The conference was just kicked off by Dave McClure, and Charlene Li and Amit Kapur gave good talks. I’m Twittering here as things go along. I liked this first slide Dave used. Will also post a lot of others on Flickr. 
Category: Conferences/Events (Page 46 of 80)
Tomorrow morning early, I’m jumping on the 5 here in San Clemente and driving south an hour to downtown San Diego for O’Reilly’s Graphing Social Patterns conference. I’m looking forward to a great two-day program. 
Here’s the main page for the Facebook Group, which 200 people for far have joined saying they’re attending, and 81 more are "maybes." The event is being held in conjunction with O’Reilly’s ETech conference, which draws an even larger crowd. It also starts tomorrow (Monday, March 3), but it goes through Thursday. This will be about the third or fourth ETech I’ve atended, including the 2007 edition, for which I wrote this Conferenza review. It’s a geekfest of the highest order, and I’ll be attending through end of day Wednesday. So, two days GSP and one day ETech, and the evening events are common for both conferences. If you’re attending either one, I look forward to meeting.
I attended an event Monday night sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists/MN Chapter, billed as "New Media, New Standards? Ethics in Online Journalism." It was held at the very impressive MPR facility in downtown St. Paul, and I was surprised to see about 200 people showed up. 
It was mostly members of the local traditional media — reporters, editors, producers, etc — and I’d say it skewed toward senior-level people. There were some academics in the audience, too. And I’d estimate a good 30 to 40 of us independent bloggers came out as well, even though we weren’t really actively invited (to my knowledge, anyway). The event was open to the public, and I actually learned about it from the featured speaker, Dan Gillmor. I just happened to notice on his blog that he had Minneapolis listed in his upcoming travel plans, so I asked him was that was about. Dan was the main reason I wanted to be there, because I have a lot of respect for the man. I’ve met him on a couple of occasions, most recently at DEMO in January, and I always enjoy reading his columns in PR Week.
I Twittered live from the event here (scroll down to a series of posts dated February 25). But I thought I’d also do a little followup post here, as I realized there were three very important takeaways from this event that deserved calling out (and all three confirmed my own suspicions):
1) The New York Times is in state of bigtime decline. Gillmor says the Times "screwed up" on the McCain insinuation story. "They’ll pay for it, and I’m most disappointed they still aren’t admitting it." How many occurrences of editorial screwups do people need to see from this paper to realize it’s dying? And the fact that Marc Andreessen has declared a "NY Times deathwatch" on his blog is only more evidence of that. Of course, his argument is more from a business standpoint, since they’ve become the best example of the dying newspaper business model. But, for me, the combination of Andreessen’s call and Gillmor’s shock at their editorial demise is enough. Stick a fork in it.
2) Transparency. Dan said bloggers understand and practice it, but traditional journalists
don’t. I was heartened by Gillmor breaking this to the audience (not that they shouldn’t have known it already). I started what I think was one of the best discussions of transparency way back in November 2006, when Mark Glaser picked up on something I said and posted about it on his very well respected MediaShift blog at PBS.org. I spoke my piece pretty well there. I’m starting to realize that the fact the mainstream media is widely perceived as biased may largely be due to its journalists not being
transparent as individuals, about their own biases, whether by choice or
because their employers’ policies don’t require them to be. But, net-net, because Dan Gillmor pointed this out, I’m gathering that this
notion of transparency still hasn’t sunk in with the traditional media crowd.
3) Readers are smarter than writers. I’ve heard Dan allude to this before. But I think it merits more attention. He said he first realized this early in his career as a technology writer for the San Jose Mercury News. And it certainly applies to the world of blogging, he said. But he also said that doesn’t mean commenters can be rude or obnoxious. Civil behavior must still be the rule. "Your blog is your living room, and you have every right to not let people come in and spit on your rug." Right on, Dan.
Howard Reingold put up an interesting list of reasons why he’s hooked on Twitter. My friend David Weinberger, another a-lister, then added a few more. I’ll add one they forgot: because it makes people feel important, that they’re part of something cool, the latest fad.
Microblogging-phenom Twitter took off like a rocket last year at the SXSW conference because the a-listers grabbed onto it, and then everybody who wanted to be like the a-listers, or see what they were talking about, jumped on.
The Twitter hype resulting from last year’s SXSW was almost deafening. I know many people tried it and later dropped it — but, as that same post says, people have discovered, after all the hype, that it’s actually a pretty cool way of staying in touch with your own circle of friends. (Include me in that camp — follow me on Twitter here.) And here’s the key: you can do it without having to answer. You got it — it’s a lurker’s dream come true!
But what will happen with Twitter at this year’s SXSW? Here’s a post that makes a case for Twitter hitting a million users by March, or possibly even sooner, before SXSW even gets underway. That’s a whole lot more than a-listers, folks. Twitter’s come a heck of a long way.
But will it still be "the thing to do" at this year’s event? Will all the cool kids still be using it so heavily? Or will some new, even-more-cool tool overshadow it? The beat goes on. I’ve already gotten one email pitch from some company saying they think they can be the Twitter of this year’s SXSW. I say good luck.
Twitter, whether it has SXSW mojo this year or not, seems to be crossing into mainstream use. Now if they can only figure out a way to make money, huh?
Time for my traditional waltz through the business card stack from the DEMO conference last week in Palm Desert. Besides, I need something to do on the plane home. I always meet so many interesting people at these events, and this one was certainly no exception. The mood is so upbeat at DEMO, the energy level so high! I mean, 77 companies launching, and probably a half a dozen people in attendance from each firm on average (counting a PR rep and many times an investor or board member or two) — all higher than a kite, ready to tell anyone who’ll listen about their red-hot new company! 
On top of that, a press contingent of about 80 is wandering about, not to speak of a whole slew of VCs, angels, and corporate investors and biz dev people. I collect a lot of business cards from these folks, even though I’m quite busy most of the time, attending every session — nose to the Macbook and/or iPhone blogging or Twittering.
Before I get to the new folks I met, here are some of the folks I ran into again whom I already knew or had met previously (alphabetically by last name):
– Stewart Alsop, VC, Alsop-Louie Partners (and the original founder of DEMO)
– Renee Blodgett, Blodgett Communications (for SpeakLike and Toktumi)
– Gary Bolles, now CEO of new startup Xigi.biz
– Katie Boehret, Technology Reporter, Wall Street Journal
– Kevin Dorren. now Chairman, HubDub
– Dan Farber, VP Editorial, ZDnet
– Mike Garity, VP, Network World Conferences
– Dan Gillmor, Journalist, Author, Angel Investor (one is Seesmic)
– Paula Gould, PEG PR (for Delver)
– Shel Israel, Blogger/Author, now FastCompany’s Global Neighbourhood TV guy
– Steve Larsen, CEO, Krugle
– Erica Lee, StrategicLee (for DEMO)
– Walt Mossberg, Technology Reporter, Wall Street Journal
– Rafe Needleman, Editor, CNet, and Chief Blogger, Webware.com
– Keith Shaw, Editor, Network World
– Chris Shipley, Executive Producer, DEMO
– Becky Sniffen, MC2 Communications (for DEMO)
– Brian Solis, Founder, Future-Works PR
– Don Thorson, now VP Marketing, Ribbit
The pix on this page are just a couple random shots. Here’s my complete DEMO ’08 Flickr set.
And now for the new people I met — at least those I got a business card from (again alphabetically by last name):
– Liad Agmon, CEO, Delver
– Michael Bogart, The Bogart Group (who does the production of DEMO)
– Bill Bryant, Board Advisor for both Blist and Liquid Planner
– Terra Carmichael, SutherlandGold Group PR
– Jinnan Cai, Cofounder/VP-Prod Dev, Buska (Perth, Australia)
– Gerry Caulfield, Lead Technology Engineer, Buska (Perth, Australia)
– Kirk Chen, Cofounder/Product Architect, iLeonardo
– Matt Clark, AE, Lotus PR (for Catalyst Web)
– Sanford Cohen, CEO, SpeakLike
– Mike Dever, CEO, YouChoose.net
– Nigel Eccles, Chief News Junkie, HubDub (Edinburgh, Scotland)
– Quentin Hardy, Silicon Valley Bureau Manager, Forbes
– Patrick Harr, CEO, Nirvanix
– Linda Huang, VP Marketing & Sales, Santrum
– Ryo Koyama, CEO, Yoics
– Miiko Mentz, Future-Works PR (for HubDub)
– Melinda Meggyesy, Online Community Manager, LiquidPlanner
– Dave Merkel, VP Products, Mandiant
– Yannis Papakonstantinou, Cofounder, App2You.com
– Stephanie Rice, Sr AE, Ruder Finn West
– Michelle Schafer, Acct Supervisor, Merritt Group PR (for Mandiant)
– Robert Schettino, Marketing, iVideoSongs.com
– Dan Seyer, VP Product Management, Ribbit
– Carnet Williams, CEO, SproutBuilder.com
Once again, it was great meeting all of you! I thought it was a particularly good DEMO, and I was excited about the quality of the startups presenting. I hope to hear again from you folks I met at the event. Stay in touch! For more, see this index page of my coverage of DEMO 08 on this blog, and even more on Twitter, plus my DEMO 08 photo set on Flickr.
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