Joe Has a Malkovich Moment
April 26th, 2008, No Comments »
Conor snapped this photo of Joe (and Twittered about it) at Web 2.0 Expo. I think the resemblance is eerie:
Someone should notify the folks at Verizon.
Is This Marketing Clever or Creepy?
April 24th, 2008, 8 Comments »
I just received this message from the always popular ‘noreply@mybloglog. com’:
Hi there MyBlogLogger!
From your IP address it looks like you’re browsing the web via the Web 2.0 Expo public wifi. Drop on by the Yahoo booth (#901) and learn more about what MyBlogLog is up to, we’d love to see you.
I was at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday. I guess they searched through all the MyBlogLog IP addresses, found the ones that matched the Web 2.0 Expo wifi IP address, and emailed us. The message is something like “we used this unintentional digital artifact that you left behind to identify where you were, and then contacted you about something happening in that place”. Weird.
I can’t decide if this is clever or creepy. Or possibly both. On the one hand, I admire their moxie. On the other hand, I never gave MyBlogLog explicit permission to correlate my IP address to a physical location. Do they need my permission, if the only people aware of that IP-location pair are me and them? What do you think?
Notes From the O’Reilly Radar
April 23rd, 2008, 2 Comments »
The following are my somewhat random notes from Bill Tim (heh) O’Reilly’s talk at Web 2.0 Expo:
- We’ve been whipsawed by negative economic news.
- What are the deep trends that are driving Web 2.0?
- The internet is becoming a global platform, a tool for harnessing collective intelligence. “We are building a platform to make the world smarter…an amazing revolution in human augmentation”.
- Software has climbed above the level of a single device.
- Areas of opportunity: Web 2.0 and the enterprise, web as platform in cloud computing, web has become ubiquitous thanks to mobile devices and sensors.
- Collective intelligence - applications that get better, the more people that use them.
- Web 2.0 is about finding meaning in user-generated data. Google PageRank was the beginning of the Web 2.0 era–a link was a vote.
- Similarly there’s hidden meaning in enterprise data. O’Reilly cites Wesabe as an example–aggregating the collective intelligence from bank account data.
- A personal computer is really just a device connected to the global computer–the cloud computer that is the web. “The computer is every computer”. Where’d I put that red pill…
- See also Amazon, Google App Engine and Engine Yard.
- Facebook radically outvalues WordPress. Why? The marketing values centralization. Fear a return to the monopoly that was Microsoft.
- Open networks and interoperability thus matter more and more.
- Mobility matters. Also think about new types of display surfaces and new interaction paradigms. Check out The Dash, an internet-connected GPS.
- Ambient computing - “We’re in a soup of computing. Web 2.0 will be all around us”.
- The web is built on “big, hairy audacious goals”.
- Big projects that need more attention: Change Congress, EveryBlock and InSTEDD.
- Finishes with a lovely poem by Rilke and a painting by Delacroix. O’Reilly offers a terrific reading. Here’s an excerpt:
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.
When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
UPDATE: Here’s another set of notes from the talk.
I’m Dropping by Web 2.0 Expo
April 21st, 2008, 2 Comments »
Just a quick note to say that I’m going to be in California for New Comm Forum this week. On Wednesday, April 23, I’m going to scoot down to Web 2.0 Expo to see a couple of clients and conduct a couple of interviews for our forthcoming book. I was fortunate to get media accreditation for the latter event (conveniently, our book is distributed by O’Reilly, the same people who put on the conference).
I know I’m a minnow in the tech-blogger ocean, but if any Web 2.0 Expo attendees want to pitch me, feel free. I like Stowe’s Twitpitch model:
Here’s the rules for Twitpitching:
- All companies who would like to have a meeting with me, need to send me a Twittered description of the product. Yes, please Twitter it to me at www.twitter.com/stoweboyd. Yes, one tweet, 140 characters less the eleven used for “@stoweboyd “.
- Optionally, send a supporting twitpitch with one link, and no other text. Could be to anything: website, video, press release, Rick Astley, etc.
- Then, twitter me one or more suggested times/place to meet at the event, using the times on the calendar, and a location in the conference building I won’t have time to visit your nearby hotel or offices.
If anybody wants to Twitpitch me, fire away.