Meanwhile, here are some We Media links:

• You can find a still-growing archive from the forum – now with audio and some lovely photos: here.
• Robin Miller of Slashdot produced a nice montage video – just ignore my babbling about cheese and skip ahead to the palm trees and sunshine.
• The We Media blog includes a compilation of the “ahas” suggested throughout the forum.
• Steve Rosenbaum, a film-maker-story-teller and newly funded CEO of Magnify.net, has been hanging and talking with us for several years. He sees how our conversation and the work of iFOCOS has moved forward. “Since my last visit with the WeMedia team, things are different. In an important way. It’s changed. the WE in WeMEDIA got bigger, the ‘MEDIA’, got smaller. Or more intimate, more more focused. Not sure which.” Steve, yes – and thanks for noticing.
• Jemima Kiss must have typed her fingers to the bone with all of her live blogging and follow-up reporting for The Guardian, starting with our opening-round fire alarm and continuing this week with an item about Craig Newmark, who spent some of his time in Miami doing virtual battle with Wikipedians over the content of his own biography.
• Rebecca Weeks, the director of business development for Real Girls Media (which just launched Divine Caroline) captured the frenetic flavor of a real-life forum with lots of people and ideas swirling around everywhere – sometimes you’re not sure who’s saying what. Kinda like when you say, “I saw it on the internet. Somewhere.” In Rebecca’s case, the Miami story incorporates the insights of “a panelist” and “an audience member.” Yes, I heard them too.
• Rich Oppel, editor of the Austin American-Statesman, wrote for his newspaper that Miami seemed less rancourous than the previous two We Media forums – and I agree, “but a few grenades were tossed between the new and the old.” Rich wrote:
  

  The media are an unsettled lot today, with new media drawing audiences but rarely making money. Some rather ceremoniously swear off the almighty dollar.But not all. The angst rose when a panel of venture capitalists said they would insist on financial returns, traditional as that may be, and when foundation executives spoke of “investments” in new media based on performance instead of merely handing over money.

• More on the angst and ennui of making money in Rich Skrenta’s follow-up thoughts. Rich, CEO of Topix, must have had a bleak flight back home. Citing the failure of Dan Gillmor’s Bayosphere, and many other citizen journalism projects that have “largely failed,” Rich wrote:
  

  By implicit definition, participatory media is non-commercial. If it’s commercial, someone owns it, and it’s not “we” anymore.

  That’s got to be especially bad news for the failed projects on his list that are new or still breathing – such as NewsTrust; but good news too, since NewsTrust is non-profit (Discosure: I’m an advisor). Is Rich right? I don’t think so, and I’ll elaborate on this down the road. To begin with, most new businesses fail. Period. Meanwhile, the definitions of success and failure have changed for media (though I’ll stipulate that going out of business counts as failure). Modest success – and profitability – is not failure. It’s the long tail, which leads to …

• Wired Magazine editor/Long Tail author Chris Anderson was not in Miami, but like many others who weren’t there, he contributed to the conversation. He responded to Rich: “We Media is alive and well. It’s just the would-be We Media institutions that are not. A phenomenon is not necessarily a business. That doesn’t make it any less of a phenomenon.”

-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 (to me, that is somewhat redolent of the bubble?)
-It’s wrong to think about how users can pay back for your services in purely monetary terms; their in-kind contributions may take the forms of services (like help with accounting, if they are experts, etc)–there should be a way to make such contributions possible.
-The ultimate product everyone is trying to create is Ebay for content, where different bits can be assessed and traded based on their value.
-It doesn’t really matter if your product is tangible or intangible; you should really think about ways of selling tangible goods every time users access your intangible ones.
-It’s hard to find the right balance between expert and user-generated content, but even the latter, as some panelists suggested, should be fully compensated, if not in monetary terms, then at least in kind. Social capital may be more important for some of them than the financial one.

Some highlights:

- Big media companies are struggling with the new media world, but they need to let go, they need to understand they can’t control the world
- Relations between new media and old media is like that of parents/teenagers
- Venture capitalists will be open to those entrepreneurs that are product visionaries and understand their communities.
- As a blogger, you might start out doing things to follow your passion, but at the end of the day, as your traffic grows, you’ll start thinking more and more about money.
- People need to be honest about what success is for their company: some will need to accept smaller investments, but in the end they all have to remain responsible to shareholders
- Can we create an information co-op?Who’s going to be the Craigslist for news? What about co-op funding for journalism? Can we ask the audience to fund their own start-ups?
- The issue is how to meld the bottom-up and top-down models. Who will provide the tools and capabilities so that those who have brands don’t destroy them?
- We can’t just use advertising crack, hoping that people will come to a site. First the site needs to provide the users with something they need.
- Need to believe that the audience will be smart enough to distinguish between content worth paying for and content that should be free.
- Today there is a much greater pool of capital
- Make sure that if you approach a VC, you are passionate about what you’re doing
- Be cautious of big business – they tend to ‘muck up’ small, innovative start ups.

Well, it just jumped 8%, but S&P believes “Yahoo faces notable competition from emerging social media businesses.”

That is, the ones it hasn’t bought yet… Yahoo also today removed the ability to comment on its news articles, which it had rolled out not too long ago.

It will be interesting to watch as Yahoo tries to build and/or buy success in harnassing user-generated content.

[Oh, by the way, I'm Travis Smith and I'll be guest posting here for the next while!]