X Media Lab’s Global Media Ideas conference day was billed as exploring “cultural and commercial content in a global world; creative ideas and innovation in media and technology; international media business opportunities; new media and new geographies; and new platforms, applications, and content.” It didn’t disappoint.

The great thing about X Media Labs is how it brings disparate ideas together and exposes the audience to worldwide trends and developments. The June 2010 Sydney X Media Lab was no exception with a great range of diverse speakers. Here’s a brief rundown of their themes, more comprehensive coverage can be found at Brad Howarth’s Lagrange Point blog;

Ralph Simon
Dubbed “the father of the ring tone”, Ralph Simon took us on a tour of innovation that started with the Sex Pistols, through applications like Red Lazer and sites like TuneWiki, which uses crowdsourcing to translate music lyrics, to end with mHealth applications where diabetic children use their mobile phone games to test their blood sugar levels. A broad and exciting view of where the mobile Internet and gaming platforms are going.

Dana Al Salem
The founder of Fanshake, Dana showed us how her site is used to connect bands with their fans. Her view is that today’s Gen Ys are just like their hippy grandparents except today’s groovers are wealthier have more technology. An interesting take on “the more things change, the more they stay the same“.

Gotham Chopra
Gotham described his journey of setting up superhero cartoons for young Indians and intertwined it with a story of his travels through Pakistan as a journalist. His hope is to replace the influence people like Osama Bin Laden have on the youth of South Asia with more positive role models.

Parmesh Shahani
The divide between the richer cities and poorer rural areas in developing nations is often just characterised as a migration story as millions of poor agricultural workers migrate to the cities. Parmesh gave us a broader perspective on what is happening in India including some fascinating case studies of how comparatively older technologies such as satellite TV and SMS mobile messaging are changing rural India.

Joy Mountford
Among the geeks and developers, Joy was probably the most anticipated of the speakers having being a designer with Apple and vice president of design innovation at Yahoo! Joy showed us how designers are moving from the “look” of computer programs to “feel”. She also showed us how crowdsourcing has worked for other projects including the fantastic Johnny Cash Project which reworks his Ain’t No Grave into a group video.

Wayne Borg
The Chief Operating Officer of twofour54, a content creation hub in Abu Dhabi, Wayne took us through the opportunities of 340 million Arabic Speakers covering diverse cultures and where 200 million are under the age of 25. His presentation showed us much of the development plans of the United Arab Emirates and how the kingdoms are seeking to be the Arab world’s creative centre.

Nick Yang
The entrepreneur label is often too easily given away, but no-one could begrudge Nick Yang, founder of KongZhong, ChinaRen.com and Wukong.com for using the title. Nick walked us through his journey of being a young student of Stanford, his return to China and both his and China’s growth over the last decade. He also showed us how his latest venture, Wukong.com, aims to change how search engines work.

Rob Mason and Scott Halcom
Local flavour was provided by Rob Manson from Sydney’s MOB Innovation Lab and Scott Halcomb from from SystemK in Japan, who walked us through the worlds of augmented reality. Rob concluded their joint presentation with the view that object recognition is going to change the way we see the world.

Haidong Pan
Like Nick Yang, Haidong is the founder of a Chinese Internet service, this time Hudong.com which is a “knowledge media” run along the lines of wikipedia that acts as a news and fact service. His presentation on how social knowledge changes the world was thought provoking in how societies are reclaiming their culture and history back from mass media.

Anand Giridharadas
Technology Columnist with The New York Times and International Herald Tribune, Anand challenged us to think about the ethics of the digital world and how foreign cultures are now beginning to colonise the dominant anglo-US culture. Personally I struggled with some of Ananda points as our online ethics should be no different to our off line standards and the US domination of global media stems from it being the richest nation, as other countries catch up with US living standards their cultures will reassert themselves.

John Penny
Like Anand, John forced the audience to think; he invited us to consider the problem of the television producer where audience fragmentation has meant we’re approaching the point where the only profitable TV productions will be reality shows and advertorials. John as an Executive Vice President of Starz Entertainment was well placed to walk us through this dilemma. John finished with a call to consider how dis-intermediation will help rebuild the fortunes of those who want to provide well written screen productions.

Amin Zoufonoun
As corporate development manager at Google, Amin was probably almost as highly anticipated as Joy Mountford had been earlier. Unfortunately his speech on the development of technologies from the Internet’s “Big Bang” fell flat, largely because the audience know this topic. The talk probably would have worked better with an audience of financiers or CEOs who don’t live this topic the way the X Media Lab audience do.

Robert Tercek
To finish a long, stimulating and challenging day Robert Tercek walked us through why great minds like Lord Kelvin, Edison and Einstein had missed emerging technologies in their times and how we can avoid it. Robert sees great opportunities for innovators as successful, large companies entering new markets don’t know more than anyone else and in many cases are blind to the potential of these sectors.

Overall, X Media Labs was another stimulating and fascinating day. The entrepreneurs and artists who had the opportunity to be mentored over the next two days by the speakers were very lucky to be exposed to this sort of talent.

The key message from this X Media Labs came from Parmesh Shahani when he said “don’t just look at India as a market, look at it as a source of innovation and inspiration”. We shouldn’t be just looking for the obvious, easy markets but watching the bigger trends that are developing around us.

All three panellists agreed that as publishers “The sustainability of our business is very much linked to the quality of content.”  because with several million online voices a site needs compelling and relevant content to attract and retain readers.

Yet every panel participant agreed the cost of content is falling and in many cases is now free.

There lies the paradox; if content is so valuable, why is it so cheap or even worthless?

The model for online publishers is the same as it was in the days of every city having three evening newspapers or when the six o’clock TV news was the most watched show on television. Compelling content attracted readers and viewers which in turned attracted eager advertisers.

In the days of metro evening newspapers and the six o’clock news there were substantial barriers to competition with printing presses, broadcast licenses and distribution networks required. Today anyone who can afford $10 a month for website hosting can be a publisher.

Worse, the rates for online advertising are plummeting and with the site owners only making a few dollars there’s little for publishers, let alone the content creators.

Which brings us back to the fundamental problem, if there isn’t any money for those who create the content then there’s little point in the middle men distributing it.

Many of today’s online publishers are like the loom weavers of the early 18th Century who derived a short term benefit from the change that eventually destroyed them. The same forces that make journalists work for nothing are the same ones that will render the bulk of publishers insolvent.

And that could be where the future of journalism, writing and publishing really lies — the bulk of the industry eking out an existance providing commoditised, generic pap and a few niche publications with readerships that attract  good incomes that in turn can pay a small number of  writers.

That’s certainly the model the panel at Media 140 are betting on and I hope they all do well.

The evening was well documented by Martin Cahill and the message was clear — publishers are not going to pay for content because even if they want to they can’t afford it.

The prevailing view was journalists will have to learn how to multi task; but given YouTube is even more poorly rewarded than online journalism, it’s unlikely sites will be any more generous to video or audio contributions than they are to text contributors. Which only suggests a future of journalists doing more work for no money.

Valerio Veo, Head of SBS News and Current Affairs Online pointed out SBS is paying a 19 year a $1000 per contribution for covering Obama’s visit to Indonesia. Ignoring this is pocket money in terms of sending a camera crew and traditional reporter, the fact SBS are one of the few Australian organisations paying online contributors suggests ABC Managing Director, Mark Scott’s view at a previous Media140 that only government supported organisations will be able to afford to pay journalists is part of the future.

So what is the future of professional journalism? Will it be restricted to a few subsidised outlets? Is it the gifted amateur contributing for their love of the masthead? Or is it that of the professional pushing their own or their employer’s agenda?

Maybe journalists will become editors cleaning up the shoddy contributions of not so gifted writers that have the only benefit of being free. Could it be that curating other people’s content will be the role of future journalists?

Or perhaps journalists are the new poets, starving in garrets and working in desperate jobs while waiting for the phone call from the ABC, BBC or PBS, penning great works that will lie undiscovered on obscure blogs which will only be found after their passing?

We didn’t really glimpse the answers at Media140 and this is an important discussion to have as the rise of the digital sharecropper isn’t confined to journalism.

Many professional and white collar occupations are going the same way and we need to understand what this means for large parts of our economy. Even if we choose not to discuss it, it’s the reality we face.

As Fred Wilson has pointed out, the problem for AP and News is the web is now the newstand and taking publications off the shelves is not good business sense.

We see that with the Australian Financial Review. Its position as an Australian journal of record has been diminished by Fairfax’s incompetent obsession with protecting content.

As result, other channels such as The Australian, Business Spectator and blogs have stepped into the vaccuum and eroded the AFR’s online authority.

Following the RIAA path and suing Google, the Huffington Post and any blog that dares link to their sites will backfire on the news industry just as it did on the record industry.

In many ways newspapers are even more vulnerable as journalists employed by organisations like News and AP are quick to rip stories off from blogs, web forums or MySpace and Facebook pages with little regard for permission or attribution.

I suspect it’s one legal quagmire Associated Press or Rupert Murdoch might rue becoming bogged down in at the very time their business models are challenged by both economic and technological change.

There’s some interesting perspectives on where social networking is going and how people are going to make money from it.

Personally, I think too many of the big players like Bebo and MySpace are too fixated on the old broadcast media model of top down content where they control everything.

Particularly fascinating is how dismissive many of the attendees are of YouTube and Facebook. The funny thing is there were five people around me with laptops on and all of them visited their Facebook pages during the morning seminar.

The icing on the cake was on the bus home. The girl in front of me had her MacBook open and she was editing her Facebook page.

It seems to me the big established media companies are struggling with their investments in the social media space. 

More on this later.