By Senior Editor Kris Smith (@croncast)

The first panel up at Webby Connect today was to address branded comedy content and its production. My original intention was to have my wife attend since she's the funny one in our civil arrangement. I'm glad that I didn't!

I'm glad not because I could have learned what comedy gold is but that the panel literally had nothing to do with comedy. They spoke my language about distribution, production, creatives, agencies and building out campaigns for brands. This would have killed my wife and I in turn would have turned into her comedy gold in her next act.

On the panel were Jennifer Kavanagh from Oxygen Channel, Douglas Scott from Ogilvy and Steve Wax (@campfiresteve) from Campire. The moderator for this session was Gillian Reagan from The New York Observer. I will spare you the titles, but just know that these people are at the top of their game and industries.

Gillian asked the panel questions that had a comedy focus in them but they were taken by the panelists and shaped to match their experiences with production of branded content for clients. This isn't a bad thing, believe me. They were able to riff off of each other and share information about their processes.

Some of the most useful information about how to create these campaigns came from Douglas Scott. He broke Ogilvy's process down at a high level and touched on the life-cycle of that production and on through distribution. He highly recommended to have the brand involved in the creative process from the beginning of a project.

If you're a creative you can stop gnashing your teeth. He made sure to point out that working with the client before hand to understand the process and the iterative nature of developing content. The goal of this is to create a more authentic product that would make the brand not feel propped up or think that the content was poorly written due to too much or too little brand exposure.

Steve Wax addressed this issue after being asked about creative freedom and it brands get in the way. He simply stated that for a boutique agency like Campfire there isn't a real need to continually bend to a brand since they are project based. Unlike agencies which are tied to the brand as matter of record and have built massive budgets around multiple campaigns.

Later in the panel Douglass Scott addressed his experience with CMO's that are new to the digital and branded content space. Here's the take away from this three minute lesson:

• Teach them the language of the writing room scripts, dailies, etc.
• Show them examples of what has been successful
• Madison Avenue, Creatives and Hollywood are being driven together by economic realities and to continue high quality content production they need to work together

This was a jumping off point for the moderator to ask about mobile. Jennifer from Oxygen put this into perspective by giving out the percentage increase in mobile traffic over last year, up 500%. She reiterated that now is the time to begin figuring out how to produce for mobile to get the most out of it for brands.

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/4

Webby Connect NYC Branded Content is a post from: TechStartups.com

Douglas Rushkoff author, speaker, and teacher is a man on a mission. As a step towards getting "people to see the software-like code lying underneath how they interact," his latest book, Life, Inc., explores the nature of money, our economic system, and how a corporate mindset has shaped who we are as people in modern society.

As a media theorist who's written about some of the most influential ideas of the digital age, Rushkoff is second to none. In Life Inc., he describes not just corporations, but how we all can change to an "open source economy" that favors decentralized value creation over banking and central currency. We spoke with to ask more about what this new economy would look like and how the Web is involved.

Sponsor

How The Web Broke The Economy

ReadWriteWeb: I was particularly struck by how you position the Web as a way for individuals to create things of value for each other, as the door to an open source economy. Can you describe what exactly an open source economy would look like, and what role software and the Web have to play in that?

Douglas Rushkoff: This program written central banking and corporatist monopolies was created to favor people who had money and wanted to make money without creating value. Technology broke the monopoly centralized banking had on centralized value creation by allowing people to develop things at low cost. The gift economy that really the real Internet was built on is anathema to the GNP.

RWW: Will enterprise software the same trend? What role is there for business-to-business transactions in the decentralized economy you've laid out?

R: When I'm at the supermarket, every once in a while the cash register crashes and they restart it and they see Windows. I get the feeling that the manager and the cashier and everyone in there thinks that this shouldn't be running Windows. They're thinking, oh my god, they're using amateur-level software. You want to think that these are proprietary perfect registers.

My feeling is that businesses and the IT of business are going to want a higher order of quality. They are going to proprietary super-pro enterprise OS's. I feel business is going to want something like the business-only IBM computer, and I think that's not a bad thing.

Localized Currencies & Technology

R: I certainly hope so. The great thing about software is that you don't need a bank because that's where all kind of bizarreness and corruption happen. But you do see every transaction; software is just really really good for that. You can see how money if flowing, how transactions are flowing. The problem with our economy is that when speculators ore extracting currency, money comes first. In a distributed system money is the result of transactions.

The main thing standing in the way of it is that people don't believe its possible. It's not they cant do it its that they can;t see it. It's like when you show someone Linux for the first time.

A New, Collaborative Mindset

R: Renaissances tend to reverse whatever the last one created. This one is towards decent partner collaboration and the sharing of value. So for sure, and we're going to get different kinds of discoveries. I think that the computer may be the most central thing to making all of this happen.

A Word for Developers & Entrepreneurs

Rushkoff: My biggest message to them is this...There's this prevalent notion is that the reason you get involved is that you create a business that you then sell. I would argue that is not the path to greatest fulfillment, I would contend that it's not the path to the great technology. The less you borrow, the less you will be required to grow, and the closer you can stay you can stay to those growth metrics that are more appropriately scaled.

Life, Inc. is in bookstores now. If you're seeking a primer on the book and Rushkoff's conception of what corporatism means, be sure to watch the short Life, Inc. The Movie below

I've been in Aspen all week so missed this announcement from a couple of days ago:

NowPublic announces Silicon Valley "MostPublic Index"
Identifies the Web's 50 most influential people in Silicon Valley

NowPublic, the world's largest participatory news network, today announced its second MostPublic Index, identifying the 50 most influential individuals in Silicon Valley/San Francisco.

The MostPublic Index is a detailed (and transparent) barometer of whose voices are most heard in the digital landscape as new channelsTwitter, Facebook, Flick, YouTube and the liketransform how media is created and spread. Last week, NowPublic identified and announced the 50 MostPublic influencers in New York.

NowPublic's formula gauges influence and publicness across four categories:

• Online Visibility
• Presence on User-Generated Content and Social Networking Sites
• Interactivity and Accessibility
• The R Factor: Presence on Microblogging Platforms (Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, etc.)

NowPublic examined statistics in each of these categories from Alexa, Compete, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Quantcast, Technorati, YouTube and various other blogs and sites, to create a list of Silicon Valley's leading influencers. It then narrowed the list to 50 by analyzing and documenting individuals' presence and popularity in each of these channels, applying a weighted scoring system, determined by the strength of specific traits held in each online community. A detailed account of the scoring system can be viewed here.

Here is NowPublic's list of the MostPublic individuals in Silicon Valley/San Francisco:

1. Robert Scoble
2. Michael Arrington
3. Jack Dorsey
4. Biz Stone
5. Matt Cutts
6. Pete Cashmore
7. Dave Winer
8. Guy Kawasaki
9. Loc Le Meur
10. Kevin Rose
11. Merlin Mann
12. Stowe Boyd
13. Jeff Atwood
14. Jeremiah Owyang
15. Veronica Belmont
16. Kara Swisher
17. Scott Beale
18. Marc Andreessen
19. Ryan Block
20. David Sifry
21. Emily Chang
22. Om Malik
23. Timothy Ferriss
24. Nick Douglas
25. John Battelle
26. David Cohn
27. Louis Gray
28. Tom Foremski
29. Tim O'Reilly
30. Ariel Waldman
31. Matt Mullenweg
32. Dean Takahashi
33. Philip Kaplan
34. JD Lasica
35. Sarah Lacy
36. Brian Solis
37. Charlene Li
38. Rafe Needleman
39. Dan Farber
40. Howard Rheingold
41. David McClure
42. Margaret Mason
43. Jason Goldman
44. Leah Culver
45. Chris Shipley
46. Jackson West
47. Liz Gannes
48. Owen Thomas
49. Adeo Ressi
50. Max Levchin

Color ValleyWag unimpressed.

Lists are fun, of course. But I'm decidedly not one of the 50 most influential people in Silicon Valley. This is more an indication of popularity on social media networks, and even there I'm not so sure.

One of the interesting people I met at last week's Princeton workshop was Douglas Dixon, who points out that almost all 20th-century media companies are going through the five stages of grief, but different media industries are going through the stages at different rates. Back in 2006, we noted that the music recording industry was still in the denial stage. Now, Dixon says that it seems to be "stuck cycling between Anger, Bargaining, and Depression -- as it still lashes out by suing its own customers, and grabs on to each next new copy protection scheme while simultaneously going DRM-free in other venues." And indeed, as we pointed out a couple of weeks ago, Hollywood is still firmly in the denial phase, insisting that effective DRM is just around the corner.

In contrast, the news business has been responding pretty well of late to the disruptive technologies of the Internet. The newspaper folks at last week's conference seemed to accept that print was a dying business, and many of them declared their committed to making the painful changes necessary to stay competitive. As we've noted before, they've been dropping their paywalls and aggressively experimenting with new media. It remains to be seen if they'll be able to change fast enough to avoid large losses in readership, but at least they've begun moving decisively in the right direction. In contrast, the recording industry has been taking three steps back for every two steps forward, while Hollywood is still doing little more than shooting itself in the foot.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the lowest-bandwidth industry -- news reporting, which is largely text-based -- is showing the most flexibility, while the most bandwidth-intensive industry -- Hollywood -- still has its head in the sand. News organizations have faced serious competition from the Internet since the birth of the Web in the mid-1990s. Internet bandwidth was not sufficient to conveniently transfer music until the late 1990s. And there wasn't enough bandwidth to transmit movie files until recently. Arguably most peoples' connections still aren't fast enough to transmit high-def video. So news organizations have been facing serious competition for almost fifteen years, the recording industry for about a decade, and Hollywood for less than five. Industries that have been facing competition the longest are making the most serious changes.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

Credit problems are spreading beyond mortgages to the heart of consumer spending.

Capital One Financial has warned that its earnings in 2007 will fall well short of its previous forecast because many of its credit card and auto loan customers were late with their payments at the end of the year.

The nation's biggest independent credit card company says that it now expects to report a profit of $3.97 per share for 2007, down from an earlier estimate of about $5. The company also said that it would set aside $1.9 billion to cover losses on credit cards and auto loans, including a sharply higher "allowance build" of $650 million in anticipation of charge-offs over the next 12 months.

"The allowance build reflects fourth-quarter delinquencies in the company's national consumer lending businesses (disclosed in an 8-K filing dated January 10, 2008), continued deterioration in the approximately $700 million Held for Investment portfolio of home equity lines of credit originated by GreenPoint Mortgage, and expectations for a weaker U.S. economy in 2008, as evidenced in recently released economic indicators," Capital One said in a statement.

Douglas A. McIntyre reports on the 24/7 Wall St. blog, "There was some hope that the consumer might dodge the problems that had infected a portion of the mortgage market. People who could afford to pay their home loans might just be able to cover the costs of their cars and daily borrowing as well. But consumers have nothing but lint in their pockets now."

Capital One is also taking an $80 million provision for legal reserves.

"It's another bank in the negative credit-market slipstream," Howard Wheeldon, a senior strategist at London-based brokerage BGC Partners, told Bloomberg News. "The outlook for bad loans remains grim."

Today has been declared Blue Beanie Day, an only slightly tongue in cheek day for supporters of web standards to show their solidarity with the cause. Originating in the mind of Douglas Vos, founder of Facebook's Designing With Web Standards Group, the day uses a blue hat as its symbol in honor of Jeffrey Zeldman, author of the landmark book Designing with Web Standards. Zeldman wears a blue beanie on the cover of the book.

You might see blue hats on the heads of your friends' Twitter avatars, if you work in an office perhaps someone there is geeky enough to be wearing a blue beanie (maybe you should ask them about it) and there's a Flickr group dedicated to blue beanie photos (the most recent 20 of which are playing on the right).

Web standards are something we write about a lot here at ReadWriteWeb. Most people think of the W3C standards for CSS and HTML when the phrase is used. Belgian web design rock star Veerle Pieters has a good post today explaining her personal relationship to web standards and Blue Beanie day.

There are new standards being developed all the time, though. Old and new standards work together. That's the theory anyway, I'd like to see some informed discussion on Blue Beanie Day about the Google-led OpenSocial. To what degree does it build on and to what degree does it seek to replace existing standards?

Why Are Standards Interesting?

Whether it's a new or old standard, the idea is the same: standardization creates a playing field that supports innovation by making scalability possible. Standardization makes life easier for users and for developers, enabling a higher level of abstraction because a common foundation has been established and there's no reason to reinvent the wheel with every new website. That's how I explain it, how do you?

If this is a topic of interest to you, check out the new site at DataPortability.org. It's an early gathering of thought leaders concerning standards for data portability.