Friday, June 6, 2008

Hey, It's Internet Week


We know Fashion Week—-very glitzy, insiders only. Advertising Week---mostly of industry interest. And now Internet Week New York, presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences in cooperation with City of New York and The Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting.

This start-up year was thrown together in a matter of months, to back into the Webby Awards themselves on June 10.

But the organizers were smart about it:

“Like the Web itself, Internet Week is open: anyone can attend events, and anyone can throw events. There's no fee to participate. No organization is too big or too small to be included. Open access for all!”

Their site was open for people or organizations to post events directly. And in an ad hoc way, it’s an impressive array of web-related events, from the tech community, digital artists, marketing people, and of course, bloggers.

I’ve gone to 2 events, both part of the Time Warner Conversations on the Circle. The first was politics and the Internet, the second on entertainment. I had never been in the corporate side of the Time Warner building (nor I have been in the mall that fronts it). The sense of power certainly reverberates off of the tasteful grey walls.

The panels were mostly old media talking at new media, stringing together as many buzz words and phrases as possible. What was more interesting were the buffet breakfasts beforehand, where executives rubbed elbows with a wide array of individual bloggers and all types of small media company people. Now that doesn’t happen every day.

Here’s the schedule of events---it’s really worth perusing.

And here are some of the exuberant web people involved in a group ritual, from Caroline McCarthy’s blog at cnet.`

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