pubcamp

So much respect due to Jed White for putting on PubCamp. I walked away with mixed feelings.

We had a blizzard of 6 minute presentations - some obvious pitches, some dull, some sharply observational - favourites were Tim Noonan's session on accessibility and Ben Gerholt's advice on how to be a media mogul. Bronwen Clune & Richard Walsh debated whether new media was "a dagger in the heart" for both producers and consumers - and they are both smart, articulate people but the debate format felt sterile. Defending or attacking a proposition is all very well but it rarely takes you anywhere interesting. Conversations tend to be more inspiring that debates.

Which brings me to the panel. We had a bunch of people with decades of media experience between them - and nothing really interesting came out of it. The whole physical set up was oppositional - the panel on the podium facing the audience. Now quite a few people in the audience were frantically twittering with each other and the twitterstream was put up on the screen - but it didn't lead much in the way of insightful questions. But the whole thing degenerated into "big media bad", "no, big media good, "journalists vital", "no, journalists not vital", "no...". It felt like an unfocused waste of time. The panel format is actually hard to pull off well - it needs a focus and an engagement on the part of all involved. At future PubCamps (which would be great Jed), I'd like to see smart people engaged in a different way or more focus given to the questions the panel have to answer and the conversations they have with each other.

So then there was the unconference bit - which was an organisational disaster. The slots were all shifted about and I had no data projector for the slides below - so I ended up holding up my laptop like an accordion in front of my little group. The talk was an attempt to articulate how a value networks perspective might be applied to new media. It's early days and not there yet - so comments welcome.

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