Greetings from the Mile High City. I love the way my morning reading starts out before I head down the elevator for the kickoff of Defrag…talk about timing: My colleague Ed Kohler’s post on Overlapping Starfishes … a reminder that Feedblitz’ book-of-the month is David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous (David’s our opening speaker at Defrag) … and a blog post from Defrag producer Eric Norlin that gets at why this conference is timed perfectly. I love it. Bring on Defrag! 
Tag: Defrag Conference (Page 3 of 3)
AdaptiveBlue is a company founded by my friend Alex Iskold, who also does some great analysis type posts on Read/Write Web regularly. (I’m looking forward to seeing Alex at the Defrag conference, which starts tomorrow in Denver.) AdaptiveBlue, based in NJ, was launched at DEMOfall ’06 (my coverage). It has since received funding from Union Square Ventures in NYC. I like the company’s mission: they want everyone to "browse smarter." Who can’t support that? Alex and his firm are very much out in front of the whole Semantic Web movement. But they aren’t just talking about it; they coming up with practical tools now to help us see the power and the potential of the Semantic Web. The latest of these? SmartLinks, which bring what Alex decribes as "fun, utility, and a social dimension to your pages…whether you’re a blogger or a big media company." Here’s a screenshot showing some of the sites whose links are displayed when you click on a SmartLink.
It’s all based on a little blue icon that appears next to certain links on your site. I’ve intalled SmartLinks on this blog, and here’s what one of those little blue icons looks like, at the end of a book link on my blog: 
And here’s what you see when you click on this icon in this case — choices on where you can go to get the book, information on the author, reviews, and other links. (Installing was a breeze, by the way — it’s one click for Blogger or Typepad, my platform; a plug-in for WordPress; and just a single line of code for other types of sites. Note: to see where SmartLinks appear on my site, scroll down to the books section in my sidebar.) 
Key point about these SmartLinks: they let your readers explore related information, such as book reviews,
similar movies, stock research, music videos, etc, without navigating away from your content. That is huge.
One use of SmartLinks that’s really getting a lot of attention since the company introduced the tool a week or so ago is SmartLinks for stocks. Here’s an example of what you’d see when you click on that little blue icon next to a Google link (stock symbol: GOOG): 
For more discussion of what this is all about, see the company’s blog, including a post on how to use Smart Links for stocks. Also, on the same blog, here’s a Q&A on Smart Links.
Next Sunday, I’m off to Denver for a really cool conference called Defrag. (Here’s the blog, which will tell you what’s really goin’ on.) I’m looking forward to it, because it’s different — a smaller, more intimate kind of event. The kind of event "where you send your brains for a workout," say the producers. 
There’ll be a couple hundred really smart people participating, many whose names you would know. Folks like Esther Dyson, Jerry Michalski, Clay Shirky, David Weinberger, Doc Searls, Paul Kedrosky, Brad Feld, Jeff Clavier, Chris Shipley, Steve Larsen, and a couple of new players I’ve met in the semantic web movement, Nova Spivack and Alex Iskold. 
And that’s just a few I can remember — there are many more smart Internet minds who’ll be there. We need this kind of event after Esther Dyson retired her great "PC Forum" conference after the 2006 edition. (I’m so glad I got to cover that one. It was soo timely, and everybody-who-was-anybody was there.)
Defrag is being held at the very cool, new Denver Hyatt. Here’s an invitation to all my friends here in the Minnesota technology community: please join me at Defrag! (At least two already are, and we’re flying out together.) Denver’s not that far — and, hey, you guys need to get out of town once in a while! 🙂 I even have a special discount code that will get you $500 off. But you have to act fast, since that expires soon: the code is "DefragMN"…and you can use it when you register right here. I guarantee you, you won’t be sorry you attended this conference! Check the agenda.
One of the three producers of Defrag is a guy I know named Eric Norlin, and I’m looking forward to meeting the other two. I met Eric back in ’99 through my work with Net Perceptions, and he’s become an even more plugged-in guy since then. He’s been in the digital identity business and has run other conferences, such as Digital ID World. He lives in Florida now, but was in Colorado for many years, so has lots of contacts there. (He also was based in the Twin Cities for a couple of years, quite some time ago.) Early on, Eric even worked with the NSA, so he’s just an interesting cat to say the least. It’ll be fun to see him again. Here’s how Eric and friends describe their newest creation:
Defrag is the first conference focused solely on the internet-based tools that transform loads of information into layers of knowledge, and accelerate the “aha” moment. Defrag is about the space that lives in between knowledge management, social networking, collaboration and business intelligence …. it’s a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, builders and thinkers that are working on the next wave of software innovation.
The sponsors of Defrag are BEA, Yahoo, Me.dium, Newsgator, ThinkFree, Adaptive Blue, AOL, Dapper, HiveLive, Lijit, Near-Time, Siderean, Microsoft, ZDnet, ProQuo, and Collective Intellect. For more on the sponsors, see this post on the Defrag blog: All the Cool Kids Are Doing It.
And here’s more insight into what this inaugural Defrag is all about, from another of Eric’s blog posts, Inter-Twining at Defrag:
One of the earliest phrases that I hit upon to help describe Defrag was ‘networked knowledge’ … That idea — that knowledge is not simply a passive, managed asset, but an active agent in a system that is working for me — is the core of what we’re exploring.
I’m pumped! Watch for my live blogging next week — Monday and Tuesday, November 5 and 6. Take a look at the agenda and tell me what you like. I especially like "Social Networking in the Enterprise." Cheers.
Summer’s usually not a big time for me to be blogging from tech conferences, but I decided I had to get to Ad:Tech Chicago, July 31 – August 1, because nothing beats hot, old sweaty downtown Chicago in the summertime. 
No, seriously, I’m getting soo into ad technology and widget technology these days, how could I miss it? And I actually love being on Lake Michigan — literally! It’s being held in the Navy Pier conference center. Lots of good speakers and exhibitors at this one that I want to hear from. Please, definitely look me up if you’re there and think you have something disruptive in the world of advertising and marketing that we should all know about.
The next day, I’m back in Minneapolis for a local gig, put on by The Collaborative. It’s called Summer Venture Camp, and it should draw a couple hundred of us crazy tech startup Minnesotans looking to rule the world from the Land of 10,000 Lakes (one of which I’m sitting next to right now, and about to dive in). 
I’ll see a lot of my friends and clients at this one….including a bunch of you in my GetGoMN network, I hope!
Then, come September, I’m stoked about being able to blog from my favorite conference of ’em all, another one of the famed DEMO events — this one DEMOfall ’07”,
in my favorite other place in the world, San Diego. 
Looking forward to seeing many of my media and blogger friends at this one — and, yes, I know a lot of you VCs colleagues will be lurking about, too… 🙂 Nothing beats hearing some 70 startups, many heretofore in stealth mode, pitch their new wares. DEMO rocks! And you’ll read all about it again right here, o faithful readers….
Not sure where I might be venturing off to in October but, in November, I just have to blog from the Defrag Conference in Denver. It’s being run by, among others, my old buddy Eric Norlin, with sponsors including the Rocky Mountain Venture Capital Association and Colorado’s CTEK organization. 
Guys like Brad Feld, VC extraordinaire in Boulder, are involved, too. I just gotta find out more about the the brand of startup mojo those guys have going’ there — it’s awesome! And how can you miss an event with a sales pitch like this:
“Defrag is the first conference focused solely on the internet-based tools that transform loads of information into layers of knowledge, and accelerate the ‘aha’ moment. Defrag is about the space that lives in between knowledge management, social networking, collaboration and business intelligence. Defrag is not a version number. Rather it’s a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, builders and thinkers that are working on the next wave of software innovation.”
Hurry up and register for this one. The buzz is building, and they only have room for 300 — which is a great size for an event. You can get to know people a lot better in a group of this size, and there will be mucho heavies in attendance here.
What events are on your radar in the next few months? Tell me in the comments….
Written from the shores of the Whitefish
Chain, north of Brainerd, Minnesota.
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