Journalism.co.uk: Changing Media Summit: Journalists - if there's a better blogger, you're 'screwed'

The UK's Guardian: Shoot the Beasties. The Beastie Boys gave 50 strangers a camera - and ended up with a whole new type of concert movie. Awesome; I Fuckin' Shot That! will be released in July.

The Web 2.0 Awards from seomoz.org were just announced, and here are the winners in the video category:

Daily Motion
YouTube
Metacafe

Honorable mentions:
Blinkx
FireAnt
MyFilmz.net
Ourmedia
Peerflix
VideoBomb
VideoEgg
Vimeo
vSocial

I'm at iSummit, Content That Pays, a new media conference in Toronto with about 400 media execs and members of the technology community. I'm speaking on the We Media panel in a couple of hours with moderator Barnaby Marshall, Matt Mullenweg of WordPress, David Jacobson of PricewaterhouseCoopers, and Bob Young, founder of LuLu.

This morning, Norm Bolen, exec vp of content, Alliance Atlantis, was one of the more forward-looking members of the Convergence panel: “You're going to be seeing huge, massive uptake of user-generated video that we can't even imagine yet. … Young people are much less interested in a passive experience.”

His son, a college student, visited the site in New York where John Lennon was shot. He came home, visibly moved, and posted a three-minute tribute to Lennon on his blog, including snippets of Lennon’s music. I told him, ‘What are you doing? You don’t have clearance to post that.” He said, “What are they gonna do to me? There are millions of us. I don’t even have an allowance.”

Bolen's the exception, though. A questioner suggested that any unauthorized use of copyrighted content was illegal and improper, even if done for artistic, noncommercial purposes. Most of the other speakers agreed. Maria Hale of CHUM Television went so far as to say when she was a kid, she felt guilty whenever she recorded commercial music off the radio onto a cassette tape recorder, "And I knew that it was wrong." Wow.

Just bumped into Jim Griffin, whom I devoted a chapter to in Darknet, and who'll be moderating the lunchtime session on The Copyright Conundrum.

Later: Also bumped into Andrew Michael Baron of Rocketboom, another speaker here, and Nathon Gunn of Bitcasters, a member of the Ourmedia Advisory Board, who's moderating a panel on online games. There's a blogger dinner tonight here that I'll try to get to.

We just finished our hourlong rap on We Media. Six people came up and said they enjoyed it, so I guess it was a success. The moderator held up this week's cover story on Newsweek (above), about MySpace, YouTube and Flickr, as an indication that We Media was breaking into the mainstream.

I began with a seven-minute presentation that laid the foundation for the panel, outlining the idea behind We media (pick you name: participatory media, citizens media, Media 2.0, open media and my least favorite, user-generated content), suggesting the differences between traditional media and these new media forms, letting people know about Ourmedia, showing off a mashup, and projecting where all this is going.

It was a wide-ranging hour (it was videotaped, and I'll post a link if I get one), with everyone getting in equal shots. I encouraged the publishers in the audience to atomize and unbundle their content, making it available (for a fee or for free) for users to mashup, re-create and recirculate. Matt and I also made the point that while Heavy.com is making $20 million a year in advertising revenues, personal publishers should be cautious before rushing to plaster ads all over their sites.

Friday is the deadline for the journalism contest for high school students, sponsored by Participant Productions. Judging the contest will be Dan Rather of CBS News and Ann Curry from The Today Show/Dateline NBC. Oh, yeah. The winner gets $1,000!

Mark Glaser at Media Shift: Go Daddy Gives Podcasters Freedom to Create Ads. Mark takes a look at Go Daddy's advertising deal with the PodShow network. More than 50 podcasters in the network are simply given talking points to create their own spots for Go Daddy, part of what they're calling Advertising 2.0. The idea is that the advertiser gives more control to the podcast host and its audience, and incorporates feedback through an open conversation. Go Daddy says it's getting better conversion rates on podcasts than with any other online advertising.

"Podcasts work because they are economically viable to create without requiring large audiences. Because the denominator gets raised and the interests more rarified and less general, it gets more possible to have sponsorships and ads that hit the Holy Grail: giving the audience the ads it actually
wants to hear...I think the value that the medium brings is increasing the odds that the sponsorship
will have that kind of relationship to the audience."
-- Dave Slusher, blogger and podcaster at Evil Genius Chronicles

Dave's right. We're just getting started. But PodShow probably isn't the vehicle for doing this the right way.

Terry Heaton's latest: Investing in a Local Future. Excerpt:

By continually supporting only those business models that attract large numbers quickly, [venture capitalists] are forcing basic top-down (1.0) laws on those of us who see greater value at the local level. So while the web and all that it offers is moving to a one-to-one or bottom-up paradigm, the world of the dollar continues to draw its influence and power from the top-down. This is beyond ironic, especially with venture capitalists who tout Media 2.0 applications.

Wikia, Inc. has just received $4 million Series A financing and has relaunched Wikicities as Wikia.com. Congratulations, folks! Here's a press release about
the news.

The Daily Kos has the lowdown on the FEC's splendid decision not to regulate Internet content during federal election campaigns with the exception of paid advertising. An important victory for free speech online.