Here's the kind of post that would have induced a feeding frenzy back in the good old bad old days here on the group. Like throwing an underling to the piranhas. In the spirit of that, I give you:
The International Academy of Web Television http://www.iawtv.org/ Just launched last week, though no one mentioned it here. Members are voting on The Streamys awards which Josh Cohen announced a while ago here. The Academy was created by a cartel of the main web video news sites: Tilzy.tv, Tubefilter and NewTeeVee. They've published their inaugural membership list, featuring some of our friends from the group. Most of those you'd expect, who have popular shows, know a lot of people, do the social media thing well, and connect in real life in the right circles at meetups in NY, SF or LA (But not Scoble or Feldman or Ze Frank). Not just performers and show producers, but executives and talent agents. I'm not quite sure why the limit on numbers - other Academies have hundreds or thousands of members, and there are quite a few people I'd want to see on the list who aren't there, because they're either not commercial enough or not well enough connected - even though they have strong and interesting voices and ideas about web television and independent production. That said, I'm particularly glad to see W&S in there. Although I clearly remember Quirk saying that awards were pretentious and pointless, and belong on the wall of real estate offices, so I hope you're not going to vote in the Streamys. (I nominated you). And so much for "International" - as far as I can see, the only even vaguely non-US representation there is Daily Motion's US representative and RDF television's US executive. Not even anybody from any other English speaking countries? That's just lazy - I wouldn't be so bothered by it if it wasn't called the "International Academy of Web Television". If you're going to call it that, you've got to go out of your way to get some representation from other countries, on more than a token level. Anyway, now the media has an official organisation to talk to when they do stories about Web TV. So if the rest of us want to have a voice in media discussion of web video (its present state and its future), we'd better follow Jeffrey's lead and organize ourselves. Rupert http://twittervlog.tv
