SXSW: Gossip
March 9th, 2008 | by Brad King |This panel will look at the closing gap between gossip and news as inspired by the social media, where information shoots around the Internet at the speed of Twitter. This should be interesting, as I have one friend on the panel (Heather Gold), Twitter founder Evan Williams and Valleywag managing editor Owen Thomas who spent the past 30 minutes defending Sarah Lacey’s controversial interview with the Facebook founder.
Live blogging notes filed below:
- Describing Twitter is very difficult to do if you don’t know what it is, which of course is recursive. It’s a platform to tell everyone what you are doing right now.
- There’s a NY Times reporter on stage questioning how Twitter allows people to deliver the news. Of course it’s a good point, but the answer is obvious: you can’t stop a lone gunman. If there is someone who is passionate about a subject, they will more quickly distribute information and news.
- Things have taken an already weird turn as Julia Allison, an editor-at-large, gets called out of the audience after booing Owen from Valleywag. I now have no idea what this panel is about.
- The TMZ site gets 7 million page views per day, which is just fascinating. There are media companies around the world freaking out about that.
- It’s amazing how completely self-important some of the panelists believe they are; Ev Williams and the Times reporter seem entirely uncomfortable being associated with the rest of this panel.
- We’re now entirely focused on Julia Allison’s personal life, which is absolutely irrelevant to anyone’s interest in this common.
- What’s interesting, she has no idea how social media works. She doesn’t believe that once things are online, everyone has the ability to comment on this.
- More and more layers of people qualify as celebrities has changed. “Is that right? Probably not. But people seem to care about it.”
- Finally, an interesting point about reporting: we make value judgments on information, and give meaning to it, which is honestly a fine line from gossip.
- This will be a very short live blog. The panel has turned into a therapy session for Julia Allison. The interesting people: TMZ, NY Times and Twitter are completely pushed off to the side.
