Leuven.
Skylla Janssen is next at EuroITV 2009. She also wonders about the future TV, and poses the question of whether there's a space for user involvement in the participatory design of new television formats and content.

I'm afraid I missed out on blogging a good part of her presentation as I had to reboot my laptop - but she presented a nice survey of TV producers' attitudes towards incorporating user-generated content and ideas (as you'd expect, such input was valued only where it generated money - think SMS voting in reality TV - or where users were seen as providing unskilled labour in creating and maintaining fan communities around mainstream programming.

Hamburg.
Normally I tend to blog more when I'm travelling - but this trip is so packed full with conferences and events (not to mention the need to keep up with my regular work) that I'm hardly finding any time to write at all. So, just a quick note to say that more videos from the next09 conference at the start of May are now online, including interviews with a number of the keynote speakers conducted by conference media partner Sevenload (a YouTube-style German videosharing platform).

Here's me, speaking (in German) to Olaf Kolbrück from the magazine Horizont.

Link:

Copenhagen.
The next COST298 speaker is Serge Proulx, whose interest is in forms of user contribution in Web 2.0. Here, users are voluntary contributing en masse to create large amounts of content, and this is increasingly harnessed by corporations as value added to their services. Why are users so ready to contribute in this way - are they voluntary participating in a new form of information capitalism, and expropriating the social link put in the service of the economic sphere of production, and/or are they participating in the emergence of a new form of individualised mass media, a form of symmetric media which may empower users through the social capital they construct, potentially leading to the creation of a more participative democracy?

Copenhagen.
Finally we move on to Aylin Aydogan here at COST298. She, too, points to the changes associated with the rise of Web 2.0, and especially the emergence of user-generated content. Views of these changes as positive developments are hardly new, however - earlier Web-related developments were similarly seen as progress. Today, however, changes are very clearly driven by users and their motivations, and this is shifting the relationship between users and media organisations.

Past research in this context has focussed especially on the impact of citizen journalism and news blogging on news organisations; Aylin's study adds to this in the Turkish context. (She's taking a long time to take us through the existing work in this field, though - I wish she'd get to her work!)

Hamburg.
Only two more sessions to go at next09... The next one brings together a number of the major professional networking sites, with Kevin Eyres from LinkedIn, Stefan Groß-Selbeck from its German competitor Xing, and Markus Berger-de León from German student networking site StudiVZ (which has also launched a post-studies site, MeinVZ, and a site for schoolkids, SchülerVZ).

Stefan begins by stating that social networking has been the key development in online media over the past few years. In Germany, Xing is a leader of this development, especially in the professional networking context; its business network is moving through the current financial crisis very in a very stable fashion. The current crisis is an opportunity - and the company is confidently planning for its future. Kevin adds that for LinkedIn as a global platform the main challenge is to service the global business community. And he agrees that the crisis has raised the awareness of networking as a crucial element of professional life. By contrast, Markus describes StudiVZ with its strongly German focus as the most truly local networking site of the three. So far, the sites has not yet experienced any impact from the financial crisis - members are as active as they have been previously.

Hamburg.
We continue at next09 with a panel expanding on the question of brand-consumer relations in the social media age. Chris Heuer from the Social Media Club promotes a holistic, whole-of-business approach here - it's about more than marketing. Great products aren't sold, he says - they're bought; this has been the case for the iPhone, for example. The brand needs to convene the conversation around their products, and act like the host of the party - this means returning to basics, and letting go of the illusion of control.

Hamburg.
OK, I'm next at next09, speaking on produsage and business. Here's the presentation - audio to come as soon as I get a chance is already online, too...

Update: a video of my presentation is now also available through conference partner Sevenload.

Hamburg.
I skipped the final speaker in the previous session at next09 - there were major laptop problems which delayed the start by 15 minutes. So we're already in the next session, in which I'm also presenting; we start, though, with Nicole Simon, whose talk is about the use of Twitter in business.

Twitter, Nicole says, has become mainstream in the US; Germany and other countries are still lagging behind, though. This may be a function of the fact that no mainstream stars (such as Ashton Kutcher in the US) have promoted its use yet. This could happen any time, though. So,how does this affect business - what if Twitter is used to build a good company profile for a competitor, and if that competitor is poaching staff; what if news or rumours about a company spread via Twitter; what if there's a fake profile for a company; what if a company's star twitterer leaves?

Hamburg.
The next speaker this morning at next09 is Lee Bryant from Headshift, whose interest is in user-driven companies. Such companies may engage in user-led product design or user-led innovation, for example, and much of their approach draws on the experience of the open source movement. But can we think beyond the 'user involvement' model, where user innovation takes place only on the surface? Examples for existing models, Lee suggests, include Digg as a totally user-driven environment, Dell's Ideastorm which draws in user ideas, and Walkers Chips' exercise in crowdsourcing new potato chips flavours - but even those remain to a large extent on the surface, and is not likely to be enough.