Culture

Exclusive: NowPublic @ nextMEDIA 2008

by Jarrett Martineau | June 8, 2008 at 04:28 pm

1113 views | 29 Recommendations | 6 comments

NowPublic has been in attendance at the 2008 nextMEDIA
conference in Banff, Alberta this weekend, which has offered a
fascinating and very insightful look into the current state and 'the
future of digital content' in Canada.

Running in conjunction with the Banff World Television Festival,
which immediately follows it, nextMEDIA examines many of the key
issues, opportunities and challenges that Canadian content creators,
broadcasters, advertisers, and media are facing in this emergent (and
perhaps no longer 'new') media space.

I spent much of this weekend participating in real-time online dialogue with other conference participants on Twitter. I invite you to read my liveblogging posts on my NowPublic member channel here.

As has been the case with several of the recent conferences I've attended in Vancouver and Austin,
the nextMEDIA sessions reiterated and reaffirmed that key industry
issues such as monetization, distribution, and community-building
remain not only hot topics of discussion, but critical issues that need
to be addressed.

For me, the highlights of the weekend were:

• Bill Buxton's compelling opening keynote on designing and implementing compelling user experiences

• Jeff Bar's discussion of Amazon's recent developments in cloud computing

• Jim Louderback's amazing presentation on building "a TV network for the internet generation" through his experience with Revision3

• the Kris Krug-moderated
panel on harnessing the power of social media (which featured excellent
panelists from CBC Radio3, Zeros to Heroes, Cambrian House, Elastic
Entertainment, and ISWID)

• and the Ken Bautista-led panel on transmedial narratives and the future of storytelling

I
will be updating this post to offer a comprehensive wrap-up of the
conference events, however, you can also check out other nextMEDIA
coverage here:

• nextMEDIA's Extended Coverage

• Twemes

• TechVibes

• Bridging Media

It's
the very nature of digital media events to be incredibly self-reflexive
and incredibly well-documented so, of course, there are plenty of #nm08
photos that have been uploaded to Flickr here.

All
in all, it's been an excellent event with a great group of attendees. I
hope to have more time tomorrow to digest all I've learned and
experienced.

Oh, and did I mention that I had dinner with Ed the Sock last night?

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