(WebProNews spent the weekend in Vegas at the BlogWorld Expo and chatted up the brightest minds in the blogging business. Stay tuned to WebProNews and WebProNews Video for updates.)

For a little background, Robert Scoble is most famous for his blog Scobleizer, and is also currently a video blogger for Fast Company. Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, and one of the world’s best-known bloggers. Laura Fitton is the CEO of Pistachio Consulting Inc., the first social media agency dedicated to business use of microblogging.

Scoble discussed Twitter as a news-stream. Mobile devices make it possible to have news anywhere, as he noted, but this doesn’t mean that Twitter should be the news. It just shows the impact, he says. Fitton says that some traditional media outlets are starting to "get it."

"Your friends are your content on theses sites," she says. "RSS micro widgets are going to dramatically change how the news is going to be delivered." Searls then discussed the static web vs. the live web (sites like Twitter).

Fitton believes that "citizen journalism" is not defined properly, and that it should be more like "citizen observation" or something. Of course, Searls and Scoble disagree with this notion because they believe journalists misrepresent interviews anyway. For example, they might represent a two-hour interview with a 10 second clip. A Q&A session took place next, but this was mostly just people asking Scoble if he would put them on his site.

One final note came from Fitton, who says that a society that has been based on control and privacy is going to have to change. It’s hard to disagree with that has everything seems to become more transparent by the day.

WebProNews anchor Abby Prince-Johnson contributed to this article.

Those zombie suggestions aren’t coming to him from Halloween fans, but as invitations on Facebook. Along with a host of other requests, Searls has found Facebook a little more time-consuming than he’d like:

The “friend request” list (top item to the left there) is one I’ve whittled down from a much higher number. If I could gang-whittle them, I might be more interested, but the routine still involves declining to check off which of many different ways I met somebody (”both owned the same dog”, “set up by a mutual ex-boss” or whatever), and other time-sucks. Not to mention that the site takes many seconds to load, or to bring up email, or whatever. At least for me.

Anyway, life’s too short, and this list of stuff is too long. If you’re waiting for me to respond to a poke or an invitation,or a burp or any of that other stuff, don’t hold your breath. Or take offense. I’ve got, forgive me, better things to do.

Searls also acknowledged in the comments he understood why Facebook makes people respond individually to each invitation: it’s all about data for advertising. He would prefer an option to avoid ads on Facebook entirely:

If Facebook drew a line in the sand now, and said “this is our base feature set”, and created a pro level that had no advertising, they’d not only make more money from more people, but would have real relationships with real “members”, and far better intelligence from, and about, those members as well.

But they’re an advertising company. We’re the product. The real customers are advertisers. And in the long run, that model is broken.

The problem we see with a pay model for a Facebook Pro would be its creation of another walled garden, an online model that sites like AOL and the New York Times have moved away from in recent times. Searls said such a walled garden has to sit on the Internet, without substituting for it.

For example, Facebook would have to make its email available for POP or IMAP clients, not just as a web-based service. Doing that takes eyeballs away from Facebook’s advertisers.

Considering the shifts sites have made to open up content and run an ad-supported revenue model, decisions that have to be making more money for those sites, we don’t see Facebook opening too much of itself as Searls suggested.

Doc Searls Speaks About “Producerism”

Our dynamic WebProNews duo of Rich Ord and Mike McDonald joined the attendees of Searls’ conference closing chat on producerism, the phenomenon major content companies have enabled due to their stranglehold on homogenized content like entertainment and news.

Searls noted how Google and Yahoo have their web search and blog searches separate. One can see Yahoo’s blog search in news results, while Google has a separate site for searching blogs (although Google does include blog posts in Google Finance and Google News.)

The two companies mainly search the static web, but blogs are part of a live web. Searls described the difference, saying “the static web is about spaces and places” while “the live web is about time and people.”

The live web is supplying itself with content. He commented on having time to blog as the time needed to write an email, only in the case of a blog entry one is cc’ing the world.

He also passed along a tip on becoming an “alpha blogger”: say quotable stuff.

On the themes of attention and intention, a common couplet in the syndication discussion, he restated what other sessions have observed, that marketing and PR will be changed by the “attention economy” where users control the attention they pay to companies.

Searls also noted how the intention economy works backwards, in that the vendor comes to a consumer who is ready to make a purchase. “We tend to think of the customer as something that needs to be scooped up,” he said.

“Branding is for cattle. Respect is for human beings. Branding was borrowed from the cattle industry by Proctor and Gamble.”

He also made some predictions and comments about technology. Searls said television is dead, radio is being resurrected by the listeners, and the liveliest parts of the live web are on cellphones.

High-definition will be cheap and standard by the end of 2006, and the majority of desktops and laptops will run Linux in five years.

What the live web has done is connected people in a way that makes them a powerful influence on the economy. “Everybody is already an influencer. Now they are getting networked,” said Searls.

Our take on this – TV isn’t dead, and won’t be because it’s too dead simple to use. Radio won’t change unless the FCC reverses the decisions that led to massive industry consolidation in the first place.

The cellphone ‘liveliness’ won’t happen in the US until pricing for Internet and multimedia from wireless companies drop significantly.

As for Linux, it had five years to make bigger inroads against Microsoft as Vista development languished. It didn’t happen. If Microsoft hits its projected release dates in 2007 for Vista and the new version of Office, they should maintain their market share without difficulty.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.