Here I am for my third consecutive year covering the Defrag conference in Denver. What an awesome event! The cream of the crop in tech — big thinkers, and lots of the Internet's movers-and-shakers and upcoming leaders. As I've done at two previous conferences this year, I'll be live-blogging the proceedings right here. I use a tool called Scribble Live, which I really like because I'm not limited to 140 characters per post, as I am when I live-tweet an event. Yet I can still attach photos if I wish to any given post (or even an audio or video file). Plus I can have my Twitter stream appear in real-time within the Scribble Live window as well — so it's the best of all worlds. Please follow along and let me know on Twitter how I'm doing. I'll start with the opening session Wednesday morning, and blog all the way through the final session late Thursday afternoon, when three of the original Cluetrain Manifesto guys will be on stage for the first time in 10 years.
Category: Messaging/Collaboration (Page 2 of 9)
As noted to the right in my sidebar, I'll be reporting from the DEMO conference coming up soon in Southern California. I always look forward to this time of year. I think it will be my seventh or eighth DEMO event in a row (they're held twice a year), and maybe my tenth overall. DEMO is "The Launchpad for Emerging Technology." 
Nowhere else can you get a reading on what's coming in tech better than you can at this event. Click in that graphic to the right for details about registering.
DEMO prides itself in finding the "diamonds in the rough" before anyone else. Over the years, this event has been the site of the first launch of such ventures as Palm, Java, TiVo, and E*TRADE in the mid/late '90s, and, in more recent years, Salesforce.com, VMware, Six Apart, OddPost, IronPort, GrandCentral, and Glam Media, to name a few.
DEMO says it focuses "on real products ready for market—regardless of their geography." Presenting firms hail from many countries.
So, who attends this thing? Media and bloggers, VCs, business development professionals, IT executives, and new technology firms from all over the world. DEMO says 15,000 people have attended their events over the past
19 years. Read more here: Who Attends DEMO? Here's a sampling of companies the people of DEMO have told me will be attending the upcoming event on March 1-3: Deutsche Telekom AG, August Capital, Meakem Becker Venture Capital, First Round Capital, Allegis Capital, Motorola, Google, Hitachi America, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Symantec, UBS, NYSE, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, VentureBeat, Business Week, Forbes, ABC, eWeek, North Bridge Ventures, NTTCOMWARE, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners, Verizon, Alcatel-Lucent, SVB Capital, Mayfield Fund, Granite Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, and more.
What kinds of firms will be pitching? Well, DEMO doesn't let out much in advance of the show — certainly not the list of presenters. That's a big secret. (Companies actually have been dropped from the event if they leak that they're presenting. And we press attendees, of course, have to honor that embargo as well.) The list of presenters is only released the Friday night before the event, which kicks off with a Sunday night reception. (I always post that list of presenters as soon as it's released to the press, so watch this space on the evening of February 27th.) But the DEMO producers did provide me with an interesting set of stats on the DEMO '09 presenters, represented in a couple of charts. So, here's a Breakdown of DEMO '09 Presenters by Market Segment and Funding to Date:
But should we really be expecting much excitement at DEMO this year? Isn't the economy in the tank? Does innovation really move ahead in these times? You bet it does! And the DEMO blog cites recent examples of that from the 2001 downturn. Sure, there will be fewer attendees, and fewer presenters. For the last several shows, we've seen about 65 presenters on average doing their six-minute pitches at each event. This time, it will undoubtedly be less, maybe may even fewer than 50. But I guarantee you we'll be hearing some of tomorrow's big winners, on stage for the first time. Because we always do. And the anticipation of that is, frankly, really exciting to me, and to the rest of 500+ who will be attending. It is an extremely upbeat affair, every single time.
There are some great updates being posted on The DEMO Blog, by Chris Shipley, Executive Producer, and other staff members. Here are three recent posts:
• Two Panels Just Announced for DEMO '09 … VCs on one, past DEMO company CEOs on the other
• Smart Money Takes a Flight to Quality … "yes, it's a great time to throw a conference that launches new technology products, spots trends, and celebrates innovation"
• Making a Lasting Impact … about how one past DEMO presenter, battery company Boston Power, is growing rapidly
And give a quick listen to a podcast about DEMO '09 recorded on January 29 by my friend Keith Shaw of Network World and Carla Thompson of the Guidewire Group.
Your intrepid reporter: pumped and ready. I can't wait to live-tweet DEMO '09! I did somewhere between 200 and 300 newsy tweets at the last one — so (fair warning) get ready for the firehose! And I'll be doing podcast interviews for the first time, too, with my whiz-bang new toy: a studio-quality handheld recorder. I'm gonna give it a go in the way of some short, ad-hoc interviews of presenting company founders, VCs, and various luminaries wandering the great hall, the pavilion, and (of course) the hallways. And I'm told I can upload these pretty quickly to my blog, giving those of you who can't be there at least a near-realtime sense of what's going on at DEMO.
Will you be going to DEMO '09? If so, let us know in the comments! (And let's try to meet up face-to-face.) If you can't make it, what would you most like to see covered? What answers would you be seeking if you were there? What you would most want to get out of the event?
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. 
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… 🙂
UPDATE: Oh, I almost forgot — photos! Here's my Flickr set (tagged "Defrag08"), which includes many of the slides I found interesting.
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. 
(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 couldn’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… 🙂 ] 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." 
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 OnePlace™ 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 OnePlace™ 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!
Apparently so, based on two recent studies. In the first, I’m once again honored to be included in a ranking by the Technobabble 2.0 blog, which is written by Jonny Bentwood, an analyst relations guru at Edelman PR in the UK. His latest ranking is called the Top Analyst Twitters (Micro-Bloggers). 
Earlier this year, my blog was chosen (for the second time) as one of his Top 100 Analyst Blogs, and now it’s great to be recognized in this newest ranking — at #18. As Bentwood said in his latest post, "It is not a massive shock that the people who have scored highest are the same as those who use blogging to great affect."
Technobabble’s methodology for its Twitter ranking was based on four data points, which were then weighted. 
The data points were 1) number of followers; 2) number of updates, which is what posts are called on Twitter; 3) conversation, or how many people have engaged in conversation with each analyst; and 4) "Technobabble points," the only personal, subjective measure in the algorithm, said Bentwood, with those scoring the highest in this category "having frequent, relevant, and high-quality content — asking questions, posting links or commenting on discussions." The following weightings were then used to come up with each analyst’s score: Followers=30%, Updates=15%, Conversations=30%, and Technobabble Points=25%.
In an earlier study, a few weeks ago, Louis Gray asked What’s Your Twitter Noise Ratio? He said this in his blog post, explaining how he came to do his study: "I feel there are different categories of Twitter users, from those who
have a listening audience, measured by a high ‘followers’ to ‘updates’
ratio, those who are engaging, seen with near equal ‘followers’ and ‘updates’, and those who are more noisy, with a lot more ‘updates’ than
actual ‘followers’."
He explained how he did his analysis: "Taking a look at 48 Twitter users I either
follow or engage with, I found the average number of ‘tweets’ per ‘follower’ was almost exactly 1, measuring at 1.02. But the ratio of
updates to followers varied widely, from the sleepy 0.06 to the firehose-like 9.75." I left a comment on Louis’ post, noting I was very glad to see, upon calculating my tweets-to-follower ratio, that it was 4.84, ranking me quite high in his "Converationalists" category.
In another article just published today, How Valuable Are You on Twitter?, Daniel Terdiman of CNet examines the topic from some other angles, including Twitter coverage of the China earthquake, and citing the opinions of other some leading observers and Twitterers in regard to measuring the value of this new micro-blogging medium.
What do you think? How do you use Twitter? Is it valuable to you? In what ways?
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