Lili Cheng (Microsoft)
Caterina Fake (Ludicorp)
Amy Jo Kim (SocialDesigner.Net)
Mena Trott (Six Apart)
Evan Williams (Odeo)
Evan: The speed with which people are adopting podcasting compared to blogging is surprising. The idea that normal people participate in media has reached a tipping point. It wasn’t obvious 5 years ago when we started blogging, but podcasting is a continuation of the same thing.
Mena: One of the biggest things is that smaller audiences really matter. Mena has an internal blog that talks to a small number of people, and it’s a different conversation than say, Jonathan Schwartz blogging to several thousand.
Caterina: One reason Flickr has traction is that a lot of work that Ev and Mena did with blogging and social networking made it possible for people to contribute their own content to the web. They felt more comfortable posting things about their life, themselves, etc. My Space and Friendster got people used to the idea that a digital id wasn’t a weird thing to have. What is going to be very important is trust networks, and this came to the fore with social networking, which exposed that there are networks of people we trust with our content and it makes things possible on the net.
Lili: One of the interesting things about this media is that we used to use comm tools to explicitly talk to people, to interrupt people and people feel cautious about that so dont’ say things because they dont’ want to bother them. Blogging is more of an implicit method, so it’s more informal and allows you to communicate without interruption.
Amy Jo: Coming out of the games industry. Interested in social apps that reach a lot of people, and the opportunity is the reinvention of what entertainment is and how that merges with communication. Blogs are a form of entertainment and coming out of the games industry, it gives us an opportunity to think about what entertainment is. What’s exciting is user/player-created content, which is an important expression of identity online whether it’s a blog or playlist.
Caterina: Data-sharing is a social activity, and if you could see two sources of data, such as a grocery list and a musical playlist, you could figure out a lot about a person.
Amy Jo: Building trust is another theme. Throwing a bunch of crap up doesn’t build trust. Blogger and Flickr is a way of building trust, and there are different layers, and it’s contextual.
Mena: With blogs, people who are reading get this perception of who you are, which you are responsible for because of what you write.
Caterina: Given the option of making your photos public or private, 82% of photos are public. In Snapfish or Ophoto the photos are all private, so this is really new. When the default was private, they still had 50/50.
Kids don’t expect privacy these days, they put everything up there. We are all aware that the computer doesn’t’ have the same kind of memory as humans have, it archives things whereas people forget. So what’s going to happen in 20 years when they are going on job interviews?
Lili: Self-moderation evolves over time. And it’s cultural, so different countries evolve differently.
Mena: There’s going to be a point where there are going to be more complex permissions, so you can control who sees what.
Amy Jo: When people get a phone for the first time, they get very excited about it, and they go through an arc. Start off over enthusiastic and then they moderate themselves. Same with social networks. So often opening everything up is often a phase, not somewhere people stay. And it’s a function on where you are in your life and what you are doing.
[more was said but i had backchannel duties to attend to]