Just finished an amazing day at the Web 2.0 conference. I had hoped to do real-time blogging, but between all the photo-shooting and introductions in the hallway (talking about the ourmedia project, the Social Media Group, Darknet, Engadget and OJR), it left little time to take advantage of the top-notch wifi connectivity set up for us at the Hotel Nikko in downtown San Francisco.
Lots to report. John Battelle told me 530 people were in the main ballroom this evening to hear Jeff Bezos and other speakers, out of 675 registered for the conference.
(1) First, the photos: The top-notch Derrick Story of O’Reilly Media seems to be the only one who’s taking closeup photos of the speakers at the sessions. Here’s my Web 2.0 photo gallery. I’ll add to it on days 2 and 3.
Among those under the lens: Jeff Bezos, John Doerr, Jason Kottke, Tim O’Reilly, Chris Tolles, Jeff Jarvis, Esther Dyson, Rich Skrenta, Stewart Butterfield, and Zack Rosen.
(2) Next, a personal note to say how terrific it was to finally to meet in person several people I’ve long admired: Jeff Bezos of Amazon (pictured at top), Steve Levy of Newsweek, Jeff Jarvis of Buzzmachine, Zack Rosen of CivicSpace Labs, Nick Wingfield of the Wall Street Journal, Michael Bazeley of the San Jose Mercury News, Stewart Butterfield of Flickr, Rich Skrenta and Chris Tolles of Topix.net, and Micah Sifry, author of Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? Washington on $2 Million a Day.
Others I chatted up or spotted in the audience: Esther Dyson, Denise Howell, Scott Rosenberg, Jonathan Weber, Steve and Dan Gillmor, Chris Alden, Kevin Burton, Mary Hodder, and many others. Quite a crowd.
(3) Next, some Notable Quotes heard throughout the day:
Jeff Jarvis during a panel on RSS: “Big media should not be scared of giving away their content for free. What big media should be scared of is the death of the centralized marketplace.”
Someone quoting a new pearl of wisdom: “RSS is the ultimate opt-in.”
Esther Dyson: “The dimension that matters is time.”
Esther again: “The tagging matters” — ie, metadata will become increasingly important in the years ahead.
Jeff Jarvis again: “[Google] AdSense took the cooties off of home pages and blogs” as a place for advertising.
Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo: “All we have to do is get publishers to adopt it [RSS]. The readers don’t have to know what’s under the hood.”
John Battelle: “The force of 1 million sites with 1,000 users is far larger than 100 sites with a million users. … The tail has an incredible amount of power.”
(4) I had planned on writing a longer takeout from today’s sessions but it’s getting late and I have to be up in a few hours.
Quick factoid from a powerpoint slide: 20% of all searchers account for 68% of all searches.
One interesting tidbit from this afternoon. Rich Skrenta of Topix polled the audience and found that 90% of the attendees used an RSS news reader. The breakdown was 50-50 of web-based (Bloglines) vs. client-based (eg, FeedDemon). Chris Pirillo took a similar poll at Gnomedex the other week and found the same result — so among the early adopters, they’re adopting.
(5) Finally, some pointers to other blog coverage of the conference, which continues Wednesday and Thursday:
A Feedster feed for the conference
At BoingBoing, Cory runs down this evening’s announcement about Snap, a new search engine. (Rojo was also announced today.)
Plus: blogging from Jeff Jarvis, Denise Howell (she’s got the scoop on Mark Cuban’s talk tonight), and others. More tomorrow.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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