Syndicate conference explores the technologies at the heart of next-generation media

By Mike Faden - May 12, 2005

By Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher

Seminar Lecturer.jpg
IDG's Syndicate conference this week in New York will explore the business cases for RSS, the syndication technology at the heart of these next generation media technologies such as blogging.

Richard Koman and I will be blogging live from the show, and I will be moderating two panels. I am not boasting but stating a simple fact when I say I have the best two panels at the show bar none. More on this in a bit…

Tom Mahr, one of Syndicate's organizers, tells me conference reservations are going through the roof. We might have to turn people away, the response has been just incredible within the past couple of weeks, he says. More than 30 media have registered.

Take a look at the lineup for my two panels:
[This is from Syndicate, but the comments in square brackets are mine.]

Panel 1: Enterprise Syndication Using RSS


Moderator:
Tom Foremski, Founder, Silicon Valley Watcher.

Speakers:
Ross Mayfield, CEO and Co-Founder, Socialtext.
[Ross is one of the pioneers of corporate uses for wikis. He is also an excellent blogger and a natural journalist. I ran into Ross Tuesday evening and congratulated him on his recent Series B funding and apologized that I didn't get a chance to blog it. That's fine, he smiled, I blogged it myself, he said. Sad but true, I think to myself. We hacks are going by the wayside, who needs us when you can be your own news service ;-) Ross gets a ton of traffic at his blog because he is an excellent writer and doesn’t hoard his ideas.]

David Schatsky, Senior Vice President of Research, Jupiter Research.
[I don't think I've met David but I've seen some his research notes and I'm looking forward to his take on things.]

Michael Terner, President & CEO, KnowNow.
[Michael is the one that invited me to moderate this panel and he is a real survivor, having come through the dotbomb and refocused the company to take early advantage of RSS technologies and applications. KnowNow have recently been working with enterprises and crafting custom RSS newsreaders for each company's employees. Apparently, this saves enterprises a ton of money on email costs, something which surprised me.]

Dr. Paul Kedrosky, Director, William von Liebig Center, University of California at San Diego. I spoke with Paul over the phone and he was saying some interesting things from his work in academia.


Panel 2:

05/18/2005, 12:00 PM - 12:45 PM
Moderator:
Tom Foremski, Founder, Silicon Valley Watcher.

Speakers:
Robert Scoble, Technical Evangelist Platform Evangelism, Microsoft Research.
[I'm looking forward to meeting this A plus list blogger, author of the hugely popular blog Scobleizer. Robert is nearly as famous as Bill Gates!]

Fergus Burns, CEO, Nooked.
[Fergus asked me to moderate and he also recently became a sponsor of SVW, we are hosting his RSS directory search box (top left corner of home page, give it a click!) I don't have to say nice things about Fergus, but I will. I ran into Fergus earlier in the year, at the very excellent New Communications Forum conference, and we hit it off right away. Fergus is an ex-Microsoft exec who got out five years ago and is running one of the leading European RSS enterprise tech and services companies. He might be soft spoken but he's got that tenacious, stubborn, Microsoft culture, with that determination to win, built into his psyche. And I know for a fact that there is something killer coming out of Nooked very soon. No need to tell you, gentle reader, that you'll be the first to know.]

David Galbraith, Founder, Wists.com.
[One of my good buddies and co-founder of news aggregator MoreOver.com with Nick Denton, now founder of Gawker Media (BTW don't mention "empire" to Nick, as in Gawker... American and others are fine.) Dave is a co-author of RSS 1.0. He and his partner Justine moved to NYC just very recently, from San Francisco and I'm looking forward to catching up with them and crashing on his floor(!)

David Dunne, EVP, Director Worldwide Operations, Interactive Solutions, Edelman.
[I haven't met David, but Jeremy Pepper, who organized this panel rates him. This is high recommendation because Jeremy generally has few good words to say about anybody, and the few he has, he saves up for his mom's birthday.]

Charlene Li, Principal Analyst, Devices, Media, and Marketing, Forrester Research.
[What can I say? Charlene is the "man" when it comes to analysis of the super red-hot online advertising and marketing sectors… Did you see her recent research on internet use displacing TV and how little is spent on online advertising? Wow. Triple wow. Take a look: Cnet News.com Online advertising on upswing.]

See the full Speaker list


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By Mike Faden - May 12, 2005 | Permalink | Category: RSS Watch
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