Time flies when you’re having fun: it’s been two days since I returned from a Web 2.0 conference — officially titled the “New New Internet” to avoid the wrath of Tim O’Reilly — in the Washington, DC area. Someone named Ken Yarmosh posted nearly a dozen blog entries through the day, summarizing the presentations of most of the speakers; I won’t bother trying to replicate what he’s already written. Indeed, I find it impossible to blog about a conference presentation while it’s underway, because I simply can’t type, listen, and think at the same time.

Since this conference is apparently scheduled for the fall of 2007, you might find it useful to hear some general impressions in order to decide whether you should put the event on your calendar. In summary: the conference was well attended (roughly 375 attendees) and held in a very posh hotel (the Ritz-Carlton, in suburban Tyson’s Corner, VA). There was plenty of food (a full breakfast and lunch were served), plenty of coffee, soda, muffins, and munchies. The facility is only partially technology-hostile: there was a WiFi network for people to access the Internet (though I couldn’t get it to work on my machine), but there were no electrical outlets in sight. If you had a laptop with an all-day battery, you could stay connected while participating in the event; otherwise, like me, you were reduced to the old-fashioned world of notepads and pencils.

This is the third or fourth Web 2.0 conference I’ve attended this year, and one of the things that truly annoys me is that copies of the speakers’ presentations are not provided. I don’t want to be bogged down with a thousand pages of paper, but for $495, it seems to me that the conference organizers could have handed out a CD with PDF/Powerpoint copies of the presentations; heck, I’d even forego the fancy breakfast and creme brulee dessert for the material. As a frequent speaker myself, I know that one of the problems in a fast-moving technological field is that events change so quickly that you want the freedom to make changes right up to the last moment … to which the solution is to simply upload the presentation onto the conference organizer’s website, or one’s own website. The fact that none of the speakers did so — and that the conference organizers apparently found it unnecessary to insist upon it — strikes me as either sloppy, arrogant, paranoid, lazy, naive, or just plain stupid. Indeed, it’s even more of an insult given the subject matter of the conference: Web 2.0 is supposed to be all about sharing information, making it widely disseminated, and enabling feedback and contributions from the audience to whom it’s presented.

Well, aside from that, the conference was great: the speakers were knowledgeable, their presentations were informative and well-articulated, and the energy level throughout the room was high. The enthusiasm and energy level was also quite high among the roughly two dozen vendors stationed just outside the meeting room; several of them are local startups, and I would expect to see half of them disappear by the time the conference returns next year. But by and large, they had interesting products and services to demonstrate to anyone who stopped and listened to them; you can see a list of them, with appropriate links to their websites, on the main page of the “New New Internet” conference site.

In general, the rhetoric and evangelizing about Web 2.0 throughout the day was fairly familiar. But there were a few themes, observations, and factoids that I found interesting:

1. Jason Goldberg, CEO of Jobster, repeatedly emphasized his belief that Web 2.0 could not have happened until we had widespread, nearly pervasive usage of the Internet, with an increasingly large percentage of end-users accessing the Internet through broadband connections. Web 1.0, he argued, was a “gold rush” to mine unexplored territory in the hope of finding great wealth; but Web 2.0 is using a huge installed base of Internet users to introduce better business models to, and better user experiences to, the marketplace.
2. As an interesting commentary on public behavior, Goldberg did a quick poll of the conference audience, asking how many had visited a public library during the past month, and how many had used Google. As expected, 100% of the audience had used Google; and only 10% raised their hands to indicate they had visited a library. Times have definitely changed.
3. Also from Goldberg: rather than waiting for people to come to your website, savvy Web 2.0 companies are going where their customers and prospects are already congregating — e.g., the blogs they read, or the social communities in which they participate.
4. Rajan Seth, of Google’s Enterprise Division, emphasized the theme that “consumers = employees”. By this, he means that employees in all of our companies go home at the end of the day, and turn on their home PC for entertainment, to communicate via email, or to surf the ‘Net. And he suggests that many of these folks mutter to themselves, “When I go home, I can do ‘X’ easily on my home PC; but when I come into work, ‘X’ is almost impossible to do.” Business applications within many of our companies, Seth argues, are not delivering “user value” to our employee-consumers.
5. Seth reminded the business-oriented conference audience that consumer-oriented vendors like Google, Amazon, Yahoo, and eBay have no opportunity to train their users; thus, it’s critical for them to provide an utterly simple user interface. By contrast, many business applications are incredibly difficult to use, require an enormous investment in training, and (though he didn’t come right out and say it) present a “user-hostile” interface to the end-user. Implicit in his statement was the suggestion that successful consumer-oriented Web 2.0 vendors will begin to invade the business marketplace — because, as he said earlier, employees are consumers (and vice versa).
6. During a panel session that followed Seth’s presentation, someone suggested that email is the new basis for mashups. This was an interesting contrast to the “email is broken” theme that I heard from several Web 2.0 vendors when I met them in late August. One reason may be the distinction, noted above, between “consumer-oriented” Internet users, and “business-oriented” Internet users. The panel suggested that business users spend all day focusing on their email, because that’s where they see notifications of new tasks and assignments, reports on the status of various activities, etc. One of the panel members (I forgot to write down which one, sorry about that) argued that we should be able to use the service of Microsoft Outlook without having to actually interface with Outlook. (Later on, someone on the panel observed that most current enterprise tools, like Outlook, are neither “social” nor “collaborative.”)
7. Panel moderator Dion Hinchcliffe suggested that today’s Web 2.0 consumer applications succeed through “emergence”-based competition: good applications gradually (or sometimes quickly) attract an ever-larger crowd of happy users. But enterprise IT provides complex, predefined solutions to a captive audience; that audience may not like the solutions foisted upon them, but they have no choice. While I agree with this characterization, I think it’s also important to remember that, in more and more cases, those bored, frustrated unhappy employees can go home and devote a few hours of their spare time to open-source projects, where they can help build what they passionately believe are better systems. And, now that the job market for IT professionals has improved, they can vote with their feet: if they really dislike the tools and applications they’re forced to use in their job, they can look for a better job.
8. Microsoft’s Michael Platt spoke on the “disruptive force of Web 2.0 on the Enterprise.” He noted that there are 10-20,000 wikis being used within Microsoft, along with roughly 10,000 “internal” blogs. He also confirmed a statistic I had read elsewhere: there are roughly 3,000 external blogs written by Microsoft employees.
9. Platt noted that one of the criticisms often made of Web 2.0 products, services, and sites is that they won’t “scale” adequately to larger numbers of users. But he noted that HotMail has 250 million users, and that LiveSpace has 100 million subscribers. Of course, MySpace, Friendster, Google, Yahoo, eBay, and many other companies are dealing with equally large numbers — so it’s evident that Web 2.0 sites can scale if they’re properly architected.
10. Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School, gave the final keynote, on the topic of “Enterprise 2.0.” He argues that businesses are at the beginning of a major “transformation,” in which they’ll be moving away from the traditional behavior of technologists and managers ganging up on end-users to impose structure upon them in the form of roles, workflows, rigid automated systems, databases, etc. The Web 2.0-based transformation that forms a part of Enterprise 2.0, he says, acknowledges that people (whether consumers or business employees) want to interact with each other, and with traditional publishing mechanisms (newspapers, magazines, etc.) And in this new world, technologists are trying to get out of the way of the end-users, removing the rigid technology-based structures, and not imposing anything — the best example of which, he suggested, is Wikipedia.
11. McAfee gave us a wonderful quote: “The Internet is the world’s biggest library, but all the books are on the floor.” I did a Google search on the expression, and found various citations and rip-offs; but it appears that the comment was first made in 1992 by Ed Krol, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Internet.

All in all, it was a worthwhile day. I look forward to returning next year…