Yesterday afternoon, driving from Berkeley down to San Jose, I pulled off on Guadalupe Parkway. I slowed for an upcoming red light. About 60’ ahead, a large red SUV entered the intersection from the left, not driving but rolling and bouncing ass-over-tea kettle, coming to rest on its side in the middle of the street. I swerved into a bus stop and ran back to the SUV. The windshield looked like chicken wire and in the passenger seat I could see someone hanging from their seatbelt, no air bag, no movement. I yelled to some guys hanging around outside an office building on the corner, “Get some fire extinguishers.” Fire broke out in the engine compartment. “For Christ’s sake, hurry up!” Two guys sprayed the bottom of the SUV with enough fire retardant that it looked as if someone had lobbed in a smoke grenade. Sirens announced the arrival of the cops; I hopped back in my car and headed to the center of town. My senses are on high alert.
Now David Holcolmb is welcoming about a thousand of us in the ballroom of the San Jose Fairmont to DevLearn 08. And while I wrote this, Brent Schlenker took the stage to tell us what’s going on today.
Tim O’Reilly has taken the stage. “Best known for O’Reilly books.” Well, maybe not. O’Reilly’s mission is to change the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators. 1992: first book on the net, The Whole Internet Users Guide, when there were but 200 sites on the web. Started the first commercial web site, GNN. Organized meeting where term “open source” was adopted in 1998. Coined term Web 2.0 to describe rules for new internet platform.
Jim Barksdale (Netscape): “Find a parade and then get in front of it.”
O’Reilly: Finding the alpha geeks. E.g., wireless networks predict universal Wi-Fi, screen scraping predicts web services and the internet as platform, the “pedal powered internet” predicts new focus on energy.
Lots of things: the wooden Apple I, the Wright Brothers plane, etc. started as homebrew experiments.
How many of you use Linux? How many use Google? You’re still in the PC era. Get over it.
As usual, Mark Oehlert is way ahead of me here. Live blogging? So yesterday. Mark (who is sitting beside me here) has some widget that is plucking realtime Tweets into his blog. Here I am creating my own text. It’s so… yesterday.
Roots of 2.0. Harmony. Blueshirtnation. Yatt’it. Being Girl (P&G). User-content, driven by users. Social media in action.
Harnessing collective intelligence. Every successful Web 2.0 company is building a database whose value grows in proportion to the number of participatns — that is, a network-effect-driven data lock-in. Google’s power is extracting meaning from the data — and it feeds on itself.
Turning 1.0 into 2.0: being better at data. Compare Google to Bank of America. Both have massive data centers, customer data, data that gets better all the time, they both data-mine. But the bank has no real time user-facing services based on that data. Start-up wesabe compares aggregrated user purchase data: Weatherford BMW costs twice as much as Bavaria Pro; every time you swipe your credit card, you cast a vote.
What would Google do? Testing on the Toilet. If it ain’t broke, you’re not trying hard enough.
Programming Collective Intelligence. Machine learning.
Design: Face-off: The blank faces at Flickr and 43Things. An ugly icon encourages people to change. It’s in the architecture of participation. Shawn Fanning’s Napster showed a different way of thinking: You join by default. Flickr’s default was sharing photos, not requiring people to email invites.
Tim is not only a great thinker; he’s a wonderful popularizer. The skill of software is to create a space where people can participate. I’m already cooking up new thoughts about extensions to togetherlearn. The mobile phone is a platform.
Air Guitar – the birth of the big beautiful art market.
Feral Robot Dogs. Hacked Aibos search out toxic waste. Botanicells enable plants to Twitter their users when they need watering. Sensor applications. Google is tracking flu outbreaks (because people search for “flu”). You can count foot traffic past a storefront by counting passing phones….
All of our machines are becoming intelligent. Together.
How do we teach the right skills? Follow your own pioneers and alpha geeks. Ask what they are doing. Study them. Comcastcares. TimesMachine. Turn the alphas into mentors. Get people engaged in the process of learning.
Kathy Sierra: Creating Passionate Users. Over the Kicking Ass Threshold.
“Everybody who is doing a wiki really needs to study Wikipedia.” Wikipedia, the Missing Manual.
What does the web 2.0 organization look like? Small teams.
Jeremiah Owyang: Stop fondling the hammer, and focus on the house.
“Training is the whole employee seen from the business point of view.”
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I chuckled at the thought of you and Mark sitting next to each other live-blogging. I’m reading and contributing to his from Madison, WI.
Nice coverage, Jay! Even if it is a little old school
No, seriously. This is great stuff. Everyone is capturing some VERY good content.
Cheers!