Yesterday was a full day at Nexus 2007, a web 2.0 / entrepreneur / technology conference organised by The Digital movement. I must say it was one of the better organised events I’ve been to even though it was put together by volunteers who are mostly university students.
Although the speaker line up included Nathan Torkington (O’Reilly) and Cory Ondrejka (Linden Labs), I learned the most from a fellow Singaporean: the blogger known as ClappingTrees.
This happened in a panel discussion hosted by Kevin which included Kathy Teo (CNET Asia), Jennifer Lewis (STOMP), James Seng (Tomorrow.SG). As the discussions went on about crowdsourcing the media, I began to wonder why the distributed nature of free content creation was embraced, but gatekeeping was left to a bunch of editors… Then came ClappingTrees to the mic and spoke the words that were on my mind.
The question (paraphrased) was basically: In a world of social gatekeeping (think digg), why do the above crowdsourcing media qualify as gatekeepers of content that’s not even theirs?
These media are clearly playing it the old school way wishing to set the agenda for their readers through “representative” gatekeeping. Even sprouting terms such as “loser-generated content”. I thought this was really odd considering the next session of the conference discusses Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail concept. Sure there would be crap out there, but maybe that “crap” has one or two fans? Why cut short the long tail with old school editorial gatekeeping?
To be fair, Tomorrow.SG did contemplate going digg-style and there is also Ping.sg (which I totally support), but it hasn’t got critical mass yet.
After the session, I did mention to Kevin that it’s not only the digg-style that could work here but StumbleUpon which achieves the similar social filtering with a less competitive interface. There are plenty of methods out there and possibly more that have not been thought of yet, but for now, I’m siding with ClappingTrees and believe if we’re going to aggregate the social media, let’s have social gatekeeping too.
Other obvious observations and occurrences:
- WiFi at conferences with more than 100 people never work. Had to use GPRS (can’t wait for my HSDPA phone!)
- Live chat on projector screens during the conference is an awesome idea, but the Twitter feeds and Flickr set wasn’t displayed in the auditorium, I guess it’s hard to get 3 big screens, ya?
- Ivan suggested uploading porn and tagging it “nexus2007″ on Flickr.
- Everytime I saw Coleman, he was eating.
Filed under: Social Media, Technology
Coleman was eating? I noticed that Coleman only appeared whenever there were hot chicks around…
Ivan can do so but it can be filtered out from ourside even if Flickr didn’t.
Ben, I only made a suggestion. I think you actually wanted to do it! Kidding.