Conferences and Panels

The Boston Globe and Boston World Partnerships will launch a series of joint events with The Intersection of Journalism and Social Media: How Traditional Media Is Shaping Our New Media Consumption, to be held April 13 at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Boston.

The event will explore the interaction and interdependence of journalism and social media, and participants will include Boston Globe editor Marty Baron, Neiman Journalism Lab founding director Joshua Benton, American Islamic Congress director of outreach Nasser Weddady, and Daily Grommet founder and CEO Jules Pieri, with SocialSphere director of analytics Jonathan Chavez serving as moderator.

Boston World Partnerships is a nonprofit economic development initiative founded and chaired by Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Social Media Week organizer Crowdcentric is looking for contributors for a global editorial platform covering worldwide social and mobile media.

Crowdcentric said it expects two to three posts weekly, in English, covering news, analysis, or commentary on social and mobile media developments from contributors’ native countries, adding that interested parties can sign up here, and questions can be emailed to sara@socialmediaweek.org.

The next Social Media Week will be held Sept. 19-13 in 12 cities.

The 2011 Tribeca Film Festival announced an online component, the 2011 Tribeca (Online) Film Festival, which will run concurrently with the festival April 20-May 1 and be supported by American Express.

The 2011 Tribeca (Online) Film Festival will offer free viewing of feature films and short films and allow users to engage with filmmakers and industry experts. Content is divided into five areas: Festival Streaming Room, Live from …, Tribeca Q&A, Filmmaker Feed, and blog Future of Film.

Festival Streaming Room will offer six feature films and 18 short films, including two and four, respectively, that are premiering at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival.

Live from … will present live streams of events from the festival, including its opening press conference, red-carpet premieres, and awards show.

Tribeca Q&A will allow users to submit questions to 20-25 subjects including: Tribeca’s Jane Rosenthal, Geoff Gilmore, and Nancy Schafer; Whoopi Goldberg; Brian Williams; filmmakers David Gordon Green and Zach Braff; and other participating Tribeca (Online) filmmakers, programmers, actors, jurors, and film experts, and more. The top questions chosen by community members will be submitted.

Filmmaker Feed is a source for information on all filmmakers featured at the festival, including biographies, interviews, favorite links, social-media feeds (Twitter/Facebook), blog posts, and video updates.

And blog Future of Film features experts from film and technology commenting on the ever-changing media environment.

Internet Week New York will see several events and presentations on its main stage selected by the public as part of Make the Stage, an initiative announced Thursday by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment.

Ideas for presentations can be submitted in six categories — startups, social media, technology, advertising and creativity, entertainment, and mobile — through April 8, after which voting will run through April 22.

Two winners in each category – one chosen by the public, and the other by a panel of experts – will receive one-hour slots on the main stage during Internet Week New York, which runs June 6-13 and will consist of more than 200 events.

The panel includes Alex Blagg (A Bajillion Hits), Josh Harris (The Wired City), Suroosh Alvi (Vice), Jared Hecht (GroupMe), Soraya Darabi (Foodspotting), Ashley Granata (Fashism), Kris Kiger (R/GA), Sean Mills (Nerve.com), David-Michel Davies (Webby Awards), Charlie O’Donnell (First Round Capital), Anthony DeRosa (Reuters Media), and Scott Belsky (Behance).

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The Interactive Advertising Bureau, the Association of National Advertisers, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) used the IAB’s Fourth Annual Leadership Meeting, Ecosystem 2.0: The People vs. Data at La Quinta Resort & Club in Palm Springs, Calif., to announce an initiative called Making Measurement Make Sense, which is aimed at developing digital metrics and cross-platform measurement solutions to improve marketing and ease media-management decision.

Management-consulting firm Bain & Co. and strategic-advisory firm MediaLink will support the initiative introduced by the IAB, the ANA, and 4A’s.

The trade groups said the three primary objectives of Making Measurement Make Sense are: defining standard metrics and measurement systems that are transparent and consistent to simplify the planning, buying, and evaluating of digital media; analyzing the current digital measurement situation from a business perspective; and driving industry consensus around the solutions.

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foursquare co-founder and CEO Dennis Crowley was the subject of a keynote interview as part of Social Media Week New York, conducted by Fast Company‘s Austin Carr at JWT’s Media & Communications Hub in Manhattan.

Crowley mentioned that the company has grown from four employees and 100,000 users to 50 employees and some 6.5 million users, saying, “Going from 100,000 users to 6.5 million users, a lot of things break in the middle.”

Describing how the foursquare platform evolved, he said, “You can get 10 random foursquare users in a room and ask them what drew them to the platform, and you’d get 10 different answers. What should I eat? Can I get a special? We threw 10 things at the wall to see what sticks, and all 10 of them stuck. It’s a good thing, because it shows how rich the platform is and how rich it could be. How do you boil everything that foursquare does down to one sentence? I don’t think we want to tell people how to use the product. We want people to teach us how they’re using it. The initial design was, ‘I go out for happy hour, I broadcast my location, and a bunch of people show up.’ ”

Crowley continued, “Can you use game mechanics to incentivize and encourage people to go out and enrich their lives? I think there’s something good about software that can get you to try new experiences. No matter where I’m standing in Manhattan, there’s 1,000 options of things I could be doing right now. foursquare can help me filter those options.”

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Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were the hot topic at WikiLeaks and Online Civil Disobedience, a Social Media Week New York panel hosted by the Personal Democracy Forum and moderated by its editor and curator, Micah Sifry.

Speakers at the event, in order, were Deanna Zandt, author of Share This: How You Will Change the World with Social Networking; Evgeny Morozov, author of new book The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom; and John Perry Barlow, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The event was held at Hearst’s Art & Culture Hub in Manhattan.

Zandt made it a point to differentiate between DDoS attacks and hacking, saying, “Denial-of-service attacks are not hacking. Hacking tends to be where systems are broken into and data are compromised. None of the business data or practices was compromised in any way. I do feel that DDOS is a civil form of disobedience.”

Speaking specifically about Anonymous, the group responsible for attacking several corporate Web sites in defense of WikiLeaks, she said, “In the past, Anonymous hasn’t done anything in this scale that was explicitly, overtly, hugely political,” adding that the group was made up of “chaos enthusiasts — they’re interested in the drama of chaos unfolding. It’s not as if there was this sleeper cell of people who were ready to attack this big, bad corporation.”

On digital activism in general, Zandt concluded, “I’m often very, very frustrated with what the face of actual digital activism looks like. We have the ability and the freedom to risk ourselves for the benefit of many who don’t. We can’t ultimately rely on these digital tools to do our dirty work. If governments and corporations can easily collude to disable our ability to communicate with one another, what is our response?”

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The Science and Technology Hub at Google’s New York outpost was the site of Monday afternoon’s The Internet and Uprisings in the Arab World: Are We Already in a Post-Social-Media World?, hosted by Wired and moderated by its New York bureau chief, John C. Abell.

Ease of use and access was a point that came up often, as Abell said, “With electricity and an Internet connection, you can whisper in Times Square and be heard anywhere else in the world,” and panelist Susannah Vila, director of content and outreach for Movements.org, added, “The fact that it’s free and easy and cool sort of underlines the need for people to see what’s happening in Egypt and get people together for an advocacy campaign.” Panelist Micah Sifry, co-founder and executive editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, pointed to how quickly people in parts of the Middle East are getting mobile phones, adding, “In the past few years, the number of people with mobile phones in Egypt has soared, something like 60 percent — same thing in Tunisia.” Adam Penenberg, assistant director of the business and economic reporting program at New York University, added, “During the civil-rights movement, if they had cell phones, they would have used them. Now we can reach many more people There’s nothing really new here: These are just tools that are amplifying the message we can connect and spread People are more connected: It helps in bringing people together.”

Sifry cautioned against generalizing and jumping to conclusions, saying, “I don’t think we know almost diddly about what’s actually going on. I think we have to be extremely careful before making judgments about the role of social media in Tunisia, Egypt, the rest of the Mideast, or anywhere else. We use the word ‘movement’ too easily. The language of revolution and movements is instead what we hear rather than the reality.”

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Social Media Week kicks off Monday in nine cities — New York, San Francisco, Rome, Paris, Toronto, São Paulo, London, Hong Kong, and Istanbul — and Crowdcentric CEO and Social Media Week founder and executive director Toby Daniels said year four of the event will be “our most spectacular yet, and one of the largest distributed conferences in the world.”

Speaking at the opening press conference at Hearst Tower in New York, Daniels said, “I am amazed by the creativity and the depth and the variety of the content. What I’m seeing now is a shift away from the technologies and toward specific industry sectors.”

Hearst Magazines president David Carey said:

This is one of the hottest topics in media on one of the coldest weeks of the year. We’ve always felt a special kinship with social media. As a magazine publisher, in many ways, magazines were the original social media. We have many of our top editors lined up to be in panels and programs. We’ve made understanding social media and applying it to our top brands a priority.

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Your WebNewser editor will be helping to moderate tomorrow’s Beet.tv Online Journalism Summit live from The Washington Post. More about the summit available here, including where to watch.

We will be joined by the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza, as well as a lineup of executives from the TV, print and online worlds.

The full lineup is available at the conference site. Feel free to tune in at 9 AM ET!