Digital natives

Inter­est­ingly, the ses­sion this morn­ing on “digital nat­ives”, the people who are already embra­cing the future, fea­tures three women. Cin­na­mon Pol­lard – woman behind thev​ine​.com​.au for Fair­fax to try and get younger people online; Rebekah Horne – gen­eral man­ager of MySpace Aus­tralia; and Kath Hamilton – dir­ector, Yahoo 7. They are younger than the men of yes­ter­day and dressed more interestingly. 

They are talk­ing about the social nature of media con­sump­tion in the next generation.

Today’s inter­est­ing info:

• Par­ti­cip­ate for Cin­na­mon means “rate, vote and have their say” – which is not full par­ti­cip­a­tion in my mind. Her audi­ence is under 26 and appar­ently most of them still live at home. They crave peer recog­ni­tion. They need to feel as though they’re going to become famous.
• Horne says 3–5 minutes is the longest video you would put online. She is talk­ing about a vam­pire film made by Hammer that has been posted exclus­ively on MySpace in 5 minute chunks.
• “Con­tinual par­tial atten­tion” – the way that digital nat­ives per­form media snacking.
• The Vine has been designed to be online, mobile and will become print – prob­ably one page a week in the Sunday paper (bizarre way to do it)
• They’re talk­ing about mobile as the recep­tion device rather than the par­ti­cip­a­tion device.
• The Vine has an edit­or­ial team of five people. It’s not designed to be a break­ing news site so the stor­ies can be well researched and well craf­ted. The aim is for the stor­ies to be conversation-starters.
• MySpace has 400 people in the US just check­ing images to make sure they’re suit­able for 14-year-olds.

And most hated word for the day: yep, someone actu­ally used incentivise.

ETA: Spoke to Cin­na­mon in the break. Real par­ti­cip­a­tion is phase 2. They have a job open­ing right now for a Com­munity Mod­er­ator. Think I might actu­ally have applied for that and not got it but she said send her my CV, so I will.