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nextMEDIA - Where to Look Next? Trends for 2009Today

As always, if you want to see everything I am writing about nextMEDIA, please check out BrandingDavid.com where I’ve placed an index for all of the posts I am doing around the Splashpress Media network

Starting with an amazing slide of all of the trends and words that companies will need to know going forward, Lori’s presentation was very marketing and marketer focused.

What the lab does is allow people to get their hands on the latest technology in a comfortable, home like way.

“The current economy is an opportunity for digital media content producers” - Lori Schwartz

Even with the downturned economy, online advertising is expected to grow from $24.5 billion in 2008 to $28.5 billion in 2009.

Open platforms are driving ubiquity. Where there is OpenSocial, and Google’s Android where things are able to scale, and be developed in an interesting way that hasn’t been done before and creates new opportunities for developers, brands and advertisers.

The new consumer reverses the 80/20 rule. Where you used to spend 80% of your money on distribution, and 20% on content, but that has switched, and is continuing to change and grow. Content is everywhere, but attention is limited.

Lori then moved into trends for 2009 that everyone here at nextMEDIA needs to know if they want to take advantage of the opportunities appearing.

Beyond the browser is the first one s

WordPress Plugin: Shared Items PostToday

Google Reader is a nice little blogging tool that is an essential item in my arsenal. Aside from the obvious RSS aggregating capabilities of Google Reader, I also use Google Reader as a bookmark manager of sorts for my followed feeds. And I can choose to star some entries for reviewing, by myself, at a later time, or I can also choose to share some articles that caught my interest with others.

By default, these shared items are readily available to your Google contacts who use Google Reader. But what if you want to share these entries with your blog readers as well? The people at Google Tutor came up with a nifty plugin that lets you include your shared items on your WordPress blog.

Shared Items Post is a WordPress plugin that automagically creates a blog post from your Google Reader Shared Items feed. You can schedule the post to go out daily, weekly, or monthly and even set the time of day.

The plugin is pretty straightforward, enabling you to automatically make a post out of your shared items. Since this is a pretty new plugin, the features are quite sparse. So far, the plugin only has these features:

  • Post schedulin
WordPress 2.7: What To Watch Out ForToday

Don’t know what’s in it for you in WordPress 2.7? Aaron Brazelli of Technosailor.com has written a list of 10 things you need to look for in WordPress 2.7. I find it fascinating and it makes me all the more excited for the next version of WordPress. If 2.5 was focused on redesigning the WordPress backend, 2.7, according to Aaron, was a complete rebuild of WordPress and the result is a “semantically, aesthetically and structurally different WordPress” than previous versions.

To summarize Aaron’s excellent post, this are the things we need to look out for in WordPress 2.7:

  • Vertical Menus - This is a radical redesign of the WordPress backend. Aaron predicts that you might hate the new menu for a while, but it will grow on you.
  • Dashboard - The new redesigned dashboard doesn’t only look sexier - it’s easily customizable. The “Screen Options” button in the upper right gives you access to the Dashboard configuration panel, where you can select the modules you want to displayed on your dashboard. And changes you make as an admin are not universally implemented, so your users can configure their dashboard the way they want to.
  • QuickEdit and WP-admin Comment Reply - QuickEdit gives you access to most of the “non-content” portions of a post such as author, post title, tags, timestamp, etc. You can also reply to your comments while
nextMEDIA: The Start and Will “Free” Save the Future?Yesterday

For a full index of all the posts related to nextMEDIA, check out BrandingDavid.com where I will be updating everyone on various sessions.

Robert Montgomery, CEO of Achilles Media took the stage first to apologize for the various issues, from the registration line-up and onwards.

He was amusing as he introduced Mark Greenspan, Director of Digital Media at Achilles Media. Mark stood out in the crowd with his blazer and its white trim. He presented in a fairly monotone voice, but was fairly high energy, seeming excited about the event, and what it meant.

His hope is that the event gives a snapshot of digital media revenue today, a great idea, and hopefully it translates well going forward. Some of the sources for revenue building that they wanted to cover is multi-platform advertising, sponsorship and branded entertainment, e-commerce, pay per use and licensing.

“Our goal is to make the most relevant mix possible and service the industry the best we can” - Mark Greenspan.

One amazing thing that they have created this year was their Match Maker system, that allows people to connect with others in their field or people that might be helpful to their businesses.

Shelly Palmer, of MediaBytes and the Managing Director of the Advanced Media Ventures Group, was then introduced to lead the first

2.7 Dashboard: Project IconNovember 17

Part of the road map to WordPress 2.7 would be Project Icon. The 2.7 development team asked for help from icon designers all over the world, and an icon contest was held. The submissions were shown to the WordPress community, where people voted for the icons they want. And here are the results of Project Icon:

  • More than 3,700 people participated in and completed the survey.
  • The winner of the contest, garnering 35% of the votes, is Ben Dunkle. His icon set (you could see it on the right side) will be the one you’ll see in the default 2.7 Dashboard.
  • The first runner up would be Verena Segert, and her work would be included as an alternate icon set.
  • Ben and Verena will be doing revisions to some of their icons so that both sets will use the same metaphors, creating the colored “on” states, and creating the larger size of each icon for use in the h2 screen headers.

The survey also showed that a few of the individual icon metaphors also had a significant lead over the other choices.

Dashboard: 1333 voters (40%) chose a house as the b