penguin

From the Los Angeles Times (via a post at Wired) comes the news that a little-known “newspaper” called the Club Penguin Times apparently has almost 7 million subscribers, many of whom read the paper at least once a week. And where is this newspaper published? Inside Club Penguin, the virtual world for kids that was developed by a trio of parents from the tiny town of Kelowna, B.C. and bought by Disney last year in a deal worth as much as $750-million. As the L.A. Times notes, that readership makes the Club Penguin paper bigger than either the New York Daily News or the Chicago Tribune, among others.

Obviously, there are differences between an online journal published for kids between 6 and 14 and traditional newspapers in the real world, but that’s still a huge number. The Club Penguin “paper” gets about 30,000 submissions a day from readers for its poetry contests, its “Aunt Arctic” advice column and other features (much of the content in the newspaper is created by users). And best of all, the Penguin Times doesn’t have to worry about advertising — it doesn’t carry any.

Lane Merrifield, the CEO of Club Penguin and an extremely nice guy, was one of our keynote speakers at mesh 2008 last May. There’s some video of his talk with Stuart MacDonald at mDialog.

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Much like its two predecessors, the mesh conference this year was just a huge amount of fun — I can only hope that the people who attended and meshed along with us had as good a time as I did. From the keynote I did with Ethan Kaplan from blackrimglasses.com, the VP of technology at Warner Brothers, and the one that my colleague Stuart MacDonald did with Lane Merrifield of ClubPenguin.com (who seemed like just a terrifically down-to-earth guy — very Canadian) to the panels and workshops, and of course the great social events, it was as good a time as I can remember having at any conference. For me, the mark of a good conference is always the people you meet and the ideas you share, and hopefully we enabled a lot of that.

Some highlights for me personally included the design presentation at meshU by Daniel Burka of Digg and Pownce, who is just a super-nice guy (also very Canadian), and the ones by Ryan Carson — complete with his trademark hat — and Kevin Hale of Wufoo.com. As for mesh proper, the music panel was one of my favourites, in part because I programmed it; but also because David Gratton was such an excellent moderator, and because the mix of people of the panel was so good, with David Usher, CRIA head Graham Henderson and Kieran Roy of the indie label Arts & Crafts (CBC has an interview with David Usher).

The presentation by Mike Masnick of Techdirt.com on “the economics of abundance” was also a personal favourite, and a whole bunch of people came up to tell me the same thing. Mike is extremely good at explaining difficult economic concepts as they apply to digital media and business models, and I could tell people in the panel room were getting a lot out of it — and I think 322 slides in 30 minutes is a new record. And of course, all the social meshing in the concourse was a big part of the conference for me, and hopefully for others, as well as the great parties put on by Maggie Fox and the Social Media Group and by Edelman, our PR partners for mesh 2008.

If you want to try and track some of what went on at mesh, here are some places to look:

– mDialog has video highlights of many of the keynotes and panels, and the videos are also available on iTunes as well (thanks to Greg Philpott and his team, and to the excellent Mark McKay).

– Flickr has some photos from mesh and from the mesh party at the Rockwood, hosted by SMG (thanks to Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan and Arieh Singer)

– David Janes’ Onaswarm has a roundup of Twitter posts, Flickr photos and more.

– Nora Young of CBC’s Spark has posted video of her chat with Bill Buxton, which will be broadcast as part of next week’s show

– My former Globe colleague Peter Nowak has an interview with David Usher.

– Michael Geist has uploaded his excellent slide presentation on digital advocacy

– Daniel Burka of Digg and Pownce has uploaded his meshU presentation to Slideshare.

– Sam Ladner, who did the Reputation Management workshop, has uploaded her slide deck.

– Amber MacArthur has put up a YouTube video of her presentation on video

– Jonathan Keebler and Guinevere Orvis (who was also on the video panel, and was an excellent choice) live-blogged most of the conference using ScribbleLive, which was featured in a TechCrunch article written by Erick Schonfeld, who attended mesh08 (and is a really nice guy).

– Mark Blevis live-blogged many of the sessions, as did Dave Fleet and Connie Crosby, and music-panel moderator David Gratton.

– Nav from Scrawled in Wax wrote about a couple of sessions, as did Colin Carmichael and mesh regular (or irregular), the excellent Michael O’Connor Clarke.

– Marketing magazine has a story about mesh 2008, as does The Industry Standard

and for bonus points:

– Mike Masnick writes about how Warner Brothers should move Ethan Kaplan out of the technology side of the label and into the business side.

– My Globe colleague Matt Hartley worked his tail off at mesh and wrote several excellent stories (and I say that as a completely unbiased observer :-): one about StumbleUpon, one about Michael Geist and online advocacy, one about online brand-building and one about online video.

– Alec Saunders of Iotum gets into a back-and-forth with moderator Rachel Sklar from Huffington Post about the privacy panel at mesh 08.

– Ross McKegney has some thoughts about meshU.

– Jon Lax of Teehan Lax posted his presentation from meshU.

– Mark Kuznicki and Sean Howard have posted their Government 2.0 presentation from meshU on Slideshare.

– Wayne Macphail from Rabble.ca has posted video of six sessions at mesh, including the keynote by Michael Geist, the keynote by Lane Merrifield of Club Penguin, the “Video is Everywhere” panel, the “New Front Page” panel, the “Cultivating Community” panel and Mike Masnick’s presentation on “the Economics of Abundance.” Just click the “On Demand” button on the Rabbletv player.

– Reg Braithwaite has posted slides from his Building and Managing Great Software Teams presentation from meshU on Flickr.

– Alistair Croll has posted his slides from his Watching the Web presentation at meshU at the Bitcurrent site.

– more at the Tucows blog, as well as from Glen Farrelly and from Doug Walker, and some thoughts on meshU at StartupNorth.

– Rahaf Harfoush also live-blogged a couple of the marketing panels.

– Zoe Siskos of Social Media Group made a video and has posted it.

– Stan Sutter of Infopresse has a post up about several of the panels and keynotes.

– Kevin Restivo has posted some thoughts about mesh08.

– Rob Hyndman did an interview with CFRA and has posted the audio.

– Kathryn Lagden has a post up about the conversation between Nora Young of CBC’s Spark and researcher Bill Buxton.

If you have any other links to mesh-related stuff — or thoughts about it — please post a comment. There are also meshU and mesh feedback forms you can use to give us your take on either of the two events.

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An update for anyone who might be thinking about heading to mesh ‘08 or meshU (the one-day workshop event just before mesh): to help you make up your mind and plan your day, we now have the schedules up for each event. There are still some panels that have to be firmed up with our speakers, but we will be filling those in soon. The sched for mesh ‘08 is here, and the one for meshU is here.

On the first day of mesh, we have panels like the Future of Music panel with musician and social-media fan David Usher, as well as Jeff Remedios of the Arts & Crafts label and Graham Henderson of the Canadian Recording Industry Association, moderated by David Gratton of Project Opus. Then there’s the panel on the New Front Page, with Pema Hagen of GigPark, Daniel Burka of Digg and Candice Faktor of OurFaves (moderated by yours truly).

We’ve also got a panel on the idea of Private vs. Public with Nancy Baym from the University of Kansas and the Online Fandom blog, University of Toronto philosopher and author Mark Kingwell and Elizabeth Denham of the federal privacy commissioner’s office. That one is moderated by the lovely and talented Rachel Sklar, who writes the Eat The Press feature for Huffington Post. We also have a panel on Video and the Web with Dana Kaplan of Bliptv, Andre Gaulin of CTV and Guinevere Ortis of the CBC, moderated by video-blogger extraordinaire Amber MacArthur.

Michael Geist will also be doing a presentation about how to use Facebook and other Web tools to build grassroots campaigns. And of course we have two stellar keynotes by Ethan Kaplan of Warner Brothers Records and Matt Mason, author of the book The Pirate’s Dilemma.

On the second day at mesh, we have panels like the Measuring Social Media panel with Alan Chumley, Sylvain Perron and Katie Delahaye Paine (moderated by mesh founder and Tripharbor CEO Stuart MacDonald); a panel about Cultivating Community with George Tsiolis of Agoracom, Derek Szeto of Red Flag Deals and Christopher Jackson, moderated by Jen Evans; a look at Building a Brand Online with Rohit Bhargava, Maggie Fox of Social Media Group and Michael Garrity of CommunityLend (moderated by mesh founder Mark Evans); and a look at some Founder’s Stories with Julia Johnston of mEgo, Leah Culver of Pownce and Ryan Carson of Carsonified, moderated by Paul Kedrosky of Infectious Greed.

We also have a presentation by Mike Masnick of Techdirt about the “economics of abundance,” and two excellent keynotes from Garrett Camp of StumbleUpon and Lane Merrifield of Club Penguin.

meshU has some outstanding speakers as well, including John Resig of jQuery, Avi Bryant of Dabble DB, Kevin Hale of Wufoo, Reuven Cohen of Enomaly, Alistair Croll of BitCurrent and the excellent tag team of David Crow from Microsoft (and DemoCamp) and Leila Boujnane of Idee Inc. You can book your ticket for mesh here, and your meshU tickets here.

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Clay Shirky, who teaches and speaks about “new media,” has posted the transcript of a speech he gave at the recent Web 2.0 conference, in which he talks about how TV as a whole is effectively a societal response to a surplus of leisure time — and how much better it would be if those excess brain cycles were used for something valuable, such as contributing to Wikipedia or other forms of “social media.” I really wish that Clay hadn’t written this particular speech. Why? Mostly because then there would still have been time for *me* to write it.

I must admit, the part about the gin never really occurred to me (go ahead and read the speech — I’ll wait). But the rest of it is right on track. Particularly the part where he describes the four-year-old looking behind the TV for the mouse. I’ve spoken to a number of groups about social media, and I always use my three daughters as examples: the oldest uses Facebook more than she watches TV, the middle one loves interactive fiction-writing sites like Gaia Online, and with the youngest it’s Club Penguin and Webkinz. To them, the most interesting kinds of media are interactive media.

Not surprisingly, more than one commenter among the dozens who have responded on BoingBoing’s post about Shirky (since his blog doesn’t have comments) argues that the author is guilty of social-media triumphalism, and that he is merely stating a preference for time-wasting with Wikipedia or Lolcatz as opposed to TV. One commenter says that his speech is like saying “now that we have Oranges no sane person is going to eat Apples, and anyone who grows Apples doesn’t understand how f’n juicy and delicious Oranges are… what a bunch of twits! amiright?”

This point has some truth to it. For every person who thinks that World of Warcraft builds leadership skills and watching TV is one step above drooling and whittling, there is another who thinks that CSI is gripping drama, and anyone on WoW is a brain-damaged geek living in his mom’s basement. There are plenty of ways for human beings to zone out and get very little accomplished — just look at golf, for example (or poker). But Shirky’s point is still a good one, I think: namely, that social or interactive media, however lame or goofy, has an added quality that sitting in front of a box does not. I’ll go along with that.

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