The past couple days have been filled with a flurry of panels and presentations about technology, politics and new media. There’s been so much information flying around, its hard to sort through all the noise. That’s why we were so pleasantly surprised by Kansas State University professor Michael Wesch‘s presentation at the Personal Democracy Forum this morning about YouTube and the new media generation.

As a cultural anthropologist, Wesch examines how YouTube — and social media Web sites like Twitter and Facebook — have made people voyeurs and over-sharers. His entrancing presentation, which included some popular YouTube videos and their tributes, remixes and satires, drew the only standing ovation we saw at PDF.

This afternoon, we sat in on a panel about how the “Internet Ecosystem” can improve journalism — a topic we have ruminated upon ourselves. Moderated by PDF founder Andrew Rasiej, the panel included Frank Rich of The New York Times, Time magazine’s Karen Tumulty, Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media and NPR’s Scott Simon.

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For a couple hours, the back room at Michael’s was transformed into a television news executive bender, a happy hour in honor of our outgoing TVNewser, Brian Stelter [right], and incoming TVNewser, er, ‘Newsers: Chris Ariens, Diane Clehane, Alissa Kinsky and Philadelphia Inquirer TV columnist and Katie Couric nemesis Gail Shister.

Some of those who showed to fete Stelter and co.: Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, NBC News president Steve Capus, Joe Scarborough, MSNBC anchors Contessa Brewer (ED NOTE: Brewer has yet to visit Dan Abrams‘ party house in the Hamptons) and Amy Robach, Rita Cosby, Gil “Stanley Bing” Schwartz, CBS’ Jeff Greenfield, CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin and business correspondent Ali Velshi, MSNBC producer Tammy Haddad, NY1′s Pat Kiernan, former CBS honcho Andrew Heyward, BusinessWeek columnist (and husband to our multimillionaire boss) Jon Fine, Jeff Jarvis, CNN anchor John Roberts, Page Six‘s Corynne Steindler, well-rested Observer columnist Michael Calderone, CNBC senior VP Jonathan Wald, Inside Edition‘s Sarah Rubenstein, Radar‘s Jeff Bercovici, HuffPo’s Rachel Sklar (whose date for the evening was 19-year-old CBS News intern Eric Kuhn), Broadcasting & Cable‘s Max Robins and Caroline Palmer (who, Robins says, is leaving B&C to become Vogue‘s Web editor), CNBC VP Josh Howard, Good Day New York host Ron Corning, Freud Communications’ Lisa Dallos, Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman and the omnipresent Julia Allison, who said she had been up since 5:00AM talking about Lindsay Lohan. Her take: “She should just kill herself already, before she kills someone else.”

Notable no-shows: Abrams, Katie, Charlie, Greta Van Susteren, Jon Stewart and Stelter supporter and former CNNer Aaron Brown.

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