An Outstanding Day at Supernova

[3 Pioneers. (l-r) Doc Searls, David Weinberger & Jerry Michalski. Photos by Shel]

Note--This is sort of a personal diary.  If you want a more journalist and comprehensive view of what happened yesterday at Supernova, go read Sam Perry at Conferenza, the excellent executive conference reporting site.

I'm not certain why I've never attended a Supernova Conference. The event, produced by Kevin Werbach has had a sterling reputation since it started in the Palo Alto Holiday Inn back in 2002. It has experimented each year in interesting ways, and has always drawn prominent social media community members.

I went yesterday to Supernova "Challenge Day" held at the San Francisco branch of the Wharton School which turned out to be an excellent venue for panel presentations and old fashioned kind of social networking where you met people face to face.

I attended four panels and enjoyed each for different reasons.  I was late to the opener, which had Societe's Jerry Michalski moderating Cluetrain co-stars Doc Searls and David Weinberger, who talked about several of their favorite themes--personal  control of your personal data online, open source collaboration benefits and Doc's brilliant vision of an intention economy. I've seen these three industry pioneers more than a few times, yet I remain slightly in awe of their thinking and their presence. I wish I'd been able to get there earlier.

[Changing Forces of Advertising panelists, from left Ryan Freitas, AdaptivePath; Evan Williams, Twitter; Dick Costelloi, Feedburner.  Not shown--Tim Shelton, Technorati and Leszek Izdebski, Cisco. ]

I almost skipped the panel on the changing role of advertising, because such panels usually consist of a single voice of sanity being drowned out by slick white men in suits boasting about the better CRMs online than off and how they "get it" because they are moving their crap from the TV to the CRT. There's also the creative genius who explain how they had a professional cinematographer handhold a screen so that they could fool audiences on YouTube. 

But this panel featured people I knew by reputation and admired the companies they represented. Deb Schultz, who's calling herself a "customer advisor" these days moderated this panel asked some good questions then wisely stepped out of the way. Panelists produced a series of memorable thoughts and one liners.  Among them:

• Ted Shelton, whose Personal Bee was recently acquired by Technorati: "Advertising can no longer be about tricking people into having people ket their brands get into their heads." It's a good quote, but there seems to me to still be a whole lot of tricking going on.
• Peter Merholz, Adaptive Path—Sees  lots of fear among brands professionals about what's going to happen next. He later observed that brands can no longer be everywhere the conversation is being held.

• Evan Williams,  the always innovative founder of Twitter said that his team has not yet decided on how his wildly growing young company will incorporate advertising.  They are aware of lots of ways t could be done.  In the end they will offer up something that lets users opt in or out.  "There obviously has to be a user value or the users just won't opt in," he said.  He said Twitter will soon start experimenting with ads and ultimately his users will decide.
• Feedburner's Dick Costello, said his company provides analytics that helps marketers engage customers in new ways. He said Feedburner wanted to help bring into reality Doc Searls vision for an intention economy. He also noted that these are transitional times and what might work for Technorati might not yet work for Burger King.
• Leszek Izdebski of Cisco was a bit vague in what he did.  He said he helped companies look at how the ad industry is going to change and helps them adapt accordingly.

[Everyone's getting into the act.The tripod leg on the Podtech camera (left) is almost touching the Ustream livefeed camera. Less than 50 feet away sits Justin with a live feed camera on his hat. Three seats to the Podtech guy's left is Nir Ofir, founder of blog.tv. ]

A panel called "Making the Most of Video, "  moderated by  Howard Greenstein , featured Podtech's Robert Scoble who talked about how his handheld camera at Channel 9 started humanizing Microsoft by letting customers see real people doing their jobs with dedication. "People realized that we were a lot less evil than they thought we were."

Tim Tuttle founded Trivio, the web video search engine, that was acquired by AOL. He told the audience that Trivio is rapidly growing because web video is rapidly going mainstream and it has all happened since 2004 when web video consisted of two walled gardens, Yahoo Music and MSN Video. The biggest growth catlyst, he said came in 2005,when iTunes stated selling commercial TV programs.

But what was really interesting at this talk was the number of cameras that had pervaded the audience, at least one, the Ustream camera was live streaming the event worldwide. By my count there were eight cameras, most of them tiny and unobtrusive. As panelists talked about how viudeo was changing the world, members of the audience were using video to actually change it, just a little bit.  I imagine the day will soon come when citizen video reporting will hardly be worth a text bloggers notice.

[From the top down.  Political panel did not seem to think much of having conversations with voters.]

I only attended Rewiring Politics, because its host JD Lasica had invited me to "come in and stir things up," an invite to which I could not refuse.  Julius Genachowski, a personal friend of barak Obama's talked about how people had come to the Obama website and formed 5000 groups who had held 10,000 meetings attende by 50,000 people all pretty much ad hoc. He said the Obama campaign had raised millions from its site, with 90% coming from contributors of $100 or less. Andrew Rasiej of the Personal Democracy Forum described his Sunshine Project which is intended to let the public see what its Congress is doing and what it has on record.  Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger from Harvard's Kennedy School seemed most passionate about explaing why political campaigns in the world's largest democracy must be run in top down fashion.

I expressed my frustration that none of the three speakers had even brushed on the thought that the social media they were using to deliver messages and raise funs were not being used to open conversations with voters.  Very little listening was done. I complained that I had emiled the Obama campaign three times and three times got the same email saying that they are being overwhelmed by email. It is my ersonal belief that campaigns that cannot talk with voters are likely to become governments that don't listen to citizens.

In short, I went in to stir things up, and I walked out all stirred up myself.  What fun.

I enjoyed the reception greatly balancing catching up with old friends with meeting new ones. I got to talk at length with David Weinberger , who was autographing his new and excellent new book, Everything is Miscellaneous and fantasized that at Supernova next year that would be me autographing my currently on hold--Global Neighborhoods.

Comments

[deb schultz]

Great liveblogging Shel. Actually - "customer advocate" was what i put on the tag.

[Andrew Crow]

The image above is actually Ryan Freitas from Adaptive Path, not Peter. Peter was unable to make it, so Ryan stood in.

[shel israel]

Thanks Andrew, I made the correction.

[BJ Fogg]

Thanks, Shel, for an interesting report. I wasn't able to attend, and this made me wish I had. But at least I got your POV.

BJ