Wasn’t able to blog from UC Berke­ley yes­ter­day, the site of the sixth annual new media con­fer­ence co-sponsored by USC and Cal, because they offered no wire­less access. I’m told they hope to have it by next year. (My dig­i­tal camera’s in the shop, so had to rely on old-fashioned film. Really hard to switch back to the processed-film era.)

Some of the pre­sen­ta­tions will be avail­able through archived web­casts on the con­fer­ence site. (Related to this, the new media “dons” met before the start of the con­fer­ence to chart strate­gies for online jour­nal­ism cur­ricu­lum.) The high­light, to my mind, was the final panel of the day, which fea­tured six young peo­ple ages 10 to 21 who dis­cussed their use of new tech­nolo­gies. Take­away: Young peo­ple use dig­i­tal tools in ways we can’t pre­dict, and are rely­ing less and less often on print pub­li­ca­tions for their news and information.

One of the best lines at the con­fer­ence came from 14-year-old Amy. Respond­ing to a ques­tion about pastel-colored youth sites aimed at girls, she said, “Pink is evil.”

Among the audi­ence mem­bers: Howard Rhein­gold, Barry Parr and Justin Hall.

JD Lasica works with major com­pa­nies and non­prof­its on social media strate­gies. See his busi­ness pro­file, con­tact JD or leave a comment.

Tweet It! Buzz This Post Deli­cious Digg This Post Face­book Red­dit Stum­ble This Post