Three chief executive officer participants at the World Economic Forum prepare public Internet blogs about their experiences in the ultra-exclusive retreat of the world's wealthy and powerful. Seated from left to right Loic Le Meur, CEO of Ublog, a Paris-based blog company; Yat Siu, CEO of Outblaze, a Hong Kong-based email service company and Joichi Ito, CEO of Neoteny Company Limited, a Japan-based venture capital firm. PHOTO AND CAPTION BY THOMAS CRAMPTON No... I'm not about to punch Loic. My fist is an expression of our solidarity. -- Joi

Thomas Crampton @ IHT

With bloggers inside, Davos secrets are out
Tell-all accounts proliferate on the Web

DAVOS, Switzerland This year the barbarians were not protesting at the gates of the World Economic Forum; they were inside and blogging.

The World Economic Forum has posted a pdf summary of the blogging panel. As usual, the tone isn't the same as what I experienced and they got most of what I said, but I think my emphasis was a bit different. I hope Loic gets his video transcript up so you can decide interpret it yourself.

billmon at Whiskey Bar is blogging from Davos. I wonder who he/she is. I looked up "Bill Mon" and last name "Billmon" in the directory and I couldn't find a listing. I couldn't find his/her real name on the blog either. Is Whiskey Bar a pseudonymous blog by a professional journalist?

Thanks for the link Abe. I think billmon is presenting an interesting view. I'm focused primarily on hanging out with people I like and going to sessions that I'm interested in so billmon's view is probably a good way to see another side of Davos.

Introduced Thomas to Sergey. Joi helping his fellow "journalist"...

He's now working on a story about bloggers and he's been interviewing the bloggers at Davos. He's been asking a lot of questions about how we view ourselves, our ethics and what blogging means. It's very interesting on many levels because I'm interviewing him about journalism, he's interviewing me about blogging and I'm watching him interact with people, efficiently gathering information to construct a story. I'm looking forward to seeing how Tom's article turns out and how he manages to take the spaghetti of conversations and turns it into a piece of journalism.

In the process of developing the story about blogs, he quickly picked up the importance of Google and asked me to introduce him to Sergey. We both asked him questions about Google and blogs and I am happy to report that Sergey thinks that blogs may highlight some general issues with page ranking that need to be dealt with to continue to increase the accuracy of page rank, but that he didn't seem to think that blogs were "noise" or that they were getting artificially high page rank. Sergey didn't seem think think that blogs should be treated any differently than any other type of web page. This concurs with the opinion that Larry Page gave me the when I asked him about this last year.

So sorry Andrew, it doesn't look like blogs will be filtered from Google any time soon, and until the media starts to become more permalink friendly, I think the role of blogs in providing information and opinion on the Internet will continue to increase. The good news is that I realize that the questions that many bloggers are asking themselves about ethics and justice are the same questions that editors and journalists are asking themselves.

UPDATE: I was walking with Tom and got a few choice quotes from him. "Reality is good. It's earthy." And in response to my comment about whether I should pull my punches on journalists, he says, "no, poke 'em in the eyes." ;-)

Yesterday was the blogging panel at Davos. Jay Rosen was the moderator and the panelists were Orville H. Schell, Loic Le Meur, yours truly and Hubert Burda. You all already know Loic and Jay I'm sure. Orville is the Dean of the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and was at the Media Leaders discussion the day before too. He's got some great perspectives and his positive and insightful view on blogs was encouraging. Hubert Burda is the CEO of Hubert Burda Media, one of the largest media conglomerates in Europe and I was extremely impressed by his positive and open view on blogs and media. In other words, we had a great panel.

Jay kicked it off by saying that we were going to ignore the official title, "Will Mainstream Media Co-Opt Blogs and the Internet". ;-)

I explained that blogging meant a lot of things. There was the technology of blogging, the act of blogging and what journalists were talking about most of the time. I explained the power-law and asserted my position that the head of the curve, or the more popular blogs, were like an amplifier and that I agreed with many people who believe that the "tail" or the more personal blogs was where most of the interesting stuff was going on. I talked about Ross Mayfield's layers and the idea that a lot of interesting sources could be filtered by special interest groups, through a social layer and to the amplifier where maybe they can connect, merge with mass media to a certain extent. Because of the the media orientation of the panel and the audience, we decided to focus on the impact that blogging had on journalism and media.

Loic said he thought blogging was like "open sourcing" himself. Which I thought was an interesting way to look at it. He used his metaphor about how he thought blogging will do to the traditional media what Napster did to the music industry. He clarified that he meant that it would allow people to share information peer to peer instead of going through traditional distribution. The difference was that people could more easily create content for blogs than music.

Mr. Burda had a lot of great insights and talked about how collapsing business models and changes were all part of the game and that he and the others needed to let go and adapt. He made a point that he would be interested to see more blogs focusing on things like science instead of typically popular stuff like politics.

I think we all agreed that the ability for blogs to talk with and become one with the audience was key.

What was interesting was the number of people from the mass media in the audience who still seemed to think that blogs were either just poor quality news or that bloggers were just wannabe journalists. One person from a newspaper said that she thought blogs would just become incubators for journalists. I (emotionally) asserted that the mass media and blogs were not the same. Many bloggers (such as myself) are blogging, not for the money, but for a passion which embodies what I believe is part of the heart and soul of journalism. We are not encumbered by the pressures of advertising, marketing and the burden of having to sell print media. It's insulting to think that all bloggers just want to be journalists for print media. I pointed out that big media had a role and that their ability to protect their journalists from litigation and to fund particularly expensive investigations and stories was something we can't do, but the notion that we're just little versions of them was absurd.

Jay chimed in and pointed out that blogs are much more similar to the spirit of the "freedom of the press" referred to in the US constitution. IE citizens with presses.

I'm on a narrow band connection so I will add links after I get to a wifi connection.

The Media Leaders Community session was a closed session with the CEOs and editors from the top media organizations. The representatives were all people who struggled with the issues of running a media business while trying to maintain editorial integrity. A variety of regions and organizational structures were represented including TV, magazines, newspaper, for profit and non-profit.

The session was held in a circle and was broken into two session. I was one of the few "outsiders" who were invited to participate, my chance to open my mouth was the second session. the first session was, "The Double Life and Information Ethics: The Challenge of Managing News and People" and the second session was, "Rethinking the Net – Internet Media Strategy, Wireless, Bloggers and Others."

Generally speaking, the media leaders talked a lot about the struggle to maintain editorial integrity in a world of increasing government and advertiser pressure. Clearly, the business of running media companies conflicted in many ways with editorial integrity. There was some debate about whether embedded journalism in the war was a good thing or a bad thing and the role of TV, photojournalism and print. One the one had, the need for TV to have images caused them to jump at the opportunity to send in cameras with the troops. It was argued that the good media were able to use these assets without compromising their editorial integrity while others clearly were unable to retain their integrity.

It was interesting hearing about how important the hiring and mentoring of journalists was and how difficult it was to find serious journalists. Last night I had dinner with some serious journalists who covered war, pestilence, and other hard-core topics in very remote regions and was impressed by their vision and ethics. The ability for editors to find, vet then manage these journalists appears to be an art.

Everyone seemed quite enthusiastic about the Internet as a "good thing" but people were not sure about the business model.

People started talking about how they were measuring traffic and that's when I jumped in and talked about how traffic was a second order or third order analysis and that looking at who was linking to articles and who was linking to them and what they were saying was much more interesting than traffic.

I gave my standard rant about how the first person voice of bloggers can help people care about the issues and "assets" in under-covered regions can help the resource issues that media companies face.

They talked about the "noise" of the Internet and the brand of print media, but I explained that there were many ways that blogs managed reputation and that these tools continued to become more refined. I explained that some blogs played the role of journalist providing new content in specific focused areas, while other blogs provided the editor role with a broader focus linking to other blogs and media sites. I talked about triangulation and how choosing a few key blogs as your entry into your view of the Net was a very good way to get a balanced view of the traditional media, something that the point/counterpoint media currently has difficulty providing.

I explained that many of the media sites in other countries were receiving more visibility in the US and other countries from bloggers linking to them. I explained that media sites could do things like permalinks, trackbacks, ping pingers, syndication and other things to make them much more blog friendly. Being friendly with bloggers was going to be essential for them, I opined.

I think that I was generally well received and I think many of the participants will be reading blogs and looking at aggregators tonight.

I'm in a meeting with the WEF Media Leaders. Its a few dozen people consisting of the editors-in-chief and CEOs of a variety of major media organizations from around the world.

I'm going to talk about the role of blogs and how we might work together. I'm going to talk about how blogs can address the issue of getting people to care about about things by providing a voice to people who don't have a voice and can provide additional resources, which seems to be one of the issues that many of these media companies have.

I will also try to talk to the big media companies about designing their online presence to be more blogger friendly.

I'll try to post notes here. The rules for this meeting are "off the record for background and not for attribution unless explicit permission to quote is granted by each speaker concerned."

I've also gotten the opportunity to hear some of the concerns that are facing these media leaders today and will summarize my notes later.

Rebecca MacKinnon, the Tokyo bureau chief of CNN and fellow GLT is taking leave-of-absence to be a media fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard. We've talked a lot in the past about blogging and the future of journalism and I'm happy that she's going to jump out and take a bird's eye view of all this at what I think is the perfect time to be taking a bird's eye view of journalism.

Rebecca has started a blog. Good luck and welcome to our world. ;-)

I wrote a bit about her before when I visited CNN in Tokyo.