This is realtime, live blogging, so please forgive the typoes I am about to make and the broken links that I'll repair when you tell me about them.
David Weinberger, NPR commentator, a Cluetrain co-author and a founding father of blogging is keynoter. He is amazingly nattily dressed with suit and necktie. He demonstrates with great humor his short attention span in his talk, "Life after Broadcast" For centures, he tells us broadcast has dominated not just marketing but our entire culture. Now it is being put in it's appropriate place.
Social media is replacing it. Social media is not about content. User generated content is important but it is not THE THING. Broadcast likes everything to have its place, which happens to be the theme of his upcoming book, Everything is Miscellaneous. Broadcast decided where everything fit in culture, what would be our common knowledge
Marketing he says is the selective release of information. When did marketing become a verb, something you do to people, rather than with them? We force messages on people and people hate it. We have remote controls so we can turn them off. "We've been at war with customers for 100 years. Marketing terminology are the terms of war, strategy, penetration, etc."
He describes the tools of social media, about how they let eople find what they want and respond to it. He talks about how social media is about we are interested in--real conversations, not the articfial stilted ones of marketing or like when you laugh at your boss's bad jokes.
"Weblogs are what we care about." These are miscellaneous things if you go to Wikipedia you find such gems as how to deep fry a Mars Bar, things that the committee who decides what goes into Encyclopedia Britannica will probably never include. Yes, people care about cats and they want to write about them. people decide what tey write about, no one else decides. They decide what they read.
Blogging is not journalism, but there is a relationship. Bloggers write about what they read in newspapers and journalists use bloggers as sources. But something has happened. The editorial boards of middle aged white guys deciding what you will know, is coming to an end. It is being informalized by sites like Digg where people vote on what is important.
Sites a USA Today piece that shows how many readers gave thumbs up, but they don't report on thumbs down, eliminating what readers want the most--revenge. Blogging is much more democratic.
We read blogs with much greater forgiveness. We understand that blogs are not written perfectly. We forgive typos. We know the writers are human and fallible and blogs reflect that while marketing does not. We use links as little acts of kindness, we send people away because we think there's another place of value and marketing tries to capture you.
In blogging we try to make the world more complex. The web is a new public space and how often do you come across a new space. So now we are filling it up. The old authorities used to organize things to their best interests of selling you what they want you to buy. Now the power is going to them.
"Person to Person communications is much bigger than marketing. It is about making the world ours, again."
Bravo, David, Bravo.
