Internet innovators from across the world are to speak at the Guardian's Activate conference in New York. Follow live coverage of the day here and tweet me @AdamGabbatt
Clay Shirky, professor at NYU's interactive telecommunications program and famed internet guru, is up now. He's the last speaker of the day.
Shirky says he and others are working on a study on the future of news from journalists' perspective. He begins by talking about how when Zuccotti Park was cleared out in November an AP journalist was among those arrested. When a colleague tweeted about it, AP famously put out procedures for using Twitter saying journalists should not tweet before a story has gone on the wires.
Shirky says if a "ragtag group of amateurs" – he's talking about citizen journalists at Occupy protests I think – can upstage AP, what does that mean for the industry?
Says @cshirky uses #ows eg as a 'rag tag' band that 'can spread the news faster than the AP'. What is PROCESS of journalism? #ActivateNYC12
— emily bell (@emilybell) May 3, 2012
He says processes such as AP inplemented following the tweet tend to come from stupidity. Any time checks are in place to prevent something bad happening, and Shirky gives the example of a confidential email accidentally having been sent out to a client, they are in place because mistakes have been made previously.
RT @Rasiej: @cshirky mentions @homicidewatch an amazing journalistic platform built"As if the net existed"#activatenyc12
— Scott Stadum (@ScottinDC) May 3, 2012
But "for the news industry defending against past mistakes produces future mistakes", Shirky says, because that industry isn't the same anymore.
That means we should see much smaller organisations outperform bigger organisations, because they don't have to go through processes, Shirky continues. Using Homicide Watch DC as an example (check the link), he says the site covers exclusively murders in the Washington DC area, with each murder victim getting a unique URL.
"This is a news site that's designed as if the web exists", Shirky says, to laughter. The site operates "more like a database than a news wire".
The site is run by just two people, and one of those only works part time, yet it does a better job at covering homicides issue than major news organisations, Shirky argues, at a dramatically lower cost.
RT @Rasiej: @cshirky mentions @homicidewatch an amazing journalistic platform built"As if the net existed"#activatenyc12
— Scott Stadum (@ScottinDC) May 3, 2012
"They've taken the risk out of the equation." They've proven you can work this way.
Now the people behind Homicide Watch DC are taking this cheaper model to newspapers. But "not one single newspaper" has taken them up on it.
"It isn't that newspapers don't have the resources to do this," Shirky says. It's that if they did it they would have to rethink their business from the ground up.
"What would it take for a traditional organisation to actually change its process?" Shirky says.
He says the New York Daily News "completely scrapped" its traditional way of repurposing a newspaper for a website when Hurricane Irene was due to strike. They sent their reporters everywhere. Their homepage became completely live and constantly updating.
What did it take to get them to do this?
One, it took Hurricane Irene, Shirky says. The Daily News couldn't have reporters at its HQ under a city ruling. But their content management system only worked from in the building, so their hand was forced.
Secondly, all the senior executives were on vacation, Shirky says, adding that now we know what it takes for news institutions to change.
"One, you have to believe your news room is about to be blown out to see. Second, your senior newspaper activities have to be completely AWOL."
Nancy Lublin, CEO of Do Something, says young people are not the future. They're running multi-billion companies now. (Queue pics of Mark Zuckerberg et al).
Lublin talks about texting, and its sometimes overlooked power. It has a "100% open rate", she says. If you get a text, you read it.
Do Something texts 200,000 kids a week. The opt out rate is only 0.6%. Now she explains some of Do Somethings projects.
"Teens for jeans" is one, designed to clothe homeless children. The campaign collected more than 1m pairs of jeans in just three weeks. The use of mobile is crucial to Do Something's success.
However she says the challenge of using texting is "how to make this social". It's "an inherently one-on-one technology", and that's what they're looking at now.
Om Malik, founder and editor-in-chief of GigaOM Network, talks about how he hates the word "content". He says we're in the information business. But he has some bad news for established media companies – he thinks media industry innovation can't happen there. He cites Buzzfeed as an innovator and gives an example of how a start-up magazine might look today...
If you had no history and asked how a gourmet food magazine would look today, I would give you @foursquare or @yelp - @om #activatenyc12
— Zachary McCune (@zmccune) May 3, 2012
What Facebook did to MySpace, Instagram was doing to Facebook, Malik says. He says as long as Facebook has Mark Zuckerberg at the helm he will be fine. Only a company founder can understand the panic of a start-up, he says.
Malik says Google is doing "unnatural things" by trying to expand beyond its search aspect. Google is threatened by Facebook's rise, he says. Malik does not use Google+ anymore.
"Google News is this machine" doing everything, he says. They never really thought about people.
.@om hates the word content. "We are in the business of information." Says it just sounds more promising #activatenyc12 twitpic.com/9gvsjn
— Craig Kanalley (@ckanal) May 3, 2012
The afternoon's panel now, "How can the open web further the sustainability agenda?" Jo Confino, Guardian executive editor, moderates, with Georg Kell, executive editor, UN Global Compact; Hannah Jones, vice president, sustainable business and innovation, Nike Inc; David Jones, global CEO, Havas; Toby Daniels, co-founder and CEO, Crowdcentric.
Hannah Jones shows off her sustainably made Nike trainers to begin – they only contain one thread – and says that businesses thinking they have to keep things secret is "totally counterintuitive".
"We got wrapped up in secrecy. But in an age of transparency, that doesn't make sense."
She says in years previous as a company, you would never tell anyone where your supply chain was. But in 2006 Nike broke with that tradition and disclosed all its factory locations. Now they collaborate with others to improve conditions in their factories.
Daniels says collaboration is actually "incredibly difficult" to do. It has to start with understanding how to build an infrastructure or framework, rather than when many people talk about crowdsourcing, they think of just putting an open platform for people to work on and share. Crowdsourcing is actually about putting incentives in place for people to "actually want to get involved".
David Jones says social media has created "radical transparency".
"People can find out anything about companies," he says, and then decide if they want to give that company their business. Now we're heading toward an age where if a business does not conduct itself well, people can bring it down.
"People have an amazing ability to hold business to account," Jones adds, before giving a killer quote. In the social age, "the new price of doing well, is doing good".
"Why did we just have the meltdown?," he says. "Because we had a model built on the idea of profit for profit's sake."
Hannah Jones says we're seeing a tectonic plate shift in transparency. "What was a whisper is a shout." Transparency in business is now becoming the norm.
Confino asks Georg Kell about this theory of the "fear of protectionism". We're seeing the challenge of fear – from water scarcity and food scarcity. Is it easier to collaborate when things are going well?
Kell says there are still a lot of short-term business models which hold back change. The challenge is to bring corporate sustainability "to maturity". But out of necessity innovation can occur.
After the second world war the majority of world leaders agreed we needed to collaborate, Kell says. But he fears over the last couple of years "the caretaking of the collaborative space that enables innovation to travel fast" has not progressed as it should have. New divides have emerged during the global financial crisis, and the world is "neglecting" the sharing of innovation.
David Jones says he's an optimist. Young people, who he refers to as millenials, now are "unbelievably socially responsible".
"Naturally, as the world gets each decade over, it is going to head in the right direction."
Kell says one problem with openness and sustainability is that we haven't come to grips yet with the issue of interdependence – "air travels across boundaries, water travels across boundaries".
David Jones agrees. He says business needs to deliver, because government "is not a system that delivers any more". Business, technology have gone global, but each leader of a country is trapped by thinking nationally".
Talking of the current climate, Daniels says "most change comes when fear is being felt". It forces us to explore solutions more aggressively, he says.
Andy Mitchell, strategic partner manager, platform partnerships at Facebook is up next. The live stream is turned off because, as per this Read Write Web article, "The Securities and Exchange Commission requires a "quiet period" for any company preparing to go public".
What does the "quiet period" actually entail? Companies are allowed to make forward-looking statements, factual progress reports on products and updates to critical infrastructure. For example, if Facebook is down for millions of users, the company can tell people why and how they are fixing it. Communications to developers, such as is made through its developer blog, are permitted.
"Non-reporting issuers are, at any time, permitted to continue to publish factual business information that is regularly released and intended for use by persons other than in their capacity as investors or potential investors," the SEC explainer page on the quiet period states.
In plainer English, that means that investors do not get any information regarding the financial performance and critical infrastructure of a company. Communications with non-investor entities is permitted.
Jonah Peretti, CEO of Buzzfeed, begins his talk by saying Google is about "connecting people with information they want".
Facebook is more about "expressing yourself", Peretti says, while Buzzfeed is about treating social at a starting point. He shows a picture of two Basset Hounds running that was shared 121,000 times on Facebook and had over 1m page views.
"It wasn't so much about the content, it was about the social experience."
Buzzfeed is organised around that idea, Peretti says.
People also want to get involved, Peretti continues, quoting a Buzzfeed campaign against the injustice of Bradley Cooper being named sexiest man alive "when it was clearly the year of Ryan Gosling".
He talks about "informational value, but also emotional value", showing a picture of 45 powerful news images from around the world. More than half of the 9m views that article received came from Facebook, Peretti says.
He goes on to talk about Buzzfeed Politics under Ben Smith, and how it got its first scoop by revealing John McCain would endorse Mitt Romney.
Peretti ends by talking about the "social dynamics", and how people like to share things wih friends that can educate them and make them feel better – he ends with a run through of Buzzfeed's "13 simple steps to get you through a rough day article".
Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief of AOL Huffington Post Media Group and Janine Gibson, editor-in-chief of Guardian US, now take the stage.
Gibson says Huffington was described to her recently as "the Madonna of our industry", before Huffington gives a run-down of what HuffPo does.
The HuffPo looks at politics and how to cover under-reported stories that matter to people's lives, she says. It was this that won them a Pulitzer.
Another HuffPo obsession is "how to reduce stress in people's life". Huffington says the search to discover how to reduce stress in people's live began when she fainted from stress five years ago. This led to the Post's 'healthy living' section and many articles about how to deal with stress, including an app which will help people to cope.
Another obsession is "making a difference". The Post has a dedicated section on good news. A lot of monetisation comes from brands targeting people around this area, Huffington says.
Asked about the White House correspondents dinner and President Obama's joke that the Huffington Post won its Pulitzer for copy and pasting, Huffington says: "Any time the president of the United States makes a joke about your Pulitzer, that's a great joke for me."
What is the Huffington Post's role in trying to "dampen down post-truth rhetoric", Gibson asks.
Huffington says the debate is narrowed by talking in terms of left and right. The state of the middle class are not just something that concerns liberals.
HuffPo was born in the George W Bush era and disagreed with many things he stood for, Huffington says, but HuffPo has been very critical of Obama as well.
Gibson asks about Murdoch's criticism that the HuffPo has been "quite clever" at stealing stories from newspapers. Huffington says the organisatione employs more than 500 full time journalists. She says to call what the HuffPo does "stealing" is to not be aware of the new way of doing things. If the HuffPo includes a story from the New York Times, or a small blog, they get traffic which they can monetise.
The idea of saying: "I want to launch a site where people can come and see my stuff, that train has left the station a long time ago," Huffington says. Now it is about creating content that can be shared across many websites.
"You were described as the Madonna of journalism, is there the possibility of a Lady Gaga appearing and possibly stealing or repurposing some of your earlier work?"
Huffington says there is room for Madonna and Lady Gaga, which is good news...
Lunch over here at the Paley Center, and the audience is currently enjoying a performance from "virtual magician" Marco Tempest, CEO of Newmagic Communications inc.
"Virtual magician" Marco Tempest at #activatenyc12 twitter.com/AdamGabbatt/st…
— Adam Gabbatt (@AdamGabbatt) May 3, 2012
Some tweets from the crowd here:
@emaleigh on Adam Sharp's assertion that news is still essential as a product:
Quality information is still a life sustaining force, same as food and water are, and people seek that. -Twitter's Adam Sharp #activateNYC12
— Emaleigh Doley (@emaleigh) May 3, 2012
@PCrysdale picks up a great quote from Sviokla on openness/social and why it is important.
"If your network is an old-world network, I can guarantee you are out of the loop. The future is social." - John Sviokla #activatenyc12
— Peter Crysdale (@PCrysdale) May 3, 2012
Emily Bell moves the discussion on to how internet change is understood. Do we really understand what is going on when change is happening at this pace?
Rusbridger says the Guardian opened its API, which was "a big decision moment". But he thinks debates are now happening so fast that a lot of news managements don't have time to think things through.
Sviokla says the speed of change is accelerating. "The only human way" to address that is to "make sure you're talking to people who know what they're talking about". The primary thing is social, he says.
"Are we winning the battle for an open Internet?" @arusbridger, @AdamS, @emilybell et al at #activatenyc12 twitter.com/AdamGabbatt/st…
— Adam Gabbatt (@AdamGabbatt) May 3, 2012
Everybody needs some privacy around something, Bell says. How does the open web conversation have a sensible public debate about that.
Benkler says to distinguish between transparency and privacy, you have to understand power. Is the person being gazed at weak, and the gazer powerful, or the other way round? Openness is fundamentally about destabilisation between power and control. If you understand that, then you will not be wrong about where privacy requires "constrain" and where power requires openness. When asked, he says it would be possible for this to be translated into a legal framework.
You are able to say privacy is about people's information when it is in a "non-public context", Benkler says. The distinguishing line needs to come from what is happening in society and then be translated into online.
The morning's panel discussion now. Emily Bell is chairing a discussion about the battle for an open internet, with Alan Rusbridger, John Sviokla, Edward DeSeve, Adam Sharp and Yochai Benkler.
Bell asks Sharp, from Twitter, about barriers to a growing, "networked world". "Twitter degrades" very well, Sharp says. You can be an active participant by text message. You don't need a smartphone. Still, there are populations which don't have access to that, Sharp says. He sees openness as "everyone having a microphone", as well as data. Openness also means the ability for people to build their own tools ontop of existing things.
Is more data really made public than ever before, Bell asks? She wonders if closed data is still a significant problem.
Sviokla, the principle and business leader for strategy and innovation at PwC, says companies would like to share data more, "but it's expensive" and "it's really hard to get at". Different data types can make it hard to publish data.
Another problem is around property rights. There are fundamental questions, "like who owns my behaviour", Sviokla says.We need to articulate the nature of those property rights, as hstorically the more we have articulated the nature of property rights, the more there has been an opportunity for openness.
Sviokla says some organisations definitely do want to keep some things closed. Some for competitive reasons, some for regulatory reasons. "There is a vast amount of information we cannot share due to regulation," at PwC, he says, and the company would be in a great deal of trouble if it did share it.
Bell says journalism sits in a position of wanting things to be open, but then wanting secrecy for competitive purposes.
Alan Rusbridger says there is still a fight for open vs closed models. The most closed model is the Times of London, for which it is impossible to see if it is a success. The Guardian is "more at the extreme of the open model", Rusbridger says. "Nobody can yet prove that economic salvation is going to lie at one polarity or the other."
Sviokla says who pays for it and what do they pay for?
The Guardian is a mixture between a membership model and advertising, Rusbridger says, mentioning the Guardian's recent "open weekend" in London, when 6,000 readers were invited into the Guardian offices. It enabled people to become "members in what we're doing".
Here's a picture of the panel here from my colleague Greg Chen...
Panel: Are we winning the battle for an open Internet? #ActivateNYC12 twitter.com/ChenGreg/statu…
— Greg Chen (@ChenGreg) May 3, 2012
Swift recap – Eli Pariser, MoveOn.org author and author of The Filter Bubble, spoke about how we create an internet that matters. He said too many media organisations think of it as a "stage model" where everyone looks at, or consumes, what one organisation puts out. With social media, that doesn't work, Pariser says. Everyone now has their say.
Media organisations need to build trust, Parise said, and we need to make internet shaped content about stuff that matters, Pariser says. We need to make sure that the "news that really matters" finds the "people that need it".
Yochai Benkler, co-director of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, followed with a detailed analysis of the SOPA/PIPA debate and how the way internet users altered the decision making process offers "a unique insight into the dynamics of what the future of democratic participation could become".
The talk was fascinating, but unfortunately I am not a Harvard-level expert on Internet and Society so would advise you to watch Benkler's talk in video form, rather than read any analysis of mine. I'll embed the video when it is published online.
Adam Sharp, senior manager, government, news and social innovation at Twitter, is up next. He begins by comparing Twitter use from election day 2008 to today.
On election day 2008, 1.8m tweets were sent. That many tweets are now sent every eight minutes, Sharp says. Continuing along the same theme, he says more tweets have been sent this week than had ever been sent before Barack Obama was sworn in as president. Impressive.
This volume has led to changes, Sharp says. Politicians and presidential campaigns had shifted to a "broadcast method" of campaigning. But billboards, television advertising etc had led to the loss of a "one on one" connection with voters that you get from door-to-door campaigning. However with Twitter that "one on one" relationship is returning.
This also leads to a "democratization of access", Sharp says, where everyone can have a soapbox – which helped the growth of the Tea Party and the Occupy movement.
Social media has also changed the news cycle, Sharp says. Voters now have a "real time", "direct connection" to events. He uses the example of how Barack Obama's trip to Afghanistan broke on Twitter as an example of how the news cycle has changed.
"There's a tremendous opportunity in the news media to do what journalists do best, which is to provide context," Sharp says. As well as providing context, tools like Twitter can be used to find and tell stories.
Hilary Rosen's comments on Ann Romney "never having worked a day in her life" would have traditionally played out over "days", Sharp says. He also gives a example of people following debates on Twitter, using "answer" or "#dodge" to assess whether a candidate answered questions. It is this which leads to the idea that a candidate fared well or poorly in a debate, Sharp says. Twitter also gives a "real-time index to the election".
Question: news of Obama's trip to Afghanistan did slip out on Twitter, and the administration then asked key journalists to delete tweets. How does Twitter deal with things like this?
Sharp says Twitter and its employees "do not want to be subject to arrest". If content is in violation of laws in a certain country, it will be deleted in that country and replaced by a box saying it has been deleted at the request of the government. Users in the rest of the world can see that tweet. In terms of deleting a tweet, a court order is required because Twitter wants a judge to have asked for deletion, not just government spokespeople.
Alfred Spector, vice president of research and special initiatives at Google, says that Google uses "hybrid intelligence", where systems 'learn' from people.
An example is how search terms use spell correction, Spector says. Google doesn't employ language experts, instead computers monitor search traffic and look for patterns where people type a word, don't get the search results they wanted, type it again and do. Computer systems are then able to use this 'knowledge' to suggest search terms. Spector gives the example of the incorrect spelling of "Barack" when President Obama shot to prominence. Google is now also doing this with speech recognition.
Openness is important, Spector says, but with large amounts of data, it is not just sufficient for systems to be able to process it. We need to make it understandable to users.
Open data enables Google to respond to searches for real-time events better, Spector says, giving the example of searches for 'tsunami' on Google maps shortly after a tsunami warning was issued last year. The searches brought up tsunami museums and centres, instead of warnings and mapping of where the tsunami may hit. Open data on tsunami warnings incorporated by Google has enabled them to have a "Google alert" system, showing locations that could potentially be affected by a tsunami.
Spector is asked about Google's translation technology. It is "imperfect", but "you generally get the correct gist" of an article you try to translate. Google has been adding linguistic queues, and parsing, as we heard are being used to help users search for terms, into its translate function, Spector says, which helps with languages which have a different sense of verb placement.
Edward DeSeve, president of the global Public Leadership Institute and a former special advisor to President Obama, is on next, discussing open government. The biggest obstacle to openness in government is fear, DeSeve says.
"If the people know, this will be bad," is the philosophy among civil servants, according to DeSeve. He says when he started out in government he was told "the opposite" of the old adege "trust the people".
So why are civil servants opposed to openness? "They're afraid," DeSeve says. Afraid of the unknown.
"We don't know what might happen" if government's ran openly, DeSeve says. Government is all about networks, but some people in government are afraid of participating in networks because they feel they might risk getting promoted.
DeSeve talks about how states should be publishing information "from a systemic point of view", which is interesting. Instead of a state taking its information on road traffic and conditions, then processing that before giving out information and advisories, why not just open up its internal system and let people see, and use, the information themselves?
Reid Hoffman, co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, is the subject of a Q&A with Jeff Jarvis.
Jarvis kicks off by asking about "openness", and what Hoffman understands by that. It's the freedom to develop, freedom to speak, freedom to act, Hoffman says. Openness is important in government as well as journalism.
Platforms for journalism are important, Hoffman says. In terms of actually making money from journalism, "nobody's seen a content model that works," he adds.
Hoffman and Jarvis talk KickStarter as an example of openness and a way of testing whether a market exists. Hoffman says companies aren't as restrained by capital as people think. He says although Kickstarter is used as a way of financing projects, which might not be able to be launched through businesses, those products could spark into companies.
We see many threats to openness, Jarvis says. Does Hoffman see a threat to the open internet?
There's three different areas, according to Hoffman. One is government, because people think they are better architects than they are, the second area is that we have to watch out for businesses try to go to a state where they have dominance. That can adversely affect the ecosystem. The third is consumer dependent. Consumers don't approach the web with the philosophy "I'm doing what's best for the ecosystem", they do what is best for them, now.
We finish with some questions from the audience. A man named Nathan says he feels we're at the beginning of social. What does Hoffman reckon?
Hoffman agrees. We're "just at the beginning". It will get deeper and richer. One of the things that's difficult about predicting the future is "it's always sooner" than you think.
Now a question about volunteering – LinkedIn has recently added a volunteering aspect to its service.
Every organisation that can should think about doing a "for good mission" and a "for profit mission", Hoffman says. LinkedIn has added a volunteering aspect to its service recently, one example being finding professionals with certain expertise who can serve as board members for non-profit organisations. He thinks all corporations should do that.
Jeff Jarvis, who is acting as "chairman" today, takes to the stage to introduce the Activate summit and dismiss his "chairman" title. He says the Brits love to inflate titles. I, for one, am introducing myself as "Lord of the Blog" to people here.
The internet is "brand new", Jarvis says. While some people believe the internet is changing things very quickly, Jarvis thinks we're going through change "at a very slow pace". But today, we have a chance to explore that change, with representatives present from journalism, technology and government. The merging of journalism and technology matters, Jarvis says. He believes that "government must become open by default and secret only by necessity", which will be discussed later.
Introducing the Guardian's editor-in-chief, Jarvis says Alan Rusbridger is the "best newspaper editor in the world". If you're reading, "I agree Alan!" (#suckup).
Hello and good morning from the Paley Center for Media in New York. The 16-storey building boasts two entrances, one on the left for office staff and a main entrance for the general public. The Guardian comes to you live from the large basement-level theater.
But enough of my extensive knowledge of the Paley Center. Today marks the second Guardian Activate New York conference, with some of the media industry's big players due to speak.
In no particular order, Emily Bell, Arianna Huffington, Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, Jonah Peretti, The Guardian's Very Own Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian's Very Own Kath Viner and many more are on the bill. (Full listings here).
We'll see presentations from speakers, panel discussions and Q&As through the day. This morning Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism and former multiple-award-winning Guardian guru will chair a discussion on openness on the web, with the Guardian editor-in-chief, and my boss, Alan Rusbridger and Twitter's Adam Sharp among those set to weigh in.
This afternoon there's a keynote speech from Arianna Huffington, president and editor-in-chief of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group, then a Q&A with Guardian US editor-in-chief, and my other boss, Janine Gibson, before Clay Shirky, professor at New York University's interactive telecommunications program, and Jeff Jarvis, director at City University of New York's Tow-Knight center for entrepreneurial journalism see us home.
Enough names for you? Good. On with the show.