I’m learning that making videos is a great way to get virtual attention. My video post for Comment is Free was shown at yesterday’s Guardian and my McCain PrezVid show on today’s presentation (see the post below). Gee, maybe I can stop going to conferences and attend virtually. But then, I wouldn’t have heard the laughs I got today. Gotta have an audience, eh?
Rich Skrenta of Topix throws in the towel on we media — way, way, too soon, I think. Because people at the latest We Media conference — just like the last one — couldn’t agree on how the various tribes of news can and should work together — once they ever stop baring their teeth or beating their breasts at each other — Rich says it’s not going to happen. I’m guessing he sees no hope for global warming, either. Says Rich:
The problem is that the hopes that Dan Gillmor raised for the media industry in his book — which kicked off this whole business — have largely failed. . . .
There is actually a media revolution in the works. So what’s going on here? By implicit definition, participatory media is non-commercial. If it’s commercial, someone owns it, and it’s not “we” anymore.
There we disagree. That’s the problem with PayPerPost, not with commercially supported media, big or small. And we have not even begun to plumb the possibilities of commercially supported networks of small media. Rich continues:
Furthermore, as soon as a new media venture crosses the line and tries to become a business, it either becomes a successful business or a failed one. Businesses aren’t about ideology, they’re about getting a job done and earning revenue to keep the thing going. Even wild success tends to leave ideology behind. Ideology is the realm of nonprofits and failures.
And here, too, we disagree. First, the definition of business success depends on the business. And I’d argue that journalism has been driven by ideology — by the desire to make the society more open and the world a better place as a result. More:
There is still a power law to success, and the few continue to reap disproportionate rewards, as they always have. Pub media turns out to be a farm league for big media. The bloggers who “make it” look more and more like regular media than “us”. They graduate to to the A-list, and start to get lumped in and criticised along with the establishment. Success looks like a sellout to a big media company, or a good business doing job boards and conferences on the side to pay the bills.
And there we really disagree. It is a mistake to judge success by the standards and old assmptions of the old media economy. Not every blogger wishes to be big media and not every blogger who doesn’t shouldn’t be judged as a failure. (I’ll spare you the reprise of the there-is-no-A-list argument.)
What Rich is leaving out, I think, is the network model: working together both journalistically and commercially. I believe that’s possible and I don’t believe we’ve even begun to scratch the surface of possibilities.
I do agree with Rich that conferences need to get past arguing. I say they need to get to the job of innovating. But more on that later.
It is way, way too soon to throw in that towel.
(Disclosure: Rich’s company, Topix, is a competitor in some ways with the company I work with, Daylife; he lists both in his post in a collection of new-media news startups.)
: And amen to Richard Sambrook on what should be next:
Enough of conferences going over the same ground, enough of bloggers (several of whom make their living from consulting with big organisations) saying big media doesn’t “get it” and only they have insight, enough of big media publicly agonising over how to respond to the huge disruption the internet has brought. Enough of the fallacy of thinking there is some kind of power struggle going on. It’s about integration, not subsititution…
For me this year has to be less about talking and more about doing.
Nick Denton accused me of being a panel whore for doing this. Guilty. But I look good in black, don’t I? I get back from the World Economic Forum in Davos late last night and this morning, where am I? At Tony Perkins’ Always On conference in New York. Perkins is webcasting the whole thing, good on him.
Tim O’Reilly announces a new conference: Tools of Change for Publishing. That’s a good idea; publishing needs to better grapple with and embrace these new tools and the new architecture of information and media. But I have two reactions: First, most of the tools that matter are lite and open and easy and the people who create them, use them, and know them best are not the big-iron technocrats of the media industry. How will you get them to share what they know on and off the stage? They’re not going to pay thousands to come to a conference to do that. Second, I was stuck by the West-Coast hubris of the announcement: “We’re the originator of the term Web 2.0.” I think the time has come when I wouldn’t brag about that. And: “San Jose? Why not New York? Because we think that Silicon Valley, not New York, is the epicenter of the changes that are driving publishing.” No, there is no epicenter. The internet obsoletes epicenters.
: LATER: Tim O’Reilly tried to post a comment and my damned spam filter zapped him and then zapped me when I tried to do it in his place. So here is his comment. Sorry for the delay, Tim…
Jeff —
A couple of responses:
1. I completely agree that “most of the tools that matter are lite and open and easy,” but I explicitly noted in my post (and in our thinking about the conference) that many of the things that seem so obvious to those of us in the tech industry are actually NOT obvious and easy to people in publishing. At the Stanford Publishing Course, I had a debate about the Google Library book scanning project with a big name literary agent, and in the course of our debate, as I was trying to explain how a book search index was just like a web search index, I discovered that not only did she not know what an index was, she had never even tried Google! Now that’s an extreme, but in my dealing with people in publishing, I have found that many of them fall into two camps: the *very* clued in (like Brian Murray at Harpers or Timo Hannay at Nature) or “confused and slightly dazed.” Even those in the middle are looking for best practices. In fact, part of the reason I do a conference like this is to learn myself. If you’ve ever heard Mitch Kapor’s talk on what works about Wikipedia, you realize that there’s far more to wikis than you realized. They may be quick and simple, but the reason most wikis don’t work as well as people hope is that people don’t really understand some of the social and architectural factors that make the best wikis work. Ditto blogs. There *are* best practices, and a lot of cool new tools that have been applied on the web but not to more traditional areas of publishing. (For example, I bet even you haven’t thought through all the implications of SEO on book search — that’s still a story in the making, and nobody has figured out a lot of what will be common practice a few years from now.)
I also agree that “the people who create [these tools], use them, and know them best are not the big-iron technocrats of the media industry,” which is why I find it puzzling that your very next point is “Why San Jose and not New York?” You just gave the reason.
And as to “getting [the innovators] to share what they know,” that’s what O’Reilly events are known for. Anyone who’s been to a conference like OSCON or etech knows that we’re darn good at that.
I’m not saying it’s a slam dunk to get established publishers and the new breed of publishing technologists and publishing innovators together and make magic happen, but it’s definitely worth trying, for all the reasons I cite in my original post.
I’m sorry you’re a skeptic, but I’d love to have a chance to convince you. Let’s talk, and I hope to get you involved.
P.S. You say that you wouldn’t brag about being the originator of the term “Web 2.0?” I don’t consider it bragging to mention it in the context that I did. But in any event, why not? In 2003, we set out to reignite enthusiasm in the computer industry, which was still reeling from the dotcom bust, by doing some storytelling about why we were still bullish on technology. It worked. A lot of people have benefited. Yes, there’s been some hype, but I think the good far outweighs the bad. And I’ve heard from a lot of entrepreneurs that the ideas at the heart of my What is Web 2.0? paper have been incredibly useful to them.
Scott Karp liveblogged the heck out Mesh. And boy, are his fingers tired.
