Web 2.0: After
: It may have seemed as if this blog was hijacked by a demigeek, what with all the Web 2.0 posts. I got in as a blogger, so I blogged. And it was a good conference with many good moments, so I was glad to. But it’s over. A few uber observations:
: Trust is an organizing principle. In our world of instant access to everything, we’ll get what we want we want with a little help from our friends — via links as a measure of trust (see Google and Technorati and more to come).
: We want to control our data. There was much discussion of big, bad companies’ efforts to keep us by keeping control of our data: the roach motel strategy, as Steve Gillmor called it. They get our email (Yahoo) or our reputation (eBay) or our IM (AOL) and don’t want us to export or sync it with anyone else. But that is clearly a losing strategy. See Jarvis’ First Law of Media.
: Open source rules: Whether via Kim Polese’s new open-source-integrator business … or a couple of wiki businesses out to replace expensive enterprise software … or talk of the web, indeed, becoming our operating system … or calls to have interoperable and open standards on phone OSs …. or talk of the big, old software industry’s days being over … it’s clear that open-source is both the architecture and the culture of technology today.
You want real proof of this, go see VC Fred Wilson today:
I am selling all my microsoft stock tomorrow. They can’t comepete with this tidal wave of community based software. It’s too powerful.
: RSS has arrived. I know, it had arrived before. But the RSS session in which I participated was jammed. RSS kept coming up in every tech presentation. There were lots of RSS vendors: Feedburner, Topix, Rojo… I asked Tim O’Reilly to hold Syndicon, a conference to bring together the constituencies with interests in RSS so we can hammer out some issues and bring it to the masses.
: Podcasting will arrive: Much buzz about the new platform for radio. Doc even got it mentioned in Kim Polese’s presentation. When Steve Gillmor asked a bunch of media guys about podcasting and it was clear they hadn’t heard of it. “That’s OK,” Steve said to me, “until three weeks ago, we hadn’t either.”
: Citizens’ media will arrive, too: Jason Calacanis was pissed that there were no bloggers in the media panel. Well, that could be a case of panel envy. Bloggers were everywhere. It would have been helpful to have a few more moments of distruptive citizen perspective. But that will come.
: Cool: Make the magazine. Snap the search engine. Rojo the RSS aggregator. Keyhole maps. Scroll down for links.
: The internet grew up. I mentioned that Jeff Bezos was more serious. Ditto Bill Gross of Idealab. Ditto everybody, really. The giddy, goofy days of tech are over. Likewise, the glum days are over, too (the fact that 600 influential people showed up for a conference on the web is the best demonstration of that). So it’s a business and it’s acting like one.
