For the past 72 hours, I gulped all I could from the Web 2.0 fire hose. And I must admit, the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo here in San Fran was flat out the most amazing conference I've ever attended. Plus I got tons of mind-blowing insights for frank's own 2.0 presentation in Toronto this June!)
The kickoff video was great. (And how could you not love the Code Monkey video?!)
The keynotes were crisp: Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos; Google CEO, Eric Schmidt; Yahoo network division leader, Jeff Weiner; and Tim O'Reilly himself.
The breakout speakers were inspiring: people who launched multi-million-dollar sites like Flickr, Delicious, Six Apart, Facebook, Digg and others just by tinkering with their passions on line.
The up & comers totally dazzled: Kapow, esnips, Octopz, Mashery, inPowr, vidoop, coghead, Joost, Ning, Swivel, TwitterVision, dogster, catster and tons of others.
Even my hotel turned out to be very comfortable.
But what made the conference so transformative for me was getting
how much I have to personally evolve (like by tomorrow morning when I
get back to work!) to be able to fully engage with Web 2.0. This stuff
is personal. And it challenges just about every business, marketing and
creative idea I've ever had. Hold on to those ideas too tightly and the
benefits of Web 2.0 go poof! Let go of old paradigms on how to
strategize, create and execute new ideas and the real promise and
excitement of Web 2.0 busts open.
"Which is what?" you may still be asking. Ahh, yes. The real question on everyone's mind ...
After all the conversations, buzz and beer, the big thing I'm taking home is a crystallized notion of "emergence." Steven Johnson
wrote a book on it. To me it means that there's no stopping to try
and figure out any of this, there's only creating it. Driven by a
personal passion or a product, service or cause you believe in, there's
only putting yourself out there using all the open, available, amazing
technology that exists today and together with your community, you
co-create as you go.
SocialText CEO, Ross Mayfield
summed it up this way: "Value comes out of people using your stuff, not
what's there at the beginning. It's all about shared control to create
new value."
My other take-away? Most people will never get that. But those who do? Look out. They're already changing the world.
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