Tickets are going fast, but there are still a few left if you hurry

One thing we’re doing again this year is the “15 Minutes of Fame” segment on each of the two conference days, in which three deserving entrepreneurs and/or their startups get five minutes each (hence the 15 minutes) to talk to the attendees about their idea and why they are the best thing to happen to the Web since YouTube. Last year’s winners included the gang at TakingITGlobal, as well as AreYouFrank.com, Favorville.com and Pixpo. Stowe Boyd wrote about the 15 Minutes here, and Tara Hunt wrote about it here.

Same idea this year: head over to the sign-up form at the mesh site, and give us a pitch — in 250 words or less — about you and your company or idea, and tell us why we should give you five minutes in front of the mesh crowd to wow them with your brilliance. If you get selected, you get a free one-day pass to the conference as well as those five minutes of glory.

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Then she describes what she sees as the future:

“Those papers that wake up in time will become a journalistic hybrid combining the best aspects of traditional print newspapers with the best of what the Web brings to the table.”

“Chomping down on a story and refusing to let go is what bloggers do best. And while the vast majority of material that ends up being blogged about still originates with a mainstream news source, more and more stories are being broken by online news sources.”

“So stop writing teary-eyed eulogies for newspapers. The only thing dead is the either/or nature of the musty print vs online debate. The hybrid future is kicking down the door. It’s time to let it in and fully embrace it.”

Hat tip to Roy Greenslade of the Guardian for spotting that one — he has his own take on it here. For whatever it’s worth, I think Arianna nails it pretty well.

In other Huffington news, Rachel Sklar of Eat The Press has a great overview of a panel she was on at the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ conference, along with Katherine Graham of the Washington Post and Barry Diller of IAC. Thanks to Rob Hyndman for that link.

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Event: Converting Your Passion into a Real Business
Date: Tuesday, December 5, 2006 from 6:00PM to 8:00PM
Location: Stanford University, Room 420-040 in the Quad (map)

From the vlogging/blogging community to seasoned entrepreneurs, our panelists have done everything from covering internet celebrity smut to running an adult luxury goods business!

Panelists will share their stories with us and talk about how and why they decided to do what they did – with topics such as getting started, getting funding, and how to run a successful business.
Free with a valid student ID and $10 without (some exceptions apply). Please register here. Food and drink will be provided.

What is Women 2.0?

Women 2.0 connects like-minded, motivated young women to swap energy, ideas, and experiences with each other. They promote the collaboration and growth of women in entrepreneurship, technology, and business and provide opportunities to interact with other successful women from a broad spectrum of industries.

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Brian Solis is principal at FutureWorks PR, an award-winning PR and Social Media agency founded in 1999. FW PR bridges the communications gap between companies and their customers, and between products and their specific benefits for their target markets. Solis blogs at PR2.0, http://www.briansolis.com, and regularly contributes to many industry trades. He is also frequently quoted in articles relating to technology trends and Marketing/PR strategies.

According to the New York Times (reg. required), the Huffington Post blog network is getting into the journalism business in a big way. The site only started 18 months ago but has become a serious online player, with 2.3 million unique visitors a month – more than some mainstream newspaper websites.

Huffington says it has hired Melinda Henneberger, a former New York Times reporter and Newsweek staffer, as its political editor, and plans to hire “a number” of other journalists to help it produce online journalism “with attitude.” The Post is already doing something along those lines with its Eat The Press feature, whose editor Rachel Sklar is a Canadian transplant.

This is obviously what Huffington has planned for the $5-million in financing the site got from Softbank Capital earlier this year (it also has funding from Greycroft Partners, backers of Rafat Ali’s online media shop, PaidContent). Arianna said she will be hiring investigative journalists and reporters with video expertise. They will travel, have deadlines and (gasp!) get paid, just like “real” journalists.

Coincidentally, there’s been a lot of talk over the past few days about Kevin Maney’s recent piece for USA Today about what to do with newspapers – which my friend and former journalist Mark Evans discusses here. In my view, newspapers had better get their running shoes on, because online media like Huffington Post and PaidContent are already halfway down the track.

Update:

As Jeff Jarvis notes, this announcement comes just over a week after two senior journalists left the Washington Post to join an online media startup that plans to focus on multi-platform political reporting.

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Mathew Ingram is a
technology writer and blogger for the Globe and Mail, a national
newspaper based in Toronto, and also writes about the Web and media at
www.mathewingram.com/work and www.mathewingram.com/media.

Stage one of Clooney’s War was sniper shots at Arianna Huffington’s Huffington Post blog, where Huffington purportedly contrived a post authored by the actor.

Stage two is an assault on Gawker Stalker, a Google Maps mashup that lets fans post sightings of their favorite celebrities and track them on the map.

Concerned about the safety and privacy implications of celeb-tracking, Clooney, according to the New York Post, gave this directive to a team of publicists:

“There is a simple way to render these guys useless. Flood their Web site with bogus sightings. Get your clients to get 10 friends to text in fake sightings of any number of stars. A couple hundred conflicting sightings and this Web site is worthless. No need to try to create new laws to restrict free speech. Just make them useless. That’s the fun of it. And then sit back and enjoy the ride. Thanks, George.”

The directive apparently was successful. Though Gawker doesn’t seem to be intimidated, offering copies of Oceans 11 and Oceans 12 to readers who can offer photos along with Clooney sightings.

On Monday, Gawker posted some of the emails they received plotting Clooney all over the country from Portland, Oregon to New York City, down to Florida and over to Utah. He even visited this emailer’s home:

“George Clooney is here in my house as I write this. He is having Jose the gardener build a bonfire to burn any and all books that I own that do not have his name or picture in it.”

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We contacted an AP senior editor and ombudsmen both and both admitted to having had the article passed on to them, and both stated that they viewed us as a blog and because we were a blog, they did not need to credit us. What we are or are not is frankly irrelevant. What is relevant is that by using a term like blog to somehow excuse plagiarism, the mainstream press continues to lower the bar for acceptable behavior.

The plagiarizing is shameful. But it’s also sad that some traditional media outlets continue to not credit (or link-to) bloggers as the source for a story.

Which mainstream media sources do a good job of crediting bloggers? Any of them good at including hyperlinks?

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

“The two most interesting things happening online are the news and the blogosphere and what we’re doing here is bringing them together,” Huffington told The Associated Press Monday.

“It will be people’s voices, including people’s spelling mistakes and idiosyncratic punctuation,” Huffington said. “Authenticity always draws people.”

John Stith is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.