Yes, that’s right, I’m at the syndicate conference at the Marriot Marquis in Manhattan. Why didn’t I say anything till right now? Because I had no idea I was coming.
Its just one of those great moments where the sun shines through, the hole opens in your schedule, the press liason calls you with your credentials, and there you are. So, on to my first session recap:
Beyond Words: Media RSS & Podcasting
Moderator:
Chad Dickerson, CTO, InfoWorld.
Speakers:
David Berlind, Executive Editor, ZDNet.
Michael Dunn, VP, Hearst Interactive Media.
David Payne, SVP, CNN News Services; CNN.com General Manager, CNN.com.
Bradley Horowitz, Director of Multimedia and Desktop Search, Yahoo! Search.
I missed the first ten minutes, so I apologize if I missed anything major.
Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo says it is looking, with Media RSS and its media search engines, to keep the entire revenue model intact, that it is not looking to ruin those businesses, but to bring them more traffic.
David Payne from CNN was asked how he felt about the fact that most people saw Joh Stewart on Crossfire online, commercial-free. He said that on the one hand, you see the complete destruction of the business model through disaggregation from the network. On the other hand, you see this technology as enablers, and you want the technology to work with the content publishers, making it a great opportunity, and not a major legal issue. If these technologies do not work with the publishers, there will just be lawsuits and lost opportunities.
David Berlind from ZDNet mentions KYOU in San Fran, saying that they should use Creative Commons to free themselves from legal issues.
Bradley made a good joke when talking about the rules differing between bloggers and regular journalists. He said that he was having lunch with a reporter, and offered to pay the bill, and the reporter said, “No, I’ll get fired if you do that”. He finished: “That hasn’t exactly been my experience with the blogosphere”, to a nice amount of laughs.
Berlind mentions that there are big questions regarding to equipment and sound quality in podcasts. He also notes that they don’t have to worry about background music, because they have the right to use all the music from music.download.com throughout the C|Net network.
Bradley talks about the opportunities to use podcasting for more than just some sort of radio program, but as a way to distribute conversations. His example: After a meeting, hitting something to just post the audio as a podcast somewhere for people who missed the meeting. The idea of just putting up the last hour of your life could be very appealing.
One person asks about Podscope, where you do keyword searches of podcasts which index the speech of the podcast and even gives you an audio excerpt of the portion of the podcast where those words were spoken.
Berlind mentions that we are running into problems with all of the differing formats, but Microsoft is far ahead of everyone else in creating a format that works on more hardware and in more places than any of their competitors.
Now, off to lunch. if you’re here and want to hook up, try my cell: 718-598-3165.
Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.
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