have to be aggregated if you want to be found. Big mediA have to learn to both share and promote others’ content.
* Feeds, I think, become the new networks; networks are becoming fluid (more on that later) and so links and feeds from those you trust become the new networks.
* Tagging enables reverse syndication — see Edgeio and the idea of tagging ads or restaurant reviews anywhere on the net and then collecting and organizing and sharing them (see Edgeio).
* TV networks are starting to syndicate (see network shows on iTunes and on the web and see Warner Brothers on Bittorrent); what is the implication for big media (and for P2P)?
* I’ll tell my standard Powerpoint story about Jon Stewart on CNN vs. on the web and what’s bigger — and what networks should do about it.
* We can talk about BBC 2.0, the unnetwork and where that should go.
2. Money and syndication.
* If anyone wants syndication to get ad support so it will (a) be free and (b) get tons of content, then we’ll have to figure out how to collect metrics: views, users, usage, and such via cookies and reporting.
* Is advertising working on feeds? (To my surprise, my Feedburner ads are yielding about $200 a month.)
* Can we put wrappers on feeds and P2P — as Warner Brothers put a wrapper onto Bittorrent — to enable measurement, tracking, and ad serving? Should we?
* What about paid-subscription feeds? Is this the new newsletter, the new magazine, the new cable channel? Good idea or bad?
* I’ll plug my notion of an open-source ad marketplace.
* Insert discussion of digital rights management here.
3. Technology and syndication.
* What’s new and what’s needed? Have we seen much development in syndication lately (and, for that matter, in blogging)?
* I’ll push the notion that feeds should serve as the information architecture of news.
* I wish for flexible RSS that is smarter, killing feeds I don’t use and adding feeds those I trust believe I should have (e.g., editors picking a World Cup feed for me for a month).
* Dave Winer’s Shared OPML as a means of recommending feeds (though I wish for some segmentation — tech feeds, media feeds, etc.).
* Two-way RSS (Ray Ozzie and SSE) and the possible uses.
* Multidevice RSS (feeds to my phone, TV, refrigerator…).
* Bandwidth issues (the problem of constant pings).
4. Conferences suck.
* We could talk about that, too.
5. N.O.T.A.
* None of the above. If they pick this, I just sit down and let anarchy rule.
We’ll see how it goes…
