Chris Gonzales is the product manager for CondeNet with responsibility for their social initiatives, which means roughly 35 widgets and apps for the various brands. It's the dead simple ideas that work, he says. Epicurious has a MyEpi and a Recipe of the Day widget that foodies can put on their pages to get just that.

Steve Mitgang, CEO of Veoh says the structural problem with advertising around online video is  shortness of clip.  He says, for example, that a lot of clips on YouTube are 9-second clips.  "But we are already seeing a ton of 22 and 45-minute  minute viewing.  All of our studio partners are shocked at how much full long-form shows are being consumed on Veoh," he says. Jordan Bitterman says that online video doesn't have to be production-quality.  "If it's contextually relevant it should have good impact," he says.  "Video on the Web is active onTV  its passive. Mitgang says …

If there's a truism about social media, all the panelists agree, it's that you can't predict what is going to take off. Sure, it's usually stuff that's funny. You've just got to try everything and enable the ability for things to take off. The users are the ones who are going to decide what takes off. Editorial judgment is just one element. "Do stuff poorly quickly. Get it out quickly and call it beta. Don't let committees build things." -- Chris Tolles of Topix.

ra Baehr from The panel on video advertising online focused on where spend is getting cut. Mediator Ross Sandler of RBC Capital Markets set the tone. "In my world, it's the worst environment since the Great Depresssion." Is online advertising feeling it?  Jordan Bitterman, SVP Media and Content says there's a lot of pressure on spend, but "We haven't seen a lot of cuts versus where we have been in years past or quarters past; a lot of clients moving more and more chips into internet space. There's a lot of renewed focus on what works." Steve …

Where do you start with a social strategy? Start with a college intern, pay them $10/hour (or Free!) to let them come in and build you a Facebook app. They couldn't be happier. For an entire summer, you can have them develop Facebook apps for you with a perspective you will never have. College students will design for college students.

Mike Davidson of MSNBC/Newsvine, who is 33, says the generation younger than him is not going to traditional sources for its news, rather they say if something important happens they will know about because one of their friends will tell them. It will show up somewhere on their radar. Kevin Wassong of Minyanville doesn't buy into that "medialess" worldview. Ultimately, he says, people are going to find a home where they want to be entertained and educated and use it as a launch pad for a broader dialogue and discussion with the members of that community. Build a big enough …

So what does social media mean in the context of publishing and content distribution?  There's a panel going on right now, and it includes my boss, Kevin Wassong, president of Minyanville Publishing and Multimedia. Here are some of the comments: Participation is the product. Content is designed to spur debate. Create feedback mechanisms, but also get out to where the conversations are happening. Don't impose your brand. If you can't get people talking about your stuff in natural ways on Facebook or Twitter, it's not worth doing it at all.

Just had a nice corridor chat with Steve Smith, one of the smartest people I know. We were talking through some of the interesting points from this AM's presentations about the affluent and their use of Facebook and social media. Steve says a new Mendelsson (sp?) study of the affluent showed there is virtually no difference in technology penetration and use between the most affluent and teen-agers, particularly where mobile is concerned. Hmm. Wonder how many of the "most affluent" will still fall in that category once the market has finished going through its current conniptions. The VC guys upstairs …

Six times more people saw the Charlie Gibson interview with vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin on YouTube than they did on ABC, according to numbers cited by panelist Dennis Miller, General Partner, Spark Capital. And, apparently, the cost of CMPs were 21 times higher on ABC than they were to buy six times the audience on YouTube. Said Miller in response: “We have to find a way to change that.”