The average age of the We Media audience dropped significantly when “The Content Creatives’ took the stage for the first panel discussion on Friday.  The discussion was supposed to pick up where Thursday night’s video presentation (outside under the stars) left off, helping the collective media brain trust in the audience understand what kinds of information ‘Generation Next’ wants to consume, and why.  It quickly became a census of sorts on the types of devices and habits that today’s information consumers employ.  I can personally relate to the panelists – multiple screens, numerous opportunities to share and consume information, the ever-present fear that information overload will fry my brain… and yet like them, I find energy and strength, and countless opportunities to learn and become engaged and empowered. 

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I’m not sure that the third major discussion of the We Media conference was appropriately titled, but it sure was interesting.  Yes, the concept of ‘soft power’ implies that there are sources of influence that are not tied explicitly to military or financial might… and that influence is quite regularly demonstrated by the media, and increasingly now the citizen media.  But soft power is a political science concept, a theory about how influence carries.  Yes, if you were to rank the most influential people in the country, perhaps the world, based on their ability to drive changes in the world, many of the panelists for this session, and the people participating from the audience, would be near the top of the list.  Still, the concept of soft power seems to require that the people who have influence are actively seeking to gain authority, drive their own agenda, or similar.  I think the collective brain trust in the room feels like it is part of a greater movement, and while they all have their own individual financial, academic, creative, or other goals that they are seeking to meet, few would ever say they are out for a power grab.

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There were numerous references to the ‘elephant in the room’ at the second session of We Media’s on Thursday.  What is the elephant?  Money. Of course. No matter what role you play in the media space – head of a newspaper conglomerate trying to figure out how to integrate citizen media into your operation, individual filmmaker looking to find an outlet for your content, crafty entrepreneur trying to push your ‘big idea’ for syndication to the world, and on and on… everything comes down to money.  If you are starting up, you want to get funded.  If you are independent, you want to get paid for your time.  If you are a public corporation, you have an obligation to your stakeholders to drive profit.  And if you are an investor, you want to make your money back, plus some.

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Everyone’s out on the grove, drinking mojitos and chatting away. Night has finally fallen, which means it’s dark enough for us to see the screen clearly. We’ll be watching some videos created for the web, and it’s a great end to a long, productive, thought-provoking day.

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some other ideas from the panel that seemed of some importance:

-If you don’t have a revenue model yet, there is no need to worry about it now as long as you manage to create a community around a theme or an issue Read more

Carlos Garcia and Omar Ramos presented and did a live demo of Scrapblog:

“Scrapblog is a free web service that allows everyone to create multimedia scrapblogs.”

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The “pitch this!” session is unlike any other. The tension is palatable, as people are sitting around the table, as if in a boardroom, ready to pitch their project in 3 minutes or less to professional investors and strategists.

Images and Voices of Hope goes first. The initial pitch is a little fuzzy (by contrast with the “judges”, I have the luxury of being able to pull up the site to read more about the organization), but the judges bring it back on track with no-nonsense, to-the-point questions. Don’t worry, no one gets fired at the end: this session is designed to help community-oriented initiatives deliver a lean and mean pitch to take it to the next level.

NewsTrust has been very visible so far in this conference. The no-frills website capitalizes on all the ingredients of social media, while offering some trust-ranking mechanism (“a Digg-like for grown-ups”) to address the ever-present credibility issue of “citizen media”. “Very crisp pitch”, lots of possibilities. The discussion yields new perspectives to leverage the proprietary technology beyond the mere news business.

Magnify.net is all about communities and video 2.0. Users can come in and create their video channels, skin them, and build their communities. By comparison with similar sites, users can manage the meta-data, yielding powerful metrics to the advantage of advertisers and… users who can benefit from the 50/50 revenue-sharing model. Verdict: definitely interesting, go talk to (investor’s name withheld for obvious reasons

The Press Institute for Women in the Developing World project is a perfect fit for this conference, as hyper-local content and user-generated reporting in hard-to-access places have been a major topic of conversation so far. All judges are impressed by the project, one-upping each other with good advice to help the project scale and find partners.

Pegasus News offers an interesting mix of professional content for local news and user-generated content. Rather than compete directly against local papers, Pegasus provides local news about hyper-local events not covered elsewhere.

The J-Zone, by the International Center for Journalists, gets pitched as a “facebook” for jounalists”. As large media organizations cut back on their international correspondents, the J-Zone offers an opportunity to build up a network of journalists around the world, offering advice, best-practice sharing, and assignment opportunities.

Stateline.org (hey I know these guys) covers policy and political news from all 50 State capitals: inside-the-beltway people to cover outside-of-the-beltway policymaking. How about working with other publications and syndicating content to other media organizations? Otherwise, charging a subscription-fee to lobbyists –a prime audience- appears to make a lot of sense (as long as citizens don’t get shut out in the process).

The last orator gets the prize for the most emotional and convincing pitch in terms of improving the livelihood of communities (in sub-Saharan Africa as it turns out) through an ingenuous idea of “buddy payments” via mobile technology. Good idea, already-available technology: next step is to package it and … pitch it.

After a Random Act of Media, the WeMedia Forum Miami dove into its Investment forum, which asked “Who will pay for new ways to understand news and act on it?”
The panel included a mixture of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs; Scott Rafer, MyBlogLog; Chris Ahearn, Reuters; Jeff Taylor, Monster and Eons; Chris Versace, Agile Equity; Brian O’Malley, Battery Ventures.

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How communities real and virtual are changing through media. What are the new ways for people to use information, news, and journalism to imagine their collective possibilities as communities and to set and reach common community goals. Can community be virtual? Let’s find out what some of the web thinkers and tinkers think.

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Some highlighed blog posts from the We Media Launch and this morning’s session.  If I’ve missed any, please add in the comments

 Media Literacy as a Family Value  and We Media Community Forum(Andy Carvin)

We Media LiveBlogging Intro+Community Forum (Publictivity.comBlog)

We Media Kicks Off (Down the Avenue)

We Media Conference, Miami (Media Guardian/Organ Grinder)

We Media 2007 Community Forum (Hyku)

We Media Forum: “online communities are real” (Editor’s Weblog)

Blogging We Media Miami (part 1) (Magnify.net blog)

At Miami’s WeMedia Conference (Web Strategy by Jeremiah)

The first session degenerated (is that the right word?) into a discussion about who should control the conversation in our society: ”little m” media (bloggers and community contributors) or “Big M” media (i.e. media companies and professional journalists).  We have had that conversation – several times (at We Media alone) – and very little new ground was broken.  Why is that?  The prevailing theory on the WeMedia chat is that the audience isn’t the right one… one person noted that until events like WeMedia invote more people who focus on consuming information, or producing it out of love/passion, instead of those who have a need/desire to monetize it, we won’t make any progress.  My personal theory is that we have to better define the various categories of media before we can start ranking them, analyzing them, and similar.  Right now everything is one bucket – m/Media.  Lets separate out all the different kinds of media, by audience, by format, by qualification, by value, by timing, by personality, and by whatever other criteria is needed.  Once we have all the players in this giant game of media Risk identified, then we can start to see who will achieve world dominance.

Other Aha! moments from the first session included:

- Proliferation of journalists vs. proliferation of sources.  Our real challenge is to bring sources toether so journalists can add value.

- People and connections — bringing an audience together to communicate with each other is critical.  Lets talk about how the audience talks to each other, not how we should talk to the audience.

- How are we going to create a vast social network where people can consume news?  We currently lack the technological and other infrastructure (and possibly the know-how) to do that.

- One thing that big organizations still provide is an element of trust in the information that is delivered.  Can’t say that about all sources.

- Important thing is not who is reading information/articles/blog posts, whatever… but who is producing new output as a result?  We should measure media as a platform for promotion not consumption.

- This conversation is not just about journalism, but rather about information more broadly.

- We is a really hard idea to figure out.

And that was just the first session.  Lots of good things to come.  Stay tuned.

Last night at a Miami/We Media bloggers dinner (hosted by Alex deCarvalho of Scrapblog)  Andy Carvin and I got into a discussion about how we got blogging…which got us thinking:  how do bloggers get to be bloggers?  Why do we take up self-publishing?  Where did the passion for media–that’s evident in so many of us–come from?

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Those of you who’ve visited the Global Voices web site are probably familiar with our core mission, and the ways in which we’ve been trying to fulfill it thus far. The central feature of Global Voices has been our international blog aggregator, which is driven today by a team comprising nine regional editors, six language editors and 60-plus volunteer authors. In the two years and three months since it came online, this edited aggregator has made major strides towards helping foster a more democratic global discourse by amplifying voices from parts of the world which normally occupy the fringes of the mainstream media, if they’re even heard at all.

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Communities exist in many forms, from chatter on a forum or bulletin board through to multi-player 3D virtual worlds. But what engagement models work and how can media companies nurture communities without alienating them as devices of corporate interests?

In our open discussion on Thursday at 12.30pm at the WeMedia conference in Miami we hope to engage the community sitting in the audience in a discussion of the different ways of working with communities – without alienating them!

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Companies and individuals are invited to join and participate in the We Media community.
iFOCOS today announced a series of action and educational programs to spur global innovation in media. The media action tank also announced key leadership and advisory appointments as well as support from partners and foundations across a a variety of sectors.

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