(All photos via Flickr user Unrest Cure; one of the panels at the Economic of Social Media Conference)

Netscape recently attended the first-ever Economics of Social Media conference, held in Los Angeles last Thursday. Hosted by Rafat Ali, the editor of Paid Content, the one-day conference sold out two and half weeks in advance and drew about 500 people from around the country.

The night before the conference, the organizers threw a cocktail party at CAA's spacious new headquarters in Century City. CAA wasn't a sponsor, but Ali told me that the super agency was eager to donate the space--a sure sign that CAA agents are watching what's going on in social media.

After chatting with Ali (with whom I worked at the now defunct Silicon Alley Reporter), I ran into Los Angeles blogger Sarah Gim and Nicholas Butterworth, founder of Travelistic.com. (Butterworth was also my old boss at SonicNet.) We also met Jason Shellen, who does business development for Google, sizing up new companies for potential acquisition. Yes, Shellen was popular at the party--everyone wanted to talk to him.

The conference proper, held at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, drew a wide range of attendees. Carson Daly (who is working on a new media venture called DotTV) participated in the "Social Media and Hollywood" panel. At one point he was asked whether YouTube was a viable venue for budding actors to gain exposure. Most unknown actresses still think of the Web as a second-rate alternative to television, argued one audience member. Daly took the opposite tack. For those without powerful Hollywood connections, he insisted, the Web is a great option. Daly went so far to give some advice to post-"The View" Rosie O'Donnell: Go do a show online.

Another interesting tidbit came out of the the same panel. According to David Eun, Vice President for Content Partnerships at Google Media, YouTube is already looking ahead to the 2008 elections. The company has created areas where candidates can upload videos and users can discuss election issues. The result, says Eun, should be a "global town hall."

More media talk continued in the "Journalism and Social Media" panel. With the newspaper business in transition, asked one panelist, is there still an economic payoff for high quality journalism? Yes, replied Kara Swisher of the Wall Street Journal, but newspapers need to accept the reality of a multi-platform world. "We focus too much on the [print] product," added Swisher. (And indeed, consumers can increasingly get their WSJ fix from a Palm Pilot or any mobile device.) Meanwhile Rich Skrenta, CEO of Topix.net, made his own pitch for mixing national news with locally produced journalism. He touched briefly on the topic of citizen journalism--clearly less of a hot-button issue than it was last year--and raised the question: "Does it matter who delivers the news?"

The highlight of the afternoon was a discussion about how deals get funded. All the panelists, including Internet pioneer Esther Dyson and Sling Media president Jason Hirschhorn, agreed the rules have changed as huge companies (News Corp, AOL) acquire smaller ones. But the panelists agreed that News Corp's purchase of MySpace was a good example of an acquisition gone right. The network has kept the original founding team, and simply let the brand grow within the larger corporation.

Additionally, CBS's Quincy Smith offered this advice to companies looking to be acquired: Position yourself 3-5 years down the road, rather than simply focusing on the present. Often companies aren't thinking about their growth strategy, said Smith. The panelists also touched on how it may be essential for an acquiring company to shift around management. (Example: the CEO of an acquired company may really be a better business product manager than a CEO.) Finally, Esther Dyson noted that social networking is currently doing very well in Brazil. Why? Dyson, who's been operating on Internet time since approximately 1997, was too rushed to elaborate.



Here's the Flickr pool of photos from the whole conference. For anyone who wished they'd attended, Ali says he is having another conference this fall in New York. Judging by number of high-profile attendees at EconSM, Netscape predicts Paid Content will do very well in the conference space!

Heather Kullorn in an undated photo; her fifth-grade school picture; age-progressed to age 19

As previously reported on Netscape, the Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis will soon reopen the cold case of Heather Kullorn, a 12-year-old girl who disappeared from a Richmond Heights, Missouri apartment on July 15, 1999.

According to Bill Baker, who leads the squad, the police continue to have a suspect, but no one has been charged. Heather, who disappeared while babysitting for the infant daughter of family friends Christopher Herbert and Dana Madden, was likely abducted sometime during the night or early morning hours, believe police.

There was no forced entry and the only witness was a neighbor --who is legally blind without his glasses--who reported he saw a child being carried out of the apartment in the early morning hours. Additionally, Heather's blood was found on the couch in the apartment.

Targeted at upscale travelers, Area-Daily.com, a Daily Candy-like email site, launched this week. Offering tips on hotels, restaurants, and shopping, the site will also offer discounts (at New York's Gramercy Park Hotel, for instance) and video reports from Area-Daily's far-flung correspondents. This week's recommendations included a safari in Kenya; a wine-tasting festival in Park City, Utah; and a cheese school in San Francisco.

Jody Raida, one of the site's six full-time staffers, characterizes Area-Daily as an insider-y guidebook for affluent travelers who prefer boutique hotels to large chains and bistros to all-you-can-eat buffets. "The site is like your cool, connected friend," says Raida, adding that there's no other competition like Area-Daily in the email- travel space.

Last night, Netscape News stopped by the opening reception for Photo LA, the three-day international photo fair held in Santa Monica, California. Although it lacks the prestige of New York's AIPAD, the West Coast annual does have the distinction of being the biggest photo expo in the U.S. More than 60 galleries, the majority of them located in California, have booths at this year's show. "For galleries, it's really about showing off the artists that you represent," said Justen Daly, of the Los Angeles-based Jan Kesner Gallery.

About 800 people--a mix of collectors, artists, photographers, and curators from museums like the Getty--attended last night's opening party. Sales were brisk: a rare Andy Warhol print sold for $9,000 in the first hour, while an Irving Penn photograph priced at $45,000 drew gawkers. (Kathryn Hennon, a Los Angeles resident who attended the show with her husband, sounded nonplussed by the numbers. "The prices are expensive," she noted. "But market.") Other items on sale included rare works by Gyorgy Kepes, Harry Callahan, Walker Evans, and Diane Arbus. Yet the show also paid the contemporary scene its due, with Los Angeles favorite John Humble and the Chicago-based Ben Gest getting plenty of attention. (The shot above is by Gest.)

Photo LA runs through Sunday, January 21, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditiorium in Santa Monica, CA. (Thanks to Marla Aufmuth for photos of last night's party!)

Editor's note: We're going to start featuring some original reporting here on the blog, such as this piece by Dakota Smith. If you have suggestions for stories you'd like to see, please let us know.

Palm Springs! Sun, desert, golf courses - and lots of modern architecture. I recently headed out to the Dwell on Design-Palm Springs Conference, a three-day conference on modern architecture in Palm Springs that featured homes by architects like Donald Wexler (the pool from a 1962-designed house designed by Wexler is pictured above.)

How did Palm Springs, a city in the middle of the California desert, become such a mecca for modernist architects? Hollywood money and a climate perfectly suited to indoor/outdoor living, for starters.

Over the course of the weekend, the panelists--a mix of architects, professors, and historians--talked about the rise in modernism in Palm Springs. Building the Oasis Hotel in 1923, Lloyd Wright was the first pioneer to enter the city, while in 1934 Swiss architect Albert Frey built the Kocher-Sampson office building. In 1937, Austrian architect Richard Neutra's Grace Miller house was first modernist residential home to go up in Palm Springs.

Following WWII, there was a big explosion in modernism, according to Peter Moruzzi, founding president of the Palm Springs Modern Committee, fueled in part by the elite industrialists and Hollywood movie stars who came to the desert to build second homes.

"They were more willing to have a less cluttered, more contemporary design compared to their main homes, which were more traditional," said Moruzzi. "And they were coming to the desert and wanted to enjoy the weather, so they wanted an indoor/outdoor design."

Notable post-war architects included William F. Cody, Donald Wexler, E. Stewart Williams, and John Lautner, while the Alexander Construction Company built thousands of modern-style homes--known as Alexanders--in Palm Springs. An example of an Alexander home is below.



And here is a shot of the guest house from the same home:

Two of the more famous homes that we learned about over the weekend: Richard Neutra's 1946 Kaufman home and John Lautner's 1968 space age-looking house for decorator Arthur Elrod. The Elrod house was famously featured in the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever and currently is available for rent (three nights for $10,000).

And while we didn't see it, another famous Palm Springs residence is Frank Sinatra's E. Stewart Williams estate. Dubbed Twin Palms, the four-bedroom home has a piano-shaped pool.

Unfortunately, many modernist commercial buildings in Palm Springs, like Fred Monhoff's Biltmore Hotel, and the Chi Chi Club (which was designed by various architects), have been demolished. When Palm Springs went into an economic decline in the 80s, many commercial buildings were torn down, but since people either didn't have the incentive, or the money, to tear down residential homes, many of these modern-style residences were left intact.

Today, there's been a resurgence of interest in the Palm Springs architecture, while architecture firms like Modern Homes and Marmol Radziner are building pre-fab homes in the area.

Here are some shots of these new homes.



More photos after the jump: