1. The blatant sales pitch in most of the “keynote” presentations was pretty obnoxious, and a real turn-off. I’ll remember that for future conferences, and I’ll be sure to warn anyone I know to avoid them like the plague.
2. At least one or two product-related keynote presentations were okay, because (a) the products play an important role in the marketplace, and conference attendees did want to hear about them, and (b) they were presented without the blatant sales pitch. The best example of this was Microsoft’s presentation about Sharepoint 2010, by Christian Finn, which was titled “Seven Essential Truths About Enterprise 2.0″.
3. Several of the vendors and presenters gave interesting case-study examples of massive adoption of E2.0 tools and products in their organization. The afore-mentioned Microsoft was one: they’ve got 92,000 employees. And IBM was another: they’re rolling out their E2.0 products to a global workforce of 400,000 employees in 170 countries.
4. There are now lots of knowledgeable consultants in the E2.0 field, many of whom gave excellent presentations, and/or participated in various panel sessions, about real-world experiences helping their clients implement new tools/products, and dealing with the political and culture-change issues. On the exhibitor’s floor, I saw an Infosys booth, and I’m they had plenty of people ready to provide such assistance; but I didn’t see any booth staffed with people from Accenture, or PwC, or various other large consulting firms you might have expected to see.
5. Many of the small vendors who exhibited here last year are gone (or at least they’re gone from this conference). And I suspect that several of the small vendors I saw this year will be gone soon, too. This is not lost on the large customers: they obviously like the security and stability associated with large vendors like IBM/Lotus, Microsoft, Cisco, etc.
6. Most of the discussions and presentations seemed to concentrate on E2.0 products and services behind the firewall — e.g., how to use such products/services to enable better collaboration among employees, faster response to proposals, business opportunities, and/or problems. There was much less discussion about reaching outside the firewall to interact/collaborate more effectively with customers, suppliers, and business partners.
7. Microsoft had the most amusing give-away toy: a flying pig, which could be launched in a slingshot fashion, and which “oinked” as it flew through the air. I brought one of them home, and our dog has been looking at it suspiciously ever since he laid eyes on it.

As growing evidence of the popularity and acceptance of Enterprise 2.0, the conference organizers will be hosting another conference in Santa Clara, CA on Nov 8-11, 2010. You can get additional details here.

For example, we know that “social media” — Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and several other examples — are becoming ever more popular, and also ever more important as an “influence” in society. As of January 2010, for example, Twitter had 75 million users (see “Twitter now has 75M users; most asleep at the mouse“, in the Jan 26, 2010 issue of Computerworld); and while Computerworld felt it was important to emphasize that “a lot of current Twitterers are inactive,” it’s also true that those who do Twitter have a disproportionate influence. It’s not just Oprah and Ashton Kutcher, with their multi-million Twitter armies, but the fact that that protesters and dissidents and ordinary citizens are using Twitter to communicate news more quickly and more effectively than the traditional media.

Cynics might well argue that 75 million is actually a very small fraction — just over 1% — of the global population. But Facebook has a user base that is estimated to be approaching 500 million. True, that’s still less than 10% of the global population; but as of April 2009, it was the fifth largest “country” in the world with a mere 200 million users (see “200 Million Strong,” in an April 8, 2009 posting on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s blog)… which means that, by now, it’s the third largest country in the world, with only China and India ahead of it.

Of course, Facebook (and MySpace, and the various others like it) is only a “virtual” country; it doesn’t have an army, it doesn’t have a Parliament, and it doesn’t have a seat at the United Nations. But maybe it should … and maybe it will. Probably not in the next 5-10 years, but it does suggest that we should start paing more attention to the blurring of “real life” and “virtual life.” Thus far, most of our attention has focused on the “virtual life” of individuals (see, for example, the excellent book, Life on the Screen, by Sherry Turkle), or relatively small “virtual communities” of individuals, in places like SecondLife.

We’ll know that things have changed irrevocably when Facebook (or MySpace or Twitter, or whatever) achieves some significant political accomplishment, such as getting a major politican elected or thrown out of office. Note that that’s completely different than the “top-down” efforts by politicians (e.g., Barack Obama) to use social media to help promote their own campaigns.

The social/political impact of future IT will, of course, become all the more important as computing becomes more ubiquitous. You’ll recall that I discussed this in part 5 of this thread of blogs (you’ve memorized all this stuff, right?), and suggested that in another 5-10 years, we might well find that a majority of the human race will have non-trivial computing devices, even if it takes the form of a mobile phone. So, if Facebook (and/or its cousins) grows from 500 million users to 5 billion users, there are bound to be some significant social/cultural consequences — the details of which I’m incapable of predicting with any specificity.

One thing is fairly obvious, though: if we’ve got 5 billion people using computers, the majority of them will be located in what we casually refer to as “third world” countries … or, more politely, “developing countries.” That means the applications that dominate the worldwide computing environment probably won’t be the ones that currently dominate the marketplace in advanced/developed countries. They might be “simple” applications that we have relegated to a back corner, like e-mail or texting; or they might be games that we’ve never seen before. Or they might be something else entirely … in any case, what creates this dominance will be culture, not technology.

One last observation, which I’ll just summarize — even though it probably deserves several blog postings on its own: the relationship between government and members of society will change, and the boundary between government and citizens will blur. I can make some educated guesses about the general nature of this change, but the details of how and when … I simply don’t know.

As for the “relationship”: recall that in part 12 of this thread, we discussed the phenomenon of resistance to change. Specifically, to the extent that new technology threatens to disrupt established political (power) structures, and/or social and religious cultures, it will almost certainly threaten to disrupt established laws, regulations, and other forms of codified behavior.

Of course, most societies have organized methods for changing their existing laws and regulations, but (a) it takes a long time, and (b) it tends to operate from the top down. Yeah, yeah, the people at the grass roots can elect new representatives, Presidents, and Prime Ministers; but unless you live in a society that operates with a “direct” town-hall-style consensus, the reality is that the day-to-day establishment of laws and codes and regulations comes from the folks at the top. And (a) they’re likely to be the same ones who were at the top five years ago, and (b) they’re likely to be 50 or 60 years old, if not older, and (c) they still haven’t figured out e-mail.

But all of that could change if you get a “Facebook army” that’s determined to make some changes. We got a minor taste of this when Twitter got used by the protesters in Iran after their controversial election last year … and I think that was just the beginning.

The other aspect of government is this: in the best of all worlds (without getting into the usual debates between liberals and conservatives), we expect government to do the things that we (individuals) cannot do for ourselves. I don’t expect a “Facebook army” to acquire guns or tanks or planes, and thus replace the government’s army and air force; and I don’t expect the “Facebook army” to start building the next generation of roads and bridges and tunnels.

But they might take on some of the responsibilities for repairing the roads and bridges and tunnels. Well, maybe even that is too much, since they’re unlikely to have the heavy equipment. But to the extent that any of this (even national defense) depends upon effective communication and collaboration — that much can be done by a Facebook army. What it means is that a lot of governmental organizations — bureaucratic committees and agencies and authorities — might find that their services were no longer needed.

Is this likely to happen in the next 5-10 years? Obviously, not completely … and maybe not at all. But it could happen little by little, without make a lot of noise, and thus without creating a lot of resistance. Want an example? Take a look at Clever Commute, and subscribe to the Clever Commute blog — I think it’s an exemplar of things to come.

But as an intellectual exercise, suppose for a moment that that was not true; suppose that we were doomed to continue using today’s hardware technology for the next 10 years. Would things get any better?

Those of us who have been working in the software industry for the past 40-50 years are likely to have a pessimistic reaction to such a scenario. “We’ve been writing lousy code, full of bugs, for the past 50 years — and we’ll probably continue to do so for the next 50 years. And we’ve been consistently over-budget and behind-schedule on our software development projects for the past 50 years — so why should we expect things to get any better in the next 50 years?”

Indeed, there is some cause for pessimism here, but there is also an optimistic response: “We have gotten better at project management, and we do write better software than we did 50 years ago. But as hardware technology has improved so astoundingly over the past several decades, business organizations and society, in general, have demanded that we solve bigger and more complex problems. And we have taken on bigger and more complex problems, until we reach the point that our efforts are just barely ‘good enough.’”

We could debate these pessimistic and optimistic perspectives for quite a long time, but for now we’ll put them aside. Back to the simple, straightforward question: what if we could only expect improvements in the computer industry from the “stuff” we do in software?

One thing is fairly obvious: it would take us another 5-10 years just to use the hardware we’ve already got! There are exceptions, of course, some of which we’ve hinted at in some of the previous postings in this blog thread. But particularly in the area of personal/home computers, and also in the area of small-business computers, we are using only a small fraction of the available computing resources. We could probably continue for another 5-10 years, writing the kind of “brute-force” software that lazy programmers have been able to write for the past decade or two; and at some point, we might have to start optimizing our code, and we might have to schedule the use of, and access to, our hardware resources. It would be extremely unpleasant to go back to the days of “batch scheduling” of computer jobs; and it would be unpleasant if we had to abandon the idea of dedicated, personal computing devices, and return to the days when lots of people had to share scarce hardware resources … but it could be done.

Again, let’s put that scenario aside for now. Let’s take a more positive, optimistic perspective: what kind of new, “good” things might we expect from the software industry? There’s one interesting perspective that we’ve been hearing from people for the past year or so: look how many apps are available on the iPhone! First it was 100,000 — which was pretty amazing — and then it was 150,000 and now it seems to be 200,000. Interestingly, I recall reading about numbers like this back in the late 1990s, when the Palm Pilot was all the rage. In a long-forgotten article in the Wall Street Journal (which I’m too lazy to track down on Google), I remember reading that Palm had cultivated a “cottage industry” of 40,000 developers who created tens of thousands of Palm apps, which they sold for a few dollars each. Of course, Palm didn’t have iTunes — and the mechanism for finding, purchasing, downloading, and installing the apps was time-consuming and tedious.

So now that we do have iTunes, does this mean we should expect a Moore’s-Law phenomenon with mobile apps? Will today’s figure of 200,000 apps escalate up to 2 million apps by 2015, and 20 million apps by 2020? Even if that were true (the likelihood of which I’ll discuss in a moment), it doesn’t necessarily mean that society will be fundamentally improved — if we had access to 2 million iPhone apps in 2015, it doesn’t necessarily follow that they would all be “killer apps.” In fact, only a small percentage of them would show up on everyone’s iPhone — but the rest could still serve a useful purpose, in the form of a “long tail” of “niche” apps that are only useful to a few people.

Indeed, the long-tail phenomenon is already quite visible in places like Amazon and the iTunes music store. In the old days, when music was sold on vinyl records, and books were only available on dead trees, retail outlets (e.g., book-stores and record stores) only had room for a limited inventory, and were thus constrained to stock and sell only their most popular items. But now, iTunes carries an inventory of approximately 5 million songs; and in any given fiscal quarter, almost every one of those 5 million songs sells at least one copy. And if it turns out that almost all of those songs sell only one copy, who cares? They’re all just bits on a disk drive, and it doesn’t really matter when you transmit one copy or a million copies to the customers who want them.

So maybe the software-driven future of technology is one in which we benefit from a long-tail phenomenon of millions of individual apps on the various hardware devices we have in our pockets, our purses, our homes, and our offices. But if that is the future, we need to ask: who will actually write all of those apps? People who already consider themselves programmers? Depending on whose estimate you believe, there may be a few million such individuals world-wide today, and if they spent their evenings and weekends working on clever apps (assuming that each of them had a clever idea), maybe that would get us from the current level of 200,000 iPhone apps to a couple million. Beyond that, I have my doubts…

Indeed, if we think that the most interesting version of the future consists of dramatically more application programs, we need to imagine a world in which people other than “professional” programmers could create them. Computer programming is no longer considered “rocket science,” so we don’t have to restrict our attention to people with university computer-science degrees; indeed, they don’t have to have any university degree. Even if we imagined that new apps required basic literacy and the educational equivalent of a high-school diploma, that would still be a very, very large number of people … indeed, perhaps enough to get us to the level of 20 million apps a decade from now.

To illustrate that this is not as crazy as it might sound, consider that until the mid-1970s, almost any kind of non-trivial computation for business, scientific, or engineering purposes required a programmer, who would hand-craft a program in FORTRAN to produce the required computational results. Today, we refer to such a program as a “spreadsheet,” and we refer to the “programmer” who creates it as a “person.” I don’t know how many copies of Excel have been sold by Microsoft, but I’m willing to be that it’s far more than 20 million; and there are many more than 20 million spreadsheets providing useful results.

So perhaps what we’re saying is that software-related technological advances will come from the introduction of a “tool” as simple and powerful as a spreadsheet, with which ordinary people can create whatever app they might imagine for their mobile computing device (or, for that matter, any computing device). Maybe it will be a “mashup” tool, developed along the lines of Yahoo Pipes, or the tools available from Microsoft and IBM and others. Maybe it will be some kind of widget, template, or other mechanism.

I don’t know if this is how the future will turn out, and I can think of one reason why there might be no relationship at all between the world of spreadsheet-developers, and the world of mobile-phone app developers. Consider this: spreadsheets are generally created in order to solve a “real” problem — e.g., because someone wants to add rows and columns of numbers in order to make a business decision. I’m sure there are exceptions, but most of us would not consider a spreadsheet to be “entertainment,” or “fun,” or some kind of “game.”

But if you look at the items in the iTunes App Store, the vast majority are games, fun, or somehow related to entertainment. There are, again, lots of exceptions (I’ve got only one game, Klondike, on my iPhone), and there are lots of apps that provide serious, productive solutions to some kind of problem. But you can’t get away from the fact that most of the apps are for amusement.

Not only that, they’re not for the amusement of the person who created the app. Instead, the app-developer is hoping to persuade others to play his game, and join in the entertainment. If millions of people are thus entertained, and if they’re willing to spend $0.99 to download and play the game, then the developer gets rich. Conversely, if nobody likes the game, or nobody even notices its existence, then the developer makes no money — and is likely to conclude that he wasted his time…

As for the “productive” apps that one finds on a mobile device, a large percentage are simply scaled-down versions of the same app that one already has on a laptop or desktop computer. In any case, though, here are the categories of apps that I think we’ll see a lot more of in the next several years, some of which may well turn out to be as much of a killer app as spreadsheets and Google:

• collaborative apps — it may be the next generation of Facebook, Twitter, and other “social media” apps, or perhaps something like the newly-released Google Wave
• virtual-world apps — most current versions of computer games could be thought of as a “virtual world” in which player(s) battle enemies, search for treasures, etc. But I think these will become far more sophisticated and intricate (e.g., like Second Life, with social rules and currencies), long-lasting, and multi-player in nature. If it can be embedded into your mobile device, with the ability to call, text, or email to you (and from you), it’s easy to imagine that some players could essentially abandon the “real world” altogether.
• more “location-aware” apps — indeed, the collaborative apps, and virtual-world apps, become all the more powerful if they know where they (and their associated human “owner”) are located, as well as knowing where other relevant participants/players are located. Looking at my iPhone, I see that roughly 25% of my apps are not only location-aware, but are able to use that information constructively. I think we’ve only begun to explore this area, because it’s only been the last couple of years that our mobile computing devices have had GPS mechanisms attached. The question to ask here, I think, is not what the “killer app” will be in the location-aware space, but rather who is likely to invent it…
• assistant/agent apps — aside from alarm clocks and simple “filters” that tell us if a designated keyword has been spotted in a newsfeed, most of today’s apps are fairly passive. We have to tell them that we want a task carried out, and we typically have to provide a great deal of specific data in order for the task to be performed. Tomorrow’s apps will gradually accumulate more and more “knowledge” about the humans they’re “connected” to, in terms of likes and dislikes, habits, areas of competence and expertise, short-term vs. long-term goals, willingness to make tradeoffs and compromises, etc. As a result, tomorrow’s apps will be able to take a more active role, offering advice, guidance, companionship, and warnings. Again, I have no idea what the specific “killer app” will be in this area; but it’s the generation of today’s children and teenagers that I think we should be watching for inspiration.

 But after a week of watching a gut-wrenching roller-coaster ride on the New York stock market, and reading various gloom-and-doom predictions of bad economic times ahead, I thought it would be more appropriate to replace that talk with a presentation on “Death-March 3: Software Processes in the New Hard Times”:

If you click on either icon, you’ll download a 12.2-megabyte PDF file that actually contains both presentations. So you can look at either one of them, depending on whether you’re feeling optimistic or pessimistic. Enjoy … or don’t.  

Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V54; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52 and V53:

1. On page 70, I added Google Maps to the list of Ajax examples.
2. On page 84, I added Google App Engine to the list of interesting products from Google.
3. On page 85, I provided a new (working) link and details about Zimbra.
4. On page 87, I added a link to IBM’s new “Bluehouse” product.
5. On pages 89-90, I added two new pages of details on the iPhone 3g.
6. On page 91, I provided additional details on CIsco’s acquisition of Five Across.
7. On page 132, I added a bullet point with a link to Nicholas Carr’s article on “Is Google Making Us Stupid?“

I probably won’t do any more updates for another week or two, but this should keep you busy for a while. Enjoy…

Here’s a summary of the additions, changes, and corrections that I made in V53; for convenience, you’ll also find that they appear in red in the PDF materials, so you can see what has changed since V52:

1. On page 6, I noted that the Michael Wesch “The Machine Is (Us)ing Us” video has now been viewed 5.6 million times, as of Jun 8, 2008.
2. On page 8, I added a bullet point indicating that while the “long tail” is not one of the main “Web 2.0 tools,” it is a “related concept”
3. On page 15, in the discussion of “risks of Web 2.0″ platform, I noted that the comparison between the Keynote/PDF version of this presentation, against the Google Apps version, was so bad that I recently deleted the Google Apps version altogether.
4. On page 17, I added a note to indicate that the chart showing usage of various technologies — including the Internet and Web 2.0 — was taken from a 2006 survey that had been cited on the previous page.
5. On page 20, I updated the Twitter example with a screen shot from my Twitter home page as of this morning.
6. On page 24, I updated the count of Twitter users to 1,811,515 as of Jun 8, 2008. I also added a new bullet point citing a Business Week article indicating that Obama and Clinton each had approximately 30,000 Twitter followers during their primary campaigns, but Obama used his more effectively.
7. On page 26, I changed the first bullet point to indicate that Zappos is a shoe-selling company, not a shoe-manufacturing company.
8. On pages 29-30, I updated the Dopplr example with screen shots from my Dopplr home page as of this morning, which shows that I’m in Rome, along with various other details about who’s in Rome, who’s in my home town of New York, etc.
9. On page 35, I added a couple of sub-bullet points about MySpace, indicating (a) that it’s larger than every other nation except China, India, the U.S., and Indonesia; and (b) that I had written a blog posting about this issue, titled “A United Nations Seat for Myspace?“
10. On page 37, I updated a note about Obama’s “Yes, We Can” video, indicating that as of Jun 8, 2008 it has now been viewed 8.0 million times.
11. On page 75, I added a citation to a blog posting entitled “Did Rails Sink Twitter?“
12. On page 80, I updated the first bullet point to indicate that the book Web 20 Design Patterns is no longer “forthcoming”; it has now been published.
13. On page 85, I updated a bullet point to indicate that, as of Jun 8, 2008, it was still unclear whether Yahoo would continue as an independent company, be acquired by Microsoft, or consummate some kind of marketing/advertising arrangement with Google.
14. On page 87, which discusses IBM’s activities in the Web 2.0 world, I added a note that IBM now has a Vice President of Social Engineering.
15. On page 88, I added a “placeholder” bullet point for the iPhone 2.0 that is scheduled to be announced/released on June 9th; and I also modified a bullet point to reflect my belief that Apple’s distribution of iPhone software apps via iTunes will represent an interesting example of the “long tail” concept.
16. On page 123, which discusses technology trends, I added a note to the bullet point asking whether computers might someday exceed human intelligence — noting that the June 2008 IEEE Spectrum journal has a special report, entitled “The Rapture of the Geeks: separating science from fiction in the technological singularity”
17. On page 127, I added a bullet point indicating that senior executives’ acceptance/non-acceptance of social networks & Web 2.0 will become a more and more significant differentiator; I also included a citation to a recent Wall Street Journal interview with Clay Shirky.
18. On page 130, I added a bullet point with a citation to another paper discussing the use of Web 2.0 in educational environments.
19. On page 134, I added a bullet point with the publishing details of Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody: the power of organizing without organizations.

As usual, you can download the 33-megabyte PDF version of this presentation by clicking here, or on the icon below; you can also download it as a 34-megabyte Powerpoint file by clicking here. It’s published under the GNU Free Documentation license (GFDL), so you’re welcome to modify the material and reuse it any way you want, free of charge; the second page of the presentation provides the usual caveat emptor disclaimers. The material is also available/downloadable as a Powerpoint file from my Slideshare page; but because Google limits the size of uploaded presentations to 10 megabytes (along with several other annoying limitations), it’s no longer available on Google Docs. If you’d like me to make the material available in some other format, or on some other hosting site, please drop me an email note and let me know.

Here’s a summary of the material that I’ve added since the last version

1. On page 5, I updated the count of YouTube downloads of Michael Wesch’s “The Machine is (us)ing Us“; it’s now up to 5.5 million downloads.
2. Also on page 5, I added a bullet point with a link to a YouTube video that provides an audiovisual explanation/definition of Web 2.0, based on the Wikipedia article.
3. Also on page 5, I added a bullet point with a link to a sarcastic YouTube spoof, entitled Restaurant 2.0.
4. On page 18, I added a bullet point with a link to a Business Week article on “Beyond Blogs“.
5. On pages 19-25, I added several new pages of material to show the Twitter website (for those who have no idea what Twitter is all about), the Twhirl client-side tweet-reader (which runs on both Windows and Mac computers), Tweetstats. and several other aspects of Twitter.
6. On page 19, I added a description of Twitter that I got via a “tweet” from a Twitter user: “IM is real-time, person-to-person communication while Twitter is baby email with everyone where you get to pick whose msgs to read.”
7. Also on page 19, I added a bullet point with a link to a case study showing how a small business is using Twitter.
8. On page 22, I added a new page to show an example of Tweetwheel.
9. On page 23, I added a bullet point with a link to a slide show that describes the difference between email, IM, blogging, and Twittering.
10. Also on page 23: I added a bullet point with a link to a St. Louis newspaper article about using Twitter to provide real-time information about the traffic impact of a repair-shutdown of a busy highway in the area. I added the same information to an existing link on page 100, which discusses the use of Web 2.0 in government.
11. On page 24, I updated the statistics about Twitter to show that it had 1,752,793 subscribers as of May 30, 2008 (which, by the way, represents almost twice as many as the 952,517 subscribers that existed on March 29th); I also added a link to this chart, which shows Twitter’s recent exponential growth. I think Twitter is going mainstream, and will really begin to scale up at this point (if its architecture can handle it, which is very much an open question at this point. If you’re interested in keeping up with the statistics about Twitter’s growth, consult Twitstats whenever you want.
12. Also on page 24: I added a bullet point with a link to GroupTweet.
13. Also on page 24: I added a bullet point link to my blog article about “Twitter in Plain English“.
14. Also on page 24: I added a bullet point with a link to Dan Farber’s May 18, 2008 blog discussing some interesting statistics about the ratio of followers to following that one sees on Twitter.
15. Also on page 24: I added a bullet point link to a blog posting on “What is Twitter Used For? The Message is the Medium“; also, from the same author, “What is Twitter For?“
16. Also on page 24: I added a bullet point with a link to an online store that now carries “Eat. Sleep. Tweet.” t-shirts.
17. On page 25, I added a bullet point with a link to Dan Farber’s Apr 28, 2008 blog posting on “What Twitter Brings to the Party“.
18. Also on page 25, I added a bullet point with a link to a new service called Tweetcube, which supports file-sharing of files, via Twitter, of up to 10 megabytes.
19. Also on page 25, I added a bullet point with a link to an article about “tweetjects” and “blogjects” (i.e., objects that tweet and blog); and I provided some examples, including the twittering London Tower Bridge, and a twittering house (see also this article from Wired).
20. Also on page 25, I added a bullet point with a link to Tweetclouds, which lets you see which words you use most frequently in your twitter messages.
21. Also on page 25, I added a bullet point with a link to Twitterphone.
22. On (new) page 26, I displayed part of the Zappos Twitter page, as well as a link to a Harvard Business Publishing article entitled “Why Zappos Pays New Employees To Quit — and You Should Too“.
23. On page 28, I eliminated the “private beta” description of Dopplr. It’s now open to the public.
24. Also on page 28: I added a bullet point to indicate that Dopplr is now integrated with LinkedIn, Twitter, Gmail, and Flickr in order to help build a larger network of one’s “fellow travelers”.
25. On pages 29-31, I added more detailed slides to explain what Dopplr is all about.
26. On page 37, I updated the bullet point about Obama’s “1984″ YouTube spoof; as of May 28, 2008, it now has 5.2 million downloads.
27. Also on page 37: I added a bullet point with a link to the Obama “Yes, We Can” YouTube video — and indicated that as of May 28, 2008 it had 7.7 million downloads.
28. On pages 32-33, I added two new pages of material about special-purpose social-networking sites, and a screen shot of interesting YouTube presentations.
29. On page 46, I added a bullet point with a link to a recent CIO article indicating that enterprise mashups are on the rise.
30. On page 47, I added a bullet point with a link to the “ultimate Yahoo Pipes mashup list“. I also added a bullet point with a link to the Yahoo Pipes Twitter link monitor, which provides a stream of Twitter tweets that contain URL’s.
31. On page 62, I added a bullet point with a link to a mini-wiki tool called Backboard.
32. On page 76, I added a bullet point with a link to an article discussing rumors that Twitter may abandon its use of Ruby on Rails.
33. On page 85, I added a bullet point with a link to an Aprill 30, 2008 Information Week article summarizing Oracle’s plans to build a Web 2.0-friendly version of its enterprise apps.
34. On page 87, which lists several Web 2.0-related things going on at IBM, I added a bullet point with a link to IBM Rocks; and I added a bullet point with a link to a recent article about IBM’s Web 2.0 tools and plans; and I also added a bullet point with a link to a Business Week article about IBM’s use of social networking.
35. On page 88, I added a bullet point with a link to the Wikipedia article summarizing the basics of Microsoft’s Sharepoint product for blogs and wikis.
36. On page 99, I added a bullet point link to David Pogue’s March 27, 2008 New York Times column on “Are You Taking Advantage of Web 2.0?” And I also added a bullet point with a link to a May 6, 2008 CIO Australia article entitled “Enterprise 2.0: what is it good for?“
37. Page 99, with a list of “trends in large companies” got so crowded and busy that I broke it in half, and put the second half on a (new) page 98.
38. On page 103, I added a bullet point with a link to an interesting example of a “laggard” culture: 20% of the U.S. population has never used e-mail.
39. On page 105, I added a bullet point with a link to a Harvard Business School podcast on strategies for succeeding with social networking technologies in the enterprise.
40. On page 126 about ubiquitous/pervasive computing, I added a bullet point with a link to the Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing.
41. On page 128, I added a new page about future UI paradigms, suggesting that (based on examples like Tweetwheel, Digg’s UI research, and IBM Rocks) some of them are likely to come from Web 2.0 vendors, startups, and inspired individuals. I also added a bullet point, with a link to Cisco’s recently-announced holographic video-conferencing technology (and I added a link to the Cisco announcement on page 90, which summarizes Cisco’s other Web 2.0 initiatives).
42. On page 99, I added a bullet point with a link to a recent McKinsey survey, summarizing usage of Web 2.0 in businesses.
43. On page 104, I added a bullet point with a link to the transparentgovt website, which has a list of about half a dozen countries whose governments are doing interesting things with Web 2.0
44. On page 126, I added a bullet point with a link to a blog posting indicating that Colombia has recently ordered 65,000 of the $100 OLPC computers, for distribution to its children. I also added a bullet point summarizing plans for a 2010-release of the 2nd-generation OLPC computer, with a link to a press release with more details.
45. Also on page 126: courtesy of Tim O’Reilly, who brought my attention to a May 31, 2008 New York Times article that I skimmed this morning but ignored, I’ve now added a bullet point on the page about ubiquitous computing to the article, which discusses billboards that are connected to the Internet, and which watch consumer reactions as they walk by.
46. On page 135, I deleted a bunch of Web 2.0 conferences that have already taken place, and added a June 25, 2008 event: International Conference on Enterprise 2.0, in Varese, Italy. I also added bullet points for upcoming Web 2.0 conferences such as SuperNova 2008 in San Francisco (June 16-18); Social Networking Conference in San Francisco (Jul 10-11); FOWA in London (Oct 8-10); Web 2.0 Expo in New York City (Sep 16-19); and the Web 2.0 Summit conference in San Francisco (Nov 5-7) . I also updated the details for the Wikimania 2008 conference in beautiful downtown Alexandria, Egypt.
47. On page 136, I added a parenthetical note to indicate that The ClueTrain Manifesto is now ten years old! (which simply demonstrates how easy it is for some companies to ignore major trends for a decade…) I also added a new book to the list: Social Networks Around The World: How is Web 2.0 Changing Your Daily Life?

I also tried to add a visual/graphic image to each page, so you wouldn’t be forced to stare at nothing but a page full of text (actually, I’m not so worried about the impact on people who look at the material on their computer screen; I’m more concerned about audiences falling asleep when I present the material in my seminar). But you should be aware that virtuall every image/graphic that you see is hyperlinked to some non-trivial material — e.g., a Website, an article, a YouTube video, etc. So don’t be fooled by pretty pictures; there’s content behind it.

I’ll probably be making some minor updates to the material during the seminar presentation in Rome next week, so check back from time to time to see if there is a new “V53″ version available.