Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Category: Defrag 2008

Defrag08: The Definitive Twitter Firehose

Well, it's over. Another great Defrag conference — the second annual, to be exact.  And what a great event it was, in downtown Denver on Monday and Tuesday of this week. Defrag08-sign
Aha moments running rampant… Here's my entire Twitter coverage, in convenient "last first" arrangement for your reading pleasure… :-)  That is, if you start by scrolling back to my last Defrag08 tweet on Tuesday 11/4 about 4:30 pm, when I left for the airport.  My coverage totaled some 200 tweets, but I lost count.

Another way to see the ENTIRE FREAKING FIREHOSE is to simply type "Defrag08" in the search box at search.twitter.com.  That will show everyone's tweets that had the hashtag "#defrag08" contained within the already-oh-so-short 140 character tweet length.

And a ton of tweets it was! One speaker did an informal survey of the approximately 300 in attendance, and found upwards of 60% were Twittering the event! That has to be a high point for the larger tech gatherings like this that I regularly attend. (I wonder how many were live-blogging it?  I didn't hear of a single person! Surely a few were. But then blogging is so 2004.)

Yet another feed was one set up by EventVue especially for Defrag. This is a community site that has conference producers sign up with them, allowing their attendees to each create a profile, then interact with other attendees — even in the days before the event begins, as well as during and after. A few months ago, they added a Twitter feature. The nice thing about EventVue's aggregated Defrag feed — which captured the tweets of everyone at the event who was Twittering (as long as they had set up a profile on EventVue) — is that each Twitterer's profile photo showed up next to their tweets, so you could really associate the name to the face. (Note one thing on both of these feeds: post-Defrag tweets started showing up today. Also, I see that EventVue, via the feed link above, isn't allowing me to scroll back very far, to all the tweets during the actual event, Monday and Tuesday. I suspect they may also shut off new entries to this feed soon, or take it down altogether.  However, they previously also created the "@Defrag08" account at Twitter, where you can see all the event's tweets, going all the way back.)

It was amazing the worldwide conversation that all of us Defrag tweeps managed to get going during this very jam-packed event! Here are a couple of screen shots of replies I was getting to my Twitter account.  My favorite?  The one from "johnsonLAB" in Berlin at 1:00 am…  šŸ™‚

TweetReplies-toGT-1 















TweetReplies-toGT-2


















UPDATE:  Oh, I almost forgot — photos!  Here's my Flickr set (tagged "Defrag08"), which includes many of the slides I found interesting.

Anticipating Defrag….

Getting excited about the Defrag conference, kicking off this Sunday evening in Denver. Once again, Eric Norlin and his colleagues who originally conceived this event (including VC Brad Feld) have planned a wonderful conference program, and again attracted a stellar group — coming off a blowout successful first-year event a year ago. Defrag2008-logo
(I wrote about the inaugural version extensively: here's an index of my Defrag 2007 posts. Actually, I believe it was the last event I live-blogged, versus the live-Twittering approach I've adopted since for my conference reporting. Why has Twitter just sort of taken over?) And, with this year's advisory board including people like Esther Dyson (of PC Forum fame) and Chris Shipley (of DEMO fame), how could this not be another fantastic conference?

Last year's experience was so great in every way that I took to describing it as basically like a religious experience. I was in awe hobnobbing with so many luminaries and big thinkers. I also got to connect again with many of my friends from the early days of the Internet — Doc Searls, Chris Locke, David Weinberger, Steve Larsen, and others.  I love my (younger) friend Aaron Fulkerson's testimonial comment about Defrag 2007, used on the current web site: "The
event had quite the attendee and speakers
list. You couldnā€™t spit and not
hit an industry notable."
 
It was an amazing group — all told, about 300. The collective intelligence in the room was unlike
anything I've ever experienced, and the program, keynotes, and
discussions — both the panels and the informal variety — were
off-the-charts valuable and thought-provoking.  There was just this energy level that I can't fully describe…that we were about to collectively imagine the future of the Internet, the social web, a whole new level of collaboration. You had to be there.

And you should be there this year! It's not too late, and I even have a juicy discount code posted in my sidebar to the right. [Shhh, don't tell anybody.  I'm not sure I'm supposed to be offering that to all my blog readers — but what the hell! Maybe Eric Norlin won't read this… šŸ™‚ ] The best way to get the real skinny about what's in store this year is to check out the Defrag blog, which Eric writes so well. The man has a gift for storytelling. And, of course, check out the list of stellar speakers…and the great agenda. This conference is packed with aha moments and extreme takeaways.

What's also cool is that there are three speakers from my home state of Minnesota. Rich Hoeg of Honeywell, whom I met at our "Minnebar" BarCamp event this past spring, will be speaking about social search in the corporate environment, and Connie Bensen, a community strategist now working with Network Solutions, will be on a panel about "making the social web." Oneplace_logo
And I'm especially looking forward to a panel on "Re-imagining
the metaphors behind collaborative
tools
," which includes my friend Steve Kickert of Minnesota's own Riverock Technologies, who'll be talking about his very cool, just released from beta OnePlaceā„¢ online team collaboration and work management system. 
These guys are some amazing developers, and this thing rocks. (I know — I use it!) You can catch some buzz about OnePlaceā„¢ just starting to appear here and here. [Full disclosure: I'm a consultant to Steve's company.]

Want to see who else you'll be able to hobnob with in this intimate setting?  Check out this blog post that lists just some of the many companies attending.  People, I'm tellin' ya, this is a heavy-duty crowd!  Want to read a great rundown on what your two-day experience will be like at Defrag?  Check out this blog post, which will give you "a sense of what you'll encounter" at this great conference.

I really hope you can make it to Defrag. See you in Denver!