Friday, September 19, 2008

The Friday Key Notes at The Web 2.0 Expo

Yesterday Tim O'Reilly urged us to do something significant and get "beyond throwing sheep". Today I am looking at the Key Note program and wondering why one of the presentations is on I Can Haz Cheeseburger. Let's hope there is something significant that comes from that session.

Arianna Huffington of the Huffington Post

Tim O'Reilly is talking with Arriana. The Huffington Post has 30 moderators working 24x7 to pre-moderate comments to ensure rapid publishing. Their role is to remove vile and inappropriate comments in order to keep the conversation from dying.

Traffic is 1/3 bookmarked, 1/3 linked and 1/3 search-based.

The direct bookmark side is growing.

"Iraq is the greatest foreign policy disaster in US History"

The difference between Rupert Murdoch and the Huffington Post is that the Post wants to shape opinion based on facts. A cutting remark that drew applause from the audience.

Can free, unregulated markets bring about public good? A fascinating question. Why is AIG being bailed out for $85B yet 4M families have faced foreclosure on their homes?

The self correcting nature of the Internet is fascinating and powerful. Publish with an error and comments appear within minutes. What's more the Internet allows the correction to be published instantaneously.

"Off the bus" is a new Huffington feature that has 10,000 citizen journalists submitting news.

The next big thing - A huge need and longing to unplug and re-charge. Sleep deprivation is driving us crazy.

Genevieve Bell from Intel

How is the Internet being re-invented?

The themes: The distant internet, The asynchronous internet, The intermediate internet, The ubiquitous internet and The imaginary Internet.

In some places the Internet is a place 150Km away. It is a destination.

In other places the data is collected taken to a city and delivered back the following day. 24-48 hour turn around is not a bad solution for some types of enquiry.

In other areas people who can't read and write will relay requests to family members who will enter those requests or emails at a cyber cafe and bring the results or messages back.

In parts of china the Internet is imaginary. Paper laptops and phones are burned to pass them to the after life for their loved ones who have passed.

Irene Grief of IBM

Talking about Many Eyes Visualization tools. Collaborative Visualization.

The beleif is that there is a pent up desire to analyze information. All that is needed is a simple toolset to do this.

How is Many Eyes different from DabbleDB?

there are some fascinating examples of word tags.

Many Eyes is an example of Venture Reseach.

What IBM has learned is that real world deployments let research keep up with the wisdom of the crowds.

Many-Eyes is part of IBM's new Center for Social Software.

Jay Adelson of Digg.com

Why do collaborative filters matter?

Any time you take the interest and foibles of a group in to account you create collaborative filters.

The younger generation shares more information. They have less concerns about privacy.

We are moving from a seek culture to a constantly connected culture.

Three parts:

1. Generic site filter. eg. Digg. Great for people consuming the same data

2. Social Networks. communities are created that we watch

3. Hyper-personalization is the next step of collaborative filtering. Find similar people to divine collective wisdom. eg. Amazon buying recommendations. iTunes Genius feature. Digg is looking at how it can take the information from 90M Facebook accounts to create a Digg home page that is very personal to you.

This is the key to future monetization. eg. better targeted ads.

Digg is receiving 16,000 submission per day.

Ben Huh of I Can Has Cheezburger

Ben's message is "Simplicity." Two people sharing something.

Jan 2007 - Crashes started in April 2007. The site had gone from a blog to an application by adding the LoL Builder. It was simple, it was online and removed 80% of the hassle of publishing.

They now receive 8,000 submissions per day.

Sep 2007 - rose to 15M page views/month.

ICHC is purchased. The fell back to Discipline. Their goal was to make users happy for 5 minutes a day. 6 posts a day. 9AM eastern start and strict promotional guidelines.

Feb 2008 - 37 Million Page views/Month. Launched a network. 8th Site now launched - a celebrity site.

Aug 2008 - 100 Million Page views/Month.

The objective is to lower the bar for content creation.

What is to follow? They work on 30 days at a time.

Shana Fisher of Head of Strategy at IAC

Talking about the future of video games. They are looking at the video game market on the web.

InstantAction is defining the $2B online core games market.

The console and PC game market is mainly offline. It is a hit driven market. Games are costly and slow to develop and depend on physical distribution. $15M to develop over 3 years plus $3m to market.

Only 8% of games broke even.

Broadband changes everything. As I said more than 5 years ago. Broadband is the killer app of our generation.

The objective is to deliver immersive games through the web browser. Online distribution. Easy distribution. Easy to give trial access that can be free. Monetization can be by subscription, premium features or virtual item purchases.

Instant Action is developing Multi-player, global, console-quality games that work inside the browser.

In less than 6 months they have gone from launch to over 700k users. Users spend an average of 30 minutes per day on the site. The age range is male, 13-34.

The VIP level has a Need for Speed look a like in the browser.

Daniel Lyons aka Fake Steve

Fake Steve is on Hiatus. Since San Francisco Dan Lyons has moved from Forbes to NewsWeek.

This may be a re-run of his San Francisco talk. Not a bad thing - he brought the house down there.

Why?

So boredom drove him to create Fake Steve. and Fear. Realizing that the industry is being reinvented.

Why Steve Jobs?

Parody of Jobs and blogging. It was a comic strip that evolved in to news.

when the readership rose to 1.5 Million it drove the search for the writer of FSJ.

Why does it work?

Why did it continue after Dan was outed? People were willing to suspend their disbelief.

The community around the blog was critical. They felt a part of something.

What had been created was a performance space.


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