Wrapping up my Web 2.0 conference thoughts... and plugging a forthcoming article offering more depth
Well, I'm now safely back at work after the whirlwind that was Web 2.0 last week, and hard at work lining up our first set of podcasts.
As those who were following along last week will know, I tried to keep up a fairly steady stream of posts during the conference, which you can get here.
As other at-the-event bloggers have commented, it's reasonably easy to report what people are saying as they say it, but it's far harder to offer anything reflective as your brain is far too tied up listening to the next thing being said. There were times when I wondered whether the stream of consciousness was valuable to people... but I've since had a load of e-mail to suggest that it was, so that's good.
I am in the process of writing up some broader thoughts on Web 2.0 for the free e-journal, Ariadne, and this will certainly include some key outcomes from the conference. It's due out around the end of October.
In the meantime, here are some more comments after a weekend to think through all that I encountered during the conference.
First off, thanks to those who organised the event. Despite my grumblings last week, they did a great job. On the whole, the conference was excellent. I think I had just expected it to be more excellent. I look forward to being invited again next year.
As mentioned before, it was big. From scanning the attendee list, I reckon 8-900 people crammed into the rooms at the Argent. About 10 people were there from the UK, including two from each of Nature, the BBC, and Talis. The sheer size of the thing probably prompted my grumbles at the time, as the wall of noise generated by that many people, and the rapid-fire lecturing at the audience from the stage for two of the three days contrasted with the rather more select and discursive groups in which I usually expect to see real advances take place.
The first day consisted of a set of workshops, most of which proved to be standing room only. The quality of those I attended was high, and these two were instrumental in reinforcing my belief that so much of what we are trying to do is going to come down to cracking Trust, identity, and reputation. Dick Hardt's excellent presentation on Friday hammered the same message home in compelling fashion. I look forward to being able to explore these issues further with the relevant teams, and to trying some of it out on this blog once sxore is more widely available.
The workshop on legal issues around blogging was also very good, and the most workshop-ey of those I attended, with real discussion between attendees and facilitators on several occasions. Can we have more like that?
Other than Dick's, I think the most enlightening presentation from the plenary sessions had to be the last one I saw, when a group of teenagers took the stage to tell us about their perspectives on all that we seek to build. There's certainly room for a lot more of this listening... which is of course why I pushed so hard for the MORI study in my old job.
My final impression is that the Bay Area Web 2.0 community (who definitely dominated an event to which they were, of course, local) is much more driven by the imperative to sell and turn a profit directly from their Web 2.0 activities than many of us on this side of the Atlantic, who perhaps see this more as part of a broader set of activities with which we are engaged, some of which make us money, and some of which don't. That isn't a criticism, just an observation of a difference.
As such, a number of us are having some conversations around the possibility of doing something similar over here, but perhaps with that slightly different emphasis. Watch this space, or get in touch if you have any thoughts.
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