Media Guardian’s Organ Grinder has a nice wrap-up of the unFestival, quoting a bunch of people including yours truly. My own reflections:
I’m not remotely surprised by the lack of TV people present. They’ve paid good money to attend the TV Festival, and it’s a considerable risk. Plus, TV is this huge behemoth with hundreds of millions of pounds somewhere, which of course everyone is chasing. Digital media is a completely different world and it doesn’t work in anything like the same way.
Accordingly, I personally no longer expect the Big Ideas to come from TV. Perhaps TV people might be involved, but if you’re in the business of being good at TV that doesn’t necessarily extend to the web. We don’t expect book publishers to come up with great TV shows on the side — though in rare circumstances that does happen.
Hence, we need to stop looking to the TV people for creative, content-based leadership. They’re not a likely source.
However, the idea of growing the unFestival in the direction of something like SXSW is extremely good, in my book; there’s plenty of boundary-challenging work being done that’s exhibited in Edinburgh, so let’s see how broad an unconference we can foster.
Roll on 2008, I say.
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