Im at the Webby Connect conference in Dana Point today, and once again The Webby team brought together some great minds in new media and got real discussions going. I wouldn’t normally Blog about a web conference but the panels today touched on some interesting trends in emerging creativity and new media culture.
The discussion was not the “buzz” of the moment typical of web conferences. Top notch panelist explored some deeper concepts and added creativity and honesty to their presentations
here is a quick recap of stuff that excited me:
Internet Dark Arts: The Underbelly
An incredible discussion on the underbelly of viral tricks, wikiedia, spam, and those affiliate programs pushing Viagra!
Virgil Griffith Showed off wikiscanner2. If your new to wikiscanner, check it out here. It shows you who’s editing wikipedia pages with a focus on exposing how things really work behind the scenes of Wikipidea. Companies battle eachother to change info on profiles.
Virigil also showed what he loosely called an “online lie detector”. Essentially taking the transcripts from politcal speeches or testimonies and doing some slick data visualization with common words and terms that would indicate a person is “lying” or more loosely, have something to hide!
Check it out in action here with the Gonzales testimony run through the filter.
Steve Kirsh gave some insight into Spam! Everyone should here this guy speak and I finally learned how it all works.
According to Steve 93% of all emails sent is “spam”!
Check out his site – http://www.skirsch.com/
Sweeps Week: Every Week Online
I think it was panelist Mark D’Arcy – SVP / Chief Creative Officer, Time Warner Global Media Group. who made great point after great point
“Television and Online are in Parallel – not separate”
“More people are watching TV than ever before”
A second panelist commented that Face time with “Screens” is increasing overall not necessarily TV viewership. This is a subtle but interesting concept – that more and more of our time is spent in front of some sort of screen. I like starting from that simple assumption as I build out ideas…
“Talent Is Not Increasing”
this is debatable but I think Mark’s point is true. The type of A level talent is not increasing as fast as consumption, and I agree with what I think was his intent – true talent is still a precious commodity.
Designers and Their Elastic Minds
Peter Frankfurt had a lot very creative and interesting things to say about some of the multimedia art/tech projects he’s worked on. I never head of him or his company, but I’d like to learn more! He was very involved in the pre-cog sequences and the visual interfaces for the movie “Minority Report”.
His concept for “New City” is a fresh look at virtual worlds, and he described it as “the world’s first architecturally considered virtual environment”. New City was a featured exhibit at the critically acclaimed show Design and the Elastic Mind at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Watch the video for it here!
Cya Soon!
