Web 2.0 Expo: Giraffes, hippos, mafias and making sweet music together
Good day, Stowe’s edglings! A quick introduction: my name is Deanna Zandt, and I’m the author of a forthcoming book called “Share This! How You Will Change the World With Social Networking.” I’m attending Web 2.0 Expo this week, and I’ll be posting a daily summary of what I’m seeing and hearing. It’s my first time attending this conference, and I’m excited to have the opportunity to report on it.
The festivities kicked off for me on Monday night with Ignite Bay Area over at Mezzanine. (Not familiar with Ignite? It’s a set of presentations, exactly five minutes long, whose tagline is, “Inspire us, but make it quick.” Each presenter must create a PowerPoint with exactly 20 slides, which advance automatically every 15 seconds. I did one of these in March (on Muppets as model social citizens), and I can tell you it’s exactly as challenging as it sounds. The winners for me from Monday night were:
One Million Giraffes. This guy from Norway is trying to win a bet that he can collect one million giraffes by 2011. His talk was both hilarious and insightful — the creativity of giraffes being submitted is inspiring.
The Forgiveness Engine. Granted, Jesper Andersen got our attention by first showing us his anti-Foursquare app, Avoidr, but the Forgiveness Engine looks right up my alley. Inspiring empathy and catharsis is a radical goal for a service.
A story about hippos. This one can only be covered by sharing the video, which I hope will be posted soon. Great storytelling talents by Chris Hutchins.
Tuesday’s sessions at the conference were a mixed bag; one thing that I’m struggling with is that there isn’t quite the depth that I was expecting at Web 2.0 Expo. Especially after Social Business Edge a couple weeks ago, I feel I’ve been a little bit spoiled by listening to speakers who don’t just sing the praises of the social tech we all know and love, but who take on the cultural challenges and future implications (both utopian and dystopian). A few of the keynotes yesterday left me frustrated with their lack of exploration — Paul Buchheit of FriendFeed, for example, spent some time cheering the notion that information wants to be public, but never mentioned the implications of privacy and publicy for people in different social sectors than his. I wanted to send a paper airplane of danah boyd’s talk at SXSW up to the stage, not to mention a great post from Stowe on Foursquare.
Of the workshop/panel sessions, my favorite was “5 Reputation Fallacies (And How to Avoid Them)” with F. Randall “Randy” Farmer (MSB Associates), Bryce Glass (Manta Media, Inc.). Entertaining us with stories about the Sims Mafia shakedowns, they showed us key insights on designing reputation systems that went beyond the obvious — how 5-star rating systems, for example, are often only used by interested, engaged fans to show their approval. Uninterested users tend to just walk away and not register a vote at all, creating J-curves of skewed recommendations.
In keynote land, the closing session of the day rocked the worlds of everyone I talked to. I won’t do it justice with a review, so just go ahead and watch Ge Wang show us the mind-blowing future of music tech — and its intrinsic link our primal human needs for connectedness.
