Keynote Speaker Hilary Schneider, Yahoo

The fog rolled in. The planes didn't, as the airport closed because of the weather. It is 9:25 AM and the Dominion room is pretty full. There is the blogger bunching in the back corners around the power outlets. I charged up over night.

The room has wireless. What is interesting, is there is the Hotel's Datavalet with a password for ONA'ers, but I'm using "tsunami" which may well be one of the other ONA attendees way of sharing the wealth. There is also Toronto Muni-WiFi, but they charge $5/hour for that.

Hilary Scheider has taken the "look at my career as an example of how the media world is developing" and she does indeed have the poster girl of new media kind of background.

Okay, she's talking maps now and has piqued my interest. "Local intent drives activity across the Web" is her topic, and she says there is $120 billion in the buying (e-commerce) and $1.3 trillion in "robo" or research online, buy offline. I have been looking at shopping malls recently, and considering how they have changed since their heyday in the 60s and 70s, and I think you begin to see the changes in the physical space (size of stores, inventory) that I think are driven by the change in way the dollars are going, e.g. from store and mall buying to e-commerce.

Ah, she's talking about local meets global. Using the Yahoo mapping integrated with Flickr she is showing how you can follow a story like "day without immigrants" as a visual example. This is something we can use in our http://creatingcommunityconnections.

Their maps have an "opacity" filter so you can have a map with Layers on it. Zillow is an example she used, with their "heat map." Len and I wonder about the inaccuracies that are part of Zillow and how that would get integrated into news.

Ah, I heard it twice already here: "the virtuous circle" so I will be listening to hear if this has reached buzz word status.

Obviously, she is highlighting flickr.com because Yahoo owns flickr now.

"Serving as an independent monitor of power" is how she describes the role of MSM in terms of elections and politics. Showing "Team Mitt" as an example of one approach to getting UGC and use-made commercials into the campaign buzz. The UGC ad has tested just as well as pro ads. Trouble in advertising land, too, I'd say. Leaving particular candidates aside, she showed "candidate mashup" feature. It takes vid clips and let's "you, the viewer" pick the issues and see how the candidates responded. She calls this a "game." Though the user picked the clips and candidates, the "clips" the user was served were chosen by Yahoo. My point is, why and who chose the Hillary clips, or Biden clips out of all the clips that existed, that the program would bring before the audience? This is NOT news, I would argue, but it is a trick. No matter whether the motive of the mashup creator was benign or malevolent, the result is not open and transparent. That is my analysis of this. Vid is emotional, not analytic like text, so the selection of the vids is completely an editorial enterprise. If you think differently, drop me a comment.