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Both Håvard and I have been blogging from the conferences we have been going to lately. First there was the Digital News Affairs in Brussels, and the Gulltaggen conference for me, and then Håvard went to the Digital Trend Day in Amsterdam.
Robin Hamman has written a nice post about things you should think about when you’re going to a conference and plan to do some live blogging.
What he doesn’t mention is the importance of being prepared. Spend some time preparing some text about the speakers you plan to present, who they are, where they are from and a little of their background. This is neat content that adds value to the posts and is really something that you need to have ready.
Someone also posted a link in a comment to a blog post by Bruno Giussani with more interesting tips about conference blogging. They mention the part with being prepared pretty much the same way as I did above.

Valleywag writes a lot of crap. Funny crap, but unless you live in the Valley or something most of it is… well, I find the cheap comments funny at least.
Anyway, here is a rather interesting post about Google Ads TV and why it won’t work. I haven’t thought about that angle before, however, as I noted (or should have) .
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photocredits: newportcity

Jo tipped me today about an essay derived from a talk at the 2008 startup school by Paul Graham. The essence is that when doing a start up, the focus should be on being good.
Several examples of startups that have “been good” towards their users, performing as non-profit organizations and such became successful. I strongly advice everyone to read it, because it does have some good points and ideas.

However, I have been in a startup with that philosophy, and going commercial was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever been involved in. The thing is, when you shift from doing something for “non-profits” and suddenly start to pay out salaries, the ones helping the project want their piece of the cake, which is understandable. The motivation is over night not the same as yesterday. Not for the users, not for the employees. If this should be done with success, my experiences are that there should be put a great amount of funding in the project. One should also be ready to cope with the cultural change that happens over night. No slack is accepted from the users, and everyone involved is suddenly working for the man, and not the greater good. It’s perfectly logical, and thus as hard.

From time to time i speak at different meetings, and last time my presentation included a case where I follow one article in 24 hours. This include response in blogs, comments and other user generated content. Below you’ll find the slides. I’m sorry to say that the text is written in Norwegian, but I`ll take you through the hours in English.

The source of the story is that the Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) made a popular series available DRM-free via BitTorrent. This resulted in a lot of reports both in the old-fashion-press as well as in blogs (so i wont use your time repeating it here). The interesting in this case is an article that followed on Itavisen.no.

The slides in English (short version):
Slide 1: 21st of February at 10.50 a.m
The Norwegian tech site Itavisen publish an article with the heading “Won’t sell on iTunes” with misleading “facts” about NRK. (Edited story here - in Norwegian)

Slide 2: 21st of February at 3 p.m
Nrkbeta.no, the Norwegian Broadcasting’s own tech blog, publishes an answer telling that “Itavisen serves rubbish about NRK”. (Story here - in Norwegian)

Slide 3: 21st of February between 15 p.m and 22 p.m
The readers on nrkbeta.no leaves a massive amount of negative comments about Itavisen.

Slide 4: 21st of February at 22 p.m
Itavisen owns Kudos.no - their version of digg.com - which is part of their front page. The readers of Itavisen has now voted nrkbeta.no’s article “Itavisen serves rubbish about NRK” to the front page. Nice!

Slide 5: 22nd of February at 8 a.m
The editor of Itavisen.no (Tore Neset) is back at work - and what a morning for this guy! He sees the article on nrkbeta.no, all the comments and the Kudos. He edits his own article and states that he was wrong.

Slide 6: 22nd of February at 8.30 a.m
Editor Tore Neset (Itavisen.no) joins the discussion (comments) on nrkbeta.no, and gets both ugly comments and support for participation in the discussion.

Slide 7: 22nd of February at 11.30 a.m
The discussion turns: Now the topic is how much of the ugly comments about Tore Neset that should be moderated by nrkbeta.no. An interesting facts here is that Tore Neset is a big fan of non-moderated discussion on the web.

Here’s a part of the presentation (I know the pictures in the presentation doesn’t look the best on slideshare):

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Not the first time this happens. New media like YouTube has helped a lot of people reach a larger audience. The young stand up comedian Björn Gustafsson is 22 years old (born 1986), and the last year has been somewhat of a race for him. He claims to work all the time, meaning (his own words); he doesn’t drink, date or eat unhealthy food.

The good old fashion television helped his carrier in Sweden. But the YouTube numbers speaks for themselves. The videos are in Swedish, but here is one with English subs. And he talks about WoW (more here: Björn Gustafsson on YouTube).

Wired have posted a piece on MySpace and friends economics.

I really would have thought that they did far better than stated, however it confirms my beliefs that the large all-spanning social network sites isn’t neccecery all that good compared to niche sites.

Wired: MySpace and Friends Need to Make Money. And Fast.

Dagbladet.no has tried a lot. They have also been very innovative over the last years. We all remember Blink. At least I do… Anyhow, they have also done a great job with their commenting functions and that type of moderation, if it could be called moderation. Some journalists have also answered their readers in the commenting sections leading to great discussions. Most notably the “Elden and friends on Facebook” article.

However, now they have also included a Track back function on some of their articles. Do not get me wrong here. I do live by “Sharing is caring”, and diverting traffic to other great recourses is splendid. However, where does this leave Dagbladet.no?

Is it an Elephant wanting to be a Giraffe? (Newspaper wanting to be a Blog). I’m all in on being innovative as online newspapers, but seriously come on! You could do better!

Originally posted at christoph.no and republished with permission.