Live From The Mediabistro Circus (The Next Day)

The following entry was written yesterday afternoon at the "Mediabistro Circus, a "two-day summit about the digital platforms and trends that are changing media" featuring Wired editor Chris Anderson, tech blogger/Fast Company.TV's Robert Scoble, Six Apart's Anil Dash, blip.tv's Dina Kaplan (who I am seeing today at this conference in Toronto), Everything Bad Is Good For You author Steven Johnson, NYT Digital News editor Jim Roberts, and MB founder Laurel Touby dressed as a ringleader, complete with top hat, tails and cane. Here are my thoughts from the event, which was completely wired (and wireless) but for some reason I couldn't connect, so I just wrote it up old-school in MS word. There's a metaphor in there somewhere.

ETP is live at the Circus! No, not the circus where Courtney Friel gets a pie in the face, the MediaBistro Circus — a two-day conference at Skylight studios in Tribeca, where you are greeted with balloons and jellybeans. Note to conference organizers: Everyone should do that.

Paradox: If your entire team of bloggers is on hand to minutely document the action, is there an incentive for another blogger to do that, too? Answer: No. Which is why I am linking to the Mediabistro Circus blog here, and the Mediabistro Circus twitter page here, and FishbowlNY here and here and here, because 'bowlers Glynnis MacNicol and Noah Davis are working very, very hard (evidence below). This left me free to wander, enjoy a delicious lunch ( pasta OR regular salad; a variety of sandwich options; cookies; a cold Diet Coke), note that attendance seemed quite good (though Skylight Studios is huge, it was notable that the outside rooms were airily empty while the Anderson keynote was SRO).

On to that keynote: Chris Anderson from Wired, which just celebrated its fifteenth anniversary last night at a party in NY. Anderson is up on stage, swishing his long tail about social networking - right now the words "tallest dwarf!" are up on screen, but I have to admit, he lost me at "we are hyper-focused on aerial robotics." Everyone else in the audience is paying rapt attention, though, particularly since he's now talking about "monetizing community." How do you target the right ads to the right communities? How to define and pin down these communities? Are we fated to contextual Google ads from now until time immemorial? (Ha, great minds think alike - now he has a slide up that says "Man cannot live by AdSense alone!)

Anderson mentions, in quick succession, that he's working on a project he can't talk about but he would like to talk about social networking and what the weaknesses are in the current paradigms and how gee, surely someone could do it better. The audience was unable to make the leap of logic, especially when cleverly distracted by a red-herring such as this: "I was going to take this moment to show you a work in progress. I was going to show you a community we were building. ...On Friday, we heard from the lawyers that the contract has a little hitch in it, and I can't talk about it." Oh, lawyers! Alas, I guess the audience at MB Circus will never know about our ultra-secret plans for a Wired social networking site! We were completely fooled.

This, by the way, is where all that talk of monetizing comes in — Anderson says that the highest value is in the smallest sites, and as the sites grow and become less specified the challenge is figuring out how to monetize them. Social networking, he says, is less about "friending" than it is about identity, community and "emergent reputation" whereby others in the community can follow the individual develop. Which is exactly how I feel about each of my 546 Facebook friends!

Anderson is a smart guy and a forward-looker, so he is no doubt onto something; he clearly thinks so, which is evident by his televangelist-looking clenched-fist pose below as he preaches to the flock. Perhaps, then, it was a mite unfair to illustrate this post with a shot of him looking almost like he was giving the Vulcan hand sign, but then again, wouldn't that make sense?

More happened at the Circus — Julia Allison and her dog were there, in a triumphant return to the company where she once fetched coffee as an intern, now resplendent in, um, some sort of outfit as another sort of ringleader-type person, along with perma-pals Meghan Asha (nice whip, honey) and Mary Rambin. Apparently you can wear white pants before Memorial Day! Especially if they have a light satin sheen.

My point — and I do have one — is that for me to attend such an event and be relieved of the burden of covering it minutely, then I ought to have some sort of grand takeaway, other than Wired plans to crush Facebook like a bug. It took a while, but I found it: It was, wow, has Mediabistro ever come a long way. Yes, the whole $23 million acquisition by Jupiter Media proved that, but I do feel like this sort of event would not and could not have happened two years ago. Laurel Touby pushed her way into the conversation, often in the face of mockery (see: Gawker), on the strength of a company that, when I first heard of it, was offering socials for journalists to meet/hit on each other and courses directed at the greenest of freelancers (i.e. me, when I signed up for my first course in January 2002). Since then, on the strength of some savvy, savvy hires and a refusal to adhere to non-boa dress codes, the company grew and expanded both its reach and its influence, and still is (fellow bloggers welcomed the recent innovation of hyperlinked headlines). It might still be kicked around a bit by the cool kids, but more than that has spent the last year quietly proving that the notion of 'cool kids' is evolving, if indeed it matters at all. Sometimes, it takes a woman padding around a conference in a top hat, tails, and striped gaucho pants to really drive that home.

Anderson preaches against the evils of Facebook. Okay, that may be overstating it but tech-fights are awesome.

One of Anderson's slides, in case you want to steal his idea. (NB: I did not steal the Google ads joke referenced above, or the use of "Paradox" which just proves that Chris Anderson and I share a brain. Wait, maybe I do love aerial robotics!

Glynnis MacNicol and Noah Davis diligently take down every word of Anderson's keynote. No, actually, that's not Gmail, why are you trying to make problems?

The entrance into Circusland! Note multi-media presentations on wall, displaying MB's impressive selection of course and seminar offerings, et al. Also note...jellybeans! Four delicious varieties in two shades each of orange and green, on two separate tables. See above: Conference organizers, take note.

Chris Anderson, Unable to Make Wired Social Networking Announcement, Settles for Revealing His Inner Aerial Robotics Geek [FishbowlNY]
From Print to Digital: To Know You is to Engage You [FishbowlNY]
MB Circus Blog [MB]

Related:
Big Payday For MediaBistro Surprises Everyone Except Laurel Touby [ETP]