WeMedia. Thoughts and Pix
February 10, 2007
Since my last visit with the WeMedia team, things are different. In an important way.

It's changed. the WE in WeMEDIA got bigger, the 'MEDIA', got smaller. Or more intimate, more more focused. Not sure which.

Photo: WeMedia founders Dale Peskin and Andrew Nachison. (by JD Lasica) Maybe the best person I caught up with was JD Lasica, who's been the best early warning radar in the space anyone could have. He was writing about UNfiltered for AJR back in '97, and really build OurMedia long before YouTube took off. Here's a picture from his flickr page of us at lunch:

The closest thing to a 'star' of the conference was Craig Newmark, who said absolutely nothing - but did so with a sly smile and charm. The fact that Craig's list is the 800 pound gorilla doesn't mean that it will become a community news company. In fact, it probably is exactly what it should be right now. But someone - will create a craigs list for local news. And it won't come out of the think tanks or the media company development labs. There's just too much talk about 'trust' and 'training' and 'good journalism' and thing that seem quaint and oddly out of step. My friend Shelly Palmer and I had breakfast before i went to we media - and he told me with absolute confidence that he only wants to engage with companies that are - to quote him "Playing with live ammo." I flinched for a second when he said it, mostly because of Iraq being on my mind, but that aside he's right of course. Trying things, giving visitors tools, letting the new bandwidth and platforms find their way in the world is what it's all about. Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, and Magnify.net are all learning a ton from letting people play with their services. Heck, Facebook got slapped silly when it added some features that it's users didn't want. So live ammo is where it's at.

Which brings me back to WE media. Here's JD's Photo Set There were some folks doing interesting things - for sure. But Robin Miller (aka RobLimo) kind of put it all in perspective in this clip from Andy Carvin -

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A brief discussion on humanity's two oldest forms of recreation, as told by Robin Miller, aka Roblimo. Robin is a former Vietnam vet and NYC taxi driver; he's also the editor of Slashdot. -andy

But still - on newspaper side in particular, there's lots of hand wringing and MBAs doing studies. Guys - those times are so over. It's time to get in the game. It's time to start learning - and stop guessing. That's why i admire what the Weather Channel is doing. Heck, they've got folks submitting videos. They're inviting people to play. And they've got folks like Wild Bill who are going to tell the weather his way.

My Pal, and Magnify advisory board member - Alan Weber was there.

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He's been working on his next thing, and we finally had a chance to sit down and hear the whole pitch. Wow. I'm in. He ran a great panel (blogged earlier) on funding and such. Boy, the lesson is that there are no models yet. Thats for sure.

Thursday night i sat on a panel about community media, moderated by Lauren Cornell of Rhizome.org. My long time friend and OurMedia founder JD Lasica was on there as well as Christine from HappySlip and the team from Umiami who's working some fiction video site concepts. It was really interesting to be talking about filmmaking and storytelling rather than platforms for a change. And the Mohito's were good as well.