What Have We Learned?:

It is hard to sum up a conference like iSummit, and I certainly won’t try to summarize the various speakers – which is better done at the iSummit blog and at Gagglescape. I will try to synthesize the most remarkable of what I heard and try to put it into context with my own perspective. Other delegates will surely have very different takes on the conference, but hopefully this might kick off a post-iSummit conversation.

(Comments and trackbacks are open, and I will suggest posting or bookmarking using the tag iSummit on flickr, technorati or del.icio.us)

A Review of Findings:

1. the digital content world is changing rapidly (no surprise there)
2. an emerging world of open network social media is colliding with mainstream media brands, copyright and closed network business models
3. this moment in history may represent a transition period between two different socio-cultural periods
4. the old forms of media will not disappear, but will be profoundly affected
5. technology is changing the human experience of all media, the structures and dynamics of social and business relationships, the human experience of culture and the opportunities for innovation and human cultural and creative expression
6. in this new open network social media world, the content is not king, the audience is king: it is their attention and their money, after all, that creators are seeking as rewards for their cultural expressions in a market where the playing field has been dramatically leveled
7. the only difference now is that the audience has tools to disintermediate the value chain if any intermediary puts up too many barriers between the audience and content it finds compelling
8. this is threatening and frightening to many in the traditional media content industries and those whose job it is to edit, filter, distribute, manage or otherwise mediate this value chain

The open network social media future has been envisioned for years, since the creation of the web in 1991 and certainly gained steam since the Cluetrain Manifesto in 1999, but lay somewhat dormant during the dot-com bust as social media (blogs) emerged in 2001. The open participatory society has been predicted for a long-time. But the rate of change has been accelerating and a critical mass of inter-related technologies is building. Some of the important technology-related shifts that are driving towards this critical mass include:

• broadband penetration
• mobile net ubiquity
• commoditized processing power and storage
• super-efficient development tools like Ruby on Rails, techniques like Ajax and standards like RSS (”Web 2.0″)
• the social experience of the web through MySpace, flickr, blogs, YouTube, Second Life and World of Warcraft
• the mobile experience of media and the web bringing an always-on entertainment and information culture

Some of the visible collision points of these two different waves of history can be witnessed in multiple domains:

• open network vs. closed networks
• passive vs. participative audiences
• mainstream media vs. social media
• web 1.0 vs. web 2.0 tools
• interruption advertising vs. attention economy
• advertiser and content-centric vs. audience and user-centric strategic orientations
• Canadian content in domestic markets vs niche content in global long-tail markets
• Boomers vs. Millennials: the boomers own the content, their children live in the social media world

These collisions are important early indicators of a big global shift, from an industrial/information economy to a network economy of ideas. Where are we? Is this another bubble? I think the image projected behind every panel discussion at iSummit tells the story: what we are looking at is the tip of an iceberg that none of us on our own can fully comprehend.

The elephant in the room, the questions on everyone’s lips were: What do we do? Where are the business models? What should we as a company or I as a creative professional, DO? Nobody had a complete answer for that, although many good examples were provided of money being made, business models being developed, startups being acquired and deals being struck. My thoughts after the jump…

Technorati Tags: Canada, Creativity, Innovation, iSummit, media, mesh06, meshconference, network_economics, Ontario, social media tools, socialmedia, socialweb, Toronto, Web2.0

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Liveblogging from iSummit: Read David Crow now. Read Jerry King’s comment here.

I’m participating in the iSummit wrap panel in a few minutes….more reflections on iSummit soon.

Technorati Tags: democamp, iSummit, torcamp

Tom Purves is up and blogging. Since meeting Tom at TorCampDesignSlam I have found him to be very sharp, articulate and insightful. Add him to your newsreader.

Technorati Tags: torcamp

I’m in the audience at iSummit, taking copious notes. Fascinating discussion, big issues, big changes. Follow the action at Gagglescape:

Technorati Tags: iSummit, Toronto

What a fantastic night at DemoCamp. The biggest room ever, in MaRS super high-tech collaboration centre, was pretty much filled up with 150 hungry DemoCampers. Many thanks to MaRS for supporting the community and providing their amazing facility. There is a feeling of a happening in the room. Most importantly, the community is meeting each other and creative sparks are flying all over the place.

We had some really great demos, including DemoCamp favourites Idee with visual search and several newcomers. Semacode is doing interesting things with camera-phone readable 3D 2D matrix barcodes that automatically link to URLs via your mobile’s wireless internet connection. I can imagine many interesting applications in the advertising space for their approach. Questionville is exploring social knowledge through public ranking of answers. Outmailer is exploring the latest releases of Ruby on Rails to stay on top of agile lightweight coding. The importance of Ruby is just becoming clear to me as a non-coding strategy nerd. The development efficiency demonstrates the radical reduction in the barriers to entry that Ruby brings to any web software product space.

We really have to start making clear that DemoCamp is first and foremost about technology and creativity; sharing techniques and ideas as demonstrated by and for the community. It is not the Canadian Venture Forum, and it shouldn’t become so. The depths of this critical difference were made abundantly clear when our regular recovering-VC participant asked a ridiculous question about business model of a fabulously obsessed hacker who is breaking into proprietary cheap disposable digital cameras. Huh? It’s a hack! Why do it? Because you can! The creative instinct is a strange and wonderful beast, and it should be respected however it manifests itself. Reverse engineering is an act of creative destruction and can be a source of innovation.

I’d like to comment about Josh’s Tag-Engine, but I don’t understand it. It looks like he put a lot of work into it, but I wasn’t getting the point. Something about templates for content development, but again I’m no coder. Strategy nerds should stick to what they know.

Technorati Tags: democamp, torcamp