Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Enough peripherals - on with the show

Eckart Walther and two other Yahoo colleagues expounded on their web 2.0 vision of ‘Find, use, share and expand the world’s knowledge’ . That sounds familiar to BBC thinking. Although I don’t think we were planning this level of world domination.

In the old days, we were told, a community constituted 1 creator, 10 synthesizers, 100 consumers. Message board model – one to post, 10 to contribute and 100 or so lurking about and just reading. How do we move into a web 2.0 world where 100% are creators and synthesisers and everyone consumes?

Anyone with a …. is now a …. That’s not an invite to swear; the next slide encouraged us to insert keyboard, camera, iPod, browser in the first bit and then author, photographer, musician and publisher in the second.

BUT, what happens when everyone becomes a publisher? You get You Tube and, sometimes, some pretty silly stuff.

But you also get Flickr where beautiful content gives Getty and Corbis a run for its money. Not just great content, but a community around it where the users rate it, organise it and distribute it.

The panel talked about the publisher as participant – Adobe and feed/blog. Publisher as micro-community – Nikon and photo community. Publisher as developer – publisher uses participation platform to create mash-up/new application.

Negroponte quote – ‘if I were to do Medialab all over again, it’d be less about technology and more about content and how people use and share it’.

Media progression – mass media from my media to we media. Yahoo’s new ‘food channel’ has Martha Stewart but also recipes from real people,

Marketing is just one voice of many. A slide showed a venn diagram of media influences – friends and family, media and info sources and marketing all meeting in the middle at Social Networking

A few examples of how Yahoo is extending its content partnership with users:

- Yahoo for Good partners with One.org, a non-profit organisation combatting global poverty and brings Flickr, video etc to tell many stories around one single point of view.

- What happens when Yahoo decides to do a morning show online. You get The 9 - stuff you've not heard about on the web, a short video a glam lady presenter and ugc . Oh, and it's sponsored by Pepsi.

- More corporate partnership as Yahoo teams up with Nissan to present live sets - music and fan content – blogs, photos etc around concert footage in HD. Starts with Christina Aguilera and then does Incubus.

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