Saul Griffith is a remarkable guy: inventor, entrepreneuer, Squid Labs, ThinkCycle and Instructables founder, columnist, genius grant winner and now president of the clean energy start-up Makani Power. A couple weeks ago, I did a talk at eTech, and while I was there, I had the fortune to hear Saul give his presentation on energy literacy and climate change. Saul’s essential point is that climate change is a problem we can choose to tackle: that the means are within our control, if we’ll learn to think clearly about them.
Probably not - or not directly. But some of the same people that have 2 million people tracking their MPs’ voting records via the site theyworkforyou.com and who, through farmsubsidy.org, got the EU to publish full subsidy data, have set up UNdemocracy.com, an attempt to shed light on the inner workings of the UN. The UN has for some time made copies of its resolutions and other information online at un.org, but like a lot of government initiatives the data published is hardly reusable in any meaningful way. URLs are not persistent, and data formats are not open. A small group led by Julian Todd, a “civic hacker” in Liverpool is seeking to change all that by laboriously scraping the data out of the site and republishing it with persistent URLs. That way, even if the UN removes the information it will be retained in Google caches or the Wayback Machine at the internet archive (archive.org). The site also links through to other decisions and debates. When you do that, said Stefan Magdalinski, Tom Loosemore, and Danny O’Brien at the Emerging Technology conference (conferences.oreilly.com/etech) last week in San Diego, some strange voting patterns emerge.
Read Eric Auchard’s article on Yahoo’s plan to expand data sharing and networking among its estimated 500 million monthly users.
“We are not building another social network,” Chief Technology Officer Ari Balogh told more than 1,000 attendees at the Web 2.0 Expo conference in San Francisco on Thursday. “We are building social into everything we do.”
Mary Jane Irwin writes this article on John Battelle’s discussion with Marc Andreessen during their Thursday morning Keynote.
It’s almost as shocking as if Al Gore were to endorse Barack Obama: Marc Andreessen, who helped create the first Web browser and jump-started the Internet economy–and who ultimately saw his company decimated by Microsoft–thinks the Microsoft acquisition of Yahoo! would be “a really good deal.”
Fake Steve Jobs, also known as Forbes business reporter Dan Lyons, has just given a talk at the Web 2.0 conference that’s been happening this week in San Francisco, about how he accidentally created a social media empire.
Dean Takahashi reports on the Tim O’Reilly and Jonathan Schwartz Q&A session, detailing everything from “utility computing,” to Sun’s adoption of a “greener infrastructure” and of course Sun’s recent purchase of MySQL.
Schwartz says his top job is being a communicator as CEO. Getting a message across to the troops, who ask him questions like “Why did we spend $1 billion on a company (MySQL) that gives away its products for free?” How does he keep his own voice and PR out of it,” Reilly asked. Schwartz said it did terrify him when his general counsel started blogging.
Daniel Terdiman contributes this article on the entertaining and irreverent Fake Steve Jobs:
In a frenetic keynote address Friday morning at the Web 2.0 Expo here, Fake Steve–otherwise known as Forbes writer Dan Lyons–gave his unique take on the world of technology, the people who drive it, and the future of media.
This spring’s SF show attracted about 8,500 web-savvy geeks and associates and I was impressed with the consciousness of both the collaborative conference editorial orientation as well as the folks in attendance.
Leslie Katz rounds up the Web Expo experience, “It was all Web apps, all the time in San Francisco this week, as some of the Internet’s most prominent movers and shakers gathered for the giant Web 2.0 Expo.”
The Internet is increasingly controlled by its users, and not its designers.
That shift was evident Thursday at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, a three-day conference co-produced by Sebastopol-based O’Reilly Media.
Nathan Halverson on internet adolescence and the future of Web 2.0:
Web 2.0 is rapidly transforming as it hurdles toward adulthood. Even the most entrenched Internet gurus have questions: Where are the cool and effective places to advertise now? Will current online behavior such as social networking lead to lifelong habits for the younger Internet generation? What should corporate executives write on their blogs? And how should marketers handle their online communities that let people both praise and defame their products?
Shannon Clark comments that Web 2.0 Expo might not deliver the “business emphasis and focus” she was looking for, but makes up for this when it comes to in-depth technical expertise and innovation.
As an entrepreneur my advice to anyone attending the show would be to take it slow. To indeed take a walk through the exhibit hall and see the booths, see how potential partners and competitors present themselves. But then to find a good spot at one of the many table filled seating areas, announce your location via twitter, then settle in for a few hours of lobbyconning (sitting still and letting people come to you to stop, meet, and reconnect).
Mitch Wagner on Niall Kennedy’s Tuesday tutorial ” Web 2.0 Best Practices:”
I found Kennedy’s presentation to be terrific, really quite eye-opening. Until watching him speak yesterday, I still thought of the Web site itself as being the most important part of a company’s Internet presence, and getting people to come to the site to be the goal of any Internet publisher.
Yahoo is swinging the doors of its Web platforms wide open to let outside developers create applications across its network of sites, as well as radically stitching together its online services under the social profile concept….”It is rewiring Yahoo from the inside out, across all of our properties, to fundamentally open up those Web services and provide a consistent development model, a consistent deployment and consumer experience as well,” said Ari Balogh, Yahoo’s chief technology officer, during a keynote at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco on Thursday.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire - April 23, 2008) SnapLogic 2.0 enables “Really Simple Integration,” a new approach to data integration that leverages RESTful Web technology to provide agile data integration solutions for business IT groups. Really Simple Integration enables enterprises to quickly and easily make data from databases, SaaS applications, SOA Web services, and other common data sources readily available for use by business analysts and other business users.
Yahoo! to Rewire for Social Graph and Data Portability
Yahoo! announced today at the Web 2.0 Expo the availability of the first program in its large vision for a dramatic overhaul of the company across all its properties. The Search Monkey developer platform will let site owners alter their search results listing, including through semantic markup. Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch has an in-depth review of that platform.
Tim O’Reilly: Tackle Big, Hard Problems With Web 2.0
Tim O’Reilly opens the Web 2.0 Expo keynotes with a discussion on the opportunities in web 2.0 today. Here are some real-time notes on his session. His main message is to “not follow the headlines” and the hot consumer apps, but go after “big, hard problems”.
So You’re Launching a Platform: After Ubiquitous APIs - What’s the Next Frontier?
We’re here at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco and are getting inundated with press releases about new APIs and developer platforms, many from companies we’ve never even heard of in the first place. How long ago was it that the forward-looking thinkers argued that APIs and platforms would soon be available everywhere?
Jeffrey Burt provides the scoop on Microsoft’s Live Mesh upcoming debut:
The idea behind Live Mesh is to create an environment in the cloud where a user’s devices can be quickly synced and work in concert with each other. The company is looking to do this by using a Live Mesh API to give users access to various services, including some Live Services, through the devices in their personal mesh. These Live Services include Storage, Membership, Sync, Peer-to-Peer Communication and Newsfeed.
Betsy Schiffman poses this question: “When is Bill Gates not the devil? Answer: When he’s saving the world from total technical chaos. That’s according to internet golden child Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Ning.”
Brief summary of the Forrester Research Web 2.0 survey and results discussed at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco.
56 per cent of North American and European enterprises rank web 2.0 as a priority in 2008 with consumer giants such as General Motors, McDonalds, Coca Cola and Microsoft investing massively in the sector.
Keynote speakers at the Web 2.0 Expo on Wednesday delivered inspirational messages to keep innovators dreaming and working hard in the face of an economic slowdown. Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media, said the Web 2.0 revolution is just getting started. He challenged attendees to work on big, world-changing problems, saying that the most successful companies in the technology industry have “big, hairy audacious goals.”
Writes Terry McSweeney: “At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco Wednesday, a Mountain View company will announce a service that believes in the saying: ‘ask and you shall receive.’ Tellme is announcing a voice to visual service for GPS equipped Blackberries. If you ask for a map or directions or where a movie is playing, then Tellme will tell you.”
On the eve of the latest and largest Internet gathering this year, O’Reilly’s [and TechWeb’s} Web 2.0 Conference and Expo, Forrester Research dropped a report that concludes that companies will spend $4.6 billion on Web2-related technologies by 2013. What that means for you, fellow office dweller, is that Forrester believes the world of wikis, widgets, blogs, mashups and social networks will increasingly find a way into your work life.
“Who’s a real platform provider?” asks Clint Boulton. “Opinions abound at Web 2.0.”
A funny thing happened in the buildup to the Web 2.0 Expo. During briefings with Web application platform provider Etelos and PAAS (platform as a service) provider Bungee Labs, it became clear there is some disconnect on what companies qualify as platform providers and which simply don’t.
“D. Mark Hornung is attending this week’s Web 2.0 Expo because he doesn’t want to get hit by a tsunami,” writes Juan Carlos Perez.
A senior vice president at employment marketer Bernard Hodes Group, Hornung sees a tidal wave of blogs, wikis, social networks, virtual worlds and other Web 2.0 applications approaching his industry. Along the way, these technologies are re-shaping employment marketing in fundamental ways that are more disruptive than the shift from print to online media, he said.
Most IT executives I talk to are baffled by Web 2.0. Don’t get me wrong, they get excited about the technology like anyone else, and arguably they understand its inner workings better than some of the Web 2.0 cognoscenti. Where they stumble is on its applicability in the enterprise. They struggle to ignite the flame. They need to come to fun events like Ignite.
“This interview actually happened by accident. A lot of the good ones normally do.” Simon Chen’s post from yesterday continues: “Day One at Web 2.0 is always a little quiet as the Expo doesn’t actually start until Wednesday. Today - there are just 2 workshops. One in the morning and one in the afternoon. I still think about 1000 people show up though.”
Web 2.0 is set to be embraced by Enterprise 2.0 as businesses prepare to spend nearly $5 billion by 2013 on social networking tools. Over half of the companies in North America and Europe see Web 2.0 as a priority for next year, a report says. The news comes as San Francisco plays host to the Web 2.0 conference on next generation of the web.
At the Web 2.0 Expo today, O’Reilly Media, the most recognizable Web 2.0 business in the world, announced the launch of O’Reilly InPractice. This new consulting and training division aims to help companies intelligently and successfully reposition themselves in the global network—and thrive in a user-centered economy.
Sara Peyton interviews George LeBrun, who takes the reins of a newly launched O’Reilly division-O’Reilly InPractice.
This new consulting and training division, announced today at Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, aims to help companies intelligently and successfully reposition themselves in the global network—and thrive in a user-centered economy. And George, a top media and communications authority and now Chief Strategy Officer/General Manager of O’Reilly InPractice, is already working with companies to help them deliver positive experiences for their customers by applying transformative Web 2.0 tactics. This week George and his team are in San Francisco attending Web 2.0 Expo. But before George headed off, I got a chance to talk to him about his career and why he’s excited about leading O’Reilly InPractice.
“I am relieved to see that we do all the (right) things,” writes Eliane Fiolet in this quick post “according in Trisha Okubo’s must-do list to produce a good Blog.”
