From Lloyd Shepherd of Yahoo! – When Yahoo! Answers hosted a session with Al Gore on climate change the moderating team in the Phillipines who hadn’t heard of Al Gore saw the huge burst of traffic, assumed it was spam and deleted the whole session.

Adriana Cronin-Lukas from the Big Blog Company says the one uber-trend is that the consumer is no more – its a two-way street now. Some soundbites:
“The process of conveying messages to audiences has been disrupted.”
“People saw the internet as another channel but it’s not – it’s the sea in which those channels float – and it’s corroding them.”
“The demand side is now supplying itself.”
“The rise of the amateur professional.”
“The problem with “new media” is that it doesn’t change the core competencies; social media does.”
“Think ‘audience’ not ‘content’.”
“The net is not a place where audiences access content.”
“The internet will be a network of digital natives bypassing gatekeepers.”

Lloyd Shepherd, director of news, sport and info of Yahoo! Europe says social media is at the heart of what Yahoo! does and advertisers are responding – he cited Ford and Chevrolet as examples where innovative approaches have worked.

Tom Bureau from CNET Networks ( 115 million monthly unique users) spoke about CNET’s approach to architected participation. He says they avoid the ‘true freaks’ but target the ‘avid contributors’ and ‘smart consumers’.

Architected participation has some challenges around brand values as advertisers care about the environment, he says. Social environments can wither without a centre of gravity which means strong brands can have an advantage.

His advice: set the bar high – must register, must have used the site for several weeks etc. Allow users to promote themselves alongside the journalist’s copy.

What is common about the successful web 2.0 businesses, asks Tim O’Reilly?

1. They are information businesses
2. Software as a service
3. Using the internet as a platform
4. Harnessing collective intelligence. “Amazon is a great example – they aren’t a breakthrough service but they just work really hard at getting users to add value.”

He argues that Web 2.0 is the era of asymetric competion – Craig’s List is a great example – 7th most trafficked site on the web with 23 employees!

Types of User Generated Content
1. volunteerism (Wikipedia)
2. self-interest (Craigs List)
3. Defaults which encourage network behaviour (Flickr)
4. Software as journalism (mash-ups)

To finish: “The challenge for publishers is that we are intermediaries and it is doubtful if we will remain intermediaries unchallenged. We need to build webservices so that we have a place in the user generated world.”

Q&A
What about payment in a user generated world?
People do pay, but not in usual ways.

Will you shift to an ad driven model?

Safari (O’Reilly’s online books play) is a subscription business – 30% of the page views are coming from books no longer in print. We asked ‘what business are we in?’ and then developed businesses to match.

What role for content creators in the UGC world?

We are in the age of the computer aided editor.

Will publishers face cynacism?

Absolutely. Companies are bubbles on the wave not the wave itself. There will be a huge amount of consolidation. There are so many frontiers for innovation. Think about when every device reports where it is, for example. Web 2.0 is just the internetisation of everything.

Web 3.0?

There are one or two candidates – device connected web; humans as a component of the software (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or Google Image Labeler; blending of real and virtual – he cited a company called Electric Sheep which has a virtual office on Sheep Island in Second Life and no real-world office at all.

Rod Henwood, new business development director of Channel 4 says the TV business model is under threat. The main defence? Brand, exclusive content, cross-promotion, corporate focus and adaptability. The strategy: protect programming budget, new services, ubiquity, VOD and online investment.

Zach Leonard, digital media publisher of the Times says Times Online has now reached 9m unique users and the commercial deals are starting to be as big as those offline.

The main points:-

• The story telling process has changed for ever;
• integration in the platforms and the newsrooms;
• advertising market is critical;
• user generated content and community is key;

Tim Weller, ceo and founder IncisiveMedia says 14% of revenue is online. The strategy is to “surround narrow markets with the complete range of media types.”

The challenges? Sellers want ROI and buyers want intelligence in real time.
The cultural challenge is making the journalists deliver the news when in happens on many platforms.

The strategy:-

• Aggregated portals
• Community content
• Peer to peer networks
• Workflow tools

The key is developing rich data, he says.

Carolyn McCall, ceo Guardian Media Group was the first keynote speaker. She says we are entering a new economy where competition comes from everywhere. For instance the Guardian’s Trader site makes £120m profit a year and eBay has just changed its business model to compete head on. Life is much more simple if you are a pure play she says; media companies may have to make decisions which are not obvious from a finanial standpoint. One of the biggest management challenges is that some people find this incredibly scary.

However there is a real opportunity:-

1. from words and pictures to film
2. from national to global
3. from passive to active communities (brands without active communities will die).

Five big challenges:-

1. Build on your brands and your talent
2. Stay close to your users
3. Innovate to learn (being scared of screwing up is fatal)
4. Excel at software development (delivery is everything) (“our best developers are as important as our best journalists”)
5. Drive digital revenue growth. Scale is important – first for respect internally and second because we know there will be a slow down and we need to be at the highest possible base when it happens.