The Social

NEW YORK--"They've created quite an industry around this whole thing," one woman in a black cocktail dress and diamond earrings commented as the lights dimmed for the start of the 13th annual Webby Awards on Monday night.

The annual awards ceremony for all things in digital media, held once again at the upscale Cipriani Wall Street restaurant, had packed the gilded space--once home to the New York Stock Exchange--with a mixed bag of folks from marketing, advertising, entrepreneurship, social media, online content, and what-have-you. (A common observation at the cocktail hour beforehand: "I don't know many people here.") It was the final event of Internet Week New York, which is co-organized by the Webby's parent, the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. And it was, arguably, the most lavish.

Seth Meyers of "Saturday Night Live" hosted this year's Webbys.

(Credit: Courtesy of Webby Awards)

A cheeky take on traditional entertainment awards shows, the Webbys limit acceptance speeches to five words. The opening video montage, projected on several massive video screens throughout the venue, featured goofy Internet memes like "Keyboard Cat." Red carpet interviews featured a handful of "real" celebrities (like "Saturday Night Live" actor and writer Seth Meyers, who hosted the show) along with Internet-minted stars like "Fail Blog" and "I Can Has Cheezburger" blog impresario Ben Huh, who showed up to the ceremony wearing his trademark cheeseburger hat. (Does he ever wash it? "Every once in a while," Huh told me.)

But this year, following complaints that the ceremony was simply too long, as well as to deal with the fact that the smaller Webby Film & Video awards were rolled up into the main Webbys ceremony this year, the organizers pared it down. All speeches were recorded for video to post on YouTube (a Webbys sponsor) and a select number of winners who would give their speeches live at the ceremony were chosen via random selection. More glaringly, the gulf between traditional and digital media grows slimmer with every year--as exemplified by the increasing number of "real" celebrities who are enlisted as Webby presenters and honorees, like this year's surprise guests Martha Stewart and Cameron Diaz. The Internet has come into its own as a part of life rather than a novelty. The question arises: Do we still need the Webbys?

The see-and-be-seen scene
The thing about the Webby Awards ceremony is that it isn't really an awards ceremony: it's a networking event, albeit one with ball gowns, a Seth Meyers standup routine, and Cipriani's trademark bellinis. Winners know well in advance that they've won. There's something a bit self-congratulatory about the whole thing, as the Webby Awards are bankrolled in part by entry fees that companies must submit just to be nominated, and winners have to pay for seats at the awards show. The real point, as with so many tech industry events, is to be seen, and the best way to do that at the Webbys is the five-word acceptance speech.

Get up there and do something ridiculous--as an Animoto executive did when he walked to the podium to accept his award, stripped off his suit to reveal a pair of zebra-print leggings, donned a wig inspired by the styles of '80s hair metal, and shouted, "Wooooo, thank you, New York!"--and you might get noticed by somebody who eventually approaches you at the ceremony's afterparty. Maybe it's a potential client or investor. Or just somebody who's hearing about your company for the first time and will go check it out.

Musician Trent Reznor received the Webby Artist of the Year award.

(Credit: Courtesy of Webby Awards)

But that changed this year, with the organizers' decision to emphasize the more star-studded awards, bestowed upon Web-savvy celebs like comedian Sarah Silverman and industrial music icon Trent Reznor, as well as Web influentials like Twitter co-founder Biz Stone (accepting the award for "Breakout of the Year") and World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who was given a "lifetime achievement" award. Small-time winners were no longer front and center.

While some Webbys-goers welcomed the new format and how it did away with the lengthy parade of accolades that seemed to just grow longer every year, a few were grumbling that they'd reconsider whether to come back next year if they couldn't be guaranteed those five words at the podium. Listening to Seth Meyers wax philosophical about the Web ("Without the Internet, prostitutes would have to find a Craig without a list") and knowing that their taped acceptance speeches would be on YouTube the next day wasn't enough for at least a handful of winners in the crowd.

This odd dichotomy between community and celebrity might sound familiar.

"So, it's like Twitter," Klickable founder Roger Wu quipped at the noisy Webbys afterparty, held further uptown at the Hiro Ballroom nightclub. On the dance floor below, Webbys-goers were dancing up a storm (a rarity in the tech industry) to a performance by ?uestlove, a member of Jimmy Fallon's house band The Roots. It didn't look like a particularly nerdy affair.

Wu had a point. Once a geek craze, Twitter has turned into the latest vehicle for celebrity self-promotion. Ashton Kutcher's hordes of Twitter followers were what catapulted the microblogging service into the mainstream, but some have said that the community-building work accomplished by Twitter's core pack of early adopters was ignored amid the Hollywood glitz.

And the same could be said about the Webbys. A decade ago, actress Cameron Diaz likely would've snubbed the chance to show up at an Internet awards ceremony, and yet on Monday night she was up there bestowing the "Person of the Year" award to Twitter-happy late-night TV host Jimmy Fallon. The Internet isn't a niche corner of entertainment anymore; it is entertainment--but that's overwhelmingly thanks to the innovators and entrepreneurs behind the scenes, not just the actors and TV hosts who've jumped on board the hottest digital trend. Still, it's going to be the likes of Fallon and Diaz who pull in the headlines.

Digital media's triumph is cause for celebration from all sides. And the Webbys team puts on a well-run, enjoyable show every year. But the increasing presence of celebrity is a sign that maybe this is an industry that's outgrown the need for a quirky awards ceremony. Or maybe it isn't. I'm sure there are plenty of people who'd be happy to debate the point on Twitter.

A correction was made to this article: The acceptance speech involving a strip-down was from Animoto, not Ustream.

IAC chair Barry Diller at last week's Founders Club party.

(Credit: Alexander Porter/New York Founders Club)

NEW YORK--From a seventh-floor roof deck at Rockefeller Center, Barry Diller, head of digital-media conglomerate IAC/InterActiveCorp, was addressing the well-dressed crowd at Thursday evening's Founders Club cocktail party.

"There was a time when 'network' was all the buildings on Sixth Avenue," Diller said, gesturing to the west, home to the midtown office buildings that have housed New York's once-unflappable broadcast and print media powerhouses for decades, "and of course now it means something totally different."

The Founders Club, with a watertight guest list, drinks courtesy of Patron tequila, and a decorative pool filled with miniature sailboats bearing the logos of New York's most talked-about start-ups (perhaps a nod to host Diller, an avid yachtsman), was one of the more highbrow events at the second annual Internet Week New York, which culminates Monday night with the Webby Awards gala.

In spite of how rough things have been for the industry over the past year, energy levels were high and there was no shortage of things to do. Internet Week attendees could fill their week up with panels, networking breakfasts, ad industry conferences, start-up expos, and loads of parties. ("It's miraculous that you are all standing up, because all I hear about are these parties!" Diller exclaimed at Founders Club.)

One thing's for sure: New York's tech and digital-media community has been humbled and chastened, and it's ready to get back on its feet. Unfortunately, now there's a whole new problem: what next?

On the bright side, there seemed to be near-universal agreement at Internet Week that changing times present opportunities to explore new territory. A handful of people noted throughout the week that online video-related events had especially high rates of attendance, as traditional media and advertising companies sent marketers and business-development types out to figure out just how they can make a buck or two off it.

There are legitimate reasons for some of this optimism, especially for smaller companies that haven't exactly had the easiest time in New York to begin with. Rents are cheaper now. Prospective employees are willing to work for lower salaries. And once-dominant New York industries have been brought down a few notches, leaving scrappy start-ups in a position that's far from undesirable--especially since big media and finance companies, short on ideas for how to stay afloat, have finally started to listen to them.

"On behalf of the crippled United States economy and the crippled New York City economy, I'd like to thank you for doing what you do," Business Insider founder and former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget said to an audience of entrepreneurs and venture capital types at the blog's "Startup 2009" pitch competition Wednesday. "When you hear people talking about green shoots in this environment, this is what they're talking about."

Even the big companies seem to think the little guys are doing something right, or at least, in difficult times, they can make it seem a little sunnier by putting an entrepreneurial spin on things. New AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, for example, referred to AOL as "the world's largest start-up-slash-turnaround." He's not entirely off base. In New York, anything digital has historically been a bootstrapping industry in and of itself.

"I think the financial meltdown might be the best thing that ever happened to the New York start-up scene," Chris Dixon, co-founder of the fledgling Hunch, told CNET News at the Founders Club event. Dixon, who sold his previous company, SiteAdvisor, to McAfee in 2006, believes that in the Web 2.0 boom, New York's tech scene was even more upstaged by the San Francisco Bay Area's than it had been in the first dot-com gold rush. "(There were) hedge funds sucking up all the talent like they didn't in the '90s," he said.

But the excitement about the potential for innovation is tinged with plenty of confusion that can descend into downright cluelessness, brilliantly parodied in a YouTube-hosted music video called "Mad Avenue Blues" that was making the rounds last week and was the subject of many an Internet Week cocktail party conversation. Set to the tune of Don McLean's "American Pie," the video details the panic that one of New York's biggest industries went through in "the year the media died," and its lyrics full of marketing jargon are uncomfortably spot-on.

All joking aside, Internet Week made it clear that across the industry, nobody seems to be really sure what direction to take, and this can lead to major friction. In his opening address at Digitas' Digital Content NewFronts event on Wednesday, the ad agency's chief creative officer Mark Beeching gave an impassioned speech that included, among other things, the insistence that media companies give up on the fight against digital piracy because it's just not worth it.

"I can name a half dozen media executives who will have something to say about that," somebody remarked to me about Beeching's talk the following day, where even more digital-advertising types had gathered for cocktails and a presentation from ad agency Crispin Porter and Bogusky, which has gained serious geek street cred for edgy campaigns like the Burger King "Whopper Sacrifice" stunt.

At least they can agree on Twitter
Then there was the back-and-forth banter in the highly anticipated I Want Media panel on Wednesday, where it seemed like the only thing the panelists--who came from both print and digital media--could agree on was that the industry's more or less enamored with Twitter. Alan Murray of the Wall Street Journal, a firm advocate of media outlets charging for online content, sparred onstage with Nick Denton, founder of entertainment and gossip blog network Gawker Media, who stands staunchly in favor of advertising.

"There's not enough advertising out there to support us," Murray insisted. "The model, digitally, in part because it's so easy to move from place to place, just doesn't work."

Denton retorted, "That is so not true," claiming that "most newspapers, apart from The Wall Street Journal and maybe the Financial Times, they have nothing that people are going to pay for."

But over the past year, as the crisis in the media industry grew worse, Denton didn't sound quite as unflappable. Over the winter, he had been predicting a near total collapse for advertising-based content, and the company spent months trimming away the fat, casting aside unnecessary cargo. Gawker Media consolidated two blogs, sold several others, and laid off a number of writers and editors. It's probably turned into a far more efficient operation.

But things turned out better than he expected, and on Thursday night Gawker partnered with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) for a party on the roof of the blog network's downtown headquarters--the latest in a parade of Gawker roof parties that started popping up as soon as the weather began to warm. There was, of course, an open bar. Waiters brought around trays of appetizers that were certainly several notches up from the fare at Gawker parties of yore, where the catering typically involved ordering pork dumplings en masse from somewhere in nearby Chinatown.

Guests weren't quite sure what was being offered to them. One of the appetizers, they learned upon asking, was pheasant. Another consisted of shot glasses of spicy tomato juice with oysters at the bottom. It was more "Mad Men" than media meltdown.

But ideally, that pheasant was eaten with the knowledge that the industry is still in a grave situation, and it's still not clear how or when it will end.

NEW YORK--According to former Vice President Al Gore, the importance of sustainability doesn't just apply to the environment. It also is key to the future of advertising.

"It really comes out of the environment, but in my opinion the key theme of this century really is sustainability," Gore said. "This theme of environmental sustainability has become a part of our culture, it's a part of our discourse, and I'm very optimistic that it will soon be a part of our policy."

Addressing the crowd of advertisers and online-media types at the Digital Content NewFront event put on by Digitas on Wednesday, Gore was speaking not as a "recovering politician" or a green-tech evangelist, but as the co-founder of Current Media, the experimental cable news channel that relies heavily on user-created content for both editorial and advertisements.

It's about time for our old views of advertising to die, he said.

"In the 20th century, the advertising model was based on the same principles that the Industrial Revolution was based on: scale," Gore said. "It was big, it was blunt, very expensive, and very intrusive, and audiences have now begun to resist that old advertising model even as the environment in which it is presented changes a great deal. The new model is very different because the media landscape is completely different."

More than half of the advertisements on Current are called "VCAMs," or "viewer-created advertising messages," Gore said. These are videos selected out of user submissions for brands interested in advertising on Current; the winner is paid by the advertiser, though it costs significantly less than the production budget of a traditional TV ad, and the winner receives an additional payment if the advertiser wants to use it outside of Current.

It's a model not unlike the wildly successful T-shirt company Threadless, which gets thousands of design submissions and gives a cash prize to the ones that it subsequently prints and sells.

Gore showed off a series of VCAMs proudly, as though they were home videos of his kids: One of them, created by two 24-year-olds, was a Mountain Dew ad about aspiring to be a professional hide-and-seek player. Another, created by a 29-year-old, was a T-Mobile ad showing people excitedly attempting to get picked for a "fave five" as though it were a dodgeball team. Gore mentioned another that was created by a 17-year-old who subsequently received a $50,000 check when the advertiser wanted to use it outside of Current.

There are problems, obviously, which some of the audience members brought up in questions. There are plenty of brands that wouldn't get aspiring filmmakers quite as jazzed as the car and gadget companies whose ads Gore showed off. And while the Flip-camera-toting young adults responsible for Current's VCAMs have the pluck and the free time to run around making commercials, it's easy to theorize that it would be tougher for a network with an older audience to pull it off.

Then there's the fact that while Current has been way ahead of the curve on some digital trends--displaying live Twitter messages onscreen, for example--it's still not a huge media powerhouse. The company canceled its scheduled initial public offering earlier this year, citing the bleak economic climate.

Gore, however, had an example of successful "sustainable advertising" beyond Current. What we can look at, he said, is his old job: politics.

"The most powerful new brand that we've all seen unveiled over the last two years is (Barack Obama)," Gore said, showing a slide of the "O" sunrise logo that became so well known during Obama's successful presidential campaign. "And what is it about this brand that made it so incredibly successful? It was all about empowerment, it was all about involving people to help deliver the message. It was very tuned into the new technologies and how people use them."

Just as the Obama campaign made efficient use of inexpensive marketing and publicity tools on the Web, Gore believes that the digital age has made it possible for high-quality ads to be ubiquitous, rather than just at the one time of the year when people get really pumped about what commercials will be on TV.

"During the Super Bowl, people leave during the game rather than the ads. They want to see the ads because they know something extra has gone into Super Bowl ads," Gore said. "(But) it's not sustainable to have that kind of ad budget and that kind of focused creativity that you find on those ads completely ubiquitous throughout the television year."

At the end of his talk, the former vice president was left speechless when one audience member asked him if he believed that the problem of carbon emissions could be solved by 2029 through the use of technology coming from UFOs.

"No," he said after a long pause. "I do not."

The crowd at one of this week's Internet Week parties.

(Credit: Steven Ekerovich/GuestofaGuest.com)

NEW YORK--Tuesday evening was the first night on the job for at least one of the waitresses at the brand-new Standard Hotel, a Los Angeles import straddling the about-to-open High Line elevated park in Manhattan's downtown Meatpacking District. And it must have been quite the trial by fire when several dozen unexpected patrons showed up for an impromptu Internet Week New York gathering.

That's the thing about Internet Week. It has no centralized location, and events can vary wildly by geography. (It seems like half the panels and conferences are in midtown hotels and the other half are in downtown NYU lecture halls.) So after-parties seem to be where everyone winds up.

This one was the work of The New York Times social media marketer Soraya Darabi and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who invited a few people to the outdoor bar at the Standard. Guests "checked in" to mobile networking site Foursquare, their friends dropped by, and soon the place had snowballed to such an extent that the guests decided to give the bar staff a break and relocate to the notably less highbrow Hogs & Heifers Saloon across the street.

On the bright side, I'm expecting that some of the well-off dot-commers in attendance at the Standard, including billionaire Mark Cuban, probably tipped well.

However haphazard it may seem after-hours--Monday night, for example, featured an installment of the Ignite geek-talks series, a TechSet party at champagne bar Bubble Lounge, and the festival's official kickoff event hosted by YouTube and the New York Observer--Internet Week has an agenda.

"New media and Internet technology are very important to the city of New York, certainly important to the film, television, and advertising world," Katherine Oliver, commissioner of Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting, said at a small opening event at the new, Google-powered New York visitors center in midtown. "All of our mediums are converging, and we're exploring ways that we can help these companies."

That's pretty clear at some of the events, like reviews site Yelp's party on Tuesday night, which aimed to showcase and promote local businesses in the Chelsea neighborhood, or the old-meets-new media partnership of YouTube and the Observer for the kickoff party, or Tuesday and Wednesday's convergence-themed Mediabistro Circus conference.

It's less evident, say, at 2 o'clock in the morning at Hogs & Heifers, where one of the primary objectives seemed to be convincing the people who'd flown in from San Francisco to get up and dance on the bar, as is customary in the establishment. (They didn't.)

The Gawker Media-True Blood party last week: They even rented a tent.

(Credit: Kate Miltner)

Last Thursday night, entertainment blog network Gawker Media held a rooftop party at its downtown headquarters to commemorate its advertising partnership with HBO vampire drama "True Blood"--as well as to toast to an edgy publicity stunt in which a fictional "True Blood" blog, Bloodcopy, passed itself off as an actual vampire news blog that Gawker Media had acquired. At least one reporter had been fooled.

As guests left the open-bar soiree, they had the option to sign up for a mailing list to attend future Gawker Media events. It's a far cry from just a few months ago, when Gawker founder Nick Denton was slashing budgets, laying off bloggers, and consolidating underperforming titles.

The city's digital media crowd, at long last, appears to be coming out of hiding.

As New York's tech industry gears up for its second annual Internet Week this week, a seven-day, city-sanctioned hodgepodge of conferences, parties, and the Webby Awards ceremony, there's a vague sense of relief about: things just haven't turned out as badly as everyone feared they would.

"Anecdotally, things feel a little different," said David-Michel Davies, Internet Week chairman and Webby Awards executive director. "It feels better. It feels like the market sort of loosened up a bit. I'm not really sure if that's because it became so hard to be hunkered down for so long and people just had to relax, or if it seemed like the bottom had come and people started to stress out a little less."

Not so long ago, more than a few people around town were wondering if companies were even going to be willing to stretch their budgets enough for a Webbys entry fee. But this week, the concerns appear to be limited to whether it's possible to catch both an Al Gore keynote at Digitas' NewFronts '09 event and a subsequent panel across town featuring both Craigslist founder Craig Newmark and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, or what costume to wear to Wednesday night's CollegeHumor party, which has a theme that seems to be vaguely inspired by comedy troupe Lonely Island's much-blogged video "I'm On A Boat."

Nobody's pretending that there hasn't been a rather brutal recession humming along in the background. The administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose Office of Film, Television, and Broadcasting co-organizes Internet Week, has put several initiatives into effect to attempt to get laid-off Wall Streeters back to work at finance or tech start-ups. There are about a half-dozen Internet Week events where employment is the clear focus. Events with entry fees have been advertising discounts, and some parties feature drink specials rather than open bars.

David-Michel Davies said he still expects an upbeat climate.

"The interesting thing to me is that all the conversations I've had with people running internet companies is that a lot of them are doing well and still trying to hire. If ever there was opportunity somewhere, it's in this industry," Davies said. "There's a ton of opportunity in this sort of industry, and it's always been hard to have any great engineers in New York because they were so well paid in financial services."

And the across-the-board difficult financial climate could, in fact, be the catalyst for a more productive week of tech networking, eliminating some of last year's evident gulf between scrappy start-ups and seemingly invincible stalwarts of Gotham finance and media. The big guys, these days, are in need of some ideas.

"We have more participation from companies and organizations than we did last year, and to be honest, at the beginning of the year we were all pretty worried," Davies said regarding the health of Internet Week. "It's 100 percent dependent on the energy and participation of the city at large."

We'll see if they have their game faces on.

There are literally dozens of categories in the annual Webby Awards--too many, if you ask some--covering pretty much every niche of digital media. This year's winners, announced Tuesday, are quite a lot to scroll through.

The list of top honors, however, is short.

This year, the Webby Awards' Person of the Year is former "Saturday Night Life" cast member Jimmy Fallon, whose new "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon" has brought Twittering and gadget fandom to the network-TV crowd.

The film-specific Person of the Year award goes to "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane, who has partnered with Google on an animated Web series and whose creations consistently rank at the top of Hulu's most-watched clips.

The Artist of the Year accolade is for Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor. A vocal critic of the mainstream music industry, Reznor has been skeptical of "innovative" digital distribution efforts and most recently lashed out at Apple on his blog for turning down a Nine Inch Nails iPhone app.

A new category, Breakout of the Year, joins the Webbys this year. It's been awarded to--surprise, surprise--Twitter.

The fact that the Webbys' top awards go to known entities isn't new. Its highest honors tend to go to mainstream celebrities who have built their fame offline and have then turned to the Web as a sort of experimental platform. Last year's Person of the Year awards, for example, went to comedian Stephen Colbert, director Michel Gondry, and Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am for his YouTube sensation "Yes We Can" in support of Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

The Webbys ceremony is set for June 8 as part of Internet Week New York.

The nominations for the Webby Awards, that annual extravaganza of accolades for just about anything connected to the Internet, have been announced. Leading the pack of nominees for the 13th annual Webbys are The New York Times' nytimes.com with 13 nominations, NBC.com with 12, and The Onion with 8. There are, in case you were counting, two nominations for Fail Blog.

There are also plenty of video productions nominated, like FunnyorDie.com's "Paris Hilton Responds to McCain Ad" and "Children's Hospital," the comedy series on TheWB.com starring "The Daily Show" alums Rob Corddry and Ed Helms.

If you're interested in the full list, it's here.

As always, Webby winners are limited to five words for acceptance speeches. Last year, when late-night comedian Stephen Colbert accepted his award for "Person of the Year," his chosen five words were, "Me, me, me, me, me!"

What's different this year: In 2008, there were separate awards shows for the Webby Awards proper and the Film & Video offshoot. This year, perhaps because of budget cuts, both sets of awards will be presented at the same show on June 8, in conjunction with Internet Week New York. But it'll still be at its regular location at the luxe Cipriani Wall Street space--and Saturday Night Live's Seth Meyers will be hosting.

I'm still crossing my fingers for a surprise performance by Rick Astley, but at this point that fad is totally over.

(Credit: BusinessWeek)

Thank goodness. BusinessWeek's new 25 Most Influential People on the Web list is refreshingly free of blowhard bloggers, busty video babes, and those wacky people who don't seem to do anything except speak at conference after conference.

Most of the list, rather, consists of the really big guys: Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, whose company acquired MySpace. Then there are legit Web pioneers like Digg founder Kevin Rose, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.

Because of the dominance of big names, it's a pretty unsurprising list. But there are a few interesting choices: BusinessWeek names Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to the list, rather than founder Mark Zuckerberg; late-night comedian Jon Stewart, whose wildly popular The Daily Show on Comedy Central led (indirectly, and among other factors) to parent company Viacom's copyright suit against YouTube; and Jonathan Kaplan, whose Pure Digital Technologies created the low-end Flip camcorder, that device that has been pointed in the direction of so many cats.

But there were two sectors of Net influencers who were conspicuously missing: one, anybody from the porn industry (I hear that's kind of big on the Web); and two, prominent figures best known for hacking, spamming, and related online nastiness. Because bad guys can be a big deal too.

NEW YORK--The inaugural Internet Week New York was eight days of open bars and missed opportunities.

On the red carpet at the 12th Annual Webby Awards on Tuesday night, the final event of the week-long city-sanctioned festival, I called out to Internet Week executive director David-Michel Davies and asked him what he'd do next year to change it. "We'd like to do a better job with the schedule," he said to me after hesitating for a moment. He added a few more words about how a better calendar could help Internet Week-goers connect, before publicists snagged Davies for a string of photo ops.

That was the problem with Internet Week: connecting. But it's an issue that can't just be solved by hiring a few extra Ruby developers for the festival calendar.

As a string of individual events, Internet Week was wildly successful--there was, literally, something for everyone. Tech enthusiasts were treated to job seminars at Google, industry roundtables at Time Warner, and free beer at the "Wiimbledon" tournament. There were no fewer than four digital-ad conferences, two evenings of Webby Awards, a whole BlackBerry's worth of parties every evening, and enough power-breakfast panels to make you never want to see a cheese danish again.

The crowd at the New York Tech Meetup.

(Credit: David Karp)

But even all those cheese danishes couldn't fill the sizeable gulf between Gotham's stalwart media-advertising machine and the digital start-ups popping up across the country.

It's an age-old stereotype: the friction between the big guys with the deep pockets and the business expertise who are short on new ideas, and the newcomers teeming with innovation but lacking the financial cred. And in New York's digital scene, it's a reality. Given the shaky economic conditions and uncertain outlook for the ad industry both online and offline--display ad spending dropped in the first quarter of 2008--an effort toward more cohesion in the media business would be a smart move. Internet Week was a stellar opportunity to focus on that cohesion, and it didn't happen; that's why the festival was a disappointment.

True, Internet Week was hindered from the start: because there was no central conference or event, a la South by Southwest Interactive, festival-goers were less likely to encounter new people and make new connections, and more likely to be socializing instead with the people they already knew. During the day, Internet Week's conferences were populated by ad-industry types in suits; at night, it was local entrepreneurs and their fun-loving groupies who were out on the town.

Neither party looked good in the process. It didn't do much of a service to the image of the big-media guys that they rolled into town for a handful of expensive conferences--the Federated Media Conversational Marketing Summit, Digital Hollywood's Advertising 2.0 conference, ContentNext's EconAds--where, in typical New York fashion, the focus was on the money rather than the innovation.

Revelers at Thrillist's 'Information Superparty'

(Credit: Nick McGlynn/RandomNightOut.com)

The tech start-up CEOs who'd been called in to speak at those conferences seemed very conscious of the ad industry's impatience. "This whole 'application economy' that was meant to emerge is really concentrating on a handful of developers," said Joanna Shields, president of Bebo, the social network acquired by AOL earlier this year, in a panel at the Conversational Marketing Summit.

She was speaking to a crowd of ad-industry types who, with pens and notebooks out, were attempting to get an idea or two on how to tackle social-media marketing campaigns. Regarding developer platforms' failure to explode into a cash cow, Shields said, "that's just the reality of the situation." In other words, the advertisers needed to calm down.

"I think it's important to also acknowledge the fact that...the concept of a platform and application developers is one year old, that's it," Gina Bianchini, CEO of the hyped social-media start-up Ning, said in the same panel about cashing in on social-network platforms. "I think that certainly everybody is motivated to enable more people to have the freedom to create and customize and use what they want where they want to use it, but we're still really early here."

On the flip side, there are those on the big-media side who perceive their start-up brethren as brash, fiscally irresponsible, and unduly disrespectful of the status quo. Some current leaders in the Valley don't disagree with the characterization.

"There's a little bit of the sense that you have to come in and tell people that things have to change and that you have to be this visionary," Bianchini told CNET News.com in an interview during Internet Week. Instead, she said, the focus should be problem-solving. "I think you have to be a lot more respectful of a business that is established."

Bianchini went on to emphasize that the dialogue between old media and new media, San Francisco Bay Area and New York, is more than crucial given the fact that she estimates the economy will be very challenging for the next year and a half. "It's going to take advertising and marketing teams a few years to catch up," she said. "(The media business) is under pressure...and I'm respectful of that, and I think online media companies need to be. That's not to say that things aren't changing."

Somewhat ironically, the brightest glimpses of industry-wide cohesion were at the Webby Awards ceremony, which some members of the New York media like to rip on for its exclusivity and ostensible irrelevance. True, the overlong ceremony and seemingly endless parade of "winners" seemed to underscore the common wisdom that the Internet industry in New York is just too jumbled and scattershot for a week-long festival.

But on the other hand, the lavish event space at Cipriani Wall Street was a more diverse crowd than Internet Week had seen yet: the heads of oddball start-up blogs were seated alongside representatives from the world's biggest media companies and advertising agencies. (I was placed, for example, between an ad strategist from the BBC and one of the editors of political activism site FactCheck.org.)

When it came to the Slinky-shaped Webby Award trophies, sometimes it was the big corporations that won. And sometimes it was the start-ups, as emphasized by the five-word acceptance speech on behalf of Web browser Flock when it won the Webby for best social-networking product: "No s***! We beat Facebook!"

Love them or hate them, the Webbys were Internet Week New York's finest example of digital media's big and small players standing side-by-side. It was a closing note that would do well as a catalyst for a hypothetical Internet Week next year: not just a way to show off the diversity of New York as a digital city, but to help it march in lockstep.

And Davies' team will likely get a chance. Considering Mayor Michael P. Bloomberg took the inaugural Internet Week as an opportunity to throw an official press conference and launch a new venture fund for local tech start-ups, signs indicate he'll want to bring it back next year.

But for the sake of the entire industry, let's just hope everyone will be using the word "monetize" about one-fifth as often.