All Things Digital

Why was supermodel Naomi Campbell suddenly standing right next to German publisher Hubert Burda at the final lunch for his company’s DLD–Digital, Life, Design–conference in Munich yesterday?

I have no idea, nor do I know why Burda broke out into song either–how much do you have to love a media mogul willing to do that?

But I got it all on video and a whole lot more on the last day of the pre-Davos European gathering focused on digital issues and innovation.

(And here is a post by European serial entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, who apparently thinks his video shows that Accel Partners’ Simon Levene and I were not impressed enough by Campbell.)

In any case, DLD’s motto was: “Uploading the 21st Century.” And while it did not quite do that, there were definitely a lot of interesting moments I captured for your viewing pleasure.

Along with Campbell (who was supposed to appear on a panel on Africa, but did not) and a singing Burda, the video features clips from two sessions today.

The first was titled “Exploding Media” and included: pundit Clay Shirky riffing on flash mobs; a very funny clip of kids talking about television (made by Technorati’s Peter Hirshberg); Google’s Marissa Mayer noting that Google will still not be in the content business; Yahoo’s Bradley Horowitz discussing Yahoo’s plans to de-focus on making original content; and BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis advising old media to just ask WWGD? (What would Google do?).

Another session on the video features the founders of the genetics-focused social-networking company 23andMe–Anne Wojcicki, Linda Avey and Esther Dyson–answering questions about fears people have about learning too much about DNA.

Here is the video (and now I am off to Hamburg to visit Xing, a business social-networking company):

Here’s a video I did about the first day of DLD–Digital, Life, Design–put on my Hubert Burda Media in Munich this week.

The three-day conference focuses on digital innovation, science and culture. It is chaired by publisher Hubert Burda and serial Israeli investor Joseph Vardi and hosted by Stephanie Czerny and Marcel Reichart.

I was here to interview Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch. In our session this afternoon, we talked about digital tools to improve reporting on human-rights abuses, the situation in China for U.S. Web companies like Yahoo and Google, along with what techies can do to help in this important arena.

I also hung around the conference and schmoozed, Eurostyle!, with a lot of folks, including Mahalo’s Jason Calacanis, BuzzMachine’s Jeff Jarvis and Vardi.

There is also some video from an interesting social-networking panel, featuring Matt Cohler of Facebook, Lars Hinrichs of Xing and Joanna Shields of Bebo.

Added bonus: I also got the no-comment-hand-over-camera move from Facebook’s Brandee Barker, but a promise of German beer!

Here’s the video:

The rumors have been a-flyin’ recently about the reported talks between LinkedIn and News Corp.

Billing itself as the “professional” social network, the serious cousin to the party-hearty twins of MySpace and Facebook, the LinkedIn service is squarely aimed at those with a task in mind from networking to recruiting to career advancement.

In many ways, it is trying to be a business classified service with online presence and connection elements woven in. LinkedIn execs, in fact, throw around the term, “productivity tool,” much in the same way Facebook likes to talk about the joys of “SuperPoking” (by the way, not so joyful to adults).

With 16 million users from all sorts of sectors and spread out globally, LinkedIn getting a look-see by News Corp. makes a lot of sense. It just bought Dow Jones (owner of this site) and its flagship business newspaper The Wall Street Journal, and owns many newspapers, all of which need an online answer to the diminishing print employment-classified business.

In any case, I talked to newly installed LinkedIn CEO Dan Nye recently (before the recent rumors) about the company:

(I still am having problems with the Brightcove player, so I uploaded the video to YouTube.)

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