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.

The Chicago Tri­bune has a story about BitterWaitress.com (“kiss my bit­ter ass”) and sim­i­lar sites that level the play­ing field between work­ers and the rul­ing class. At Bit­ter­Wait­ress, miserly tip­pers get their just deserts. (Ver­sion on mercurynews.com)