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Notes from Web2.0 Expo 2008 (SF) (37.78502894901508 , -122.40164279937744) This year felt a lot less hectic than last year. Crowds were noticeably smaller than last year, probably because of the economy. Discounting the crowd size as a factor, the buzz seemed more controlled and thoughtful than last year. The question has shifted, thankfully, from how do we make a mashup and put it on Facebook to how do we make the cloud smarter, easier to use and the same regardless of how you access it. Open standards are the rallying call of the day.

Tim O'Reilly’s keynote was nothing short of inspiring in my opinion. The takeaway: we are at a critical juncture in human technological advancement and we should all concentrate on how to use any and all of the various inputs around us in new and unthought-of of ways to get people useful information in real time, without regard to desktop vs mobile vs refrigerator. He’s encouraging us to all look at the big picture and do something amazing with the mountain of technology that surrounds us. Obviously O’Reilly loves the open source methods for doing these things, as should we all.

 
From Joseph Smarr’s Web2.0 presentation

Most exciting new technology (stack): OpenId, OAuth, OpenSocial, Google Social Graph API. I attended a great session hosted by Joseph Smarr of Plaxo where he talked being able to login to a site that you’ve never been to before using OpenId and having the site auto-populate your profile with content from your friends already on the site based on your social graph. The need to maintain a spreadsheet full of username and passwords goes away. The need to manually find your friends on the 27th social site you join is gone. The need to give your google login to an application so it can scrape your contacts is gone. You maintain control over how much of your information the site can use via OAuth. Permissions to use your data can be revoked at any time. Eventually everything works this way - one cloud working seamlessly from the user’s perspective with complete control over the profile data. There’s been a lot of coverage about OpenSocial and OpenId already this year, but to brainstorm about what these technologies could actually do together is exciting.

Mesh from Microsoft makes your data available 'anywhere' you want it and should be interesting. It was kind of funny how much prominence the mac user had in the promo video they showed though. Can’t wait to have my files synced everywhere I go. The little bit they talked about the smarts built into the technology sounded interesting as well.

How to make money by the pallet: Dash’s ability to glean (and then sell) specific search queries from in car GPS units to companies wondering where they should build their next franchise as demo’d with aggregated Starbucks searches along an Arkansas highway.

Posted by Josh Brewer Some great thinking from Clay Shirky on the real threat to established media content, the idea that people start doing something useful with their cognitive surplus.

"And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads....

And this is the other thing about the size of the cognitive surplus we're talking about. It's so large that even a small change could have huge ramifications. Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that  is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I think that's going to be a big deal. Don't you? "

It's a great new way to think about the 2.0 world and consumer generated content, at last!

From a version of the talk Clay gave at Web 2.0 last week.




Posted by Ed Cotton Alexis Madrigal has written for Influx a few times and should pending favorable conditions be working in the Planning Department of a large San Francisco agency, sadly the ad world’s loss is Wired magazine’s gain.

Alexis writes about science and space for the renowned tech lifestyle pub, but he is also taking the concept of journalism into the 2.0 world.

If you are interested, you can follow Alexis’s research process on his Twitter account, you can see his inspiration sources from his Google reader account and join his Facebook group.

It’s interesting to see that content doesn’t have to be one-dimensional, it can be seen in many forms; pre creation, during creation all in addition to the finished piece.

There’s a lesson here for all media, all storytellers and planners; there’s gold in everything you do.


 

Posted by Ed Cotton It appears there’s no shortage of brands trying to grasp the concept of Web 2.0, but do they know what they are doing?

Bruce Nussbaum in a post for Business Week, believes clients can longer trust big ad agencies, because they are pushing them “lemming like” into the 2.0 world, without first understanding consumer needs.

“I've been spending much time with ad agencies and focus groups lately and can only conclude that--with some exceptions--they are mostly clueless. Three years ago they had a traditional knowledge about consumers but didn't know much about social networking and web 2.0 technology. Today, most of them don't know about consumers and don't know much about social networking and web 2.0 technology either. Mainstream ad agencies have one refrain--one message to their corporate clients--do social networking, do social networking, do social networking.”

However, it’s not just agencies that are rushing, everyone is and agencies are being dragged along in the wake.

Here’s a sampling of some of the headlines from the last month.

Media:

The BBC files reports on YouTube for the recent elections in Turkey

Sony launches Crackle to pioneer a new studio model

Nokia purchases social networking site Twango

Brands:

Some efforts might be agency induced, but it looks like most of these were client driven.

Finish Line launches its own social networking site

HP launches a back to school campaign with ads on YouTube and 80 social networking and web sites

Jeep launches the Havefunoutthere.com social network

Although I agree with Bruce that agencies need to inform their clients about what’s going on before rushing into the fray, but this is hard to do, there’s an unstoppable force behind this “meme”.

As Bruce suggests, agencies should spend more time understanding the consumer and need to do more than focus groups to get there.

However, the challenge with all this is to gain enough insight to create content that's compelling enough to ATTRACT and KEEP people’s attention.

As always, this is a massive creative challenge that needs to be fuelled by insight, imagination and intuition and that’s why Bruce is right, compelling experiences won’t happen by simply re-creating what exist.

This is no easy task as the very nature of brands and brand communication is in a state of flux, it doesn’t matter if you are MySpace or Buick.

The acuteness of the problem is neatly expressed in this quote from an article published in the Times (London) on July 3rd.

“Social networks are spawning a generation of Internet tarts, research suggests: online consumers with little brand loyalty and no qualms about keeping several sites on the go at once.

Users of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are “chronically unfaithful”, a survey by Parks Associates, the analysts, has found. Half of users regularly use more than one site, most of which are free. One in six actively uses three or more.

This phenomenon of “network promiscuity” extends across web commerce. Analysts say that it is symptomatic of a new consumer scepticism over traditional branding.”

How does an old-school brand change it's spots and adapt to the new environment?

It appears that many brand efforts are Web 2.0 in theory, but not in practice, because it's so hard for brands to get away from the "command and control" model.

Brands seem so enamored their own self importance and insist on building social network destinations, but is that what consumers want?

We should hire some ethnographers to find out.



Posted by Ed Cotton It appears the relentless innovation of Web 2.0 is already sapping the mental strength and willpower of some of its most ardent supporters.

“I just got a Pownce invite yesterday and was excited to try it out, but I must admit a sense of horror came over me as I realized that I had to find everyone all over again.

I mean, I have spent a lot of time adding friends on Facebook - I have used it to reconnect with people from eras throughout my entire life and I have poured days of time into the effort. I have done it to a certain extent on Twitter, where I have a pretty solid snapshot of my industry colleagues. I have done it with my MSN friends list, but it is becoming less important these days as I forget who most of the people I have added are - there is very little context with traditional chat applications as you have to rely on remembering silly screen names.

Then I thought, what about everything else, like Xbox Live, Finetune, LastFM, AIM, MySpace, and so many many more.

This has turned into a nightmare.”

Teknision

No one has time to read blogs any more; “the weberati” are spending so much time downloading, trying out new web applications and plugging their friends in.

This is a huge issue for social networks as they evolve and fragment and as brands try to create their own, but does it all become too much?

Maybe it’s just one example of the constant quest for the “next” now characterizes contemporary consumption. Brand loyalty is fast disappearing and has been replaced a constant search for the “next” thing.

It explains marketing’s latest fetish for innovation; brands constantly need to have something new and “next” to talk about, if they want to engage.

However, in an “attention starved” world, how much work do people really want to do? When does the trade off between the cache of discovering something new and the effort required to discover it become too much?

Will people get “next fatigue”?

Brands have to hope this is the case.

It’s what they are supposed to do, simplify.

Or

Has the quest and display of the shiny and new now become more powerful than the cache of brand, because the consumer no longer trusts brands to stay ahead and look after all of their interests?



Posted by Ed Cotton Some interesting new "rules" from the BBC. (Via Tom Loosemore)

1. Build web products that meet audience needs: anticipate needs not yet fully articulated by audiences, then meet them with products that set new standards. (nicked from Google)

2. The very best websites do one thing really, really well: do less, but execute perfectly. (again, nicked from Google, with a tip of the hat to Jason Fried)

3. Do not attempt to do everything yourselves: link to other high-quality sites instead. Your users will thank you. Use other people’s content and tools to enhance your site, and vice versa.

4. Fall forward, fast: make many small bets, iterate wildly, back successes, kill failures, fast.

5. Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site.

6. The web is a conversation. Join in: Adopt a relaxed, conversational tone. Admit your mistakes.

7. Any website is only as good as its worst page: Ensure best practice editorial processes are adopted and adhered to.

8. Make sure all your content can be linked to, forever.

9. Remember your granny won’t ever use “Second Life”: She may come online soon, with very different needs from early-adopters.

10. Maximise routes to content: Develop as many aggregations of content about people, places, topics, channels, networks & time as possible. Optimise your site to rank high in Google.

11. Consistent design and navigation needn’t mean one-size-fits-all: Users should always know they’re on one of your websites, even if they all look very different. Most importantly of all, they know they won’t ever get lost.

12. Accessibility is not an optional extra: Sites designed that way from the ground up work better for all users

13. Let people paste your content on the walls of their virtual homes: Encourage users to take nuggets of content away with them, with links back to your site

14. Link to discussions on the web, don’t host them: Only host web-based discussions where there is a clear rationale

15. Personalisation should be unobtrusive, elegant and transparent: After all, it’s your users’ data. Best respect it.

Posted by Ed Cotton