The further life of a blogger: Moderating two celebrity panels at Syndicate
...Part three of a bloggerific week in NYC
Wednesday May 18 was my big day at the Syndicate conference in New York. I started off moderating an early-morning panel with Michael Terner, CEO of KnowNow, the RSS corporate services company, and Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText, the corporate wiki company.
Dr. Paul Kedrosky of the University of California and David Schatsky, senior vp at Jupiter Research, talked about how enterprises are using blogging, wiki and RSS technologies to publish to their employees and business partners. Paul made a good point that corporations are loathe to hire editorial staff because they want to keep headcount low - but they are already publishers of information internally and externally.
Strangely, this is one of the only Syndicate sessions that looks at corporate use of these media technologies, and it is well attended. The time flies by and I have to wrap things up. At the end, a large bunch of people rush the podium for more information. Not a bad panel all in all; only one person escaped early, and I saw only one dozer!
Lunchtime super-panel
My lunchtime panel, which was sponsored by the European RSS corporate services company Nooked (an SVW sponsor), was a lot livelier. Jeremy Pepper of Pop! PR helped organize an excellent panel and we had uber-blogger Robert Scoble of Microsoft; John Udell, formerly of Byte and now of InfoWorld; Charlene Li, Forrester's superstar analyst; David Dunne, EVP, Director Worldwide Operations at PR leader Edelman; and my buddy David Galbraith, co-author of RSS 1.0 and now with his post-MoreOver.com project: Wists.com.
Fergus Burn, CEO of Nooked introduced the panel. I skip the bios and launch the group right into the thick of things on the topic of future scenarios for RSS. They respond with gusto, they are animated, happy to play devil's advocate with each other, and responsive to my interruptions and occasional attempts at humor.
Again, the session flies by and I can barely remember what was said, other than the fact that Robert Scoble reads/scans through 1340-plus RSS feeds. But they have to be full-content feeds, otherwise they get zapped.
Charlene says her heavy travel schedule means she is away from her young children a lot, and so she has created a private blog in which she can communicate with her kids.
At the end of the panel I remember to announce our launch of ionRSS.com:reporting on the business of RSS, edited by RSS guru Richard MacManus.
Is Google stomping on or validating the RSS ad market?
Later in the afternoon I chat with Bill Flitter of Pheedo about Google's announcement of AdSense for Feeds. I joke that this “validates” the market.
The validation argument is a common take by companies in response to the entry of a much larger competitor to their markets. But Bill might have a point, and at least a few months of grace: “Placing ads in RSS feeds is actually a better place to advertise because it gets to more readers, but few advertisers realize this yet. Now with Google validating this market the phones are ringing off the hook.”
Coming soon: Find out what happened the previous day at the conference, and why all the A-list bloggers and Internet pioneers at Syndicate were at the Nooked dinner...
