There's video of some of the sessions online here. The keynotes from Doc Searls and Dan Gillmor are there, as well as the session with Dave Weinberger. I haven't sat through them (I was there when they happened), but the quality from the bits I sampled looked pretty good.

The rest of Doc Searl's title is "Reading some writing on the web's wall". Here's a side observation, while we wait for the ending keynote - there are a lot of Mac's here, a truly disproportionate share. An awful lot of "thought leaders" are - and have been - moving to them. There's something Microsoft should pay attention to.

The title reflects something Doc's been writing about for awhile on his blog. By showing a Google search for "syndicate", he says that search isn't dead, it just isn't live. However - a search for "syndicateNY" turns up a lot better results... ). There are live searches on Yahoo and Google, but they aren't primary (and Doc calls them hidden). Hey, my blog shows up near the top on that Yahoo search :)

So Technorati is the "live" web as far as Doc is concerned - their default search results are the live stuff. I don't know - the main problem with the example, to my mind, is the term "syndicate" - it's way to general, so the results are likely to suck. The point is good, but it's a bad example. Anyway, back to Doc - he's stating that Google and Yahoo search the whole haystack, as opposed to just syndicated feeds ([ed] although - those two are converging, and that convergence will only grow).

"On the Live Web, the demand side is supplying itself". He's relating this to the growth of Linux (Torvalds and open sourcers supplying the demand and the supply). Umm, no, not so much. The real growth started when IBM and a few other old line firms started tossing real money at it. It's a blind spot that fools a lot of people. Including the Sun executive team, but I repeat myself.

Back to the presentation. "The best blogging is provisional, not finished. It's about rolling snowballs downhill". You can watch that rollout on sites like techmeme. You can be be an "alpha blogger" by being quotable. I like this - there's no "new economy" - it's the same one, but networked. The power isn't redistributed, it's re-originated. The most connected will be those taking advantage of the Live Web.

"The value chain is being replaced by the value constellation". The wide open space around the constellations is freedom. Heh - with apologies to Gillmor, he says that we it's more about intention than attention. The intention? It's about customers who are ready to buy. To Doc's mind, a lot of marketers, PR people (etc, etc) are back in the original web bubble - trying to get eyeballs and attention to sell to. His notion is that people are now coming with intention - ready to buy - and they need to find a willing seller. So he wants vendors to come to the customers, not vice-versa.

An example - renting a car without shopping around.

The Live Web exposes many of advertising's flaws. Zapped by mute and fast forward, inattention to the message, etc. etc. Top-down advertising is just noise, and it's very inefficient. AdSense is a start at fixing the problem, but it's not done. Doc thinks money will be spent fast in the intention economy, because it matches willing buyers and sellers quickly. He also thinks that the stuff that Gillmor is talking about plays into this, as a way of getting that matching built up.

Large vendors are going to have to adapt, and resist the urge to build silos. Consumers are coming in educated about what they want to buy already. So some more stuff:

A free market is not "your choice of silo" - a great example being the various carriers that want to ditch net neutrality and let the ISP's build out their own silos. Another: "no one wants an experience". People want to make, find, understand, or buy stuff. They don't want crap. Another: "The Consumer" is a relic of the industrial economy. We need to gag when we say "consumer" rather than "customer" - or "listener" or "viewer". More: The net is not a place where "consumers" "access" "content". For instance, I'm producing right now...

"Branding is for cattle, not for products or people". Playing into this, everything and everyone is being unbundled. This is impacting local TV already. The current distribution mechanisms are outdated - we need a la carte, but as we design it, not as "they" design it. TV as we think we know it is already dead. One in three teens cannot identify the top four networks. Meanwhile, the FCC is busy mandating HDTV and moving the existing channels off the air.

"Clear Channel killed Radio. Listeners are resurrecting it". The same thing happened to newspapers, as they standardized and stopped being local. Doc says that Podcasting is bringing back local radio. Hi-Def TV will be cheap and available by the end of the year. Neither cable nor satellite can carry (much) of it. Neither can ISPs, who have left the last mile for delivery only. However, you can buy cheap production tools for it (cameras, etc). [ed] - I don't see a small timer putting together something like "Battlestar Galactica" anytime soon though.

"Email marketing is creepy. So is SEO" - I heartily agree with that.

The "livest" part of the web is on mobile phones (etc). Everyone is now an influencer, or can be.

"Closed Formats are Doomed" - Heh - he thinks that the majority of desktops and Laptops will run Linux in 5 years. he's very wrong about that, for reasons I've blogged about before. Hand a Linux box to any nearby non-technical person, and watch them try to get audio and video (or printing) working. I don't see any of that being fixed, either - none of the outfits promoting Linux are interested in that stuff at all, and - to be blunt - uncompensated developers don't do that kind of "finishing" work. None of which has anything to do with stability or safety, btw.

"The net should be as fast as your hard drive" - and he says someday it will be, although the carriers will fight it. People want real bandwidth, and will fight for it. The funny thing is, Verizon is laying fiber in my neighborhood, and they charge $45 for the 15mbits connection - and $145 for the 30 mbit one. Which means, they'll sell very little of the latter, and will have to drop that price. Who knows - this one, the market will sort out. What will likely happen - anyone who can convince their company to pay for the upper end connection will get it, and anyone who can't, won't.

Question: What social changes do you see? The end of the couch potato (not sure of that one). Education will change, as it's now on an old style industrial model. I hope he's right about that, but there are a lot of people standing in the way of real change (regardless of how you define real change) in that field.

And that's it - end of the show.

Up front question after intros for the panel (which I missed) - have PR people picked up on the change in the media relations model? Do they get the idea that "the users are in charge?" yet? The panel thinks that clients of PR firms are picking up on this faster, and that west coast firms are further along than east coast firms. I'm not sure about the latter, but I buy the former. The push model of marketing messages is pretty much dead.

Interesting - there aren't many PR people here in the room (or at the show, for that matter). Hmm - is that evidence that PR firms still haven't picked up on this stuff? The old agency model is still in place, and the "up and coming" generation of people haven't made an impact yet. The agencies don't think that they have time to get involved ([ed] - they need to make time).

Good observation from the panel here - the agencies are still in early days in understanding this (and the ones that aren't paying attention yet are falling behind). The ones that aren't paying attention will be utterly oblivious to nascent negative PR events - and with that obliviousness comes an inability to respond early.

These guys are very interested in the activity surrounding Digg, Techmeme (et. al.). These sites allow you to follow an ongoing conversation - and, depending on the conversation, it may well be of interest to a client. This is more useful to PR than tagging. A lot of this is just basic fubdamentals: Can you write well, can you listen. The difference now is, there's more to listen to.

Heh - good comment: "There are a lot of tools out there that will tell you you're on fire, but not many that will tell you how to put it out". You need tools to learn that you're on fire, but you need PR skills to put it out.

Pitching a reporter vs. pitching a blogger. Before blogs, you would read previous writings and know the ground rules. With bloggers, getting those interests/sphere of influence is every bit as important, but the rules of engagement (i.e. - what will get published) are different. Another take: don't pitch them, ping them (link to them, comment on their blog, be part of their community).

It's after lunch, and time for a breakout session on attention - Craig Barnes and Seth Goldstein are running this one. I had some less than charitable words for Goldstein's ideas here. Barnes is with Attensa - no moderator, so it looks like the two of them will give their views. Craig is speaking first.

What does Attensa do? It observes behavior (RSS), prioritizes, and attempts to give you mor of what you want - all the while mitigating overload. This is all based on what they call predictive ranking. They rank things for you based on observing your behavior while you read RSS - more than just links. They give you a manual ranking stream as well, letting you push things up or down (which itself modifies the automated rankings). They are in the process of adding things "from the cloud "(or behind the firewall for intranets).

So what is attention? Most people are talking about browser clickstream behavior. They aren't doing that in the browser - they are following behavior with RSS. That can include group behavior. Heh - they've been talking to Steve Gillmor for quite awhile, and don't really like the attention.xml path to get there. They think it's too heavyweight. Like Steve, they believe that "the user is in charge", but they've come to different conclusions based on that. They don't view this as being for the targeting of ads (they are mostly going after the enterprise). So what do they target?

• Blog Posts, News Headlines
• Alerts for BI (Business Intelligence) - what I use search feeds for
• Business Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts
• RSS Enabled Enterprise apps - they are seeing more of these all the time

The bottom, bottom line - RSS overload will dwarf email overload (don't I know it :) ). So this all goes to what they call Attention Streams - where people are spending attention (in the Enterprise). So:

• Business RSS for now
• Email Implications - nothing done yet, nor do they have firm plans. But they think that attention as it applies to RSS applies to email as well.
• Other stuff - PDF, docs, etc.
• Structured Blog Templates (microformats?)

Sounds to me like they are trying to create tools that people will use for prioritizing their attention in the enterprise. Ahh - Attensa is another Outlook plugin thing. That explains why Greg Reinacker walked into the room :)

Seth Goldstein has the title "Selling Attention" on his slides. To start with, Seth thinks Attensa is doing good work for the Enterprise, but says this: we are all touching different parts of the elephant, but it's still one elephant. Seth is involved in attentiontrust.org with Gillmor, et. al.

His evolution in this area - from Josh Schachter/del.icio.us: "Tags are crystallized attention". hadn't thought of it that way, but it makes sense. Attentiontrust.org with Gillmor. He calls attentiontrust a consumer advocacy group, interested in making sure that you have access to the attention that you are giving things. With all that data being electronic, recording it is easier, and that you as an individual should, at the very least, be able to keep track of that.

So what is this all about? He's trying to create a marketplace for clickstreams. The idea would be to reverse the selling situation - allow people to market themselves to companies. He thinks it could become a new kind of credit bureau. Hmm. Color me skeptical. The idea is that you toggle some settings in a browser, and then let their servers gather your clickstream data for potential sharing. The reporting is interesting - it gives back details on what I've visited. You can share this data with other users of their system.

One thing just became clear to me - the potential for extreme embarrassment is huge. Sure, you can turn the tracking off, but imagine that you forgot and visited an, umm, "not safe for work" site. Here's the end question I have - what's the business model? How do these folks intend to monetize this? Ah - he says that there will be opportunities down the road via leads. Hmm. I think the VC guys were skeptical of that kind of thing :)

I decided to attend this talk even though there are two more obviously technically oriented talks going on - I'm curious as to how the legal people see this field. So from their standpoint - the good news is, the subscription model gives people the content they want, when they want it. It's driven new business models, etc.

The bad news? heh - he says Lawyers (he is one). All of the traditional risks of copyright are still around, and fair use really hasn't been hashed out in this area. For that matter, free expression and libel hasn't been hashed out either. The existing rules - those hashed out in the past - still apply (trademark, copyright, libel, etc.).

Copyrights - Good quote - "The law is always struggling to catch up to the technology" - and the problem is not new. Old law is being applied to new situations all the time. Copyright is any original work that is fixed in tangible form. Generally speaking, copyrighted works cannot be used in whole or in part (copied, etc) without permission. This causes problems with the standard rip and paste culture we live in.

Things fall into the public domain after life + 70 years (95 years for an entity). Way back when, copyright was 14 years + a renewable 14 years. It's gone up and up steadily since then. Discovering whether a given work is or is not in the public domain is not always easy to determine. For instance - the book "The Wizard of Oz" is public, but the film by MGM is not. Things get more complex when you cross borders - which law applies? Which treaty obligations? In the US, there's the 1909 act, and then there's the newer regime.

Works of the Federal Government are in the public domain as well, so any publications from there are public (moon photos, for instance). There may be other issues beyond copyright though. There's also data publication that has been contracted out to a private entity, which may make it copyrighted. Take postal stamps - some of them are licensed by the PO, and the PO itself is in a quasi-public state anyway.

Fair Use - the bottom line is, it's complex and the right answer is often no better than "it depends" :/ It's a risky doctrine to rely on if you are trying to make use of copyrighted material. A lot can depend on the potential market value of the copyrighted work. So quoting a book (newspaper, magazine, etc) is fair use - the hard question is where you have taken too much to fall under fair use (quantitative and qualitative). All of this impacts bloggers - not via linking, but when we quote people, the same rules apply to us as apply to any other form of writing. A comment here from Julie Fenster (on the panel) - media players are most interested in whether the use impacts the economic value for the copyright owner.

Don't rely on how big players do it either - the "Perfect Ten" decision hit Google, for instance.

A question from the audience - if you offer full text feeds, are you offering implied consent to republish (BlogLines, etc)? The panel says yes - your control over re-publishing is diminished based on your actions. It does not, however, diminish your copyright protections. Sounds to me like the debate a lot of the attendees need to have on this is based on what Dana VanDen Heuvel wrote this morning. What the panel thinks is going to happen is DRM applied to RSS feeds . Heh - that will go over well.

Another set of questions arise here - given the "implied consent" theory, RSS makes it easier to repurpose content (for instance, scraping a family cartoon and pushing it to a website that the copyright holder wouldn't want it on). To my mind, this is a technical non-issue - you can scrape HTML nearly as easily as you can scrape RSS. The copyright holder still has ownership either way. As the panel points out, given the smallness of many of the violators (or foreign location), it may not matter anyway. To my mind, if you want to derive value for your site, you need to give me a reason to visit it.

Risk Management - the core business you are in matters, and your size matters. For instance, media orgs and large orgs probably already have policies in place (insurance). For small organizations? Insurance companies move much more slowly than technology, and they are not excited about jumping into this kind of thing quickly (an example: protections given early on for P2P plays, before there was law in the area). Right now, you'll end up in the specialty insurance business if you are looking for coverage here.

Question - how does a blogger protect himself (comes to mind based on that WKPA stuff). Not easy to do, given the paucity of loss data on this (i.e., there haven't been many cases). So a great question - what liability is being assumed by anyone republishing content that could be slanderous (Google, BlogLines, etc) - the panel says "none", as they are seen to be in the same position as a book seller (as opposed to the publisher and writer). A manager who acts in an editorial fashion may well run into a problem (techmeme, et. al. ?). That's very gray at present. On the other hand, sites like Slashdot have been around a long time now.

Steven Schwartz from Reuters is up, discussing the changing nature of news, syndication, and publishing. Schwartz is from the Direct to Consumer portion of Reuters. One of the main things they are dealing with is the emergence of citizen journalists, who can be immediately on the spot when something happens.

Where this hits Reuters is right in the ad model - as alternative journalism rises, that revenue stream gets threatened. Internet advertising is growing, as is consumer spending online. The average consumer spent $100 online last year - and that's given that only 12% of the (US) population is confortable spending money online. Meaning, it's only going to get bigger.

What Reuters is really after is the influentials in the blogosphere. Now here's the interesting part to me - he's talking about how they are leading in RSS distribution. However, I dropped all my Reuters feeds recently. Why? Because they were all partial feeds, requiring me to click through to the site. I've dropped most of the bloggers who do that too. Now, I'm an edge case, since I use an aggregator. Will people who read RSS only via "My Yahoo" (etc) care? If the headline is in the browser, following the link may not seem like much. We'll see - but I dislike link blogs too. I really think that mass customization of ads (i.e., ads that we actually want to see) combined with full text (video, etc) feeds are the answer.

"Consumers as partners" and "everyone is a journalist". Hmm. He says that the issue with citizen journalism is that facts may be lacking. Interesting then that the mainstream media is bleeding subscribers. He's right that people want authority, but wrong in thinking that the MSM has it.

Huh - during Q&A, I ran across this via Dana VanDen Heuvel - from a Pheedo report:

As the RSS publishing and advertising marketplace evolves, it is important to monitor the indicators such as click-through rates, which are normalizing; RSS ad performance, which remains strong; and most importantly, how RSS consumers are interacting with feed content.

Advertisers and publishers need to engage the RSS consumer at the aggregator or feed reader level. That's where the relationship is -- not at the website. Hoping for a click-through by publishing summary feed content is not a viable content monetization strategy in an RSS-enabled publishing model. This is good news for publishers who are evaluating opportunities for RSS feed advertising, and good news for advertisers seeking to reach information consumers in this growing channel.

Full-Text Feeds and Summary Feeds Garner Similar Click-Through Rates (CTR)

Summary feeds (full content not shown in the feed item) average at 12% CTR while full-text feeds average 10% CTR. The report states that the median CTR for full-text feeds remains at 10% while summary feeds drop to 8% CTR due to extremely high CTR rates in certain categories and individual feeds.

If that data holds up, then the entire justification for summary feeds just falls flat. There are charts and more data over on Dana's site. Very interesting stuff. If summary feeds don't generate significantly more (or even less!) click throughs, it really calls the concept into question.

I was zoned out for the first keynote of the morning - not enough coffee to pay attention :) I'm coming around now that Gillmor is up (looks like he's moving his blog here soon). Heh - he's riffed the political slogan "It's the economy, stupid" into "It's the Gestures, stupid". Sounds like a key point of his talk is to get a simple point across: The user community is in charge and can no longer be effectively "talked at". There was a lot of talk about that yesterday, as well.

This goes back to attention.xml (something I've been ignoring, truth be told), which is a technology format that can be used to track what it is that you are paying attention to. Maybe I should look at it - I've had people ask for that kind of personal (not necessarily shared) information gathering in BottomFeeder, as a way of helping filter what they actually read as opposed to what they subscribe to.

Seems that some of the talk at last night's VC discussion, about business models that the VC's (here) don't believe in, has been the subject of some banter on the Gillmor Gang podcasts. I haven't been paying attention to those either, so I can't really express much of an opinion on that. I can say that I've been skeptical about Steve's gesture ideas though - see here, for instance. I spoke to Steve yesterday, and it sounds to me like he's thinking in public, and engaged in throwing ideas at the wall in public - so a lot of what he's writing about is forward looking cogitation. I'm still skeptical, but then again, so is he.

One thing he's got right is that there is a huge information glut. There are tons of sources for information, and current search engines return results based on a rough measure of relevance - pagerank/link results. Confusion over how that works was how WKPA got itself in trouble with their recent blog problem, for instance. Heck, whenever I need to link to that, I hit Google and take the second result - which is the Maine blogger they wrestled with. In a small way, I'm helping push the relevance of that result up.

"We are in a post search world" - the quality of what comes back from search results is questionable, from Steve's viewpoint. We are in the process of creating communities (Mike Arrington being an example of a self created publishing "somebody"). What Steve is looking for is this: RSS has transformed publishing, allowing people to subscribe to what they want, when they want it - but what's next, as a way of managing that? How do you "gesture" to the cloud and ask it to give you what you want? Gmail is a small scale version of that cloud (but in an email specific silo). What Steve wants is a mechanism better than current search that will find what you want and subscribe to it. Feed Discovery, if you will, but not limited to the page you happen to be looking at.

He's asking for smart use of history tracking in your browser. Google is doing this on a large scale, according to Steve. What he wants is a personal implementation that is aware of what you look at, and can then make sense of your future requests for "more like that" - sounds a lot like Amazon's "people who bought the book you are looking at also bought these other ones - would you like them too?" Google has something like that, in "find similar pages" - I don't think I've ever used that option though, so I have no idea how useful it is.

Question - are Techmeme (Digg, Reddit, etc) examples of this? Steve claims that techmeme isn't, as it's specifically what the site owner thinks is worthy of attention. Digg (and the others like it) are community based though. Heh - Steve doesn't pull punches either. He called the guy on the panel yesterday (Davidson) who was against full text feeds a pinhead who didn't realize that the truck was already half over him. Steve thinks that ad supported full text feeds are inevitable. There's a combination possible here - mass customization, offering relevant ads to people based on what their actual interests are.

Steve thinks that we'll get into a real lead generation economy. Hmm - sounds like personally selected middle men. No idea how that would work, but there's certainly no infrastructure for that now. He's pointing to GestureBank, which is building up that data. I'd be very curious to see what the response would be to a Google sponsored effort of this sort. Would people freak out over privacy concerns? That would be interesting to see. Steve thinks the revenue model should involve payment back to the people sharing gestures - and I think that's the part that breaks down right now. There's simply no convenient micropayment system around yet.

Now we're on to a money conversation - Greg Reinacker and three VC guys - Seth Levine and Richard Fishman, and Dan Flatley (sp?) to talk about where the money might go in the syndication space. Greg is moderating the panel. Two of them are backing Newsgator, which is amusing. Richard's company is called "RSS Investors", which was certainly forward marketing into the space. They received over 600 business plans in short order, and only something like 2% had a revenue model. They've invested in Attensa and Edgeio. They are looking in to two more RSS oriented plays in the next little while.

Seth Levine is another investor in Newsgator, from Mobius. They also have money in Technorati, Feedburner, and a few others. Dan Flatley's firm is also a Newsgator investor, and in digital media in general. RSS is one of the things they follow.

So starting with a question from Greg: Where do the VC's here think the syndication space is going, and how does the entry of big firms like MS and Yahoo affect it? Dan thinks that the field is validated, and that big firms and government organizations will be moving into it. Seth agrees. He's looking beyond blogs (etc), and sees syndication technology moving across many notification domains. RSS will be an enabling technology. We have consensus - Richard agrees as well. He also sees RSS moving into new domains as a connecting technology.

Heh - Seth says that many of the business plans out there seem to involve getting sold to (insert big company here). Question along those lines to Richard - what common themes (if any) amongst the "losers". He immediately rejects any plans that involve "revenue will come later".

I asked about something Avi mentioned in discussing bootstrapping DabbleDB - he counselled avoiding VC money. The panel here said sure, on the technology side, you can do that a lot more easily than you ever could before. Depending on your target market though, it may be very important. If you are going after the enterprise, for instance, you'll need those expensive sales/marketing folks - and thus, will need cash.