Web 2.0: Day 1

I’m attending the always well-done Web 2.0 conference. Still attending the workshops before the official conference gets underway. Not sure how much I’ll be blogging, since there are scores of bloggers here. (36 posts on Technorati so far.)

Lots of familiar faces here: Marc Canter (newly returned from 3 weeks in Europe), Mary Hodder, Dave Sifry, Chris Alden, Valerie Cunningham, Renee Blodgett, Steve Gillmor, Esther Dyson, Hank Barry, hosts John Battelle and Tim O’Reilly, and others. Unfortunately some of the sessions’ audiences are over 90 percent male.

Some highlights so far:

Tim O’Reilly: “Data is the next Intel inside. Who controls the stack?”

Ross Mayfield, founder of Socialtext, announced that the wiki company was going open source (Yay, Ross!) Dan Farber has a roundup of Web 2.0 platform launches at ZDNet. Infoworld has this good piece: Socialtext to open source bulk of its software. Wikiwyg wiki editing tool will be Socialtext’s first product to go open source.

Interesting new tool (in alpha) from Adaptive Path: alpha.measuremap.com, a new blog metrics measuring tool. (You need to email them to get access.)

Did you know you can buy the anti-allergy drug Loratadine for about half the price of Claritin — and they contain exactly the same ingredients? That’s the continuing power of brand.

Quote shown on screen: “You can no longer tell people about your brand; you have to let them experience it.” – Esther Dyson

Open source everything

From the Open Source Infrastructure panel with Marc Canter: Toni Schneider of Yahoo! agreed (at Marc’s prompting) to support a new open protocol called simple event sharing.

Tantek Celik of Technorati named these themes that apply to Web 2.0 (the phenomenon, not the conference):
– You control your own data. You should be able to move it around, mix and match data services.
– Open data formats and protocols. (It should be posted on the Web and downloadable.) Highly interoperable and Web-friendly.

Interesting site (in Japanese) that lets you review things: Goodpic.com.

The echo boomer phenomenon

Do you know what an echo boomer is? They’re the kids of baby boomers — 80 million people, almost a third of the U.S. population, spending $170 billion a year. They’re young, affluent and tech-savvy — the first generation immersed in a digital and Internet-driven world. They want speed, reliability and choice. They’re always on and intensively focused on all things virtual, mobile, personal and digital. They build social online communities.

On the same Echo Boomers panel, Robert Ferrari of Turbine described as a “macrotrend” the entire movement toward mash-up creativity: echo boomers think they’re entitled to DIY collaboration and innovation.

Was great to meet Dave Williams, chief marketing officer and general manager of AtomShockwave. They’ve been doing short-form video better and longer than just about anyone. Said Dave: “It’s all about instant access and gratification.” Atom started as a place for indie filmmakers to get online distribution, and now it’s a place where echo boomers go to get short form entertainment.

I asked a question at the Echo Boomers session: “I’ve got Darknet T-shirts for sale on Zazzle. Why can’t users download the logo and remix it with their own artwork to create a new T-shirt? Why can’t people mix their own creations rather than having to select from a predetermined, limited number of selections?”

Katie Burke Mitic, vp of marketing at Zazzle (a cool online retailer), agreed. “It’s currently one degree away and eventually we want to be an infinite number of degrees away.” The limited customizations available now are due to copyright issues (even when the owner, like me, is willing to waive them).

One panelist asked: Asked how many people have clicked on a banner ad in the past 30 days? One out of 90 people raised their hands.

Do the mash

One of the highlights of the day was the “Mash-ups 2.0” session. There was almost no discussion of music mash-ups, but quite a bit of talk about how to create Web 2.0 services that pulls from multiple databases, sometimes without permission. Met Paul Rademacher, who created the mash-up HousingMaps.com and started working at Google two weeks ago.

If you’re going to try this at home, Rademacher said, keep in mind that it’s one thing to create a mash-up if you’re doing it as a public service, with no attempt to appropriate the data. It’s quite another to begin collecting ad revenues built on other people’s data. “Courtesy goes a long way,” he said.

Dave McClure, Director of Marketing, SimplyHired.com, showed off more than a dozen Web mash-ups, all of which relied on grabbing data off company or government websites.

Check them all out here. Google also shows off over 200 mash-ups using Google Maps here. Said Rademacher: “Mash-ups represent a new liberation of data.” Does Craig Newmark mind use of Craigslist listings for HousingMaps.com? “He hasn’t said either way.”

McClure asked the audience for mash-up ideas. Someone suggested mapping prices of homes for sale against school district ratings. (Some services may be doing this already, though klunkily). A reporter for the Economist magazine said she’s like to see geographic maps of locations named in novels.

Heard on the main stage, a great quote: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it,” attributed to various authors.

“The computer revolution hasn’t really begun yet.”

More in a moment …

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.