I attended The Future of Media Summit earlier this week. My interest in this event was partly its format, which included participants such as Phil Sims and Ben Barren (via video) in SF and Sydney, but I was also interested in the topics, lots of chatter on the value of online conversation, globalization and localization of media, and the challenges of merging the traditional with new. Des Walsh provides a nice recap from the perspective of someone on the other side of the world (in Sydney). Some observations, in no particular order:

Dave Sifry at Technorati made some interesting points, he talked about popularity and authority with regard to bloggers. He reminded folks that there’s a value proposition with blogging outside of making money - pointing out rewards such as participation and discussion for the purpose of creating ideas and driving innovation. Mike Linksvayer at Creative Commons, who was on the panel, agreed.

Chris Anderson, EIC at Wired Magazine and author of “The Long Tail“, commented on the value of peer production (or co-creation). “I give away half baked ideas and they help me bake it.” Chris referred back to Dan Gilmor’s famous axiom, “Our audience is smarter than we are.” Chris brought up one concern with peer publication, explaining that he published his book chapters online - essentially giving away his ideas — but believed that this made the book stronger in the end. Chris said, “Nobody wants to read a book in 800 entries. I think it will pay off. We should do the same with our stories. We should open source our research stories.” John Hagel, panelist and author of “The Only Sustainable Edge,” commends the success of The Long Tail - pointing out the power of the meme, and remarking, “the book is a welcome contribution to our understanding of a fundamental force reshaping the media industry.”

After the conference I had a chance to chat with Dave Sifry, gauge his thoughts on community aggregation/ranking models- services such as Digg, Meme and others, it was helpful. We also spoke briefly about the broader adoption of blogs and on how to find the needle in the haystack quickly - those blogs that are not appearing on blog ranking services, but provide awesome content.

My overall thought on the event?

I think it was well done! I liked the format, I can see that working again in the future, in a variety of contexts. I had hoped that more people would have added stuff to the event blog beforehand, oh well… and the framework and report (PDF) which were released before the event were helpful in developing pre-panel ideas. The collaboration was cool - I saw a definite difference in perspective (not goals or ideas) of the media world and the topics under daily discussion between Sydney and SF. This helped broadened the panel discussion and hopefully helped to close the gap between U.S. and Australian perspectives on the topic.

In the future I hope to see more collaboration, more exchanging of ideas in other countries, in ad hoc formats like videoconferences.

– Nichole Khan

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