"Digital Transformation" presentation from Brussels

Here is the full presentation I delivered at the FLEET New(s) Generation conference in Brussels, Belgium on Jan. 31, 2008. I'm posting it for those who participated, and others who may be interested. You can also find some of the other presentations I mentioned here:

http://futureforecast.com/danpacheco/presentations/

I would like to thank Hans De Canck from FLEET for organizing this and inviting me to be a part of this conference, and many others who I met today whose names are unfortunately stuck in a stack of business cards in my hotel. It was truly one of the more informative conferences of its type that I've had the pleasure of attending recently. I will be posting more of my insights from the conference soon, but let me just say that the people in Flanders totally get the importance of online community.

Technorati Tags: FLEET

Next Steps in "Networked Journalism"

I'll be at Jeff Jarvis' Networked Journalism Summit in New York City next week, speaking on a short panel and, more importantly, participating in a day of discussions about how to take participatory/social/networked media to the next level.

I have to tip my hat to the organizers of this conference. In the interests of getting past show-and-tell and into next steps, they've banned presentations. In place of that, they ferreted out information from attendees in advance, which you can read here. All of the attendees are supposed to read up on each others' achievements and check out each others' sites ahead of time so that when we meet, we can talk about how to make everything better. And they're promising to "gong" anyone who bogs things down with useless, unending debates about things like whether bloggers are better than mainstream media reporters or vice-versa (the old "Batman could beat up Superman" fight -- spare us!) Every conference should be this way.

Some of the profiles were based on phone interviews with David Cohn. You can read his writeup of me here, although I have to warn you that I was a little under the weather during that call and, thus, just a bit unfocused (what else is new). Since we have so much going on in so many directions in Bakersfield, it's difficult to know how to answer basic questions like "what is your goal" (reaction: which one?) and "what was your biggest mistake" (how to choose?), so I tend to give generic answers like "we're growing audience and looking for ways to monetize it." There are of course many different bullets points underneath those goals, but they can never be summarized in one interview. Thus -- the need for a discussion-orientedsummit.

I'm sure David and others will be blogging about some of the more interesting tidbits of the conference. I'll try to post a few things here, too. Based on the list of attendees, there should be some inspiring stuff. I'm already learning about interesting new sites and services, such as Blog Talk Radio, which lets anyone create their own call-in talk radio show online. They have 3,000 hosts already. I'm also interested to learn more about an upcoming service called MixedInk, which claims to let an infinite number of people contribute to a single news story or op/ed piece, wiki-style. Creator David Stern talks about that on the summit site.

If you'll be at this conference and would like to hook up, contact me.