Pieces of me on community... : video

Web 2.0 Expo New York 2008 highlights

b2ix — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:57:00 GMT

This past week, I had the honor of going to O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expo in New York City. Overall, it was a great event that allowed me to connect with some of the great minds in the industry in addition to learning a lot.

Some highlights from the conference:

Tim O'Reilly's keynote -- as someone who is passionate about community first and foremost, O'Reilly's call to action for us to focus on what matters really hit home for me. Community -- not limited to technology, is what brought me to Microsoft. I think tech has a big role, but ultimately the measure of it's true worth is what does it mean to everyone else? How does it solve the really big problems of facing the environment, global health, civic participation and so on? Thank you, Tim for calling attention to what really matters.

Clay Shirky's keynote -- I've always appreciated Shirky's insights in bringing much needed depth and focus to looking at how community affects social interactions. Looking at the so called information overload problem through the lens of broken filtering methods changes the conversation, in my mind, and helps us all focus on problems to tackle

Genevieve Bell's presentation -- Much like the keynotes by O'Reilly and Shirky, this session (and her abbreviated keynote) brings a different perspective to the Web2.0 space. As an anthropologist for Intel, Bell brings rich insight and poignant questions for the future direction of how the internet impacts social interactions. How this physically shapes our environment, and how it changes our experiences with technology and each other present many new challenges and opportunities for all of us.

Avinash Kaushik's presentation -- Focused on the topic of analytics, Kaushik gave a great overview of how we effectively measure and analyze what is really going on with the Web2.0 space. Kaushik provided great insight, and gave a thoroughly entertaining presentation for a topic that can be quite dry at times.

Joshua Porter -- where to begin? Porter is great! A must read in my list of feeds, I appreciated the opportunity to attend both of his sessions, in addition to dialoguing with him on issues of reputation and recognition. (thanks also to Bryce Glass for the clarification of your definition).

Other highlights -- connecting with folks from all over. Whether it was with folks from Etsy, Lithium, Cisco, Chile, or old colleagues it was great. Additionally, New York has always been my kind of town and it's a great place for something like the Web2.0 expo. Thanks to everyone involved!

Thanks Bill!

b2ix — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:55:00 GMT

I don't know if Bill's actual last day will be like the video below, but I'm sure it will be memorable. Thanks for all the insights, vision and humor all these years. I look forward to seeing all of the wonderful things that he'll be doing at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for years to come.

Video: Bill Gates Last Day CES Clip

Organize your life (or at least your favorite urls) with Social Bookmarks

b2ix — Wed, 28 May 2008 17:58:00 GMT

While browser favorites, or bookmarks, can help people find the web sites they need, many websites are not easily categorized into the folder model common with browser bookmarks. If this situation sounds familiar to you, then Social Bookmarks can help.

Social Bookmarks present a new way for you to store and organize urls of pages you find interesting. Rather than selecting one folder in which a url shall appear in, you can now associate multiple words (or tags) with that url. Each tag essentially serves as a folder for that url, and there is no limit to the number of folders in which the website appears.

You can also add a brief description about that url for future reference. Just think how much easier it will be to find the resources you find interesting in that extended brain of ours we call the Internet.

An added bonus with the description -- if you don't want to type your own description, you can highlight the text on the page you wish to save, and it will be automatically added to the description of that bookmark.

For more information on how to save a bookmark, and organize your list of bookmarks check out the following video.

Video: Social Bookmarks - Part II

Support forums via video?

b2ix — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 22:42:00 GMT

Alex Barnett has a post pointing to Chris Prillo's video tech support experiment and wonders if this is the beginning of an online video-based technical support network. Given the amount of interest in UGC, videos, and all of the various home improvement / DIY shows, this is a natural fit. Indeed, there are variations on this theme already.

There's a recent site I ran across (via Ypulse and PopCandy) that is created for people to not only post their questions / problems, but then others post video responses as possible solutions. While this is not technical support forum, it does provide an interesting model for peer-to-peer assistance. Honestly I don't know too much about the details of how this works, but it would appear to provide plenty of opportunities for the community to decide upon the problem to be solved, in addition to the best video clip solution.

In addition to peer-to-peer assistance, I see the model put forth by howdoisaythis.com as a boon to those looking to perfect their skills at video editing and the like. With something like this, who needs reality tv shows like On The Lot?