As wonderful as it is to be here and see Web 2.0 Expo coming to life once again at Javits, it’s a bittersweet moment for me. I’m both happy and sad to announce that this will be my last event with Techweb and Web 2.0. I’ve been so lucky to have worked with this amazing community and to have learned so much from all of you. It’s been incredibly inspiring – so much, in fact, it’s inspired me to start a non-profit that will help bring the principles values of Web 2.0 to city governments. I’ve founded an organization called Code for America, which is loosely based on Teach for America, and I’ll be building it full-time starting in December. Some names you know, including Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky, serve on the board. I’ll be looking for recruits, mentors, sponsors, and other contributors for our projects, so please stay in touch by following us on Twitter at @codeforamerica and @pahlkadot.

This is really good news for the Web 2.0 events, because it provides the opportunity for someone with a perfect background, a great personality and a bunch of fresh energy and insight to take my place. That person is Sarah Milstein, co-author (with Tim O’Reilly) of The Twitter Book, former O’Reilly editor, soon-to-be graduate of the Haas Business School, Web2Open leader and repeat Web 2.0 speaker. She and Brady are the exact right combination to take this conference to the next level. Sarah is here at Javits this week and I encourage you to introduce yourself to her and share your thoughts on the event. She’s @SarahM on Twitter and smilstein@techweb.com on email.

To everyone who’s helped make Web 2.0 Expo a vibrant conference and community, thank you. Working with smart, interesting people is such a gift, and I’ve had an embarrassment of riches in the past few years. Please stay in touch.

Last January I wrote about a speaker I had contacted who was on email sabbatical. I didn’t name her at the time, but it was danah boyd, who, being back from sabbatical now, will be speaking at Web 2.0 Expo New York in November (though on her research, not on her email policies.)

I’m still a huge fan of this idea (though I haven’t had the opportunity to try it out myself yet) and was excited to see that CBC radio has done an interview with danah here.

Enjoy.

Lots of words come to mind to describe last week: affirming, social, interesting, fun, and helpful come to mind. I’m most struck by how positive the attendees were in general, even when things went wrong; I think that can be credited in part to the pleasure of being reminded that this market continues to grow and evolve in interesting and powerful ways despite the state of our economy. We needed reminding.

Words aside, we’ve had several requests for numbers. Those are reassuring as well. We had somewhere in the neighborhood of 8300 people through the doors at the event. (I will update this post later in the week when we get final confirmation of our attendance from our registration manager.) This number includes Expo Only attendees and exhibitors, and it does not include folks who registered but didn’t show up; we only count those who actually picked up a badge. That is down from about 10,000 attendees last year, but it appears that the folks who showed up this year were overall a more serious crowd; we seem to have lost those who lacked budgets or even viable business models.

So who was there? These numbers reflect our roster from two weeks out from the event, and the final numbers haven’t been crunched yet, but we asked attendees four questions when they registered, and here is how they answered.

What role(s) do you play? (attendees were asked to check all that apply)

BusinessStrategy	46.6%
Development	41.3%
Marketing	40.4%
Design/User Experience	34.6%
Product Management	26.9%
Web Operations	25.4%
Content	22%
IT	18.5%
Community Management	16.5%
Other

Which of the following is closest to your job title?

President/CEO/Owner	24.7%
Staff	18.3%
Manager	18.3%
Director	14.3%
Vice President	6.3%
COO/CFO/CIO/CTO/CSO/CXO/CMO	6%
Student	4.7%
Other	7.3%

How long has your current company been in business?

10+ years	38.2%
2-5 years	20.9%
6-10 years	14.6%
Less then 2 years	19.5%
N/A	6.7%

How many employees are at your company?

1 to 9	33%
10 to 99	22.9%
100 to 999	15.1%
1,000 to 9999	9.4%
10,000 or more	13.5%
Don’t know	6.2%

If there’s one word that comes to mind looking at these numbers, it’s DIVERSE. Web 2.0 isn’t about coding or marketing or business models, it’s all of the above. It’s not about startups or enterprise, it’s across the spectrum. It’s also not just about business; several of the top-rated sessions last week were in our Government 2.0 track, so increasingly it’s about applying the principles of Web 2.0 to governing.

Want two more numbers? 5/3 – 5/6. The dates of Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2010. That’s May 3 – 6, if you don’t mind a word in there.

I may be a bit excitable when I get onsite at a show, but I’m practically giddy about our Thursday keynote line up after having talked with Douglas Rushkoff yesterday. People keep asking “is it weird to be at the conference this year and comparing it to the past two years?” The answer is no. For one thing, the event is still very strong and this community is still very strong; folks who remember 2001 are afraid we’re reliving that, but it’s so different, as evidenced by the fact that we’ll have almost as many folks here this year as last despite the number of layoffs and shrunken budgets. But the other reason isn’t not weird is that, amidst the distress, we are finally returning to something resembling sane. What was weird was the world before; not so much in the Web 2.0 sphere, but the larger world, in which the disconnect of our financial institutions from any reality had started to spin the rest of our society into orbit.

Douglas Rushkoff’s talk on Thursday is going to make sense of the disconnect we’ve intuited in the business environment over the past decade. He starts with the trenchant observation that many companies have lost sight of their own most basic competency. As a consultant, Rushkoff has been asked to help build 2.0 communications strategies for companies; one would assume that means cultivating communities of enthusiasts of the company’s products or services, and providing greater transparency to the company’s internal workings. But what if no one in the company is actually engaged in the business they thought they were engaged in? He’s worked with a TV manufacturer at which no one in the company was actually engaged in the production of televisions; apparel companies who proudly boast of their lack of experience in designing and manufacturing clothing. How does a company that’s outsourced all of its core functions communicate with authenticity and transparency? What does it have to say?

This is just the beginning of a journey that Rushkoff embarks on touching on money as a social construct, the false assumption of the need for investment capital in a 2.0 economy, and a new model for structuring organizations around competence. The model he’s proposing relates to the idea of an integrity economy we talked about last year, but he takes it further with a fuller vision of how open source can serve as a model for the institutions that have failed us.

This is a don’t miss talk: tomorrow, Thursday, at 9:00 am in the keynote room. See you there.

Thinking of coming to the Hackathon next week but don’t know what you’d be hacking? Some news from our friends over at Sunlight Labs. They’ve been working on something called the Fifty State Project, which is essentially an openly available structured database of state legislation. From their blog:

Those of you who are familiar with Open Congress know that its power lies not in making legislative information available, but instead in how it makes legislation accessible by allowing people to interact with and repurpose what Congress produces. Unfortunately, hurdles remain in creating a better democracy at the local level and shedding light on state legislation. At Sunlight Labs, we’ve been thinking about this problem for a while and now is the time for a fix.

This is a long-term project and we hope to make significant progress with the help that shows up during the Expo next week.

If you’re planning on coming to the Hackathon and don’t already have a badge, you can register for a free Expo pass using this code: websf09hack.

Hope to see some of you there.

Recently, my colleague David Berlind introduced me to Carolyn Lawson, the CIO of California’s Public Utilities Commission. For a couple of months now, I’ve been working not just on Web 2.0 Expo, but on a new set of events the TechWeb/O’Reilly team will produce focused on the use of Web 2.0 in government, and David was excited to connect me with someone with a passion for public service, great insight into the challenges of government and technology, and an extra helping of leadership savvy.

Over lunch (for which we needed separate checks, since government employees can’t take freebies for anything over a couple of bucks), I asked Carolyn about her thoughts on the potential for the principles and technologies of Web 2.0 to transform government (and recruited her to speak at Web 2.0 Expo). As she gracefully articulated the challenges and the potential, I began to get a sense of a woman who has risen to a position of authority and power not because of her passion for technology (though she is clearly an expert), but because of her dedication to people: both the teams she leads and the public she serves. When she talked about what drives her – a firm belief that she serves the public good, that citizens rely on her teams’ systems for their safety and well-being, that her work helps people survive in a harsh world – I got shivers down my spine. And I knew that I had found the person I should profile for Ada Lovelace Day.

What is Ada Lovelace Day? It is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology, named in honor of one of the first computer programmers. A few months ago, Web 2.0 Expo Europe speaker, social software consultant, and inspiration in her own right Suw Charman-Anderson published the following on PledgeBank.com:

“I will publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if1,000 other people will do the same.”

What a great idea, Suw. Here’s my interview with Carolyn:

How did you get started in technology?

Out of self-defense. I was an administrative assistant at a brokerage firm; our office was in Northern California and the main office was in Southern California, and the network would constantly go down. I’d call the guys in SoCal and they’d say “what did you do?” It got tiring. So I went to Borders and bought a book on NT 3.5 and read it. I did it to avoid them, to avoid always calling for help.

Continue Reading »

In the process of my pre-show speaker check-ins, I had the opportunity to speak with Angel Djambazov of Jones Soda,who’ll be speaking on Thursday in the session Translating Online Success into Offline Retail Sales. I like this session because neither the product nor the speaker is one of the “usual suspects,” by which I mean that we don’t normally think of selling soda as a typically web 2.0 marketing effort, and that Angel hasn’t presented on this at other conferences. But it’s a very natural fit, and there are some great lessons in Jones’s experiences with community, user-generated content, and conversational marketing.

“Jones was Web 2.0 before there was a word for it,” Djambazov told me. By this he means that as a brand, Jones has always been street-focused. They had an early presence on college campuses, marketed at youth-oriented events like the X-Games, and engaged in various other offline community-building efforts. But they were a late adopter to the Internet, being unsure how this digital medium could help move heavy cases of flavored water. Their early efforts in social media involved display advertising on Facebook, but the results didn’t impress anyone at Jones headquarters. Angel was tasked with coming up with online efforts that created true engagement.
“No one at Jones had heard of I Can Haz Cheezburger, so I had to pitch wacky cat photos to an executive team,” said Djambazov, of their next online foray. “Luckily, they were used to wacky ideas.” The team figured that what Jones did well was mesh with niche communities with a strong sense of personality, and the popular Lolcats site fit the bill. (ICHC’s CEO Ben Huh gave a great presentation at Web 2.0 Expo New York last year, which you can watch here.) One of Jones’s differentiators is their customized labels; Djambazov created a contest that put the best Lolcats (captioned photos submitted by users) on a run of Jones soda labels distributed nationally. Ultimately, they expanded the program and put them in Target and other mainstream retail outlets.

Pitfalls in the program? “Well some of the submissions were, um, inappropriate.” That’s par for the course with user-generated content, and hopefully at least good for a laugh. But the results were remarkable. Jones saw a 42% uplift in online sales during the time of the promotion, the largest selling period outside of the holidays. Offline sales of soda featuring lolcats sold 30% more than bottles in the same run featuring other photos. Djambazov attributes the success a strong fit with the brand. “If Coke did it, it would have fallen flat,” he says.

Djambazov more targeted community marketing campaigns in the works and should have some more strategies and metrics to share with the audience next month. I’m looking forward to his session.

I am fond of reminding people who recall the last economic crash that this time, it’s not the web industry’s fault. In fact, this time around, tech is the way out of the mess we’re in. There are many ways to see this, including the efficiency gains of adopting 2.0 tools and practices still latent within our businesses, and many folks have rightly pointed out that innovative startups will be needed if we are to reinvent our economy. In the broadest sense, however, we’re talking about a way of thinking that centers around participation, transparency and openness. In retrospect, these were the assets that have been in the shortest supply in recent years.

But if you’re not keen on launching a banking 2.0 start-up at the moment, what’s one easy way a developer can start building the new economy and society we sorely need? Participate in the Open Government movement. A growing number of talented coders and designers are taking advantage of the data the government is beginning to make available and mashing it up in ways that make it accessible, useful, and meaningful to citizens, lawmakers, and any constituent you can imagine. Tim O’Reilly wrote about the significance of this trend here. Vivek Kundra, who was recently named the US Federal CIO but who previously served as the CTO of the District of Columbia, famously sponsored an innovation contest called Apps for Democracy, which invited hackers to mash up DC’s data. Sunlight Labs (the development arm of the Sunlight Foundation, which “uses the power of the Internet to shine a light on the interplay of money, lobbying, influence and government in Washington”) has extended this concept with Apps for America, which is taking submissions now through March 31st. Expect more opportunities to build utility out of government data as this movement builds.

But Sunlight is also coming to Web 2.0 Expo! We believe that the more smart people we can get involved in this movement, the better, so we’ve invited the great folks at Sunlight to come out and run a Hackathon at the Expo this year. There are a dozen odd projects currently on listed on their website; we invite you to go vote for the one you’d most like to contribute to, or suggest a new one. The one that gets the most interest will be chosen as the project for Web 2.0 Expo, and attendees can come by the hackroom and help build the app and meet some great people during the event.

You know you want to. Work on stuff that matters!

I just ran across a great interview with Stephan Spencer over at TechCrunchIT. Stephan is one of our most popular speakers (and one of the nicest!); his session last year got rave reviews and attendees keep coming back, since one of Stephan’s super powers is being up-to-the-moment in this fast-changing and sometimes ethically confusing field. Jeff Widman gets some good insights out of Stephan by asking specifically about the clash between typical enterprise culture and the demands of SEO.

Enterprise and SEO is like cognitive dissonance–SEO is nimble, experimental, dynamic, continuously iterating, never-ending process. A complete anathema to enterprise IT which is project focused, do it and forget it.
There’s also an internal disconnect because SEO crosses IT and marketing. Example: changing from horrible URL’s–super long, no keywords in the URL–to cleaner, shorter URLs is a marketing driven initiative but entirely reliant on IT execution.

This speaks to one of those structural barriers to improvement that is so easy to see (at least from the outside) and yet so hard to fix. I’m often asked how the tracks work at Web 2.0 Expo: do attendees pretty much stay in the track closest to their job function? My answer is the smart ones don’t; getting the most out of the conference usually involves attending around half the sessions outside your obvious home, if only to try on a different way of seeing things for an hour. Early stage start-ups are often forced to cross-train because everyone pitches in; even when they get to the phase where the developers aren’t doing customer support and the designers aren’t ordering the office chairs, there’s so little distance between the various roles that perspectives are easily shared. In contrast, at the enterprise level, success on the Web requires an active dissolution of the boundaries of many functions. I’m reminded of another workshop we’ll be running in April, this one by Alistair Croll and Sean Power, called Watching Websites:

Until recently, no one person in a company knew what the web was up to. Different people watched different parts of the online world: Operators tested its uptime and responsiveness; marketers counted visitors; UI designers worried about how test subjects navigated pages; and market researchers conducted surveys to understand buyer intentions. Today, these once-separate roles are being forced together. Each role has things to teach the others.

When Alistair and Sean proposed this session, we had a lot of trouble sorting out whether it belonged in web operations or marketing. Ultimately, it’ll be held in the room where the other webops talks are happening, but we’re cross listing it with marketing. We hope a bunch of marketers show up.
What other disciplines are ripe for cross-training? Leave a comment and we’ll take it up in a future post.

It’s ironic that sessions that talk about how Web 2.0 tools and practices work in the enterprise don’t naturally fit into any of our tracks. Not that we haven’t always had sessions on this topic; you’ll find them scattered throughout the other tracks, especially Fundamentals and Strategy & Business Models. We’ve also addressed how specific roles and functions make Web 2.0 a part of how they work: the conversation sounds a little different for designers restructuring teams than for marketers or developers, so there have always been talks in those tracks just for those communities. But they way we chose to organize the content, most of the sessions end up describing customer-facing strategies.

For such an essential subject, we decided that cramming these sessions into a variety of other tracks didn’t do it justice. After all, Web 2.0 at Work is finally getting really interesting. As with any sea change, the discussion is at first mostly theoretical, with real-world examples scattered thinly around the landscape. We’ve been absorbing, processing, and integrating these principles into the fabric of our work now for several years, and change takes time. For the majority of businesses, we are only starting to see real results on a significant scale now. Sleek, savvy startups have signaled what’s possible, but they’ve never had to deal with entrenched cultures and technologies. Pilot projects in enterprises have shown promise (and pitfalls), but if our goal is system-wide evolution (or for the more ambitious, revolution), we need to see what happens when this stuff gets into the lymph nodes of the organization.

So in addition to several other sessions that live in other tracks, we’ve added four sessions on Friday dedicated to Web 2.0 at Work. A couple of them are still in discussion, but one I’m particularly excited about comes to us from the smart folks at IDEO, who saw the problem of enterprise collaboration as a perfect place to apply design thinking. By linking the needs and rewards of the organization to those of the individual participants, they’ve found ways to achieve high adoption rates in their own internal collaboration efforts. Doug Solomon and Gentry Underwood will share their experiences on the last day of the conference.

Other sessions you won’t want to miss include:

Economics 2.0: Highly Effective Strategies for Putting Your Business on a Recession Diet, from Dion Hinchcliffe, Enterprise Assets are Going Virtual, from Denis Browne of SAP Labs, and Stowe Boyd’s The Open Enterprise: How Web Tools And Culture Are Remaking Business.

And stay tuned for updates as we flesh out this track over the coming weeks.