Are blogs destined for the grave? (courtesy of Greg Ortega)
Are blogs heading the way of the Dodo? Or would they be here for the long haul?
Here is an extension of Steve Rubel’s thoughts on whether our obsession with newer and more summarised all-in-one platforms may lead to the demise of the beloved blog. As usual, he gave a no-holds-barred analysis of the situation coupled with his usual whimsical touch.
Podtech.net’s Jeremiah Owyang with The Digital Movement’s founder Steve Ng
At the recent iX-TDM New Media Forum, I had the privilege of meeting and hearing from Jeremiah Owyang. The director of corporate media strategy at Podtech.net, Jeremiah is a social media consultant to big guns like HP, Cisco and Hitachi. In his session, he spoke about trends and developments in the social media space.
Jeremiah started by explaining fundamental concepts. Companies need to shift their strategies and mindsets to look at harnessing all employees – not just corporate communicators (like yours truly… ha) – to be advocates.
Apparently, I was (faint) according to the cool folks at the Digital Movement. They apparently liked my 5 parter on Nexus 2007 so much that they have given me a free T-shirt for Best Coverage Award. Wow!
Thanks for the cool accolade folks. I really appreciate it and I think that you guys are doing a swell job too. Keep it up! The future is bright for Singapore 2.0!
Inspirational IT-preneurs sharing war stories
The final session at Nexus 2007 saw three eminent entrepreneurs in the technology field sharing their tales of passion, zeal and fervour in changing the world.
The three occupied very different tech niches. Farzad Naimi’s Litescape looked at integrating business applications, voice and data, allowing greater real-time collaboration on any device. Roberto Mariani’s XiD Technologies, on the other hand, was largely involved in face recognition and other biometric systems. And of course, crowd favourite Cory Ondrejka was one of the guys responsible for the hugely successful Second Life, a virtual world largely owned by its users.
The third session at Nexus 2007, “The Future of the Web”, was led by a fascinating presentation by Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist of Amazon.com. He spoke about Chris Anderson’s Long Tail (Wired magazine, Oct 2004) as well as the following futures:
Future of the individual – From e-business to me-business, and from eco-system to ego-system.
Recently tackled as part of Nexus 2007, “Crowdsourcing the Media” looked at how citizen journalism was changing the dynamics of the media landscape. It saw social media provocateur Kevin Lim moderating a session with online media luminaries Kathy Teo of CNET Networks, Jennifer Lewis of SPH‘s STOMP, and James Seng, Editor extraordinaire of tomorrow.sg (Left to right above).
Discussions centred around citizen journalism and its various forms (youtube, wikipedia etc) and included fascinating insights into how CNET and STOMP operated. As Jennifer puts it, there tend to be more “loser-generated” rather than “user-generated” content, and she does get her fair share of junk being MMS-ed and SMS-ed to her via 75557.
After hearing my fellow media socialists Kevin, Benjamin, Ivan, Siva, Coleman, Preetam and Vanessa talk about Nexus 2007, I decided that I simply had to check it out for myself. And boy was it a blast!
Before going into the heavy stuff, let me share some photos and tongue-in-cheek observations about what Nexus 2007 is all about.
Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba has created the 4 Fs of citizen marketers. This is an elegant idea which distills some of the types of bloggers and new media activists you find in the blogosphere.