Article Title: VON Day 1.
By: Steve Rosenbaum
So, never a boring time at VON.
The day started out at 9:30 am with a pretty free-wheeling discussion let by Chris Brogan..
the topic – “Future Visions of Internet TV”
Dan Dubno – who’s been the tech genius behind much of what CBS has done in the past years around tech – is now out on his own. He’s running a company called Blowing Things Up. So I think Dan wanted to blow up the conversation a bit (in a good way). He got in to a bit of thing about the amount of ‘crap’ on the web and the need for ‘quality’ and ‘premium’ content.
I sat quielty for second or two – then, decided to wade in. I proclaimed that everyone in the hall would be successful in their video on the web endeavors… and that made Dan even crazyier (*grin*). Colin Decker from Yahoo jumped in and defended curation and the need to give users the tools to find the best content to meet their needs. But then, just as i was sure that I was going to have to challage Dan to a wrestling match to calm the crowd’s growing chants “fight! fight! fight!” Fred McIntyre was in the ring. He and Dan went three rounds – with Fred ending with a great big comment about Magnify and how on the web, quality is defined by its context and by pages like the ones created by Magnify.net. Whew! That was quite a melee. Fun though. Blake Lewin, who’s been at Turner for 13 years and has had 17 bosses – was smart enough to stay on the sidelines. All in all – it was a great way to start the day – and I still think that the next 5 years are so explosive in web video that we’ll be looking a back at today like it was the world before fire, or the wheel, or loin cloths. Which is to say – its early days.
Then, after toweling off, it was down to the floor to hang out with Ari and Tamar and mingle with the booth crowd. More goodness ensued. There was a steady stream of interesting folks…
Among them, celebrity chef Bayla Scher(http://feedmebubbe-2.magnify.net/). It was Bubbe from “Feed Me Bubbe.com” the most fabulous Jewish Grandma Chef on the planet. She came by – talked a lot about how amazing the web has been in connecting her to people who she feels like she’s cooking for. 
Really, for a Jewish Grandmother to be able to cook for the world must be a very wonderful feeling -since cooking is love. And Bubbe and her wonderful and entrepreneurial grandson Avrom Honig.
Overall, great day. Great to see friends like Mike Hudak from Blip.tv, Jesse Lawrence from IAC, Amit Shafrir from Network2, The whole gang from Feedroom (Bart, G, Matt, and Frank), Michael Smolen, the founder of DotSub, and Mike Hirshland of Polaris. I do love Boston, even if it is totally crazed with World Series Champ Fever 🙂
Feed Me Bubbe 