AlwaysOn conference: YouTube and clip culture

It's the first full day of the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit at Stanford University. There are lots of bloggers posting good coverage of the proceedings.

There's a live Webcast and chat of the event today and tomorrow.

I arrived in time for the panel, "How Far Will Consumer-Generated Media Go?" with moderator Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal; David Goldberg, Head of Yahoo! Music; Michael Robertson, CEO, MP3Tunes; Chad Hurley, CEO, YouTube; and Michael Arrieta, Senior VP, Sony Pictures.

Hurley clearly has the star power so far at the event - he was mobbed by TV reporters after the session. I asked him from the floor whether there was room for the other 240 video hosting sites out there like Ourmedia, Revver and Blip.tv, and whether they might serve different needs than YouTube does. YouTube was getting all the media attention and sucking all the oxygen out of the room, but other sites might serve targeted constituencies better, I suggested. He said yes, that YouTube wasn't trying to dominate the marketplace and that other sites can certainly serve the needs and interests of other people participating in the personal media revolution.

Michael Robertson chimed in, suggesting that all the other 239 sites will be "history" soon because of the first mover effect. That's absurd, of course, since many video bloggers and professionals are flocking to sites other than YouTube. There's room for a handful of successful video publishing sites, and I think it goes well beyond niches.

Snippets from today:

Marten Mickos, CEO, MySQL: “Code can never deteriorate when you open it, it can only get better.”

From his talks in front of crowds, SalesForce CEO Marc Benioff discovered, “Less than 10 percent of the general public knows what a mashup is.” (Here's an incomplete definition at Wikipedia.)

When I was at Oracle, said Benioff, “There was no trust page. There was an FU page.”

More Benioff: "Mashups are the future. That's the most exciting thing I've seen." (He's discussing the tech industry's version of mashups, not the better-known music mashups.)

Tags: AlwaysOn, AO2006, AlwaysOn2006, YouTube, citizen media, conferences, citizen journalism