[Reminder: I’m live-blogging. Sketchy, imprecise, sometimes inaccurate, incomplete, snap judgments, errors of transcription…you name it.]

ClipSync is a real-time social medium. It will “revolutionize entertainment on the Web.” The founder previously founded Webex, which does simultaneous, synchronized experience. When experiences are simultaneous, you get social inter-reaction. Del.icio.us et al. are serial experiences. Clipsync lets you watch stuff—such as YouTubes—together. [Cool. The idea of enabling people to watch TV together over the Net has been around for a while, including a good version put forward by a friend of mine a few years ago, but I like ClipSync’s doing this for grassroots content. We’ll see if it catches on.]

MotionBox.com says that everything is becoming a video camera. [Well, not video cameras. They already are video cameras. Perhaps I’m quibbling :)] Currently there’s a greater than 10,000:1 ratio of video posters to viewers. Motionbox makes it easy to edit your videos. Cool feature: A slider that lets you pan through the thumbnail of a clip. (Try it here.) The editing interface looks easy to use. It’s Web based, so no software to load. MotionBox also has a player that makes it easy to scan through a video you’ve found. And, a user/viewer can drag select any segment of it and tag it. [Yay tags!] [There are a number of players in this space. Will MotionBox succeed? It looks slick and usable, but I dunno.] [Click here to see why not everything tagged “sex” is really about sex.]

PayPerPost is the “first user-generated advdetising program.” “We connect our advertisers with the largest network of high quality bloggers…The PayPerPost Marketplace lets advertisers connect with bloggers.” In the Market, the advertiser advertises what productsit wants bloggers to blog about for pay. Bloggers look through the available ads and choose the ones they want. He shows an appalling video in which little kids are goaded into smashing a camera because it’s not an HP. but he seems to think we’ll like it. Interesting. I’m live-blogging so I don’t have time to be right, but please permit me a preemptive “Yech.”

Vidavee “enables and organizes the video ecosystem.” Vidavee has built an ad-placement technology “that places ads more intelligently and in a more consumer-friendly way.” It lets your site popup an ad during, say, the most viewed portion of a video based on real-time analytics.

Now the panel of experts gets up. Unfortunately, the first one says “Advertising and content, what’s the difference? Ads and content are all mixed up in the traditional media, so why not on the Web?” [A: Because the Web is ours and we’re trying to build something better.] The other two panelists state some bad feelings about PayPerView. [Tags: onmedia07 advertising marketing video ]

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AlwaysOn OnMedia has a series of short pitches by new companies. I came in on Vringo.com, which plays a clip of your choice when you ring someone. The Vringo guy shows a clip of the people dancing to “Shout” in “The Wedding Crashers” and of the “Whaaaaaatzup?” Bud commercial. It thus seems to be an attempt to make cellphones even more annoying.

Voodoo Vox “is pioneering a breakthrough advertising channel: In-call advertising.” [Uh-oh] They have a clickthrough rate of 14%. “Monetizing phone calls for a diverse network of high call volume industries”: Radio/TV stations, directory asistance, call centers, VOIP telcos, etc. Their site says they create “interactive audio ads dynamically inserted into appropriate spots in various types of telephone calls.” [What exactly is an appropriate spot in a call to insert an ad? I’d say it’s 5 seconds after I’ve hung up.] Their ads auto-target particular demographics. He concludes: “If you have a phone call, I can monetize today.” (Surprisingly, the firm is in North Adams, Mass., home of Ethan Zuckermans ’round the world.)

Now a panel reviews the presentations. [Tags: onmedia07 alwayson media marketing advertising ]

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AlwaysOn OnMedia is a well-run affair with great coffee, fresh fruit, and men wearing actual suits. We’re sitting in a large room in the Mandarin Oriental, a hotel so hoity-toity that its lobby consists of a person who greets you and shows you to the elevators. I feel a bit like an anthropologist here, although I do recognize some friendly faces I’m looking forward to re-connecting with.

The conference is about monetizing communications. I like money and I like it when Net companies make lots of it. It’s not my native idiom, but I have a phrase book that covers the most important areas (“Good morning/afternoon/evening. I am looking for an angel,” and “May I monetize that for you?”).

You can watch the webstream here, which is a nice service. (I’m on a panel at the end about PR on the Web. ) [Tags: onmedia07 alwayson media ]

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The Sunlight–Berkman confab on providing more access to more information about politics and government was terrific. The thirty attendees are (by and large) working fulltime with their sleeves rolled up to provide citizens with better information about how our government and political system work. Some of the information is presented in slick graphics and some is pretty raw, but all of it can be used by any citizen to peg opinions to facts, and to find illuminating patterns and relationships. This is unalloyed good for our democracy.

So, here’s my question: Most of the attendees are progressives, although some are non-partisan. But even the people behind the non-partisan services tend to be left-leaning. Yet what these folks are devoting their time to building are tools that help all citizens no matter how they lean—seeing patterns of private infliuence on public events, exposing corruption. Why is it that these tools for a better democracy are coming from the left? Or are there similar tools developed by the right that I don’t know about? [Tags: berkmansunlight sunlightberkman sunlight berkman politics]

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After lunch, we went around in small groups to stations where folks each had 7 minutes to demo their sites. Some very cool stuff is going on, including (and, damn, I lost my notes so I apologize for what I’m forgetting):

Metavid takes C-SPAN feeds of public domain video of our government in action, strips out the copyrighted stuff, and makes it all searchable by indexing the close captioning provided by our government. Once you’ve found the clip you want, they give you the code to embed it in your site. Way cool.

Front Porch Forum is a Vermont-based service that uses email listservs and the Web to let geographical neighbors talk to one another. It’s a terrific and simple idea that happens to have been executed so well that in one case, 90% of homes have signed on. They’ve found that the optimum size for a virtualized neighborhood is about 300 real homes.

Congresspedia is an open Wikipedia-style wiki with entries for every congressperson, every bill and every rule.

Can you guess what FedSpending has lots of data about? You’re right! It’s a project by OMB Watch, and is funded (as several of these projects are) by the Sunlight Foundation.

The Capitol News Connection feeds 230+ public radio stations with stories pertinent to their localities.

MorePerfect is a wiki where people can use the wisdom of the political crowds to craft language for bills, proposals, referenda, etc. Rather than aiming at “neutrality,” the way Wikipedia does, it aims at contributors being “constructive.” So, if you disagree with a bill, you’re asked not to reverse its meaning and insert stupid comments. Instead, create your own bill. They even have posted the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights as wikis, asking people to improve them.

The Gentilly Project has volunteers in New Orleans color coding houses on maps according to their state of repair. Part of the story is what they’ve learned about getting volunteers to do the work efficiently, which includes having a deadline, breaking a big project down into little steps, and being sure all the sub-projects are transparent to one another. The other part of the story are the results, which reveal that we have to make lots more progress, and that the progress is not as unevenly distributed as one might think.

The Campaigns Wikia is an ambitious attempt to gather information about significant campaigns around the world, using the Wikipedia format.

Lots and lots going on, building an infrastructure of facts and relationships that is direclty valuable, but, perhaps even more important, will be the source for mashups and visualizations we haven’t yet thought of. [Tags: sunlightberkman berkmansunlight berkman politics everything_is_miscellaneous]

On second thought, just read Ethanz’s descriptions of the projects. Way better than mine.

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Dan Gillmor has posted a useful and link-rich report on the opening of the Sunlight-Berkman conference.

I second Dan’s enthusiasm about the quality of the people here. These are folks who are inventing new ways of accomplishing the traditional goals of democracy. [Tags: berkmansunlight conference politics ]

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Le Web 3, which I thought was an outstanding event and a very good conference—great for networking and community, with excellent speakers trapped in a traditional conference framework—is now enmeshed in a controversy that confounds me.

If two of the three leading presidential candidates came to a US tech conference to talk for twenty minutes each about their Internet policies, it’d be considered a coup. At Le Web, however, some attendees feel cheated and betrayed.

In part, perhaps it’s because Le Web was a genuinely international conference. I happen to enjoy politics, so I was happy to hear from the French politicians (even one who I thought treated us like pommes de terre de couch). Others obviously don’t share my interests, so perhaps it felt to them as if two soccer stars bumped other speakers to promote their books. (But the candidates were talking about Internet policies, so the analogy isn’t exact.)

Some apparently resent the intrusion of the traditional media. They came in with the candidates, elbowed people aside, and left with the candidates. On the other hand, one of the candidates, and Loic, pushed back on them. Le slap across the media’s face.

Then there’s a personal layer. Loic Lemeur (Disclosure: I count Loic as a friend. Plus Le Web paid my plane and hotel expenses) has blogged in favor of one of the candidates. He was quite gracious to the other candidate, but some have accused Loic of inviting the candidates in order to advance his own career, and perhaps to advance his company’s interests. If you see no other value in having the candidates attend, then I suppose personal motivations become the best available explanation. And how could any of us not be tempted by the opportunity to be noticed by possible future presidents? But since the candidates’ appearances at the conference seemed to me so obviously a positive, I don’t need to resort to Loic’s inner motives.

None of this has been helped by the post-event conversation, much of it quite angry, and further fueled by an ill-tempered, late-night response from Loic, for which he quickly apologized. Frankly, the swirling path of anger is too exhausting and unpleasant for me to follow.

Finally, there’s the possiblity that there’s simply a cultural divide here, and I’m just not getting something. Perhaps there’s a subtext or a history. My own understanding—it may well be deficient but for now it’s all I have—leaves me feeling bad that a first-class event is being torn down for what I thought was a net (and Net) positive. [Tags: leweb3 loic_lemeur politics france]

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The conservative candidate for the presidency and Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, comes to address the conference. He talks quickly and I’m taking notes on the simultaneous translation, and not keeping up.

He begins by saying the Internet is important. He focuses on the need for France to catch up in Internet as a business opportunity and culture. The government should make the France a leader in Inteornet. It should have boosted things. The miracle is that we nevertheless have people like you, Loic, were able to invest in Internet despite the lag. The lag is also cultural because we did not build the tools for the Internet. We had a difficult debate on IP rights. I was very much in favor of protecting IP because there’s no creativity without protection. But law enforcement isn’t the only possibility. There are win-win solutions that I wish we had spent time devising. The Internet must be one of the four or five priorities of our R&D efforts. France recently set up several global centers of excellent in IT, but France is not investing in the Internet. We are last but one in the effect of the Internet in boosting our economy in Europe. We need e-government, Internet in education, in medicine. I want to invest in free sites for the public. We’re thinking of digitizing our archive. What is private must be respected but what is public must be genuinely public. I want broadband coverage. We should learn from what works in the US.(“That doesn’t mean there’s only one culture,” he quickly adds.)

I plan to restore investor confidence in our country. More accountable, more transparent. Greater confidence in employees. I want France to stop being the country that enriches Switzerland, Belgium the UK, putting to the edge those who want to make money. My message is simple: We need your capital, your intelligence in France. I want us to have a major higher education reform. Our young should be in the level playing field. Universities should be viewed as tax-exempt areas. Encourage young people to take patents. Tax breaks for young people creating companies.

Huge possibilities. Internet breaks down distances. It’s sort of university campus on a global level. Generates intelligence. Brings people closer together and can be an instrument of emancipation. I’m thinking of China. I’m thinking of poor countries. Anyone can disseminate their movies in place of Hollywood. Anyone can be a journalist. Anyone can post his goods. A new area of freedom of expression opens.

It’s a means of cultural diversity. It cannot be a single culture or economy. It must derive its creativity from the multiplication of small companies that innovate. Some become monopolies that inhibit innovation, and we must not that happens.

The dissemination of anti-Semitic information is not ascceptable. Not everything is permitted. I’m not afraid of the word “internet regulation.”

Internet makes school and education even more necessary because of the flow of knowledge that needs interpretation and assessment.

Let us make the new Internet continent the continent of new liberties, that includes rather than excludes. Let us make the Internet continent of the transmission of knowledge, and not the transmission of lies. The continent of sharing of cultures, not of the leveling of values. [Wow. Does he know he’s contradicting himself sentence after sentence?]

You have in your hands the liberty and progress of the world. Realize you must think of what others might do who do not share your values and ethics. The liberty the Internet serves must be that of universal rights. Internet with rules. Huge responsibility on your shoulders. The new citizen of the world is aware of his responsibility and his liberty is bound by values.

He leaves without any questions. And Esme Vos, who I am sitting next to, says Sarkozy speaks perfect English.

I feel like i’ve been lectured by a guy who has no actual understanding of the Internet. I don’t know about French politics, but personally, I sort of hated him. (This is not a well-grounded opinion.) [Tags: leweb3 france politics sarkozy]

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Marko Ahtisaari, formerly of Nokia (and a remarkable person), talks about Blyk, which is building a “pan-European free mobile operator funded by advertising.” Free cell service for teenagers!

He says there are two billion mobile subscribers. He says your children won’t believe there was a time when to make a phone call, you had to change next to a wall.He points out that had been a collective object (“the family phone”) became a personal object. Because of its social function, it pulls other functions into it: It becomes a watch, an alarm clock…

He points to five obstacles:

1. Reach – reaching the next two billion will drive changes in the infrastructure.

2. We are not doing a good job of tuning out communication.

3. They need to be hackable.

4. The future will be around social functionalities, e.g. gifts (Palm beaming), photostreams (Flickr), signaling (Jaiku), real identity (LinkedIn)

5. Freedom – making communications free or at least transparent pricing.

Q: What type of ads will you be serving?
A: We aren’t saying yet, but they will not be interruptive. [Tags: blyk movile telecommunications marko_ahtisaari leweb ]

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What’s up with youth? Why don’t they settle down, get a job, and stay the hell of my lawn, you darn kids!! Aaarrghhh.

danah boyd says: “For the average teenager in the US, if you’re not on MySpace you don’t exist,” she says, just as in Europe if you don’t have a mobile phone, you don’t have a social life.

Friendster was the precursor of MySpace she says. It was populated by freaks, geeks and queers who rebelled against Friendster’s hostility to them. They’d make fake profiles, which Friendster tried to kill off. MySpace went after the people being kicked off by Friendster, including musicians. Music is cultural glue for young people, danah says. A symbiotic relationship grew between bands and fans. The fans invited their friends. They started engaging with their friends. MySpace made the “mistake” of allowing html in the forms, so kids hacked the pages, creating highly personal spaces that people feel they own. A culture grew among those trying to figure out how to hack MySpace profiles.

MySpace profiles were based on Friendster’s, based around dating. But because you can list your friends and comment, it becomes a public conversation space. This causes a shift in what it means to be a friend. They’re writing not only themselves into being, but writing their entire community into being.

Top 8 lets you choose who your best friends are, in public. “Any decision you make about this are wrong.” Nowhere in our public lives do we list who our friends are.

What’s happening at MySpace is very similar to what happens in the rw. Kids are trying to figure out status. But, online social networks have “persistence, searchability, replicability and invisible audiences.” Kids sent the norms based upon the invisible audience they assume is there. She points to Stokely Carmichael having to decide how to speak on TV, the way he spoke in DC to politicos or in the south to congregations. There is no right choice, she says.

Kids on MySpace are constantly being pummeled by marketers, she says. Marketers want to be friended by teens. To teenagers, email is nothing but spam. “That’s what MySpace is turning into.” It’s a huge struggle. “I don’t know if MySpace is sustainable.”

The future is obviously mobile, she says. But how? What will it look like? We’ve assumed Net neutrality: Anyone can build something and put it out there. But not on mobiles. So, how do we take that next step?

[Great talk. Everyone knows danah’s brilliant, but she’s also a brilliant presenter.] [Tags: danah_boyd myspace leweb3 social_networks]

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