Web 2.0

I thoroughly enjoyed getting caught up in the whirlwind of Web 2.0.  My summary:

Including the gatecrashers there were probably close to a thousand people in attendance, schmoozing each other up and creating the kind of optimistic, wild enthusiasm that I haven't seen since 1999.  Silicon Valley is buzzing again -- and the powerful, the influential, and the entrepreneurial came together to trade ideas, to make connections, and to get energized to take the industry and the world to the next level.  This was, by far, the best conference I've attended in a long time.

(I judge a conference's quality by the quality of the hallway banter, and I can count the oodles of private bits that I became privy to this week as testament to the excellence of Web 2.0.)

I have neither the time nor ability to make a comprehensive archive of Web 2.0, nor do I want to repeat bits in the wonderful Web 2.0 coverage, so I'll just post my favorite memories.

Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle on the big themes of the conference:

• The web is a development environment.
  
• Websites are now software components that you can call as services.
  
• PC application stack was Intel-Others-Windows, with third party applications to lock in at the top.
  
• Web application stack is NetworkSolutions - OpenSource/Browsers - BigGuysLikeAmazonAndMapquestAndGoogle, with network effects to lock in at the top.
  
• Customers build businesses -- tons of people are putting content on the Internet to help eBay, Google, Blogging, Amazon, Flickr, etc.
  
• Microsoft won the browser war but saw no financial gains from the win.  All the value has migrated to the applications.
  
• We're seeing the end of the software upgrade cycle, because Web applications are always up-to-date.
  
• "The Power of the Tail" means you can have a lot of small players that all survive. Google AdSense takes advantage of the tail.

Cool companies showcasing goodies were debuts like JotSpot, SpikeSource, Sxip, Keyhole, Rojo, as well as Flickr, Laszlo, PubSub, and SocialText.  There's true momentum for lightweight business models.  Oft-mentioned technologies getting significant buzz in the hallway chatter were RSS, Wiki (and especially Wikipedia), Firefox, and Podcasting.  (More interesting, technologies that received no mentions in hallway chatter were SOAP-style Web Services, Longhorn, Bluetooth, and WAP.)

There are 313 billionaires in America right now, and three of them attended this conference: Mark Cuban, Jerry Yang, and Jeff Bezos.  (Out of the three, apparently there were zero billionaires for Bush. :)

Jeff Bezos enthusiastically showcased the Alexa Web Information Service and Amazon Web Services 4.0, which now has 65,000 developers and serves more than a billion web service requests a month:

[Our philosophy is] find the useful guts of Amazon and expose them... offer API's and let an ecosystem develop... It's still day one.

Tim O'Reilly said, "Web Services let us rip/mix/burn websites", recalling Apple's rip/mix/burn ad for iPod.

Bill Gross showcased Snap, a new search engine.  Said Bill, "Search results are where the journey begins." More interesting than Snap is that when Cory blogged about Snap's linking policy on BoingBoing, which was then snapped up as RSS and fed to employees at Snap.com who subscribe to a PubSub.com feed about themselves, which led to them changing the policy.  Actions and cause-and-effect reactions happen in real time in the blogosphere.  After the Snap presentation, John Battelle said, "I really want to be blogging right now."

Gian Fulgoni presented a wealth of statistics about the Internet; here are some bits I scribbled:

In the United States there are now 160 million people who use the Internet. Almost half of them have broadband at home now. The average narrowband household spends $217/quarter online; the average broadband household spends $311/quarter. People who have been using the Intenet for more than 10 years average more than $700 spent online per quarter.

This year Americans will spend $148 billion online. $35 billion of that will be spent on eBay. $1 billion a year is now spent on online content. 20% of Americans pay some of their bills online.

U.S. Internet users conducted 3.9 billion Web searches in August. [The implication is that this will be the first year that U.S. Internet users do 50 billion Web searches.]  The top 20% of searchers do 68% of the searching. The average Web searcher does 34 searches a month. [editor's note: Rifkin does more than that a day, but I'm a search junkie.]

Gian pointed out that "searchers are the online buyers", and that the Internet is now what you use for any major purchase or life decision.  We've come a long way in 10 years.

John Doerr reminded us that 500 million cell phones shipped in 2003 as part of the HereWeb (always with you), as opposed to NearWeb (PC), FarWeb (TV), WeirdWeb (voice), b2bWeb (plumbing), and DeviceWeb (devices). [editor's note: What about PersonalWeb?]

John pointed out that soon there will be 3 billion people worldwide on the Web, and 3 billion events happening in the world at any given time -- and that an interesting research problem is that of how to get relevant information to the right place at the right time.

John also noted that "MoveOn was a social networking phenomenon", and Esther Dyson agreed.

Mark Cuban had lots of interesting things to say, among them:

Wherever there's a deathmatch there's an opportunity...

A 1.5 Terabyte hard drive is $1200. And those prices will drop. [It might be easier to ship a drive with every song ever recorded and manage rights locally, rather than download a la carte.]

A Gigabyte secure digital card is $59. Consider it as an alternative delivery mechanism: shipping a Terabyte hard drive overnight is equivalent to downloading at 7 Megabits a second... File obesity is file security... It's not on the horizon to get 50 Mb pipes into the home.

If you're at this conference, your livelihood is at risk if the Induce Act passes... Orrin Hatch wouldn't know a computer if it hit him.

[On IceRocket.com:] I don't search for relevance; I wanna see what's new and what's been added and exclude external sites. [editor's note: At this point, Rohit applauded and Mark said, "Why thank you." Classic.]

I'm a natural born short seller... CNBC is like a QVC for stocks.

Had there not been a DMCA, there probably would have been alot more bandwidth coming into the home.

[On Mark Cuban's blog:] Sports writers are so driven about the scoop that they miss the in depth story, and that's what blogs provide.

Watching news in high-definition is eery. We just tell the reporter to set it up and get out of the way.

Denise Howell noted in Cubisms, "Mark was saying that if he learned one thing in the NBA, it's that a general manager's job is to keep his job. It's a good life, who would want to give it up? So if something goes awry, there's always Shaq to blame. Piracy is Hollywood's Shaq."

See also: Joyce Park's interview of Mark Cuban in Red Herring, "Cuban Lets Loose":

Red Herring: Are you a geek?
Mr. Cuban: Yes!
Red Herring: Are you sure?
Mr. Cuban: I have pictures!
Red Herring: Do you feel like you’re out of the fray since you don’t live in Silicon Valley?
Mr. Cuban: Not at all. Living in Dallas and being away from the Valley, you have to have a high bullshit meter when you come back here.

Joyce Park said about the interview: "The thing that impressed me about him is that he doesn't seem to worry about seeming stupid, and therefore he is able to allow himself to do simple but crucial things -- like focus on his own business instead of worrying about what all his competitors are doing. It's incredibly hard in Silicon Valley to stick to your own knitting instead of being distracted by the next shiny sexy thing."

Cory Doctorow had a great quip during Q & A with Mark Cuban: "TVs are just like dumb laptops that are hard to carry around."

The Google party offered a thousand points of light.

Joe Kraus debuted JotSpot, a platform for developing semi-structured content and custom lightweight applications that combines the best of wikis, databases, and the web.  Said Joe, the world needs a platform for people who are collaborating that reflects the fact that "half the time you don't know what you want when you start".  The spiffy integration with email, Yahoo RSS feeds, Google searches, and Salesforce.com made the JotSpot demo very slick.

Brewster Kahle reminded us that

Universal Access to All Knowledge is Within Our Grasp... it shouldn't be a crime in this country to give away information for free...

and provided lots of juicy bits:

There are 26 million books in the Library of Congress. Over half are out of copy, and many are out of print. Since a book is roughly a Megabyte of storage, 26 million books can be stored in 26 Terabytes, which costs $60k and could fit in a very small room.

It costs $10 to digitize a book and get it online, so the Library of Congress could be completely digitized for $260 million.

There are 8 million books that are out of print but under copyright. We call these orphans, and they should be freed. See: Kahle v. Ashcroft.

It costs $1 to print and bind a book (vs. costing $2 to borrow a book from a library).  The entire Library of Congress could be printed for $26 million.

Between 2 million and 3 million LPs and CDs have ever been published.  Archive.org offers unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, forever, for free archives of any music published under the Creative Commons license.

Between 100,000 and 200,000 movie releases have ever been published.  Half of them are Indian.  600 films in the United States are not copyrighted, and 300 of them are on Archive.org where people can use them to rip/mix/burn to make new films.

Archive.org is recording 20 televison channels 24 hours a day; already 1 Petabyte has been stored.

Usage of Archive.org has been growing; it just passed 1 Gigabit per second. It's also noteworthy that Archive.org has already spun out 4 companies.

Andrew Conru pointed out that $445 million was spent by Americans in 2003 for adult content online. (Remember, the total Americans pay for content online in a year is $1 billion.)  Margins are getting tighter in the adult business, because there exists lots of content that's hard to differentiate from freely available content.

Bill Janeway on a panel discussing the financing environment:

How many companies were started so that at the dawn of Web 2.0 we already have eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Google? ... Billions were spent to get here.

One thing we like about this environment is the number of scarred veterans who want to build [lasting] businesses... It takes 5-7 years [citing Bill Cole of BEA].

Web 1.0 was about experimentation; Web 2.0 is about building lasting value.

Rael Dornfest: "People spend more on a ringtone than they do on a full song."

Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati, was one of the most thrilling speakers at the conference. Technorati now tracks 4.1 million blogs, and the median time it takes from when someone does a blog post to that content being indexed at Technorati is 7 minutes.  Dave says,

Weblogs are the exhaust of personal attention streams.

If Yahoo is a card catalog and Google is a citation index, then Technorati tells you what's happening on the web, right now. Some blog stats:

• A new blog is created somewhere in the world every 7.4 seconds, so there are 12,000 new blogs created every day.
• Over 400,000 blog posts are created every day -- meaning there are over 4 blog posts per second in the world.
• Corporate blogs are proliferating but the absolute number (5000) is still tiny. Robert Scoble has humanized Microsoft.
• English is less than half the Blogosphere.
• About 45% of blogs are abandoned.
• RSS adoption is still low -- only 31.2% of all blogs have RSS feeds, and only 28.3% of RSS feeds are full text.  However, the most influential blogs all produce RSS.

The new attention.xml work at Technorati is very exciting.

James Currier pointed out that Tickle offers 300 self-assessment tests. 14 million active users have taken 200 million tests, which offer five insights into consumer psychology:

1. It's all about me. Tell me about me. Know me. Appreciate me.
   
2. Freud said that for humans there really only two things: sex and work, work and sex.
   
3. Your mind is different than your consumers' minds. (You: power, technology, knowledge, code, gadgets, work, dollars, sex. Them: puppies, babies, God, Nascar, celebrities, coins, sex.)
   
4. Psychology changes over time. Consumer psychology shifted circa 2001 to the point where more people were willing to use credit cards online, post photos online, and provide more personal information online.
   
5. Understand consumer motivation. At 25, it's competition. At 35, it's understanding who we are and where we fit in. At 51, it's affirmation of the choices we have made.

Expect to change your job 11 times in your lifetime. The majority of workers currently want to find new jobs.

Mary Meeker talked about China. Some bits:

China has 1.3 billion people, or 21% of the world. In 1850, China was 33% of global GDP; in 1991, less than 2%; in 2003, 4% (and 13% using purchasing power popularity).

There are 87 million users of the Internet in China, making them #2 in the world.  Within 5 years, they will be #1. 70% of Internet users in China are under 30. (30% of Internet users in the United States are under 30.)  China is #1 in the world for cell phones, cable, and phone lines.

GDP per capita in China is $619; in the United States, it's $37,000.  Opex per employee is $6500 in China's Hang Seng index, representing tremendous employee surplus; in the S & P 500 it's $73,000, and in Microsoft it's an amazing $333,000.

Andy Xie: "In the middle of every small town in Europe or the US stands a church.  In China, it is usually a Kentucky Fried Chicken or a McDonald’s or both."

Mary made the statement, "China is like the United States in the mid 1990s." What's next? Messaging, gaming, ad networks, ecommerce, and massive amounts of cross-border trade.

Marc Andreessen: "The new lock-in is clearly the data. The Internet has eBay envy."  Then he chatted about Firefox and Safari.

DJ Danger Mouse: "[Remix culture] is about the instant gratification people get from mixing music and pop culture... if I had thought about [The Grey Album] too much, it never would have happens."

Hank Barry: "Napster was the first program Shawn Fanning ever wrote. He went out, bought a Visual Basic book, and just went for it."

Udi Manber: "Google succeeded in reducing the cacophony to a single clear note. It might now be time for chamber music, and eventually perhaps a symphony."

Marc Benioff told us that Salesforce.com has 185,000 subscribers spanning 12,000 customers. Citing customers as small as Zagat (with 20 sales folks) to medium sized customers like Polycom to big companies like ADP (with 3000 sales folks), Marc proclaimed, "You've never been able to deliver the same application to 20 people and to 3000 people."

In chatting with Marc, John Battelle revealed that The Industry Standard had spent $6 million on a Siebel installation.  Apparently John was "trying to build AdSense with Siebel" -- something that demonstrates how ahead of his time John was.  Marc Benioff, with panache, declared that "the Siebel thing probably brought down the whole company."

John Battelle smiled, and added, "BoingBoing has twice the readership The Industry Standard had, with just four guys.  Now that's a lightweight business model."

Derrick Story: "As each session unfolds, so does a clearer image of where we are today and the directions we should explore. Web 2.0 is making our tech world just a little easier to understand -- and a whole lot more exciting."

Cory Doctorow gave a fantastic speech (available as mp3) about copyright and "how the forces of darkness are conspiring in smoke-filled rooms to criminalize the Internet and you're not invited."  Said Cory, "Copying is a feature, not a bug."

Mitch Kapor noted that until this conference, he had never met John Battelle.

Technology can fix a broken political system... to make the system work for everyone.  Of, by, and for the people. Is self government a meaningful concept in 2004?

There are 13 registered lobbyists for every elected official. Political investing inside the Beltway has great returns, VC-level returns...  (For example, 200-to-1 return for big agriculture subsidies.)

We were never meant to have a highly centralized government... They can stifle innovation where they can. (For example, the Intellectual Property cartel.) Overall voter turnout has been going down steadily since 1955. People feel alienated -- manipulated, not engaged.  Is our politics broken?  Yes, without a doubt.

The Dean campaign raised over $50 million -- mostly small contributions over the Internet.  This points to an embrionic mass movement for change.

If Thomas Paine were writing Common Sense today, he'd be doing it on a Linux laptop.

Wikipedia is useful and stable despite the fact that every page is fully world editable... thanks to the principles it is governed by, such as neutral point of view.

The final version of the Patriot Act was introduced simultaneously with the vote -- meaning no one who voted on it actually read it.

Now is a good time to consider an Internet-based reform movement.

Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison were entrepreneurs, not just founding fathers.

Dale Dougherty: "[O'Reilly's first magazine, Make, is for] do it yourself technology projects... Martha Stewart for geeks."  I like the forthcoming article by Charles Benton on kite aerial photography using a "silly putty viscous timer" with a ping pong ball as a tell tale.  Said Benton, "I own 250 feet."

Mike McCue: "There are 2.5 billion people with a telephone... I am interested in the opening of the telephone as a platform."  411 and 800 numbers are killerapps.

Hossein Eslambolchi: "At AT&T we say if it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features."

Peter Norvig: "For us at Google, we don't have beautiful buildings.  Labs are a state of mind more than a state of real estate." Actually, Denise Howell had a nice writeup of Peter's demo:

Peter Norvig demo'd an upcoming feature from Google at Web 2.0 that will allow you to see clusters of search results related to specific search terms. The concept is you put in, for example, someone's name, and you get a list of related links that help you focus the search based on the fact the terms you searched for are frequently associated with other terms. So when you try "George Bush", you get search clusters including "dubya," "jenna," "gaffe," and "idiot" (among others). "John Kerry" produces his own long list — but no "idiot."

Said Peter about understanding the hive mind, it's "all about understanding meaning better."

Rick Rashid when asked about personal search said,

You can store every conversation you've ever had in a terabyte.  You can store every picture you've ever taken in another terabyte.  And the Net Present Value of a terabyte is $200. 

Rick Rashid (pronounced RASH-id, not ruh-SHEED -- trust me, I used to work for him) also showed us Terraserver (which now has such good resolution you can see people!), SkyServer, Virtual Observatory Web Services, SkyQuery, World Wide Media Exchange, and Wallop.

By the way, the pronunication of Rashid's last name reminds me of another oft-mispronounced name: Vannevar Bush.  Vannevar is pronounced Van-NEE-var. as in "receiver".  Trust me, Wikipedia backs me up on this one.

Martin Nisenholtz: "Journalism is about storytelling. If it's gonna touch you, it'll touch your emotion... [The New York Times has] two separate departments: News and Op-Ed. Most blogs are rich with opinion. I read them for perspective, not with the expectation that all facts are fully vetted." (In response, John Battelle said, "Blogs are works of passion... what was the role of editors is now the role of readers. Readers are the most honest.")

Shelby Bonnie: "25% of local ads go unsold." (In response, John Battelle said, "That sounds like a business opportunity to me.")

George Conrades: "More bits.  Good."  (In response, John Battelle said, "You're an arms merchant, aren't you?")

Marc Canter: "I represent everyone else." (In response, John Battelle said, "Can I have a vote here?")

Chris Nolan: "The news decision process has moved out of the newsroom."

Mike Ramsey: "[TiVo's] role in life is to give people a better experience watching television... we're an advocate for the consumer."  Mike sees working with Hollywood and the government as essential to success. (Cory Doctorow responded, "Marconi didn't give em a say.  The VCR didn't give em a say.")

Bill Gurley talked about MMORPG's.  As with Snowcrash, welcome to the Metaverse.  Some bits:

EA's Ultima Online in 1997 was the first U.S. commercial success.

NC Soft out of Korea has a $1.6 billion market cap, with 3.5 million registered users paying $10 per month for games like Lineage and Lineage II.  Their new game, City of Heroes, has 200,000 users paying $15 per month.

Shanda out of China has a $2 billion market cap, and will do $100 million in revenues this year. They licensed a game from Korea, and use Internet cafe penetration -- there are 200,000 Internet cafes in China -- to serve more than 700,000 concurrent users.

Sony's Everquest cost $30 million to build, and should net them $500 million within 8 years.  They already have 500,000 users.

"Passion of the MMORPGs" is evidenced by prosecution of in-world theft, real world retaliation, resale of digital assets/accomplishments, and people "earning a living" playing games.  To that last point, there are now online game sweatshops at the low end, and at the high end people are making $60k a year to play a game.  Not quite the NBA or NFL... yet.

On the other hand, there is now "virtual clothing" (including brands like Nike) that deteriorate after several months so you have to buy more.

TenCent in China has an instant messaging engine called QQ that now serves 90 million users.

NeoPets in Los Angeles has characters, avatars, and persistence -- and is very sticky for the 23 million kids using it.

SecondLife by LindenLab offers development tools -- programming in a virtual world! -- that allow people in the world to create the world.  One guy built an airplane and sold it.

Bill likes MMORPG's because they have recurring revenues, competitive moats, network effects, increasing returns, "real" competition, time engagement, unlimited complexity, and of course high risk / high reward.

Allan Vermeulen: "Amazon is a technology company, and we believe that sets us apart from other retailers... by giving customers the most quality information, we offer the best product."  There are 10 million Amazon reviews, 500,000 Amazon associates, and 65,000 Amazon Web Services developers.

Bob Morgan: "Before the Internet people took 4 rolls of film a year.  Now Ofoto is closing in on 1 billion images stored, and 100 million shared."

Andrew Anker: "Good blog software is like photoshop: a plug-in architecture and an ecology of offerings around it... People optimize for the tools we give them... Companies need to understand that turning comments off doesn't stop the dialogue."

Brian Behlendorf: "To get long-lived community, have a variety of purposes."

Tim O'Reilly paraphrasing Jeff Barr about Amazon Web Services: "SLAs? We don't need 'em. People want stuff and they want it fast."

John McKinley: "Technology is like surfing: miss one wave, another comes along... Your sustaining value is only as good as your metadata."

Adam Bosworth defined platform as something that delivers value and also lets people build on top to add value.  Developers are the heart of building a platform.  He pointed out that as things become mass market, they get simpler.  Database SQL queries gave way to Web Search text queries; Web Services gave way to RSS.  On that last point, Adam said that

Web Services is like the cartoon character that ran off the cliff and is waiting to fall... The future is simplification... Look at blogs, that was the next step... The hallmark will be your 12-year-old kid can use it... There doesn't even need to be one standard.  You have a choice: RSS, RDF, Atom...  Amazon offered SOAP and HTTP, and 90% chose to do the easy thing, what a shock.

Adam also pointed out that a Web Browser is not a reliable piece of infrastructure, and yet $100 billion has been added to the market caps of Amazon, eBay, Salesforce.com, and Google since the dawn of the Browser while Microsoft's stock has dropped $50 billion.

Stewart Butterfield: "Why do the developer tools for Flash suck?  Support for developers is what wins."

Craig Newmark on a milk carton gave out a hip-hop "fo' shizzle", standing beside Jim Buckmaster: "I'm going to be spokesmodel to exploit my George Costanza-like glamour... The topic of our talk tonight is something about nerd values and speaking of nerds...."

lessons learned (transcribed by Jeff Jarvis)
    - nerd values, the golden rule, a culture of trust
    - a public commons, community of self-moderation, extreme user-centrism
    - the ironies of unbranding, demonetizing & uncompeting
    - social capital - the importance of user success sories
    - appropriate technology and other lesons from open source
    - a litmus test of light-weight business models
    - stepping off the treadmill of internet time

Jim pointed out that "users run the site for us." Later Craig gave a "hip hop shout out to Mozilla".  Fo' shizzle.

Brendan Eich talked about why Longhorn is irrelevant in the Post-Mozilla world. Firefox is compatible with the web, a big messy sprawl, and already we "took back 2% of the Web so far" (according to websidestory.com).  (editor's note: E4X is a beautiful thing too! Also, I'm excited about future plans for an offline mode for Firefox that allows for intermittent connectivity -- can a personal proxy be far?   Sounds like a plan for a personal proxy for Gmail might be in the works at Google as well, but that was hallway chatter...)

Lawrence Lessig (available as mp3) started with a bad Forbes review for Free Culture -- among other things Stephen Manes called him blustering and bloviating. None of the following are direct quotes, but they get across the points Professor Lessig made.

What did he do? What he did was to take my words, my creativity, with his own... [a review is a] right to remix without permission from anyone. The world of text knows this freedom well.

[Remix culture is] no longer just a broadcast democracy but a bottoms up democracy, no longer just a New York Times democracy but a blog democracy... This is the architecture of this form of creativity...

[Consider the potential of the digital remix.  That a $218 movie that won at Cannes would cost $400,000 if music and video clips were paid for. Or consider creative works such as DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, Hey Ya Charlie Brown, and George Bush and Tony Blair sing Endless Love.]

Potential is a function of the technology.  Restrictions are a function of the law.

The laws have massively changed.  Before 1978, copyright was opt-in; now it is opt-out.

[Thinking the INDUCE ACT is dead is an illusion.]

Getting something as simple as a clip of the President is tough due to copyright, and it is made worse by media consolidation.  Lessig has no tolerance for people who file-share illegally, but we go overboard allowing people to remix Shakespeare but not Lucas.

John Battelle: "Only one person can follow that.  Kim, where are you?"

Kim Polese debuted SpikeSource with a presentation filled with wonderfully well-done hugh macleod illustrations that complemented her speaking points. The world is moving from a top-down industrial egosystem to a bottom-up ecosystem where the real hero is the IT guy.  Governments are reconsidering their IT stacks -- Brazil, Spain, Germany, Belgium, and China are all favoring Linux, and even the Department of Defense is considering it. Companies are running their entire operations on open source. Watching the "Switch to Linux" movie of Steve, the Supervillain who switched to Linux, we're presented with the catch phrase "Linux gives us the power to crush those who oppose us....... Switch to... uh... whatever the hell you want.  Linux."

Web 2.0 arrived when demand began to supply itself.

The rules of open source: nobody owns it, everybody can use it, and anybody can improve it...

Innovation is moving to a new layer... Innovation moves to process automation to manage abundance. What kind of company assembles software that Ford did for cars or Dell did for hardware... well, we do.

An automated system for assembling software from open components sounds like... magic!  Offering CIOs validation, integration, testing, support, and services can help them manage a mature market ecology filled with commodities.

Jerry Yang: "Yahoo! is a constant work in progress." I thanked Jerry for making the job title Chief Yahoo! fashionable, and I looked forward to having that job title someday.  He told me I could have it now if I wanted, which I appreciate. I asked him if he had any good bubble stories. He deferred to Kara Swisher, who in her charming inimitable way told the story of how Jerry tried to get a free copy of her book. That's easy to understand; we techies love free swag.

Ross Mayfield: "What's really fascinating about this event and participants isn't the money gushing about or the return of the cult of the CEO or VC. Its that we learned some hard lessons, paid greater attention to what worked and tinkered away unselfishly to create new value. New architectures, but for participation as well as systems. The New New Thing is that these architectures have an easier entry point that scales from garage to beyond. But if we forget that the hard part is the business model and delivering customer value, we are going to get called on it."

Abe Fettig: "These are the things that people were talking about the most: RSS, Wikis, and Web APIs." Nicely summarized, Abe.

Jeff Jarvis: "The internet grew up. I mentioned that Jeff Bezos was more serious. Ditto Bill Gross of Idealab. Ditto everybody, really. The giddy, goofy days of tech are over. Likewise, the glum days are over, too (the fact that 600 influential people showed up for a conference on the web is the best demonstration of that). So it's a business and it's acting like one."

Some of the Web 2.0 presentations are now available.

John Battelle: "I've never been as energized by three days of content as I am right now."  I couldn't agree more!  Thank you to everyone who put in the effort to make this conference so spectacular, and the #1 question on my mind is, when's the next one?

Comments

[Ross Stapleton-Gray]

There are 26 million books in the Library of Congress. Over half are out of copy, and many are out of print. Since a book is roughly a Megabyte of storage, 26 million books can be stored in 26 Terabytes, which costs $60k and could fit in a very small room.

It costs $10 to digitize a book and get it online, so the Library of Congress could be completely digitized for $260 million.

Where is Brewster digging up these numbers? $10 to digitize a book? Maybe a text-only scan of some pulp novel you could bust up and feed into an OCR, but I've got to believe that the works in the LOC might require a bit more care and attention. "Birds of North America," ferinstance, with all those pesky Audubon prints. I strongly suspect that if Brewster got numbers from preservationists digitizing historic books, he'd get widely differing numbers.

I can't help but marvel at the sheer mass of on-line content today, though; having gotten my primary and secondary education without ever using a computer, I've now got vastly more than the whole of my old high school library at my fingertips.

[Adam]

Good points, Ross. For example, the SIMS analysis does say that the 26 million books in the Library of Congress would actually need 208 Terabytes to store.

There's a lot of other good bits in the SIMS analysis; for example,

Approximately 240 terabytes (compressed) of unique data are recorded on printed media worldwide each year...

World flow: Scanned: 1200 TB, Compressed: 240 TB, Text: 24 TB

United States flow: Scanned: 421 TB, Compressed: 84 TB, Text: 8.2 TB

[James Sherrett]

Adam, great summary of the conference. I'm back in the office now and reading through your synopsis brings back all that energy and enthusiasm for the ideas presented. Thanks for all the links and notes. As I attended I wondered what everyone with their laptop was doing - it seemed to me that they weren't really paying attention to the presentations, but rather, they were hypnotized by the wireless Internet access available and forgot how great it was to be there, in that moment. But now I'm reconsidering that thought, since your notes do such a great job of capturing the content and feel. Hmm. Perhaps I'll be one of the hypnotized next conference?

[Adam]

Thanks for the comment, James, but actually I left my laptop at home the entire week. All of my notes were hand-written in a small notebook, and I filtered out my favorite 20 percent for this post.

I think the best reason to go to a conference like Web 2.0 is to get away from the machines for a while and interact with other people who are changing the world -- and in so doing, realize the amazing ability of individuals and small groups to do innovative things. That's what I found so energizing, and that's what left me with such a wonderfully optimistic feeling.

[NudeCybot]

awesome, wish I had been there, thanks for the summary!

Is this a fucking joke? Are you real? This entire W 2.0 travesty is basically a robot communism. Privacy and individual identity will no longer be in the equation, once this ball really starts rolling. Do you not see how frightening that will be? Giving the masses access to every aspect in one another's lives? Each person clickity click clicking away at a little machine that they are sucked into like a fly to light. Sorry, but that's just entirely too open for me. This is a Brave New World turning out as prophecy of our immediate future.

[MMO]

I Agree. Privacy will be almost completely gone once web 2.0 rolls out. There won't even be a need for individual privacy though.

[Account Deleted]

Each person clickity click clicking away at a little machine that they are sucked into like a fly to light. Sorry, but that's just entirely too open for me. This is a Brave New World turning out as prophecy of our immediate future. There are at least three things about Kevin's comment that made Rohit smile: the invocation of physics, the notion that 30 is relative, and the thought of seeing you next week.

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[Account Deleted]

has someone been to the web 2.0 summit this year ? it was a week ago and the presentations were terrific ! A lot of knowledge for me ! :)

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