The simultaneous, cross-continent Future of Media summit was held today by the Future Exploration Network. Media folk in Silicon Valley and Sydney participated in pan-Pacific panels and roundtable discussions on predictions of Media’s future. The Twitter backchannel was very active as usual. A good train of consciousness summary can be found at Summize.

Future of Media report

First up was Ross Dawson, beamed in live from Silicon Valley to cover off the highlights of the Future of Media 2008 Report.  The report highlights seven driving forces shaping Media:

1. Increasing Media Consumption
2. Fragmentation
3. Participation
4. Personalisation
5. New Revenue Models
6. Generational Change
7. Increasing Bandwidth

The Future of Media Lifecycle with a “Personal Cloud”, “Precipitation of Participation” and “Diffusion of Memes” provides an interesting visualisation of Media.

Future of TV and Video panel

Panelists:

• Mark Goldman, COO, Current TV
• Mark Antonitis, President and General Manager, KRON-TV
• Bruce Meagher, Director, Strategy and Communications, SBS
• Mark Pesce, Founder, FutureSt Consulting

Notes:

Mark Antonitis provided a lively discussion of his vision of media - to make money via world domination.  He obviously has a wealth of commercial experience in (traditional) media, but is perhaps still playing by the traditional playbook.  The basic synopsis of his strategy is media commoditisation: producing the most content at the minimum quality in the cheapest way. He also asserted that combining and editing content was more valuable than the typical User Generated Content production.  The Twitter backchannel disapproved.

He went on to say “you have to have an editor, somebody overseeing the process, a quality control system, to provide a singular view by a person or organisation that’s consumable by you.”  More of the Old Media command and control mindset.

Mark Pesce provided a rebuttal to this with the visceral example that “the watercooler effect is dead”. He says there is a transition from time-based aggregation to salience-based aggregation, based on reputation and relationships.  Mull those deep insights over for a while.

One interesting point that Mark Antonitis made was that one of the values provided by Mainstream Media (MSM) is “discovering things I didn’t know I should care about.”  That’s a fair point, and a common problem for recommendation engines, restricting views vs broadening them.  But there are social media tools including Twitter, Google News and FriendFeed that are just as useful and in many cases more useful for this discovery.

Future of Privacy and Personalised Advertising panels

Panelists:

• Jason White, Vice President of Media and Operations, Traffic Marketplace
• Jenny Williams, Director, Ideagarden
• Shannon Clark, Founder, Nearness Function
• Chris Saad, Chair, DataPortability.org and CEO, Faraday Media

Notes:

Chris Saad started by covering the DataPortability angle, observing that “people own their data, but they don’t have control over it.” There was general discussion around permission-based, highly relevant advertising. Chris also discussed the concept of vendor relationship management.  The discussion from the panel sounded a whole lot like PureProfile.

Global Media Strategies

Panelists:

• Willie Pang, Head of Yahoo! Search Marketing, Australia and New Zealand
• Chris Tolles, CEO & Co-Founder, Topix
• Loic Le Meur, CEO, Seesmic
• Craig Blair, Executive Director, netus

Notes:

Chris Tolles gave a very interesting talk about Topix. They’re apparently an enemy of the state in Zimbabwe according to Chris.  He said they are big in Des Moines and are focussed on hyperlocal conversations.

Loic Le Meur of Seesmic then delivered an entertaining discussion of the differences between Northern Europeans (heavy wikipedia usage, low blogging) compared to Southern Europeans (high ego-driven blogging activity). He also observed that you can’t just try to translate US tools to all parts of Europe.

On monetisation and strategy, Chris Tolles observed that the big advertising dollars are in the US, saying “whoever dominates the US first, wins. Very important in terms of advertising dollars.”

Ross Dawson provided some statistics that highlighted that the United Kingdom has highest per capita advertising spending, with Aus #2 and United States #4.

Talk turned to China and India.  Most of the panelists observed that it will be very difficult for western companies to make an serious money in China (good luck, Seek and Sensis).  Shannon Clark from the audience (and on Twitter) noted that at Supernova2008 he met someone from a Chinese firm with 25+ million active users and was ad supported via Chinese-sourced ads.

Craig Blair observed that it was possible to build a billion dollar business in Australia by partnering with an overseas company and bringing the idea into Australia.

Future of Journalism panel

Panelists:

• Jane Schulze, Media Editor, The Australian
• Hugh Martin, General Manager, APN Online
• Jonthan Este, Communications Director, Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance
• Stephen Quinn, Associate Professor, Deakin University
• Robert Scoble, Managing Director, Fast Company TV

Notes:

A typical MSM-centric conversation, led by Jane Schulze provided to be very unpopular on the Twitter backchannel.  The basis of her argument was that bloggers weren’t good enough to “do journalism” and real journalists didn’t want to be labelled as bloggers.  Interesting, but have you checked out, oh I don’t know your own employer’s Blogs section (40 blogs)?  Your competition’s Blog section (no fewer than 24 blogs)?

The Business Spectator and Crikey were raised as examples of people (Alan Kohler, Robert Gottliebsen, et al in the first instance and Stephen Mayne and Eric Beecher & co in the second) building strong brands for themselves online.

Predictions for the Future of Media CEO panel

Panelists:

• Angelos Frangolopoulos, CEO, Australian News Channel
• Wendy Hogan, Managing Director, CNET Australia
• Mark Scott, Managing Director, ABC
• Belinda Rowe, CEO, Zenith Optimedia

Notes:

The final panel of the formal conference section of the summit began with Wendy Hogan noting (in counter point to Jane Schulze earlier) that CNET employs many journalists, for online only, who blog.

Mark Scott talked about the ABC’s digital strategy and pulled on examples from the BBC. Favourite quote: “We don’t talk much about monetisation at the ABC…it makes people nervous.”

Other coverage

Other early coverage available here:

• Gavin Heaton
• Ben Barren

Many others will no doubt be posting, once the after-drinks have worn off