Quick hits from #ONA09

In the spirit of the rampant Tweeting during the terrific Online News Association conference Thursday through Saturday, here are some brief thoughts on a variety of topics: 

• This year’s conference was the best I’ve attended. Fantastic diversity of topics, fresh speakers and a nice mix of formats.
• Thursday’s “Fund Your Media”  session cost an extra $50 but was well worth it. Great ideas for content and for funding streams for upstarts, entrepreneurs and traditional media.
• I came away from the Thursday session recognizing there is no silver bullet when it comes to business models, but that each site I launch likely will have a different revenue stream. One size does not fit all.
• The boxed lunches served Thursday and Saturday were a nice surprise: gourmet sandwich, salad, apple, chips, cookie, chocolate and drink. It was like a never ending lunch box.
• The Twitter hashtags for each seminar were great for those in attendance, although I know there was confusion outside the conference among readers who wondered why there were so few posts to the #ONA hashtag (#ONA09 was the preferred overarching tag).
• Lisa Williams of placeblogger makes $15-$25,000 a pop selling access to her aggregate user data! Talk about an alternate revenue stream
• I appreciated the lack of whining about the sad state of the industry at this year’s conference. There was a strong sense of “let’s get on with it.” Refreshing.
• I was not surprised at how many people paid their own way to the conference. Seems like a sign of the times. 
• I loved that Jessie James Garrett spoke of the need to “emotionally engage” with your audience. That emotional connection is absolutely critical to success, yet far foo many sites are polish over passion.
• I talked to some people at the conference who don’t Tweet or blog and instead are quietly doing some amazing work. That’s why in-person conferences like ONA are so powerful in connecting bright minds offline.
• There’s some great work occurring at sites big and small, but there’s still far too little focus on revenue or realistic business plans. Too many people are banking on either grant/foundation money or “build an audience and the revenue will follow.
• At the other end of the spectrum, one highly lauded hyperlocal site with three staffers seemed comfortable with its current 11,000 page views per week. At some point, though, your inaugural sponsors are going to question their ROI. MinnPost's Real-Time Ads" are posted through a Twitter tool that allows the advertiser to update their ads whever they want.
• I loved how MinnPost.com is using Twitter as the platform for its real-time ads. Great concept that I hope takes off. 
• Great observation from MinnPost’s Joel Kramer suggesting that $35,000 you might want to spend on a reporter might be much better spent on a full-time staffer focused on bringing  in long-term revenue (sponsors, grants, subscribers, etc.).
• The hotel Starbucks priced nearly everything $1 more than that Starbucks one block down O’Farrell.
• Leo Laporte was a great Friday luncheon speaker. His “sad sack” humbleness overshadowed a great story in perserverance, reinventing oneself and truly understanding marketing. BTW: His "This Week in Google" podcast is worth listening to at least once. Co-star Jeff Jarvis' offers good insights on Google stuff that affects journalism.
• EE News (Greenwire, ClimateWire and more) is flying under the radar. I had no idea their staff included Pulitzer winners lured from high-brow newspapers. It’s now an $8 million a year business with 30% margins – with 25% annual growth projections moving forward.
• “Social Media Mania” panelist Steve Fox used Twitter to request questions from the audience. The audience instead asked that Fox steer the panel back on topic, which he then did. Bravo! Props also for his concise advice for staffers using social media: “Don’t be a dumbass!”
• The SacPress story viewer allows you to easily find previous stories on ongoing topics. The tool surfaced on story pagesThe “6 in 60” panel was fun and invigorating (great give and take between the VC and pretty much everyone else). Given the intent of the event, I didn’t think Sacramento Press should have won – too established – but it is a terrific site with some excellent navigation and usability features (I love the archive viewer that displays a timeline of stories on a particular topic).
• I didn’t see a single ONA attendee reading a print newspaper the three days I was at the conference. Hasn’t always been the case.
• Saw tons of iPhones but also a few low-tech models – but I came away from two different seminars (Amy Webb’s and one of the mobile panels) thinking that Android is the way to go.
• I’m still laughing at the thought of people IN the main conference hall firing up Livestream to watch the speaker right in front of them.
• Thousands of Tweets were sent using the #ONA09 hastagThe ONA Twittersphere added an amazing layer of insight and analysis to the conference. It was surreal at times.
• I did find it funny that one prolific Tweeter also told people attending his panel that reporters covering meetings needed to focus on listening to speakers instead of tweeting the proceedings.
• I took more of an analog approach, Tweeting only a few times during the conference. I was simply too busy with other things. But thanks and props to those who did Tweet. There’s a ton of great information behind all those ONA hashtags. However, I do hope someone at ONA collects all the presentations in one place. Until then, there are hundreds of links in the many Twitter posts.
• It’s so inspiring to hear of people launching really cool sites with budgets of just a few thousand dollars. 
• Amy Webb’s presentation was amazing, and worth revisiting online. Some of her insights don’t directly translate to day-to-day journalism but they’re critical to understanding where consumer attention will be focused in the years ahead. Keeping and monetizing that consumer time is where our future lies.
• Webb’s presentation included more than a few products that were very invasive in terms of today’s expectations of privacy. I wonder where the tipping point is in terms of individual privacy. Are normal people – not journalists or marketers or tech geeks – really going to expose themselves that much?
• Paul Saffo predicted “we are going to be tearing down architecture for the next 18 months. Get used to it.” I think the rest of our lives are going to be chaotic, with architecture a fleeting concept.
• Not sure of the screengrab Saffo showed of Apple’s new iTablet was real or not but it looked pretty cool and different that some earlier visuals I’d seen.
• We all know mobile is going to be huge but, cripes, successful revenue models will be twice/thrice the challenge of the desktop world.
• I had a meeting conflict so couldn’t attend the unconferences but I’m glad the organizers made the concept an option. Great way to crowdsource a conference and keep things fresh. (I was struck by the request for a “brief summary” of how to develop software. For those of us in that business, um, let’s define “brief”).
• Several people I talked to agree LinkedIn is underrated.
• Was stunned to learn BlogHer is still not profitable.
• Josh Hatch showed shared some cool new reporting tools: Swivel for super-easy data visualization and Audioboo for posting podcasts online from your iPhone. Even I could figure out both. 
• Cory Haik shared two fantastic and easy tools for using your phone to shoot and post  images into live maps and inline stories. Fun for personal use but effective in reporting from the field.  
• Two weeks left to submit your Knight News Challenge proposals. It’s super easy, with major upside.
• Had a great dinnertime debate over the value of Twitter, Facebook, etc. My contention is that the people I follow on Twitter have become my editors and I feel like they’ll alert me to anything important going on in the world. A bright software development manager at our dinner table who detests Twitter rightly contended there’s a huge and profitable audience that still wants people to edit content for them. I agree – the key is monetizing that new “mass” because it’s not mass like the old mass.
• I drove up from Bakersfield, 5 hours to the south, so I left the conference at about 5 p.m. Saturday. Unfortunately, I hit the streets just as the city's "celebration of love" parade was ending. It took me an hour to get from the hotel to the Bay Bridge, typically a 5-minute drive. If there was any consolation, it was no shortage of eye candy along the way.