Speaker List

This year’s speaker list (far from complete) includes

• Baratunde Thurston
• Paul Buchheit
• Eric Ries
• Clara Shih
• Ben Huh
• Steve Blank

If you want a great preview of what you might see, here’s a video of Baratunde Thurston at Web 2.0 Expo New York 2009:

Conference Tracks

The conference agenda includes four main Conference tracks:

• Strategy & Business Models
• Social Media Marketing
• Design & User Experience
• Development

Our six Focus Tracks include Mobile, Community, Real-time, Analytics, Enterprise, and Cloud Computing.

This Year’s Theme: The Power of Platforms

Ten years ago, companies like AOL, Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Earthlink, and eBay battled to define the ways we would use the Web. The winners drew millions of customers, but more importantly, they spawned ecosystems that created huge opportunities for partners, vendors and competitors. Today, new wars with new players like Facebook, Twitter, and Bing are emerging on the Web—wars that create hard questions for businesses that must decide their own roles in our increasingly mobile, social, and real-time world. Web 2.0 Expo highlights the important debates, handicaps the key players, and helps you pick the winning platforms for growth in a web-fueled world.

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If you have any questions about this year’s content, be sure to leave them in the comments!

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager for Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

These relative newcomers were likely inspired by pioneering, local online community makers such as Topix. Founded in 2002, Topix is – as their About Us page says – “the leading news community on the Web, connecting people to the information and discussions that matter to them in every U.S. town and city.” It aggregates news from thousands of sources across the web and delivers content based on your chosen zip code (there’s an international audience as well of course).

But beyond posting news stories, Topix encourages its users to comment and report on stories going on in their own neighborhood. Due to this focus on community, Topix receives over 30,000 comments a day, most of which are focused on the local level.

Topix CEO Chris Tolles was gracious enough to answer a few of our questions about local online communities, user generated content, and the future of the newspaper industry (including what he thinks of Rupert Murdoch’s threat to pull News Corp. content off of Google News). Chris will also be speaking at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco this May, so be sure to register later this week!

Without further ado, another Web 2.0 Expo Speaker Interview:

Kaitlin: In a recent Topix blog post, you noted that “Topix has gone from being merely an aggregator of local news, to becoming the home of local voice on the web”. You base this on the fact that 60% of articles on Topix are original, user generated news stories, and 75% of pageviews on Topix are on the commentary.

First of all, how did you get there? What specifically makes Topix different from any other site that can throw up a comment board and host “a community”?

Chris: It’s that we have created this commentary around locality. We have 30,000 forums around specific US cities and towns. Also, we have reached critical mass with over 90,000,000 comments across millions of different threads. We created this initially as an adjunct to the news we aggregated. Now, it has really turned into the main focus of the site, especially in areas with poor news coverage.

Kaitlin: While browsing Reddit the other day, I came across this and got a good chuckle out of it. The top comment however, made me cringe a little for all the sites out there that base their models on user-generated content: “chess_the_cat: Web 2.0: You create the content; we keep the cash.”

Do you think community-based sites owe their users anything? If not money, what tangible benefits do community members/contributors receive from Topix or any community site? Is that better than money?

Chris: Well, as I mentioned before, we have provided communities with a forum to discuss what matters most to them – and this is often in lieu of a local newspaper. There is a lot of utility for our users to be able to find out what’s going on in their towns and be able to put their opinion up and join the conversation. What we owe our users is to provide a free and open place to talk about what they want.

Kaitlin: Is it possible for the Web to be supersaturated with community-based models? Are you seeing evidence of that in any particular vertical?

Chris: Well, it is much more effective to be unique— we tend to have very strong community around local, and partially it is because no one else has local message boards for every town in the US with the kind of usage we have. Also, we have a set of other message boards which have attracted interested folks from around the net. I think you will find that over the next ten years, billions of people are going to come onto the web and learn to contribute their opinion and stories to the mix. So, no I don’t think we are anywhere near supersaturated as a whole. Now, I think there are areas which have leaders with market power—classifieds in the Bay Area is going to be a Craigslist party for the foreseeable future and restaurant listings in SF are likely to be from Yelp. But there are a lot of places with growth potential

Kaitlin: Are communities targeted by location the wave of the future, so to speak? What examples of this are you seeing? What’s the potential for growth?

Chris: Clearly, communities tied together by who you know have done very well over the past five years with the rise of social networks. Communities of interest have been with us as long as there has been an Internet with Usenet, AOl et al. Location starts making sense as the basis of online community once everyone in your neighborhood is online and can be addressed there. As we have reached a point where over half the US population is on broadband, I think location and local are going to be two very large areas for growth in online community over the next several years – and the growth here at Topix, as well as the excitement around Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla and the like are indications of this.

Kaitlin: Let’s talk about the newspaper industry. Not long ago, people scoffed at Rupert Murdoch’s threat that he’d block Google and other sites from crawling News Corp. content. Some said he was just a Luddite and didn’t “get” how the Web worked. Now it seems he may have a stronger hand than any of us thought. (Here’s a great article summarizing the situation.)

As the CEO of a site that aggregates news from a variety of sources, is this keeping you awake at night? Are you worried the newspaper industry could form a syndicate wherein all papers agree to enforce a paid model?

Chris: We have had more than 10,000 media sites ask to be part of our crawl, and very few ask to be pulled out. We also syndicate our feed to large sites like ESPN, CNN and AOL. Those syndications deals seem to be of real value to local news sites, so I’m not too worried about this kind of thing at the moment.
Also, we’ve really got more traffic coming in directly to our local forums, so this is a lot less of a worry than it would have been several years ago.

Kaitlin: If newspapers start to block you from using their content (or sue you even), what does that mean for Topix? Can you continue to operate relying on “citizen journalism” ? By that I mean user generated news stories or independent blogs even.

Chris: We will certainly try and work with publishers to make sure we are making inclusion into Topix useful. Remember, the three largest newspaper co’s are investors in our company, so I’m really not worried about this as a likely scenario. But as I mentioned above, we are really focused on the local communities we have built up and it is likely that we are beyond the point of being beholden to the folks we aggregate from a traffic standpoint. That said, we try and maintain good relationships with publishers and provide value through traffic and syndication. I think we enjoy a very different role in the minds of publishers.
Newspapers source stories from our forums all the time, as well.

Kaitlin: What’s the future of citizen journalism in a world with a rebounded journalism industry? If Murdoch’s model succeeds, and journalists are once again in demand, what incentive does anyone have to report on news for free?

Chris: People have a fundamental need to be heard and contribute. The Internet enables, for the first time, this to happen easily and inexpensively more or less universally. We are not a replacement for the newspaper or the professional journalist, or for that matter the dedicated blogger. We give the average citizen the ability to contribute in a place with worldwide distribution immediately. I don’t believe journalism needs to fail for us to be successful, nor do I believe that we are going to return to a world where we let journalists have a monopoly on telling the story. That dog had its day.

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager for Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

“My nightmare is someone would ask me a question, and I wouldn’t see it.”

Jenny Cisney spends hours searching online for what people are saying about Kodak – “looking for trouble” as she calls it. As their Chief Blogger and Social Media Manager, she’s a first responder to questions or comments on Twitter about Kodak, and she blogs about such things as Kodak giveaways, Kodak Picture of the Day winners, and as was the case for the recent 2010 International CES, Kodak booth news and updates during conferences and events.

“I would tweet something like ‘first person to take a photo of yourself in the booth and send it to me on Twitter wins a digital camera,’” Cisney said about one of her many giveaway promotions at CES that generated significant buzz—and booth traffic—for Kodak.

Cisney is one of the growing number of social media managers companies hire to proactively engage customers online and to help drive interest at shows and conferences. Although social media marketing is growing, most event exhibitors have yet to fully explore tools like Twitter, Facebook Fan Pages, or blogs.

To help bridge the gap, we at Web 2.0 Expo are hosting a free webcast, “Effective Social Media for Event Exhibitors,” on Tuesday, February 23 at 10 a.m. PST. Led by Web 2.0 Expo Co-Chair and “The Twitter Book” co-author Sarah Milstein and myself (Kaitlin Pike), the one-hour session will feature real-life success stories and practical tips for using services such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and your own company blog for efficient marketing before, during, and after a show. We’ll follow the presentation with a meaty Q&A, so bring your questions.

Register for this webcast below by filling out the Google form we’ve created. We’ll email you the necessary information to sign in and join us. Space is limited, so please sign up now if you are interested.

During the webcast, we’ll discuss how Cisney and other exhibitors use social media to drive booth traffic and generate leads during events.  Specific topics we’ll cover include

• Tools and websites to use
• Measuring success with social media
• Pre- and post-show strategy
• Demographics of different social networks
• Tested and proven giveaway contests
• Organizing Booth Tweet Ups
• Upcoming trends

One strategy in particular we’ll discuss is how to start talking about your booth activities well in advance of the show. Even if you’re planning to do a lot of blogging or tweeting from the show, you’ll get better booth traffic if attendees learn ahead of time about interesting things you’re doing and can plan to visit you. “Not everyone is walking around the show checking Twitter,” Cisney notes.

If you have any questions about the webcast, please leave them in the comments or talk to us @w2e.

We look forward to talking with you in February!

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e.

Sarah Milstein is the Co-Chair of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @SarahM.

We have a small favor to ask you: We’d like you to tell us what you really thought of our conference, and what we can do to make it even better. Take our survey by logging in with the same credentials you used to register for Web 2.0 Expo New York.

As an incentive, if you take the survey you’ll be entered to win a Kindle, shipped to you at no cost.

Speaker Presentations

Did a certain session really wow you? Want to check out the content of sessions you had to miss? Luckily for you, we have dozens of speakers’ slides available online for your perusal. Please keep in mind that not all speakers choose to share their files, which is why you may not see the presentation you were looking for.

Rate the Sessions You Attended

If you haven’t already, please take a minute to rate the conference sessions you attended and let us know what you liked, what you didn’t, and why, by logging into the Attendee Directory and rating each session from one to five stars. These ratings help shape next year’s program.

Keynote Videos

In case you missed any (or want to go back and see them again), video of the keynotes from Web 2.0 Expo New York are available as well.

Flickr Photos

Hundreds of photos from Web 2.0 Expo have been posted to Flickr. Don’t forget to post your own photos of the event and tag photos with web2expo.

News and Coverage

Take a look at the media and blog coverage generated at Web 2.0 Expo New York on the News and Coverage page.

Thank you once again for joining the Web 2.0 community in New York. We look forward to seeing you next year!

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Kaitlin Pike is the Web 2.0 Expo community manager. She can be reached @w2e.

“Communication is essential,” Paige, who will speak at tonight’s Ignite Bay Area | Women Innovators, said. (Web 2.0 Expo is a sponsor of the event.) “It makes the experience for the muggee less painful.”

Although the 5-minute talk focuses on her mugging experience, Paige also intends to examine how communication can break down and escalate into conflict, whether it be with coworkers, friends, or family. As was the case with her mugging, lack of communication resulted in physical violence.

“I didn’t know what was happening because I was attacked from behind,” she said. “I didn’t know she was mugging me.”

While walking home from the grocery store through San Francisco’s Mission District last October, Paige felt a hand touch the back of her head. She assumed it was a friend playing a trick. The would-be mugger then grabbed a chunk of Paige’s hair, whirled her around and punched her in the face, leaving her with a “joker black eye.” Paige clung tightly to her laptop bag in an almost instinctive response to the hitting, which became a full-on beating. She realized later, long after the female assailant had left, that the target had been the computer.

“She didn’t communicate clearly to me that she wanted my things,” Paige said. If the mugger had first communicated what she wanted—and given an ultimatum involving violent consequences—both her and Paige could have had a win-win situation: The mugger would have gotten the laptop, and Paige would have avoided the beating and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Besides, laptops are easily replaced. “I’m insured, I’m employed; what do I have to lose?” she said.

In response to her experience, Paige created “A New Way to Mug” for robbers to follow:

1. State the other person’s behavior: “She has a laptop, and she’s just walking around with it.”
2. State your emotional response: “That pisses me off. I want that laptop.”
3. State choices to the other person as a result of your emotional response: “If you don’t give me that laptop I’m going to get violent.”

Although the example for these three steps involves muggers, Paige believes they should be applied much more broadly. “This can be used in any situation requiring negotiation,” she said.

For instance, imagine your boss gives you a deadline for a project you know needs more time. 1) State the other person’s behavior: “The boss has given me a deadline that isn’t realistic if we want a quality product.” 2) State how that makes you feel. “This makes me anxious.” 3) State choices to the other person as a result of your emotional response. “Boss, I am anxious this deadline as it stands will force us to cut back on important features. If you give me 4 more days I can deliver a much higher quality product.”

The important thing to remember, Paige said, is that the person cannot “make” you feel anything—your response to your boss could have been ambivalence; “It’s not my fault the product will suck. Oh well.”

Paige did not make the mugger feel angry—that was simply her response to Paige’s behavior.  When in a negotiation or conflict, say things such as “While you were doing this, this is how I felt.” People aren’t mind readers, and if you want to resolve issues with them you need to be straightforward with your feelings and what you want out of the discussion.

“Articulating your emotional response to another’s behavior enables the person – who can’t read your mind – to respond, which in turn leads to conflict resolution,” she said.

Paige’s Ignite talk won’t be the only how-to or communications-focused speech of the evening. Ignite has gathered together an impressive list of speakers including

• Software expert Sarah Allen
• UI and communications specialist Liat Berdugo
• She’s Geeky’s Kaliya Hamlin
• Ritual Roasters’ Eileen Hassi
• G-dcast director Sarah Lefton
• Neighborgoods’ Micki Krimmel
• Code for America’s Jen Pahlka
• InDinero and Cal’s Arielle Patrice Scott
• SF Weekly’s Alexia Tsotsis
• Altimeter Group’s Deb Schultz
• EA Games/Maxis’ Caryl Shaw
• Filmmaker Tiffany Shlain

Although the event is sold out, you can watch it live here. Be sure to tune in to hear all the great speakers. If you’ll be there in person, be sure to say hello!

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Kaitlin Pike is the Web 2.0 Expo community manager. She can be reached @w2e

Paige Finkelman is a writer and public speaker. She runs the blog Torn Paige and can be reached @peepf

As I’d hoped, the Morgan focuses on a handful of objects from Austen’s life, and the commentary is thoughtful. I was surprised, though, to find myself thinking that had Twitter been around in Austen’s time (1775-1817), she would likely have been a fan.

Austen wrote more than 3,000 letters, many to her sister Cassandra. They corresponded constantly, starting new letters to each other the minute they finished the last one and sharing the minutia of their lives. From reading Austen’s novels, I’d always assumed that people in her era spent a long time waiting for the mail. But the show mentions that during Austen’s life, mail in London and environs was delivered six times a day. Sometimes, a letter sent in the morning was delivered the same evening. Which makes snail mail sound a lot more like email or twitttering.

The speed of mail at the time and the content of the Austen sisters’ letters suggest that the desires to communicate instantly and to let other people know what you ate for breakfast aren’t modern phenomenon. Of course, Twitter lets you share your soy milk-to-cereal ratio with strangers and thus adds a layer of publishing to our updates. But people today often assume that email, Twitter and other relatively instant communication media have created a slew of brand new communication behaviors. The Jane Austen show at the Morgan suggests just the opposite: our human patterns are surprisingly consistent, and technology evolves to meet us.

Incidentally, the show doesn’t say when multi-daily snail mail faded, and I wonder if it passed out of fashion with the rise of the telegraph in the mid-1800s. Anyone know?

Want to take these tunes home with you? Here you go:

Artist: Jon Margulies
Album: TOO BIG TO FAIL
Song: Hobotech Mix
Sounds like: Techno, bassy
Get it here

Artist: Richard Cheese
Album: Sunny Side of the Moon
Sounds like: Lounge singer meets Nirvana, NIN, Pink Floyd, etc
Get it here

Artist: The Kleptones
Album: A Night at the Hip-Hopera
Sounds like: Hip hop remixes
Get it here

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Kaitlin Pike is the Web 2.0 Expo community manager. She can be reached @w2e.

From ideas through implementation, we’re looking for war stories, success stories, case studies, innovations and lessons learned. From startups to enterprises to independents, if you’re helping define the future of the Web, we want to hear from you.

Speaking at Web 2.0 Expo is great opportunity to put your ideas and projects in front of a savvy and connected audience. Submit a proposal today. Deadline for proposals is November 19 at 11:59 p.m. PST.

We’re looking for proposals for sessions and workshops in the following tracks:
•    Landscape & Strategy
•    Marketing & Community
•    Design & User Experience
•    Development
•    Web 2.0 at Work
•    Government 2.0
•    Mobile
•    Social Media

Need advice on how to write a successful speaking proposal? Check out our blog post detailing the “Dos and Don’ts” of winning submissions.

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e

For those of you unfamiliar with Ignite, here’s a brief description:

If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides which rotated after 15 seconds? Ignite captures the best of geek culture in a series of 5 minute speed presentations.

The speakers ranged from sewing fanatics to an arctic explorer - two groups you don’t typically see at the same event. Duncan Davidson took lots o’ pictures (including the one above), so be sure to look for yourself in the crowd shots!

We’ve pulled together from Twitter a few of the reactions about last night’s Ignite NYC to give you a taste of what went down. Feel free to leave your comments here about what you thought, or who you thought was the best presenter.

amyellisredux Really great #ignitenyc tonight. Exhausted but excited for tomorrow’s sessions and speakers. #w2e

mriggen I thought @ignitenyc KICKED BUTT tonight! Thanks and props to presenters and organizers. #w2e

toomz @quinnnorton Really liked what you said at #IgniteNYC “Take a truth + blurt it out.” #w2e

RayBeckerman One very cool presentation at the @ignitenyc event was by @leesan talking about design & about simplicity #w2e

cliffsmithstl @ignitenyc was awesome! You can’t beat a concentrated cluster of smart, interesting, inspiring people. #w2e #ignitenyc

imagineelection Loved #igniteNYC, especially “flat” and polar bears! But the event space was odd… #w2e should be hosted in a glass house, not a bunker.

Red_Banana Wonderful diversity of presenters tonight at @ignitenyc! And great presentations to boot. #w2e

manyas Viagra will get you to the North pole. Also, sticking your hands in someone elses groin will prevent frost bite. #ignitenyc #w2e

petrescuebarbie Quotes from sheldon and a vibrating voodoo doll… what a night @ignitenyc #w2e

petrescuebarbie A five minute talk about virtual bio warfare because of virtual chicken farming was the best laugh I’ve had tonight. #ignitenyc #w2e

ginablaber watching @brady and many others doing intriguing, quirky, insightful Ignite presentations. gotta love Ignite! #w2e presos up soon

laurenaschmidt Just gave a talk about hour-long bananas at #ignitenyc! The talks were awesome. @hmason was terrific and I really liked @arctictony’s talk!

norrisc respect for speakers at #ignitenyc; ultimate test to ur presentation skills when u have only 5min+20slides+exactly 15 sec per slide!

jeanneboyarsky #ignitenyc Science and tech writing has heart when done right - sounds like @BertBates advice to tech writers!

peterdcowan Programmer creates nag bot to provoke an email response. Neat idea but who wants more email? #ignitenyc

peterdcowan Working in government is like running blindfolded with sandbags tied around your ankles #ignitenyc

ceonyc “Hello Kitty doesn’t even have a mouth and she’s still a multibillion dollar business.” #ignitenyc

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e.

We are livestreaming selected content here. That’s almost better than a high five.

The first broadcast will be on Tuesday at 1:00 p.m. ET. Watch Tim O’Reilly welcome the Web 2.0 Expo New York community. Read our other post on livestreaming to find out what other types of events will be filmed and placed online.

And one other note about following Web 2.0 Expo New York from afar: The official hashtag is #w2e.

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Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager of Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e.