As I sit through the first couple presentations at Online Media, Marketing and Advertising Conference and Expo, I ponder their tag line: "Worlds collide; All Hell Breaks Loose!". How much of a collision will we see here? I look around the room and note that about 5% of the audience have laptops fired up. Perhaps we are still a long way from the collision.

The first couple presentations do not leave time for Q&A. Geoff Ramsey of emarketer.com does a great rapid fire introduction to what is going on in the world of online advertising. Currently, $289 billion is spent on advertising. It is growing at about 3% per year. Of that, $21.7 billion is online advertising and growing much more rapidly. He further breaks it down by email, user generated content (UCG, a phrase that gets repeated a lot), mobile, social networks and video.

He takes the typical swipes at Twitter and Second Life, and I post a quick comment to Twitter about it. I suspect I was the only one using Twitter during his speech. He is followed by Eileen Naughton of Google. There are various comments about Google during the introductions, moderation and Geoff's remarks. Geoff ponders if Google Earth is a precursor to a play in the real estate market by Google. There is a sense of nerveousness about what Google has done, is doing and will continue to do to the advertising market.

Eileen addresses this upfront by talking about convergence istead of conflict. She speaks about how searching is a core consumer behavior. She spends a lot of time talking about YouTube and how the Super Bowl ads played well on YouTube, not only immediately, but continuing afterwards.

What is lacking in both of these presentations is an opportunity for the audience to interact with the speakers, other than laugh at a random funny remark. Perhaps that is what is lacking in so much of the approach to online advertising.

The next speaker is George Kliavkoff, Chief Digital Officer at NBC Universal. He makes a comment about how at the end of the day, they belive professionally produced premium content wins. This sounds a bit like an either or world, either you have professionally produced premium content, or you have amatuer produced crappy material. I don't think it is either/or. In fact, George is so boring that I end up walking out.

I wander down to a session about "making dollars and cents out of social networking". The discussion ends up being mostly about how to target audiences and very little about building community. The exception being a discussion about Flip.com which has a tag line "Make Flipbooks | Make Friends". This panel is different in that there is time for questions and the concerns are with user burnout and the proliferation of social network sites. Will we move to an environment of greater portability between social networks? Perhaps, but people may want to keep their online personae separate. My business persona on LinkedIn or Ryze is different from my social network persona on Facebook or MySpace, and all of that is different from how I appear in political or non-profit spaces.

I think this captures where how we are still a long way from the collision. Online media is increasingly about being connected. SMS messages, Facebook statuses, Twitter messages, being in Second Life. These are about being connected with one another, and not simply sucking the pap broadcast by advertisers creating professionally produced premium content.

This gets amplified for me when kmakice comments about a twitter message saying, "Geoff Ramsey doesn't doesn't get Twitter. It's main value is the sense of connection, not what is typed"

So where is the sense of connection? I'm still looking, and I think that is where the collision really takes place.