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TechCrunch20 and Hammer: Can’t touch this
So Mike Arrington announces some of the new advisors on the “panel of experts” for the TechCrunch20 conference that he and Jason Calacanis have started up as a kind of anti-DEMO conference. And the first thing that some people — like Ben Metcalfe and I, and Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests, for example — think when we look at the list is: What the F? MC Hammer is on this panel? What’s he an expert on?
Ben makes some good points, I think (points whose value is only slightly decreased by the fact that he consistently misspells the name “Michael” as “Micheal”). The Hammer — or to use his real name, Stanley Kirk Durell — seems to have done very little that qualifies him for a role on a panel of Web 2.0 startup experts. Yes, he is reportedly working with a music-based startup, but is that really all it takes to get on the panel of experts? Then Nick Denton at Valleywag weighs in with the “tokenism” card, at which point Karoli lashes out at the Wag for picking on Hammer — and then Nick and Mike take shots back and forth at each other in Karoli’s comment section. Nick says Karoli has missed the whole point, and Mike says he’s race-baiting. Is he? Who knows. But one thing occurred to me while I was reading this whole sordid tale: It would be a lot easier to argue that Hammer isn’t a token black guy if he had actually accomplished anything in the last decade that justified his presence on the panel. Just saying.
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I corrected the mistakes - thanks for pointing them out :)
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When we're talking about YouTube - the technological component of which consists in FLV files and a server farm the size of a small town - it seems far more appropriate to have media people than tech people. I mean, what the crap do we know about advertising and music promotion or indie video? We write code and geek out with computers. A group of fourteen year-olds could club together and build their own YouTube clone in less than a month these days (and evidence suggests quite a number of them have - and then subsequently went on to found companies).
In an age of tech startups being basically media companies in disguise, MC Hammer is a far more appropriate choice for the conference board than a techie.
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As for your point about users, that's a fair point -- except that Mike and Jason are calling it an "experts panel." There's kind of a disconnect there I think.
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"The intermingling of Hammer and the blogosphere will be HOW future generations comsume their news. Period. End of story.
I learn stuff on Hammer's blog every day that is more profound than many of the twitter postings that I read."
;-)
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