Last panel of Monday was “Open Content, Remix Culture and the Sharing Economy: Rights, Ownership and Getting Paid” – moderated by Eric Steuer of Creative Commons. (He’s also one half of the duo Meanest Man Contest).
Panelists included:
As is typically of the last panel of the day, I didn’t really get good substantial notes. But there were a few highlights:
They keynote for day three was Dan Rather, interviewed by Jane Hamsher from Fire Dog Lake (also the producer of Natural Born Killers and Permanent Midnight).
The mp3 of the interview is available from the SXSW podcast page: Dan Rather Keynote Interview.
Apparently the acoustics of the room were quite bad – Rather asked several times for Hamsher to repeat herself or couldn’t understand the question being asked, and also (the lights?) couldn’t see the folks in the audience with questions.
Nonetheless, it was interesting to hear his take on investigative journalism and why there is so little real investigative journalism in the US today.
He was always careful not to exempt himself from his criticisms of “journalism today” – not claiming to be above or beside it but addressing them as problems within the industry he is still part of.
Unfortunately there wasn’t really much time for discussion of his new show on HDNet, or how new media might be able to change the equation of access journalism – I wish there had been more time for good questions from the audience and for Rather to talk about whatever he wanted to discuss- the interview seemed very focused on what’s wrong with journalism today, as compared to some glory days when Rather was challenging Nixon – and perhaps how bloggers could change that.
(Update: There’s a great summary here – really looks more like a transcript! – Dan Rather at SXSW (Dogged) and another here – Dan Rather Keynote Liveblog from SXSW 2007 (Conversion Rater) )
My raw notes:
Q: What was it like to challenge Richard Nixon, when you refused to be dismissed?
So if my blog posts from Beyond Broadcast didn’t make it clear, I’m a huge fan of Henry Jenkins’ work.
Monday’s panel “Convergence Culture: A Conversation with Henry Jenkins” was simply further evidence that I’m right to be Jenkins Fanboy.
(I ran into Erik after the session for lunch and told him “Henry Jenkins is what I want to be when I grow up.” Iwas only partially kidding.)
Jenkins was interviewed by Danah Boyd, who was smart enough to generally allow Jenkins to talk with minimal interruption (except at one point to chime in – “do you see why I think he’s god!?”).
Here’s a photo from the pre-session setup – really a crappy photo on my part, so I had to mess with the brightness/contrast to make it clearer:
(I was kind of far back in the room, too – but the audio was great).
My notes from the session are below – covered a lot of the same ground as the Beyond Broadcast keynote, but certainly threw in some additional insights.
My favorite: “What everyone’s now calling Web 2.0 is really just fandom minus the stigma”
Lots of links to issues discussed during the session can be found at Jenkins’ blog: “If you attended our session at south by southwest . . . ”
Notes:
Monday morning started with a panel on “Revisiting Commercial Open Source Business Models.”
It was moderated by Edward Cavazos (Fish & Richardson PC) and panelists were:
The panel was fairly freeform. They started by polling the audience a bit – asking people what kinds of questions they wanted to hear about. Broke out pretty clearly that there were lots of folks who wanted to know how to leverage open source in their businesses but weren’t sure how. Panel distinguished between open source users (people who download, install, and use software under open source licenses) and software developers who are building products which include (one way or another) open source components.
Because of the wide variety of different kinds of folks in the audience, I didn’t feel like the discussion advanced very far. I suppose that is a sign that the understanding of the various mechanisms by which open source projects are imagined, created, coded, maintained, and licensed is not as broadly spread as I had come to think. Still an awful lot of confusion about what can and can’t be done with something found in the open source world.
The last panel I saw on Sunday was “People-Powered Products.”
It was moderated by Jason Levitt (Yahoo! Developer Network) and included:
Aside from the humorous bits (the bored balloon clown), it was interesting to see a discussion full of people whose products truly are people powered in the most basic sense. They are not communities which were built up on “professional” content and then opened – what a lot of large media companies are trying to do these days – but built “from a blank screen” out of unpaid user contributions.