Category: Uncategorized (Page 1 of 2)

Defrag: Accelerating the “aha” moment

As online data is growing and fragmenting at an exponential pace, individuals, groups and organizations are struggling to discover, assemble, organize, act on and gather feedback from that data.

Defrag is focused on the tools and technologies that accelerate the “aha” moment, and is a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, and thinkers that are building the next wave of software innovation.

Below is the liveblog I published during Defrag 2009, now archived here from beginning to end.  And my Twitterstream during the event is sprinkled in for good measure.  For more pix (about 115, some with actual captions!) here’s my complete Defrag ’09 Flickr set.

• 9:27 AM: GraemeThickins
• 9:29 AM: GraemeThickins It’s now early morning Wednesday. I arrived yesterday afternoon, and attended an excellent pre-conference dinner last night, sponsored by Gist. It was at Maggiano’s and attended by about 35 people, I’d say. I ended up at the table with founder T.A. McCann. I’m impressed with what they’re doing with Gist — check it out. Lots of great conversation and laughs last night. And, wow, the lobby bar was hoppin’, both before and after the dinner. I bailed about 10:00, though (11:00 Minneapolis time), to build strength for the all-out schmoozefest and blogfest starting today… 🙂
• 11:48 AM: GraemeThickins Eric Norlin just did event intro, and now opening speaker, Andy Kessler is up… says he promises to do his entire talk without mentioning the word “Twitter” 🙂 … “Economy Sucks” – showing some funny slides… now getting to the point: “It’s all about productivity!” … “output per worker hour”
• 11:51 AM: GraemeThickins Andy Kessler: “Are there tools we can use to defrag the economy? Hell yes!” He’s about to walk us through some…
• 11:54 AM: GraemeThickins Kessler says there are two kinds of people: “creators” and “servers”…
• 11:59 AM: GraemeThickins Service jobs that have been destroyed in recent years: manufacturing, DJs, supervisors, tellers, secretaries, librarians, postal workers (displaced by email and Twitter… “whoops, I said it”). A category of servers is “sloppers” – just move something from one side of the room to the other.
• 12:01 PM: GraemeThickins Amazon is a “slopper” company… a low-end task. But they’re moving up the productivity chain.
• 12:06 PM: GraemeThickins Andy Kessler: “There are still millions of ‘slopper’ jobs that have yet to be automated….We’re in an era of more and more government workers being added – and they don’t care about productivity.” Now he’s talking about “super sloppers”… which he says include all the marketing people that over-hype and sell stuff that isn’t worth the money.
• 12:15 PM: GraemeThickins
• 12:15 PM: GraemeThickins Next category of “sloppers” are “spongers”… another: “slimers” – which includes the finance guys who grease the economy with capital. “But we can’t just get rid of Wall Street – ‘slimers’ are important.”
• 12:23 PM: GraemeThickins Kessler: “The way to defrag the economy is to eat those jobs and replace ’em with higher brain-power jobs.” Analogy he makes is to “Soylent Green” movie: eat people!
• 12:25 PM: GraemeThickins RT @davefauth: RT @lizasperling: Can’t we just say innovation must focus on productivity – keep it short and sweet? #defragcon
• 12:35 PM: GraemeThickins Next talk is by Lili Cheng of Microsoft on “Social Boundaries.” She works in a labs group that looks at the future of social interaction. Now showing her own social map. She’s focusing her work in “social productivity at work.”
• 12:40 PM: GraemeThickins I’m live-blogging the Defrag ’09 conference here: bit.ly
• 12:43 PM: GraemeThickins Lili Cheng: “When you look at it, about 70% of people’s email is stuff they really don’t need to read, but it’s still important to them.”
• 12:45 PM: GraemeThickins RT (lol!) @nfoarbitrage: This MSFT mail “innovation” simply highlights why this kind of stuff needs to be done by start-ups #defragcon
• 12:46 PM: GraemeThickins Cheng is now talking about what MS is doing with Bing and Twitter, which she says was presented at the recent Web 2.0 Summit.
• 12:47 PM: GraemeThickins RT (lol!) @infoarbitrage: This MSFT mail “innovation” simply highlights why this kind of stuff needs to be done by start-ups #defragcon
• 12:52 PM: GraemeThickins Lily Cheng: “As silly as Twitter is, it motivates you, to go in there and have fun.”
• 12:54 PM: GraemeThickins RT @cshipley Lili Cheng: productivity projects haven’t focused on the work itself, but rather on the flow of information. #defragcon
• 12:56 PM: GraemeThickins Lili Cheng says her labs group at MS is engaged with more than 200 universities and schools in more than 20 countries. Her Twitter handle is @lilich.
• 1:27 PM: GraemeThickins Coffee break’s over, now my buddy Aaron Fulkerson (@roebot), cofounder of MindTouch is up as the first speaker in the session, ” Exploring Unsolved & Newly Discovered Problems.” His firm is trying to solve enterprise collaboration with essentially a “more elegant” MS Word. He says they’re well on the way there…”and MindTouch is free and open source.”
• 1:29 PM: GraemeThickins Now Tim Young, founder of Socialcast (@timyoung), says he’s
  “got 99 problems, but funding ain’t one of ’em” – his firm just announced a round of VC. Funny slide.
• 1:35 PM: GraemeThickins Tim Young is rolling us back to 1945, a Dr. Bush (no relation) who was the organizer of the Manhattan Project – specifically, a piece he wrote in Atlantic Monthly called “As We May Think” – about thinking machines. He likens problems he’s now trying to solve to questions raised way back them – before this kid was even born!
• 1:38 PM: GraemeThickins Eric Marcoullier, founder of Gnip is titling his talk: “The business world doesn’t give a shit about your lifestreaming app.” Huge laughs. Of course, social media is hugely useful to the enterprise – marketing, PR, customer service. But business is way more than that.” He suggests we now need to “make a leap to business intelligence*.”
• 1:45 PM: GraemeThickins Eric is @bpm140 in Twitter. Check out www.gnip.com … “data for the real-time web.” They’re created a filter for social media sites, esp focusing on YouTube, to find videos where people are talking about a given company. He’s closing by challenging developers to come up with solutions that “drive business decisions.”
• 1:49 PM: GraemeThickins
• 1:54 PM: GraemeThickins Steve Newman, CTO of Gist, is now talking about solving the problem of managing online relationships. He described Gist, but is also citing other companies “doing cool stuff” — like People Maps, ZoomInfo, Telligent, Microsoft Research (Mark Smith), Lailana.
• 1:56 PM: GraemeThickins Another keynote now: Stowe Boyd, “Deep Structure of the Real-Time Stream: Semiotics and Microsyntax.” A future-oriented talk, looking 10 years out. “What will businesses of the future look like?”
• 1:59 PM: GraemeThickins Stowe says he’s been blogging now for 10 years. Prior to that, he was investigating a collaboration tool, an open email model, called “Buzz Behive.” It was attempting to shape culture, he blogged at the time, and many people thought he “was going off the deep end.”
• 2:03 PM: GraemeThickins “The individual is the new group,” says @stoweboyd. “We define ourselves through the relationships we have with other people.” Small talk is big again, he says, but real-time is where it’s at now – and Twitter search only goes back two days now. “Must keep up with the tempo; otherwise, you’re behind.”
• 2:06 PM: GraemeThickins Stowe Boyd: “Meaning is the new search…The latter is based on scarcity… We’ll switch to having things arrive to us by way of our social networks. The important things will find you, as Eric Marcoullier said earlier.”
• 2:08 PM: GraemeThickins “A shared thread of time is how people will get work done,” says Boyd, “shared with those most important to you.” People will continue “to trade personal productivity for connectedness.” That latter will trump our other obligations.
• 2:10 PM: GraemeThickins “Flow will be the new center,” says Boyd, “like the bloodstream of the business.” We all will be the engines of meaning – “this is where business will get done.” He says this is very utopian – “I admit I am a hippie.” Oh?
• 2:17 PM: GraemeThickins
• 4:49 PM: GraemeThickins Lunch over – now “Smackdown – the 2009 Kedrosky Awards,” with moderator Paul Kedrosky (“big CNBC star,” says Eric Norlin) and panelists Guillaume Cohen (reigning champ), Aaron Levine/Box.net, Jason Lemkin/Echosign, Flip Kromer/Infochimps.
• 4:52 PM: GraemeThickins
• 4:58 PM: GraemeThickins Funny line from Kedrosky: “VCs are just people who wanted to be bankers but didn’t have the personality.” Good discussion now by panelists about current venture environment… sorry state of returns, reduced funding needed by today’s startups, etc. Mentioning Y combinator model, how that still works well…
• 5:20 PM: GraemeThickins First afternoon breakout session – I’m in the “Communication Metaphors” series now – is “Activity Streams: Changing How We Forage for Information.” Discussion leader of this series is Sameer Patel, and the first speaker is Tim Young of Socialcast. He says all humans are basically informavores (our brains crave a steady supply of information). The notion of “information scent,” as sharks smell blood, he says is reflected in seeing a Twitter RT you like, and then feeling you want to follow the person who originally tweeted.
• 5:28 PM: GraemeThickins Second speaker in this series is Alex Moore, founder of Baydin, on “Why Email’s Not Going Anywhere.” He’s making the point that email is richer and more flexible than other (esp social-media) methods. For example: 87% of emails are longer than 140 characters! See Baydin blog for more fascinating info from Alex’s research. Follow him on Twitter at @awmoore.
• 5:32 PM: GraemeThickins Third speaker in this series is Michael Cerda (@mcerda99), CEO of cc:Betty. “Email will be around for a long time.” He says that email’s final frontier will be making it smart, engaging, organized, live, sharing, and more…
• 5:41 PM: GraemeThickins Fourth speaker in series is Matt Brezina (@brezina), one of the founders of Xobni, on the topic of “Email Happiness.” People hate changing workflows. What his firm did is create a social profile of each user that appears in Outlook, used today by a vast majority of the Fortune 500. All an individual’s social media links, photo, etc, appear in their profile.
• 5:51 PM: GraemeThickins Discussion after the email session. Xobni: “Innovation of consumer web is finally happening in the enterprise. Three million people are now using it.” Baydin: “That success comes from getting people emotionally connected with a tool like this.” Socialcast: “We’re not trying to force another Facebook or Twitter into the enterprise – we’re trying to help them get business done.” cc; Betty: “I used to wish I could tweet more like Scoble or Stowe, but then I realized, hey, that’s their job. I have to push two releases out per week – I don’t have time for this shit!”
• 5:54 PM: GraemeThickins Sameer patel asks: “Is Google Wave an incremental improvement, or what?” cc:Betty: “It will take a decade to play out. People are trying to figure out use-cases.”
• 5:56 PM: GraemeThickins Xobni: “Eventually, people will like having Waves in their email.” Socialcast: “There are places where Wave makes sense.” He sees “atomizing discussions onto content. The conversation lives on the content.”
• 6:01 PM: GraemeThickins “What’s going to keep email alive is long-form ideas,” says Alex Moore of Baydin. Regarding the preference for younger kids to text, cc: Betty’s Michael Cerda says, “When they get a job, they’re gonna have to learn out how to email like the rest of us!”
• 7:08 PM: GraemeThickins I’m back, after break, ready to do more live-blogging of #defragcon…right here: bit.ly
• 7:10 PM: GraemeThickins Wow, the hallway conversation with @sether and others kept me out of the “Social Media & Community” breakout session… (Associated Content, Social Media Group, NavStar, Open Text)… with my buddy Steve Larsen as discussion leader. But I made it into the final discussion/Q&A….
• 7:18 PM: GraemeThickins I asked question about social media policies for employees – should companies even have them? How are companies going about this? Andrea Baker, NavStar, says the US Army is — put they put it out for comment first to the “troops.” She says they also are looking at potentially outlawing iPods and iPod Touches from Army facilities, and seeking feedback on that. She also said that the YouTube channel for the Iraq forces is one of the most popular channels on YouTube.
• 7:33 PM: GraemeThickins Kevin Marks of Google talking about OpenID, which now has over a billion users… he showed a logo slide that looked like a Nascar page. He’s calling his talk “The Flow-Past Web.” Talking about “empirical standards” like Oauth, Microformats.
• 7:43 PM: GraemeThickins Next up: Bill Arconati of Atlassian, speaking on “Innovation Culture – Studying the Effects of 20% Time.” His firm is 8 yrs old, about 200 employees. Few yrs ago, they wanted to implement something like Google’s 20% time. They implemented a “FedEx Day” – 24-hr coding exercise. They’re now on their 12th or 13th. Lessons include “one day isn’t enough”… “it takes a long time to ship code”… putting all their developers onto a 20% time program is a $1M gamble, they figured. Results: 48 projects, 248 days of effort, 1.1% time (not everybody wanted to do 20% time), 34 people participated, and they got 8 external blog posts about it. “Filling gaps as much as finding the next big thing”… chance to do “random wacky shit.” Follow bill @barconati.
• 7:48 PM: GraemeThickins Final “Fragment” talk is Danny Kolke, founder of Etelos, on “The Rise of the Application Marketplace.” He’s in the business of distributing apps, primarily for large institutions. Describes himself as a “cloud geek”… “finally, our day has come.”
• 7:54 PM: GraemeThickins RT @Scobleizer Do you need web hosting? Looking to go cheap? Read this success story: tumblr.com #rackspace
• 7:59 PM: GraemeThickins Danny Kolke of Etelos says he’s a cloud geek, and “our time has finally come”..he’s all about web app distribution & marketplaces #defragcon
• 8:01 PM: GraemeThickins RT@sether: apparently i don’t know as much about startrek as i thought. tweet “@zingstring know ur trek” and see how you do…
• 8:01 PM: GraemeThickins RT @sether: apparently i don’t know as much about startrek as i thought. tweet “@zingstring know ur trek” and see how you do…
• 8:04 PM: GraemeThickins Danny Kolke, Etelos: “The best web app hasn’t been been invented yet, and you may be working on it tomorrow. Users expect it.” He says web app marketplaces are a game changer, just like iTunes was a game-changer.
• 8:11 PM: GraemeThickins Final keynote of the day: “A Discussion Between Chris Shipley (Guidewire Group) and Chris Sacca (angel investor in Twitter).” The latter just did a bike ride across the the entire country, and tweeted the whole thing. He’s doing a funny schtik on his new (fictitious) startup. The idea of this chat is to chew over what they’ve heard today…
• 8:18 PM: GraemeThickins Chris (@cshipley) & Chris (@sacca) are talking about how earlier stages of the ‘Net were about snarkiness. “It enabled assholes,” says Chris Sacca. “We’re now moving to an era of the web that’s more civil.” Social media is making us more social?
• 8:23 PM: GraemeThickins The ‘following’ system feeds narcissism, says Chris Shipley. But she thinks people should be thoughtful about who they follow – take the time to look at their twitterstream, just follow those that seem interesting, deserving.
• 8:24 PM: GraemeThickins “We’re heading to community-driven authentication of voices,” says Chris Sacca.
• 8:29 PM: GraemeThickins Final thoughts on the day…. Sacca: “I’m very optimistic about the overall state of things. Even the state of VC.” The ‘Ramen’ type of startup is bringing back the passion. “I haven’t seen a business plan pushed on me in years – now, it’s about live URLs.”
• 8:35 PM: GraemeThickins
• 8:36 PM: GraemeThickins Good show, Defrag – it’s a first-day wrap! Now, reception time….
• 9:42 AM: GraemeThickins RT @defrag big day today: john winsor, jeff dachis, kim cameron, khris loux, and the cluetrain at 10 reunion. action-packed day 2 #defragcon
• 9:56 AM: GraemeThickins RT @infoarbitrage New Post: “Social Leverage” in Venture Capital bit.ly Just stirring the pot for today’s #defragcon panel
• 10:16 AM: GraemeThickins I would have come to #defragcon just for this panel today and nothing else: bit.ly
• 10:18 AM: GraemeThickins RT @mrflip @defrag does it help if I wear a stealth Hawaiian shirt in honor of fake beach day at #defragcon? (darn, didn’t bring hat & lei!)
• 10:48 AM: GraemeThickins Getting ready for Day 2 – it looks to be a great agenda. Hard to choose in the breakout sessions again! Highlight for me personally will be VC panel before lunch. I’m also going to try to post some audio interviews using this ScribbleLive tool – haven’t tried that yet. I’ll be talking with some interesting startups during breaks and lunch…
• 11:20 AM: GraemeThickins hey, @andraz – I’d like to chat with you today to get an update on Zemanta… when’s good time for you, during breaks at @defragcon
• 11:47 AM: GraemeThickins Let’s get this Day 2 party started! Eric Norlin kicking it off… introed first keynoter: John Winsor, author of “SPARK” and “Baked In” – talking today about “Creating Products and Businesses that Market Themselves”…
• 11:54 AM: GraemeThickins Winsor says there are four scenarios for telling a marketing story, “baking the marketing in”…. I’ll post the slide shortly.
• 11:57 AM: GraemeThickins Winsor now talking about Patagonia… slide is “Recognize the artificiality of the corporation.” He notes how “they invite consumers in to improve the system.” Breaking down walls, they know how to making jackets better, for example… “the power of transparency.”
• 12:02 PM: GraemeThickins
• 12:04 PM: GraemeThickins Crowdsourcing in advertising is not a new trend.. Winsor cites Planters Peanuts. They did a logo contest in 1919, and an 11-year old boy won. That’s still their logo today – the peanut guy with the top hat.
• 12:08 PM: GraemeThickins Winsor is citing some recent key happenings re: crowdsourcing in advertising… including those related to USA Today, Samsung, Unilever, Victors and Spoils. I’ll post the slide.
• 12:12 PM: GraemeThickins it’s Day 2 at #defragcon and I’m continuing to live-blog it, right here: bit.ly
• 12:14 PM: GraemeThickins Go check out Winsor’s book project online …. www.bakedin.com …it’s a crowdsourced book, continuously being updated.
• 12:17 PM: GraemeThickins Next talk is by @KhrisLoux, CEO of JS-Kit, filling in for Anil Dash, who’s laid up. He’s speaking about the Semantic Web.
• 12:19 PM: GraemeThickins Make that the “Synaptic Web”… see www.synapticweb.org.
• 12:23 PM: GraemeThickins
• 12:24 PM: GraemeThickins Back to Synaptic Web… Khris Loux: “If the information is important to you, it will find you.”
• 12:25 PM: GraemeThickins On “filtering,” Loux says, “You don’t have to read everything, just let it flow through you.”
• 12:29 PM: GraemeThickins “Implicit connections (like Facebook) are a by-product of the Synaptic Web.” Loux is showing us the Twitter page @synapticweb. Talking about other companies doing stuff in this area, Apture and Zemanta.
• 12:32 PM: GraemeThickins By the way, if Anil Dash would have made it, his talk was going to be titled “The Push Button Web.”
• 12:34 PM: GraemeThickins Now in Q&A discussion, Stowe Boyd talking about how your connections are going to make sure the right information flows to you.
• 12:35 PM: GraemeThickins “Applying people to information, faces next to data”… is what makes this work. I think that was Kevin Marks just talking back behind me.
• 12:36 PM: GraemeThickins Khris Loux: “If everything you’re doing is connected on the web, for everyone to see, is there such a thing as a secret anymore?” Hmmmm….
• 12:37 PM: GraemeThickins Next keynote should be great: Jeff Dachis and Tim Young (Socialcast) on “Social Business Design.”
• 12:40 PM: GraemeThickins Guess Jeff Dachis is doing this alone… Tim felt he was over-exposed, so he’s deferring. Jeff is based in Austin, TX. Says he’s not as good-looking as Stowe Boyd or as funny as Chris Sacca… but he’s forging on.
• 12:44 PM: GraemeThickins Jeff founded Razorfish, which grew to 2200 people. Now he’s launching into his case for why we’re in a shift to the social business. “New distributed, collaborative, and agile organizations”… powered by the millennial generation.
• 12:45 PM: GraemeThickins Jeff Dachis: “Social Business Design is the *intentional* creation of socially calibrated and dynamic business systems, process, and culture.” Got that?
• 12:47 PM: GraemeThickins What’s the purpose, the goal? Enhanced value exchange among constituents delivering improved “… blah, blah, blah
• 12:53 PM: GraemeThickins Dachis: “We needed a vocabulary… first was ‘ecosystem’ – from disparate silos to connected nodes.” The second, “hivemind”…from hoarding to collaborating. The third: “dynamic signal”…from static to dynamic, “communication as work, not for work.” The fourth, “metafilter”…. from filter failure to clear signals, “finding meaning in all the noise.” Says he focuses on measuring patterns, not counts.
• 12:56 PM: GraemeThickins He calls his four vocabulary terms “lenses” or “archetypes”… this guy is the buzzword king of Defrag so far, fer sure.
• 12:58 PM: GraemeThickins RT (likewise): @SameerPatel: @maggiefox thanks so much for hosting us all last night #defragcon
• 12:59 PM: GraemeThickins RT @tamccann: interesting home page for social business consultancy, www.dachisgroup.com – #defragcon
• 1:32 PM: GraemeThickins Got too busy on the break, chatting with @zingstring and doing an interview with Jeff Dachis, then catching up with Eric Norlin and Brad Feld. So, I’m missing most of the preso by Chris Finn of Microsoft on “Adventures in Community Learning with Podcasting”…. will post a link later.
• 1:46 PM: GraemeThickins Here’s an interview I found online of the last presenter: www.fastforwardblog.com
• 1:50 PM: GraemeThickins Next up is “A Discussion of Discovery vs. Search”… Buzz Bruggeman moderating, with Robert Scoble, Scott Beaudreau/Microsoft, Robert Reich/OneRiot.
• 1:54 PM: GraemeThickins Scoble’s now showing live his “river” of information on Friendfeed… says “I just try to pick things out that add value to my life.” About 3-4 posts per second going by…. whoooosh 🙂
• 1:56 PM: GraemeThickins watching Scoble’s live Friendfeed “river” is a wild experience… here at #defragcon
• 1:59 PM: GraemeThickins MS guy cites example of Hudson River plane crash… Scoble points out it’s really hard to go back now and find that original TwitPic photo – he spent a half hour trying to do that (finally did). The other Robert of OneRiot says real-time events are important to people – like the families of the people that were shot at Ft. Hood.
• 2:03 PM: GraemeThickins Why is Foursquare important? Scoble says “it’s a cool location thing, and it’s a game… but that gets old after a while.” But people (your friends) will give you “great information about experiences to have nearby.”
• 2:07 PM: GraemeThickins Buzz asks, why are new things on Twitter so important? Re: “Lists” feature – Scoble showing his now…anyone can go to his Twitter page and look at what’s going on in them – “don’t have to follow any of these people”… “Twitter has fundamentally changed!” He says he’s spent hundreds of hours on his lists. He even says he has a Defrag attendees list! We’re all on it… “Listoria” is a site he’s showing… lets you find whatever list you want.
• 2:11 PM: GraemeThickins Robert Reich of OneRiot is showing a “Defrag” search at his site… says it’s real-time ranking. Also has a feature calls “RiotWise,” which is about real-time advertising.
• 2:18 PM: GraemeThickins Final exchange here is on Scoble asking: “Which search is right for ‘defrag’ right at this moment? The one on Bing (about hard drive stuff), or the one on OneRiot (about the conference)?”
• 2:18 PM: GraemeThickins
• 2:21 PM: GraemeThickins Now, we’re hearing Kim Cameron, Chief Architect of Identity at Microsoft, on “Identity as a Collaboratrive Foundation.” He says “we don’t have a mouse for determining who we’re dealing with online.”
• 2:22 PM: GraemeThickins Kim Cameron: “Everyone has a mosaic of identity, and we need to be able to present that mosaic.” He says we need an “identity metasystem.”
• 2:26 PM: GraemeThickins RT @krishnan: Kim Cameron of Microsoft talking about Identity. Relief. Some geeky stuff. #defragcon
• 2:30 PM: GraemeThickins Kim Cameron showing his “AD Federation Service”… which he points out is not an MS framework. (I’m shooting pix of his slides.) Now talking about OpenID in the consumer space. Showing an OpenID Identity Selector in Plaxo as an example.
• 2:34 PM: GraemeThickins RT @ekolsky: this stuff is so cool i am almost drooling @kim_cameron #identity #defragcon
• 2:38 PM: GraemeThickins Next up is the VC panel: “Is ‘Social Leverage’ the Next Big Thing for VCs?” Panelsist: Brad Feld, Fred Wilson, Howard Lindzon, Jim Tybur, and Roger Ehrenberg. Lindzon says “social leverage” is his term. He became friends with Fred and Brad through their blogs, and Fred later invested in his startup, Wallstrip.
• 2:40 PM: GraemeThickins Fred Wilson: “The search-driven web is quickly becoming the socially drive web.” Brad Feld thinks “it’s a total joke how we use the web right now”…we’ll look back in ten years and thinks it’s crazy.
• 2:44 PM: GraemeThickins Lindzon asks how do we deal with inboxes? Roger Ehrenberg: “I spend way more time on Twitter via Tweetdeck than I do on email anymore.” Brad Feld: “I’m not overwhelmed by the amount of data.” Problem, he says, is people aren’t “rigid or disciplined” about how they deal with it, with tools we now have.
• 2:48 PM: GraemeThickins Fred Wilson now talking about how the business of building relationships has changed so drastically for VCs, over the ’80s (bus cards and calls), ’90s (email), and now online. He does everything now, quickly and efficiently, with online tools, “and I don’t even use the phone anymore.” Lindzon: “And I do everything Fred does, so don’t call me.” 🙂
• 2:55 PM: GraemeThickins Lindzon says he’s running a business, but came to the online world late, from the financial business. His next question: are we heading for some kind of a crash because of the lack of innovation in online advertising? Brad Feld: that has nothing to do with monetization of social web. Fred Wilson: “Time to call bullshit” on the ad model – look at revenue models like virtual goods! That’s where the action is. “Who cares about the 5 or 10%! Look at the other 90-95%!”
• 2:57 PM: GraemeThickins Fred Wilson: “We’re going to see some amazing monetization models outside of social gaming.” Jim Tybur says brands have opportunities to make money off virtual goods.
• 2:58 PM: GraemeThickins Fred Wilson: “We’ll see some amazing monetization models outside of social gaming.” Jim Tybur: brands have big opportunities. #defragcon
• 2:59 PM: GraemeThickins thanks for the RT! @jeneane: @GraemeThickins live blog #defrag bit.ly
• 3:02 PM: GraemeThickins Brad Feld now talking about fascinating concept of how we can all be “friends” with Fred (most of room feels they are, by show of hands), but very few have ever met him… or been at his house for dinner.
• 3:03 PM: GraemeThickins Fred Wilson: “Trouble with online video is it looks a shitload like TV. People always want to go to models they know.”
• 3:06 PM: GraemeThickins Brad Feld: we’re witnessing a lot of VC firms dying off. Takes a while, but it’s happening. Fred asking Roger to explain his blog post of today: “mix of angels w/domain expertise and VCs” – it takes a combination of investors today.
• 3:10 PM: GraemeThickins
• 3:11 PM: GraemeThickins Lunchtime! Back soon….
• 4:29 PM: GraemeThickins Back after lunch and checking out of my room. Now joining “Listening, Learning & Emergence” in progress….
• 4:34 PM: GraemeThickins Rypple is a tool to ask your colleagues work-related questions… get fast, anonymous answers. How to get people to listen? Brevity, honesty, and engagement. How they designed it for learning: continuous, action, and sharing. See more at www.rypple.com “Rypple is to feedback surveys what Twitter is to email.” For performance reviews, surveys, more…
• 4:38 PM: GraemeThickins “How Heavy is the Internet?” Next up is Dan Neely, Networked Insights (the guys with their logo on our fleece!)… Great slide, the “Life of Social Media Analysis” (I shot a pic).
• 4:44 PM: GraemeThickins Dan Neely: “huge difference between monitoring and social media analytics… the latter helps deal with the river of information.” He says there are 1.5 billion online conversations a day… “best focus group that ever existed.”
• 4:48 PM: GraemeThickins Discussion after this session: moderator asks, “People don’t like feedback – how do we make it fun?” One panelist says depends on def of fun… engagement factor is the key, we engage online, play games, cuz it’s fun. Our brains like that stimulation. Key is to bring that into the learning environment.
• 4:55 PM: GraemeThickins Rypple founder says most learning is in small chunks. Andrew Lewis, Smart.fm: “We sit and look at our Twitterstream and email inbox because we want those little microbursts of dopamine.” Humans seem to be programmed this way, he says. Good question from audience: is there way to enable group, remote learning for, say, sixth graders who want to learn about the same thing. Lewis: “Smart.fm!”
• 5:00 PM: GraemeThickins Rypple co-CEO Daniel Debow: “When kids are playing World of Warcraft, are they just playing a game or are they learning how to collaborate?”
• 5:21 PM: GraemeThickins Next session is “Context & Analytics.” Discussion leader is Ian Glazer, Burton Group. Panelists are from Collibra, Radiant Logic, Kynetx, Kognito.
• 5:29 PM: GraemeThickins Collibra is an enterprise software company integrating with and adding Business Semantics to all major SOA, EAI, and data integration vendors. RadiantLogic is a provider of virtual directory solutions for identity management and enterprise information integration. Its platform provides unified, secure access to identity and contextual views built out of heterogeneous applications and data sources.
• 5:31 PM: GraemeThickins Phil Windley of Kynetx is up now talking about the location metaphor (the web site), and suggests the metaphor of purpose is a better one.
• 5:37 PM: GraemeThickins Focusing on purpose requires a client perspective. We need intelligent, adaptive browsers to deal with purpose… and he cites companies that are doing things in this area, like Gist, AdaptiveBlue, in addition to his own (which is a builder of tools). His thesis is really interesting… will post slide of his contact info.
• 5:40 PM: GraemeThickins John Thompson of Kognitio is now talking about “Turning Data Into Money Intelligently – Fast, Easy, Flexible.” Bring it on, baby….
• 5:44 PM: GraemeThickins Kognitio provides solutions to business problems that require the acquisition, rationalization, and analysis of large or complex data, giving firms the ability to turn their raw data into valuable business insight fast.
• 5:48 PM: GraemeThickins does the moderator of this session look like Frank Zappa, or is it just me? #defragcon
• 5:51 PM: GraemeThickins I put up a bunch more #defragcon pix on my Flickr set: bit.ly
• 5:57 PM: GraemeThickins
• 7:10 PM: GraemeThickins Missed the “Sharing, Markets & People” session (just dropped back into the big room in time for the discussion/Q&A). I was out in the hallway sitting around a table with Steve Larsen, Chris Locke, Rick Levine, JP Rangaswami, and Doc Searls – recording kind of an ad-hoc, free-association conversation about Cluetrain and the whole history of these guys working together, going back to the early ’90s. (I met most of these guys back around ’97 or ’98, and have followed their amazing careers ever since.) OMG, it was fun! Before I knew it, I’d captured 43 minutes worth of this crazy gab-fest – which I’ll definitely post to my blog. Serendipity!
• 7:15 PM: GraemeThickins wait till you see the slide deck Doc Searls put together for the closing Cluetrain keynote here at #defragcon got an early peek – too good
• 7:19 PM: GraemeThickins
• 7:20 PM: GraemeThickins
• 7:21 PM: GraemeThickins
• 7:23 PM: GraemeThickins The “Cluetrain at 10” panel is beginning! This is gonna be fun….
• 7:31 PM: GraemeThickins 46 billion results on Google now for “Cluetrain”!
• 7:33 PM: GraemeThickins The slides Doc showed were funny…I shot pics and will post to my Flickr set.
• 7:43 PM: GraemeThickins Doc Searls cited the great line of Chris Locke’s that “we’re not just customers, we’re humans, and our reach exceeds your grasp.” Rick Levine says it’s a shame companies are still treating people as masses, not individuals – trying to aggregate them, segment them. JP says a statement from Cluetrain that really struck him was “hyperlinks subvert hierarchy” – and he says it’s really come true.
• 7:48 PM: GraemeThickins Question: any opinion on where we’re headed with OpenID? Rick Levine is now channeling the one Cluetrain author that couldn’t make it (David Weinberger)… he says anonymity still has its place on the web, for those who are afraid they will be attacked if they speak out, and JP cites those in the third world who also may need anonymity. Doc: “I don’t want more identity on the web. I want less.” He thinks it will be a long time before OpenID really catches on.
• 7:57 PM: GraemeThickins JP says Cluetrain was about human beings. Eric Norlin: “Isn’t it crazy that the US government is talking about regulating the ‘Net?” All agree. Now Eric’s telling the story of how Chris Locke called him in 1999 out of the blue and said he’d found something that was gonna change the world: Blogger. Eric says that was literally when Ev Williams had the server in his bedroom.
• 8:01 PM: GraemeThickins Chris Locke misses the days when bloggers were really a tight knit group, “discovering all this new stuff.” He says kids today didn’t get to experience that – “I hope that spirit can live on.”
• 8:03 PM: GraemeThickins Defrag ’09 is a wrap! Thanks Eric and team – it was awesome…