Digital Life Day, 2006

The first morning session of Digital Life Day 2006, presented by Burda Media, is underway here at KF-1 in Munich. I thought I'd post some of my initial impressions. Lots of other people are doing the same (DLD06).

I have been to a lot of technical conferences, of course, and consumer electronics shows, and academic colloquia, but this is the first conference I've been to that is focused on media. The audience is marketing, and seems (from my unscientific sampling) to be largely non-technical non-engineering.

The presentations, in a single track, are far too brief to discern more than the themes. The first celebrity death match: Dan Gillmor (Center for Citizen Media, his blog), juxtaposed with Anina, the blogging fashion model. I know where you all are clicking...

At their best, the presentations are intensely personal (how blogospheric). Loic Le Meur from Six Apart (son blogue) talked at some length the political motion he and other bloggers have created in france by capturing the attention of politicians, both local and national. (at the same time, not coincidentally, N.Z. Bear and others are doing the same thing here in the U.S., e.g. porkbusters).

There were presentations by bloggers, videobloggers, fashion bloggers, podcasters, everyone has a cell phone, a playstation, a video camera, its all media, and locationality is the topic du jour. Where you are, what's around you, how you find out, how you interact.

There was a way-too-brief conversation about the extraordinary adoption of social networking technology in asia. Michelle Guthrie (Star), Andreas Weigend (Weigend Associates), Rich Kim (Cyworld.com), and the Swiss curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist (an exhibition curator with a recent project Guangdong). The interesting discussions centered around adoption differences (Weigend says, "It's not a technology gap, it's a communication gap") based on age or generational differences, and Rick mentioned the issues of cultural and societal differences, specifically how they make the adoption patterns in asia look different than in the west ("Apples and Oranges", he says). All in all, interesting questions were raised, even if there was no chance to explore the issues.

One of my favorite pull quotes - Gabe McIntyre, of xolo.tv. "Blogs are OK, but there is so much text, and I hate to read..." He then launched his promo-reel of video blogs. I suspect a quarter of the audience had their cell phones out, taking pictures which will probably appear on flickr before you know it. Preaching (almost literally) to the converted.

So far, it's a pretty cool crowd, Kudo's to Marcel Reichart and others for pulling it together for Hubert Burda, who was, of course, "in the house".

I'm struck by the large number of projects going on in areas where I have a specific interest, which I feel like I'm falling upon just by chance. Almost every web site that people are mentioning to me is new to me. It's not just information overload in general. Even in the narrow niche where I want to know what's going on, it's too much to keep track of. The internet is just too big, that's the problem...