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I don’t want to get all mushy or anything, but I would just like to echo what my fellow mesh 2007 organizer Stuart MacDonald said in one of his speeches to the crowd — either at the end of the second day or after the speakers’ dinner on Wednesday, I can’t remember which: We could not have done this without you. And that’s not just a nice thing to say — it’s true.

And by “you,” I mean all the attendees, all the speakers, all the people who asked questions and made great comments, and all the people who have since said so many great things about the conference (Tony Hung has some links here, and there are more on the mesh blog) that it’s hard to keep up with them all. As Stuart said, we just created the structure that made it possible for something wonderful to happen — you are the ones who ensured that it did happen.

I have so many personal highlights from mesh that it’s difficult to list them all. Doing the keynote interview with Mike Arrington (and hanging out with him after the keynote and at the after-party) was obviously a big highlight, and the keynote that Mark Evans did with craigslist CEO was also hugely entertaining — as I mentioned in a post below. But there were tons of other moments too, like chatting with Mike Masnick of Techdirt (I am a huge fan) at the speakers’ dinner, as well as Lionel Menchaca, Dell’s head blogger, who is a great guy and has done some amazing things at that company with social media.

Talking about crowdsourcing and newspapers with Jeff Howe of Wired magazine was also a highlight, since it’s an area I am keenly interested in, and so was talking with the lovely and talented Christine Herron, ex of the Omidyar Network. And Toronto-born Rachel Sklar of Huffington Post’s Eat The Press is about as fantastic as a person can get — she lit up both the panel she was on as well as the speakers’ dinner and after-party, and pretty much any room she was in or table she was at throughout the conference.

Loren Feldman of 1938media is not only hilarious — and clearly a workaholic, since he had already done two videos before even arriving at the pre-mesh cocktail party, one from the hotel bathtub — but also a stand-up guy. And so is Ethan Kaplan, the head of technology at Warner Brothers Records, who is so smart that at times he made my head hurt.

In other words, just an incomparable couple of days — right off the charts. And all because of you (and of course my partners Rob and Mike and Stuart and Mark). If you have any links, or pictures, or a blog post, or even just thoughts, please send or post them and tell us where they are. I’ve included some below. (photo by Pema Hagen)

mesh links:

— Flickr photos here
— Technorati tag: mesh07
— mDialogue video (thanks a lot to Greg and his team)
— Tony Hung live-blogged a whole pile of sessions
— Mark Dowds
— Mike Arrington and his underwear (courtesy of Loren Feldman)
— Cynthia Brumfield on the underwear (I’m sensing a theme here)
— PayPerPost CEO Ted Murphy’s thoughts
— some thoughts from panelist Christine Herron on Mike Arrington’s media keynote
— Tom Williams (whose keynote with Austin Hill was mentioned by many as a highlight)
— Rachel’s post at Eat The Press (I have expressed my apologies for what is referred to later on in the post)
— the Arrington/Ted Murphy “most evil man in the room” comment makes Wired’s blog
— Dell head blogger Lionel Menchaca.
— podcaster and workshopper extraordinaire, Leesa Barnes
— Richard Edelman, keynote and an extremely nice guy
— ProductWiki
— Global Nerdy
— Technosailor (thanks, Aaron — and I think you are right)
— Webslinger
— Digital Word (good point, Kristina)
— Adam MacIsaac, a panelist and my dinner partner
— a couple of posts from volunteer Kyra Aylesworth of PrGirlz
— Chris Clarke of ThornleyFallis
— Julie Rusciolelli
— notes from Joi

And so another rumour comes true — with Google officially acquiring Feedburner — and another startup gets acquired by a giant. In journalism, that officially makes it a trend, since we can now add that deal to CBS buying Last.fm and eBay acquiring StumbleUpon. I confess that the Googleburner deal makes a whole lot more sense than either CBS.fm (which I think makes a little sense) and the eBayUpon deal (which makes very little). I wrote about the Googleburner rumours awhile back, after Sam Sethi at Vecosys broke the news. I know that this deal is only going to feed the “Google is too big and possibly evil” theorists, but I think that’s over-reacting just a tad. My friend Scott Karp has some thoughts at Publishing 2.0

I’m still trying to recover from the incredible two days that was the mesh conference, and will be posting updates and links to video, blogs, photos and reviews as I come across them, but in the meantime here’s a cross-post from my Globe and Mail blog in which I try to catch up with two of the many tech deals that occurred while I was en-meshed:

It’s been a busy week in tech-land, as media and Internet giants have been snapping up Web startups like kids in a candy store. CBS, which only just finished buying the financial video-blogging show known as Wallstrip (created in part by Toronto venture capitalist and hedge fund manager Howard Lindzon) is paying $280-million (U.S.) to acquire Last.fm, one of the most popular online music tools around today. And as has been rumoured here and other places, eBay — which paid $2.4-billion or so for Skype not too long ago — is buying StumbleUpon, a Canadian creation that was based in Calgary before moving to the Valley.

StumbleUpon is what you might call a “serendipity engine,” in the sense that it randomizes the Internet by serving up web-pages from a vast catalogue of user submissions, either sending you to a completely random page or choosing a random one from a category of your choosing. Users — of which there are about 2.3 million now — can then vote on whether they like the site or not. I have to confess that I still don’t see how it’s going to fit into eBay’s traditional auction business, but someone at Seeking Alpha has done their best to put together a convincing argument here.

Last.fm, which is similar to another site called Pandora, allows users to set up a profile with their favourite music (including their iTunes playlists) and then share that with others. The site then recommends new music based on similarities between their selections and those of people with similar tastes. By contrast, Pandora uses advanced algorithms to determine similarities between songs, and then recommend new ones based on those attributes (there’s a good discussion of the differences between the two here).

Scott Karp has some thoughts on the Last.fm deal as a sort of Hail Mary play by CBS because of its radio assets, and there’s a post from one of the Last.fm founders here. In case you are keeping score at home, according to the Times of London (Last.fm was created in London), the three founders will get approximately $38-million each from the deal.

Who knew that Jim Buckmaster, the CEO of the massively popular craigslist classified advertising/community, was such a funny guy? Not yuck-yuck, clown-in-a-little-car funny, but insightful and funny in a very dry and laid-back sort of way. And there’s a lot of Jim to lay back, since he’s very tall — six-foot-seven or so, I believe.

His mesh “keynote conversation” with Mark Evans this morning was not just fascinating and informative — especially about the way that craigslist manages to run a site that gets 9 billion page views a day with just 200 servers (Jim said he heard that Google has about a million) and 24 staff — but also funny.

For example, Jim was asked by someone what was the weirdest thing he’s ever seen on craigslist, and Buckmaster said at first that he couldn’t mention some of them in mixed company, and then said he had found a couple in the “best of” section of the Toronto site of all places — including one in which a woman said “Spadina subway station, I spilled my grandmother on you (because I was carrying an urn with her ashes in it); think we got off to a bad start, would love to have coffee.”

Delivered in his laconic way, it was hilarious. There were many moments like that, and also tons of insight into the laser-like focus that craigslist has on its users — they are effectively in control of the company, Buckmaster said over and over. If they don’t want it or ask for it, it doesn’t happen.

Update:

Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests has a couple of great live-blogging posts here and here.

Looking forward to the second day of mesh, with Stuart MacDonald and Richard Edelman talking about marketing and social media, and then Mark Evans talking to craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster about what has to be one of the most successful online startups in recent memory — and one that deliberately refuses to take advantage of the hundreds of millions of dollars that are no doubt shoved at it by venture capitalists dozens of times a day.

As usual, the post-mesh social in the atrium and the post-post-mesh social at the Distillery District were some of the highlights of the first day — tons of fantastic conversations happening in the atrium of MaRS and then at the Archeo restaurant and the Boiler House, with people like Mike Masnick of Techdirt and Christine Herron (who is leaving Omidyar), Andrew Coyne and Phil de Vellis, Jon Dube of the CBC and Rachel Sklar of Huffington Post.

Our second mesh conference got off to a great start this morning (if I do say so myself) with a keynote conversation I did with TechCrunch supremo Mike Arrington, followed by one that my co-organizer Rob Hyndman did with Austin Hill of Akoha and Tom Williams of GiveMeaning.com, and then the 15 Minutes of Fame with Octopz, DemoFuse and FiveLimes.

The talk that I — and the mesh attendees of course — had with Mike was really fun, I have to say. He took some well-deserved shots at the traditional media (I’m sure he didn’t mean me) and he talked about how blogs need to deal with issues such as accuracy.

He also admitted that he doesn’t know everything, which was refreshing, and how he would much rather take the immediacy and constant interaction that new media offers, even with its flaws, over the slow-moving and inflexible process that is the norm in traditional media (I’m paraphrasing here).

My favourite mesh moment so far: when Ted Murphy, CEO of PayPerPost, put up his hand to ask a question and Mike proceeded to tell everyone how Ted was the “most evil man in the room.” Classic. The two shook hands later, so we didn’t have to call in security 🙂

Some early pics from our friends at Canada NewsWire are here.

Update:

Tony Hung of Deep Jive Interests has been a live-blogging machine this mesh, and his posts on the Arrington keynote conversation are here, here, here and here.

Just wanted to say that mesh 2007 is off to a great start. First the mesh team did a great panel with the Third Tuesday gang, and then a bunch of in-town and out-of-town speakers got together at the Pantages martini bar for some social meshing. We had Austin Hill and McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves and Cynthia Brumfield and the incomparable Loren Feldman, Rachel Sklar, Ethan Kaplan, Andrew Coyne, Jian Ghomeshi, Christine Herron and the head blogger for Dell, Lionel Menchaca – and others too numerous to name. An eclectic mix, and some great conversation. If that was a taste of what mesh is going to be like Wednesday and Thursday then we are in for a great ride. And now I have to get some sleep.

It was touching to read a journalism professor’s stirring defence of traditional journalism and criticism of newspaper cutbacks in the San Francisco Chronicle — particularly since the Chronicle is losing about 25 per cent of its staff due to cost cutting. And I was totally with Neil Henry until about halfway through, when his argument went off the rails in an all-too predictable way. He starts off talking about the attacks on traditional journalism, including:

“The Chronicle’s announcement earlier this month that 100 newsroom jobs will be slashed in the coming weeks in the face of mounting financial woes represents just the latest chapter in a tragic story of traditional journalism’s decline.”

Fair enough. A little over-dramatic, perhaps, but still — journalism is kind of going through a pretty strenuous transformation or evolution. Fine.

“As a result, newspapers such as The Chronicle must make staff cuts to survive — and increasingly it is highly skilled professional journalists committed to seeking the truth and reporting it, independently and without fear or favor, who must go.”

Still with you, Neil. Professional journalism is valuable, and should be supported. Carry on.

Idolaters of Web-based news and information sites, “citizen”-produced journalism, and the blogosphere of individual self-publishers, often argue that old mainstays such as The Chronicle are, in fact, getting only what they deserve.”

Whoop! Whoop! Warning bells are going off. Idolaters? Seems a little over-the-top.

“There are plenty of alternatives on the Web to take traditional journalism’s place, including the millions of bloggers opining about the news, not to mention powerful news aggregators such as Google and Yahoo whose computerized search robots harvest riches of news and other content provided by others — and generate billions of dollars in annual profits for their owners.”

Okay, now I see where we’re going with this. It’s all Google and Yahoo’s fault for stealing newspaper readers, and they should cough up some dough to keep papers in business (just out of curiosity, why is it always the robots who get bad-mouthed in these things? They just do what they’re told).

I guess I should have expected it, considering Neil’s book is entitled “American Carnival: Journalism Under Siege in an Age of New Media.” But still — it didn’t make any sense when Sam Zell said it — or the World Newspaper Association, or the Belgian newspaper group — and it doesn’t make any now. Newspapers may be in trouble, but blaming Google is a cop-out.

The head of the second-largest ad agency in the world, WPP Group, says broadcasters are under “severe pressure” from the Internet:

“Television broadcasters face “severe pressure” as advertisers abandon traditional media in favour of the internet, Sir Martin Sorrell, head of WPP, the world’s second-biggest advertising company, told The Times.

The chief executive said that the quickening pace at which advertisers are switching their budgets to online has created a “fundamental shift” in advertising that would change irreversibly the way in which broadcasters
such as ITV and Channel 4 make money.

Sir Martin said: “Television is under severe pressure at the moment from the internet. There has been a fundamental shift and the pace will quicken, but predictions of a depression in traditional media have gone too far. Television advertising is not going to disappear. It still has pulling power, but the balance will switch.”

Steve O’Hear — who also writes for ZDNet on social media — has a great post up at Last100 about how bandwidth-stingy Internet Service Providers threaten to stall many online-video apps such as Joost by throttling the download speeds that their users get. He looks at how some ISPs cut back your bandwidth after you’ve downloaded a certain amount per month, which with video isn’t difficult to exceed, and how some put a cap on downloads period. Many ISPs also use “bandwidth shaping” to restrict the flow of peer-to-peer apps such as Joost and Skype.

This is an issue that is going to become more and more important as Joost and Babelgum and other peer-to-peer video apps become widespread. One thing Steve doesn’t mention is that many ISPs also have ridiculously tiny upload speeds, and this is just as much of a threat to peer-to-peer apps. It’s no good to have a big fat download pipe if the upload is a tiny drinking straw.

Update:

Of course, if you live in an area where Verizon’s FiOS is available, you can get 30 megabits download (no details on uploads or whether they use bandwidth throttling). As Cynthia Brumfield notes at IPDemocracy, there’s no such thing as too much bandwidth.

As my friends and fellow mesh organizers Mark Evans and Stuart MacDonald have mentioned here and here — as well as the mesh blog — the winners of the “15 Minutes of Fame” feature have been chosen, and it is a pretty impressive group. Each will get five minutes to pitch their startup or service. The press release we issued this morning is here.

May 30 – 11:30 a.m. to noon

Octopz – An online collaboration service for text, video and audio
DemoFuse – Create interactive tours for your Web site
FiveLimes – A community based around eco-friendly products

May 31, 11:30 a.m. to noon

Conceptshare – An online collaboration tool for designers
SneakerPlay – A social network for sneaker enthusiasts
Wild Apricot – A website management service for non-profits

Congratulations to all. And thanks to all those who didn’t get chosen too — we had a great response and some really excellent applicants.

This isn’t really Web 2.0 or social media or anything like that (depending on your definition, of course) but for some reason I just love this story from GigaOm’s James Wagner Au about the rise of Desktop Tower Defense. Paul Preece’s Flash mini-game has exploded in a truly viral way, to the point where he is getting 20 million page views a month. That could translate into six figures in revenue, and the hosting costs are minimal. Isn’t the Web great?

 

Those who follow this blog will probably know that I’m doing a “keynote conversation” for the mesh conference this week with Michael Arrington, founder and editor of TechCrunch and pretty much the go-to guy when it comes to all things Web 2.0 and startup oriented (for anyone who hasn’t been to mesh, we don’t have keynote presentations, we have conversations — fireside chat-style — in which one of the mesh organizers interviews the keynote and then we have a question and answer session). So here’s my question to all of you: I know what I want to ask Michael, but what would you ask him if you could? Post your suggestions as a comment, and I will do my best to work them into the keynote conversation on Wednesday.

Today’s award for the most obvious statement about a Web-related issue has to go to the New York Times, which wrote an entire story about how getting “users” to generate advertising actually — audible gasp! — takes work, in the sense that someone has to weed through all the crap in order to produce anything useful. Does this really come as a surprise to anyone?

As a commenter said on Ryan Sholin’s blog, this definitely falls under the heading of “Free Lunch — isn’t one, etc.” If any of the advertisers quoted in the New York Times story were told by a “Web 2.0” advisor that they could somehow outsource ad production to “the crowd” and wind up with something just as good as what they produce in-house, then they should sue. But I suspect they weren’t told that. They may have wished that was true, but if wishes were horses then beggars would ride, as my mother used to say (actually, she still says that). Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has more on the subject.

As a number of people (including commenters on Scott’s post) have pointed out, however, whether an ad is technically or even creatively as slick and well-crafted as a Madison Avenue spot isn’t the only factor that needs to be considered. In some cases, a quirky, user-created ad like the one Global Nerdy likes, or like the Diet Coke and Mentos video, might actually work better. And getting people to “engage” with the brand may be even more important than the actual technical brilliance of the ad.

Let’s put it this way: there are plenty of ads that are slick and well-produced and no doubt cost millions, and do absolutely nothing for me whatsoever, just as there are Hollywood blockbusters with stars up the wazoo and giant budgets that barely even register. But a small, quirky, independent film can really touch you. As Heather Green notes over at the BusinessWeek blog, there has to be some kind of connection there or it won’t work.

It has to be pretty great to see your application become the new hot thing — with everyone wanting to sign up all at once — and to be able to piggy-back on the success of something as huge as Facebook’s new F8 platform in order to get there. And hopefully that feeling of joy and well-being will sustain the crew at iLike through the next couple of days, as they watch all their servers explode into flames from the heat of 50,000 new users all wanting to log in at the same time. According to an email posted at Venturebeat, the company doubled the number of servers it had, then doubled them again, then again, and then again — and is still getting slammed.

Scott Karp wonders whether Facebook will become the arbiter of which Web 2.0 apps become successful (or which ones get hammered into the ground, in iLike’s case). Will all of those 180,000 signups translate into real traffic and/or revenue for iLike? That remains to be seen. Some people prefer an app like Last.fm, which doesn’t have a Facebook widget but has acquired one unofficially, thanks to the resourcefulness of Jeff Jarvis’s son.

And my friend Paul Kedrosky makes a typically insightful point about Facebook’s success — it isn’t that the apps are so good, but that Facebook brings them all together in one place, in the same way Microsoft Office does. That and the social glue that is created through Facebook are a powerful force.