May 06
17

Mesh Conference

3 Comments

Mesh ConferenceThe Web 2.0 Train stopped in Toronto for the past two days with the appearance of the soon to be annual Mesh Conference. Several interesting seminars from some interesting Web 2.0 types, Amber Mac, Steve Rubel (missed his keynote), Om Malik, Andrew Baron (producer of Rocketboom) and many others. Subjects included blogs, podcasting, post-mass media, future of broadcasting, communities and the like.
The crowd was interesting with a mix of bloggers, entrepreneurs, loads of PR people, a few client-side marketers, and a smattering of ad agency types (the lack of that last group surprised me a bit). A couple of sessions really highlighted the division between the hardline blogging crowd rallying cry of “Fire your PR Agency”, versus what were, in my opinion, many genuine PR people trying to figure out how their jobs are evolving in the face of this new paradigm.

Frankly I lost a great deal of respect for Tara Hunt after her appearance on the Corporate Blogs – How and Why panel with flip comments like “I didn’t know corporations had opposable thumbs [to blog with]“. To me it seemed like she had way too much opinion without any real depth. To me the most puzzling thing is the way many hardline bloggers type out of both sides of their keyboard when they wish to be treated like genuine journalists, but resent getting pitched by media relations types (sorry, but the one goes with the other).
Overall, the whole thing was hugely heartening in two ways:

  1. It made me realize that pretty much everyone attending the conference (even those on podium) haven’t really got this figured out yet. Which is good because it makes me realize that I am not as behind on this movement as I had previously feared.
  2. It reminded me so much of a Web conference I attended in Chicago in 1995 (or maybe 1996) where the same division between the anti-corporate Web folks versus the marketers who were just catching on to the meme. We all know how that worked out.

All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

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Posted in Culture Industry Events Public Relations by dwalker 3 Comments

3 Responses to "Mesh Conference"

  • Tara 'Miss Rogue' Hunt says:
    May 25, 2006 at 11:40 am

    Douglas,

    Sorry you were turned off by my comments. There certainly is a division between corporate and revolutionary. And, yes, I was (and am) flippant. But with a conference full of questions about monetization and discussion of character blogs (which I think is extreme on the other end of things), I wasn’t feeling terribly diplomatic about it.

    Until this is ‘figured out’ (as you pointed out), the two sides will struggle to have their viewpoint aired. The fear on the revolutionary side is that this medium, which many of us thought of as a self-publishing, human-centric medium will be highly commercialized…just like just about every other medium. My point is/was that blogging should be done by people, not corporations. Robert Scoble is a fantastic example of this. He acts as a brilliant insight into the community for his company, not as a PR engine.

  • dwalker says:
    May 25, 2006 at 12:17 pm

    Thanks for stopping by Tara. As any hothead blogger knows, when the person shows up at your door (or in this case blog) after you just criticized them, discomfort follows…

    I hear you on character blogs, it is a typical marketing approach to the blogging phenomenon to have one’s brand be the “personal voice”.

    What bothers me about the anti-commercial movement is that it is so fruitless. As Web 2.0 gets more attention, the marketers and PR people are coming in droves and so they should. Many of them will get it wrong and learn from their mistakes and get better (hence the value of conferences like Mesh). During Web 1.0 it was the same thing, Arpanet and denizens of The Well bemoaned the commercialization of the net and scoffed at everyone who did it wrong, but the people who got it (Yahoo, Google, Amazon, etc) won and dragged everyone else along with them. In fact, dare I say that Web 2.0 would have been impossible without the massive financial and infrastructure contributions of the corporate sector. We walk on the bones of many Web 1.0 flame outs. This is now happening with blogging, podcasting, vlogging too. I say just let it play out, cause it will no matter what any of us say about it.

  • Webwalker » Mesh Conference 2007 says:
    May 29, 2007 at 9:13 pm

    [...] I am not sure if I will be able to, but I will try to liveblog some session notes/photos if at all possible. I have a few impressions from Mesh2006 available here. [...]

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