Digital media: on the front lines

Spent Wednesday at Under the Radar Conference: Why Digital Media Matters. A crowd of 300 or so of the digerati turned out at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View for a day of Web 2.0 demos and hallway schmoozing. Early on, Stowe Boyd and I discovered that the wi-fi set up for the gathering would not work if you had an Apple laptop -- as about 20 of us did. (I used to work for a time at Microsoft; sad to see that some things haven't changed. Advice to the conference organizers: Make sure you don't blow off the creative, Mac-savvy portion of your audience.)

Denmark West, EVP at MTV Networks, showed up for a frank fireside chat about MTV's role in the brave new online world. (See above for a photo of him I shot.) I was surprised and impressed by his positive words for open source and social media. He singled out Songbird, whose demo he saw a few hours before, for praise. (Songbird is a media player built from the Firefox browser engine.)

Lots of interesting Web 2.0 startups put their wares on view throughout the day. Alas, the lack of wi-fi yesterday put a crimp in my plans to do so, so I'll instead point to some other bloggers' writeups:

Stowe Boyd: Under the Radar and STIRR

Stowe Boyd: Michael Arrington on "Web 2.0 is Dead!"

Dan Farber: MTV's Denmark West on super-serving the audience

Meantime, more tech news:

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch: AOL-Netscape Launches Massive “Digg Killer” (and San Jose Merc article on Netscape's relaunch, in which AOL exec Jason Calacanis says of the new social news site, "It's sort of like open-source journalism.")

TechCrunch on Ray Ozzie to replace Gates as Chief Software architect (and CNN: Gates to leave day-to-day role at Microsoft).