Spent the day at Challenge Day at Supernova. Not sure if I’ll be able to attend the rest of the conference Thursday and Friday, but today was rewarding. Spotted, met or spoke with: Susan Wu, Kevin Marks, Liz Lawley, Raph Koster, Deb Schultz, Mary Hodder, Jeff Schwartz, Brian Solis, Esme Vos, David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Shel Israel, Denise Howell, Greg Elin, Heather Gold, Sam Perry, Stephanie Booth, Reuben Steiger, host Kevin Werbach and lots of others.

Web video

A few highlights from today’s Web video panel:

Panelist Robert Scoble of Podtech: "We’re paying 14 cents a gigabyte to distribute video out to you."

Justin Kan of Justin.tv agrees: he’s paying 14 cents/gig.

Scoble is having another kid in September, yet no companies have contacted him to promote their brand or offer products for new parents to use. Traditional advertisers still aren’t grasping the possibilities of the online medium. "Five years from now, if I Twitter that I’m having a kid, I’ll bet a big company gets ahold of me within 30 minutes."

Scoble: "Facebook is the leading social network going forward. I don’t see anything else touching it." I agree. I need to upgrade my Facebook presence soon. It’s not just for students anymore.

I ask the panelists about the importance of web video hosting sites supporting downloads instead of just streaming, so that we can use, remix, mash up and comment on videos instead of just passively watching them. Some sites do this very well, like Blip.tv and PodTech.net. Others don’t, like YouTube (which supports just streaming and embeds) and Joost.

Scoble had a one word response: "iPhone." He then expanded on that: "Apple’s iPhone will force the industry to react to it. I can’t watch Justin.tv live through mpeg4." Steve Jobs will play kingmaker, deciding which content partners can be seen through the iPhone, due out next week.

If I have time, I’ll create an iPhone Content channel on Ourmedia, so that people can download videos to their iPhone that are cool and high-quality but don’t necessarily line Steve Jobs’ pockets.

Some sites mentioned during the panel:

Joost

Kyte.tv (from the guys at Joost), for mobile devices

Rewiring Politics

I moderated an afternoon panel today on Rewiring Politics, discussing how the Internet and new technologies are changing the dynamic between the electorate and elected officials, from political campaigns to governance in City Hall and Congress.

Spent 90 minutes throwing out questions to Julius Genachowski (Rock Creek Ventures/Obama ’08 and former chief counsel of the FCC), Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger  (Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government) and Andrew Rasiej  (founder, Personal Democracy Forum).

Greg Elin of the wonderful Sunlight Foundation had some advice for those who want social media technologies adopted by the presidential candidates: "It takes a log-ass time for this to happen." Don’t expect your favorite candidate to embrace these Internet technologies before they become widely adopted.

Some sites mentioned during the session:

David Cameron’s Webcameron

Mouse.org (an educational site for students)

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who put a Google MyMaps map on his congressional site chronicling the cities he visited in Iraq. (Oddly, it may have been taken down already because of possible violation of rules on the Hill.)

Congresspedia

Later: Interesting Independent ticket for president possibility today on PBS’ NewsHour: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. They looked good together as a team. Especially with Bloomberg’s billions and 70% approval rating. Still a longshot, but with Bloomberg leaving the Republican Party, can no longer be discounted. Fascinating if there were three New York candidates on the ballot: Giuliani, Clinton and Bloomberg.

Update: New from John Zogby: President Bloomberg? Not such a longshot.

I spent some time last week with Zadi Diaz, one of the organizers of the firstl Pixelodeon festival in Hollywood. Zadi’s one of the coolest people I know in the videoblogging world — high-energy, bursting with dazzling ideas and super nice.

Says Zadi: "This is a new language. People are telling their stories with their cameras." Here’s a 9-minute video interview of her discussing her popular JetSet Internet TV show, Pixelodeon, and the revolution in video storytelling.

Ourmedia page | watch video in MPEG4 (29MB)
Blip page | watch video in Flash

Blogger-Prof Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine is on tonight’s NewsHour on PBS, interviewed as part of a discussion about the mix of facts of opinion in the media today, and whether that’s a good thing or not.

Jeff offers up “three ethics” that the news media can learn from bloggers:

(1) The ethic of corrections: Be honest about your mistakes and correct errors quickly.
(2) The ethic of the link: Don’t take my word for it, here’s my source material, here’s where people are disagreeing with me.
(3) The ethic of transparency: Be transparent about your motives and biases.

Sound advice, and precepts that you can find at resources like the Center for Citizen Media’s Principles of citizen journalism project.

I wouldn’t have been a good participant on tonight’s segment because I actually agree with both the speakers, Jarvis on the myth of objectivity and the needs for the news media to embrace the ethos of openness found in the blogosphere, and Callie Crossley, contributor to “Beat the Press” at Boston’s WGBH, who held out for news organizations making it clear what are the facts and what are your opinions, a distinction still worth making, in my view.

I had more fun at the first Pixelodeon videoblogging/filmmaking conference in Hollywood than I’ve had at any conference this year. Made some great contacts and learned a few things, too. Congrats to Jay, Ryan, Zadi and Steve for putting on a great event.

I put on an hourlong workshop with Markus Sandy on Ourmedia’s new channels feature, and I sat in on Dave Toole and Michael Verdi showing off SpinXpress as a free collaboration tool for digital media producers.

Here’s a large Flickr photo set of shots I took at the conference. And here’s the Flickr pool of the conference.

It was fantastic to meet folks like Abra Chouinard of TotalMMO.com, Veronica Belmont of CNET, Casey McKinnon and Rudy Jahchan of Galacticast, Jacqulyn Joy and Cornelia Gibrand of Richprettygirl, Daniel Liss of Pouringdown.tv, Drew Olanoff of Pluggd and others, and to hang with friends like Harold Johnson, Mikki Krimmel, Mike Hudack, Eric Rice, Rob Parrish and many others. I conducted a boatload of video interviews, so I’ll be posting those over the next month.

Here are some notes, quotes and observations from Pixelodeon that I haven’t been able to post until now.

Some of the trippier videoblog sites that received screenings here (the organizers plan to put all of the screened videos online): Channel101, Carp Caviar’s bottomunion.com, tomatopatch.com, alienresident.net and aaronvaldez.com.

From DivX CEO Jordan Greenhall’s opening keynote: “For God’s sake, go with the wave” [of the personal media revolution].

Remarks by Kent Nichols of AskaNinja.com:

“Audio is the most important thing” in a video.

“We cut out the second camera angle because it was too much hassle. Coverage is for pussies.”

During editing, “make it faster than you think you should.”

Ninja co-founder Douglas Sarine had the best line of the conference: “I personally believe that what we call ADD [attention deficit disorder] is actually the evolution of our species.”

Quotes from the Saturday keynote by Fred Seibert, founder of MTV who’s now the head of Nextnewnetwork.com:

"The world doesn’t care anymore" about intellectual property and copyright. "When the history of our era is written, the 20th century will be seen as the century of copyright, and the 21st century as the century that led to the dissolution of copyright. From the moment the Xerox machine was born, it meant the end of copyright."

Dan Harmon, the off-the-wall, out-there genius who executive-produced the pilot for the Sarah Silverman Program, at Sunday’s keynote:

In response to a question, he said, "Copyrighted music. Fuck it. Use it." (Cheers from the capacity crowd of 300.) "You’re not making any money off it. … Your biggest defense is being broke." An assumption that is only half valid, given that some of us own homes.

"When you’ve created something really amazing, they’ll come find you. They [Hollywood] will come knocking down your door."

"You’ll make money in the long run if you stop giving a shit about money."

In its lawsuit against YouTube, "Viacom is defying the laws of the universe."

"Don’t aspire to be like ‘real TV.’ [Real TV is screwed up.] It’s all about maximizing profits. … [Junior executives are running around] trying to show their bosses that they’re 2010-compliant" and their network won’t die under the onslaught of Internet programming.

Rob Schrab, Harmon’s partner, who executive produced the Sarah Silverman Program for Comedy Central and executive produced Acceptable.tv for VH1, at the same keynote on not fixating on financial costs: "The universe will provide if you give it back."

Not long ago I appeared on a panel at UC Berkeley with Daniel Weintraub, who writes the California Insider political blog for the Sacramento Bee and a syndicated column on California politics. He’s well known as a mainstream journalist who has absorbed the ethos of the blogosphere. In this 6-minute video interview he  discusses transparency and mainstream media’s approach to blogging. We included the interview in the Principles of Citizen Journalism project.

Watch video in these formats:

QuickTime/MPEG-4

Windows Media

Flash

A while back I interviewed Mike Orren, editor/founder of the Dallas-based citizen media site Pegasus News. Mike offers a lot of wise advice in this 13-minute video interview in which he  discusses fairness, independence and other attributes that contribute to a quality citizen media site. Formats:

QuickTime/MPEG-4

Flash

Windows Media

Length: 13:48

Also see: Independence in journalism video at citmedia.org

Download MPEG-4 video (44.6 MB)

Cross-posted to Real People Network.