The Buzz Bin

The Digital Media Conference last week at AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, an interesting locale for a conference, was run amok with thirty-something and early forty-something men and women (and a few old timers) wanting to learn more about new media.

If the average blogging age is 26, not so surprisingly, there weren’t very many twenty-somethings in the crowd. They already know it all. But there were 300 registered attendees who showed up to learn more.

A blog scan revealed a lot of coverage for the conference prior to the event, but only a few comments since (thus the ? after success, one would think there’d be more coverage). Tech Daily Dose of National Journals Technology Daily talks about the must-see sites from State of the ‘Digital Union’ panelists, including, Jim Brady, president and executive editor of Washingtonpost.com and Betsy Scolnik, president National Geographic Digital Media. Digital Media Wire has a small summary of the morning’s events here.

Content
My favorite panel was ‘Beyond the Buzz: Is there a Business Model for Social Media and User Generated Content?’ Panelist Haroon Mokhartzada, CEO of Freewebs, part social network and part Web site publisher, presented some excellent thoughts, including ‘would you take audience over growth as a social media company.’

Haroon asks if it’s possible to do both at the same time. He says as long as your not going to go bankrupt, the choice is easy. As for the demographics that are using social media, panelists said it’s broken down 13-20 year olds, and 26+. It’s hard to determine which one is more valuable. The youth group is more viral, less content. They’re using it as next generation email. The older demographic has more meaningful content.

Interesting observations continued to be discussed during keynote Robert Greenwald, filmmaker, director and producer, and panel What’s Next in Web 2.0. There was a lot of talk about widgets and virtual worlds, as well as an introduction to Second Life.

I’m glad I went. Besides having never been to Silver Spring before, I actually felt like I could hold my own. For the most part, I knew what everyone was talking about. New Media Nouveaux is next on July 13^th.