Last Chance: Submit a Talk for the Web 2.0 Expo

The next Web 2.0 Expo is this November 16-19 in New York City. It's our annual East-coast gathering for the web community. As always we'll have tracks and sessions for the product team (developers, ops, designers, project managers) and the business team (marketers, business development). The topics will cover mobile, ops, social media, government, geolocation, web development, RIAs, sales, VCs - just to name a few.

The CFP (Call For Participation) for the show closes this Friday. If you have something to share then submit your talk now. Last year we had over 5,000 attendees. Let us know if you have something to share with them. We are using the CFP to find speakers for 5 tracks of 12 fifty-minute sessions and 2 three-hour workshops. We'll be looking for both single-speaker sessions and panels. We will not be using it to find keynotes.

When writing your proposal keep the following in mind:

• Think about the attendee. What will the attendee learn? Wy should they care? How useful will it be to them now and in the future? Answer these questions in your submission.
• No product pitches. The attendees are not necessarily there to learn how to use your product. Instead tell them how you made your product or service and share the lessons you learned.
• Informative first, catchy second. Make sure that your title and proposal clearly state what you will be talking about and what the attendee will gain.
• Additional Reading and/or Viewing. A good submission will have a 2-3 paragraph description. If you've written more on the topic feel free to suggest some additional reading. If you haven't spoken at one of our events consider linking to a video of yourself speaking.
• DIY Submissions. Do submit your proposal yourself. Do not have a PR person submit it. To often we find that proposals submitted on behalf of someone who is unaware of the conference. It makes us wary of them.
• Always get in the system. Every conference chair gets a lot of emails asking to be a part of the event. If you're not in the system it's very easy to get lost in a folder.
• Check Examples. Look at last year's Expo sessions. Chances are we'll look for similar types of talks (though not the same ones).
• Pick a track. The Expo has five tracks. Our system allows you to select more than one. I strongly recommend that you NOT select more than two.

My co-chair Jen Pahlka has more advice on the Web 2.0 Expo Blog. We had over a thousand submissions for the San Francisco Web 2.0 Expo 2009. Hopefully, these suggestions will help you stand out.

Photo: Fred Wilson on stage by Duncan Davidson

Web2Open: An Exciting Experiment

As I've written here recently, we've got some amazing sessions scheduled for Web2Open--the free unconference hosted by Web 2.0 Expo in SF this week. One that I'm particularly excited about is a new experiment, "Practice Your Customer Pitch."

We're bringing in five startups who will get two minutes each to give their customer pitch (not their VC pitch), as if meeting a potential customer at a cocktail party (i.e., no slides but OK to drink if you want). To give them feedback, we've assembled a top-notch panel of serial entrepreneurs and marketing experts. It's not a competition, so there's no judging or ranking—just discussion among the entrepreneurs, panelists and other session attendees.

We're trying this idea for the first time, so who knows how it will go? But in the entrepreneurial spirit, we've mitigated our risks: even if the format doesn't sing, the session can only be a hit given the participants. (Thanks to Sean O'Malley for helping us connect with a lot of these folks.)

The rather impressive panel:
*Rashmi Sinha, moderator. SlideShare CEO
*Robert Acker, panelist. LiveSpot CEO
*Michael Cerda, panelist. cc:Betty CEO
*Nilofer Merchant, panelist. Rubicon Consulting CEO

The smart startups:
*CrowdVine, social networks for conferences
*dbTwang, Dogster for guitars
*Doodle, online scheduling magic
*Maestro Market, a Web 2.0 speakers' bureau
*Magoosh, customized test-prep

The session is on Weds, April 1 from 10:50 - 11:40a. If you still need a free pass for Web2Open, you can register using the code websf09opn. There's more general event info on the Open website.

Web2Open: Great Sessions, Recessionary Pricing

Next week is Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, a four-day mind meld for programmers, practitioners and novitiates. The Expo is co-produced by O'Reilly and TechWeb, who, for the third year in a row, are devoting resources and a row of rooms to Web2Open--a free, two-day unconference that anyone can attend.

The Open, April 1 and 2 at Moscone West, is like most unconferences in that we provide a blank grid and designated rooms so that you can create your own discussion sessions. But unlike a lot of unconferences, the Open includes a handful of prescheduled sessions. And I gotta tell you, this year, we've got some incredible stuff on tap--all for the low, low price of free.

Among the highlights are Hybrid sessions (more fun than the name suggests). We pick three sessions in the main conference track and open them to all Web2Open attendees. Then the presenters from those sessions follow up with lively discussions in the Open. You can join both parts of Hybrid, or just one. This year's Hybrids include:

- Web Developer Tools with Ajaxian's Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer

- The Lean Startup with customer development expert and "Lessons Learned" blogger Eric Ries

- Sparking a Crush: Attracting and Retaining New Users with Adaptive Path's Alexa Andrzejewski

To attend the Open, you need a free Expo pass and the urge to participate in conversation. The Open site has details on how to register, along with session times. See you next week!

Online Communities: The Tribalization of Business

Or, you may download the file.



Recently I spoke with Francois Gossieaux of Beeline Labs about the role of online communities in the enterprise. Francois has been evangelizing the learning gained from his recent study “The Tribalization of Business” (see here for the Slideshare presentation).



The interview is broken into three parts. Francois is a great storyteller, bringing case studies in to support nearly every point. Here are a few insights I took away from our conversation:
Community for community’s sake: most businesses begin planning a community with traditional objectives (lower support costs, drive innovation, increase customer loyalty etc.). On the Social Web this is the equivalent of entering a personal relationship with an ulterior motive (which never works out quite right). Businesses should begin with the question, “how can I satisfy the needs of this community?”- and then follow the community’s lead. Be open to the unexpected.

In my experience this is one of the hardest things for companies to get behind and relegates this kind of "enlightened" community effort to either top-level leadership or skunk works development. Middle management is typically the most reluctant to deviate from standard practice and place a bet on community for the community’s sake.

Communities require a social framework to thrive - most companies have a mindset that reflects the legal, contractual and hierarchical underpinnings of their business and carry these behaviors with them into the community. This informs their planning, measurement and how they encourage contribution. These incentives have little sway on the Social Web where the mindset is social and trust, reputation and relationship are big drivers of contribution. As Francois says, “The most successful communities occur when you tap into that social framework”

Consider stories as a success metric: While there is a fair amount in this interview about measurement - this was my favorite: A great anectdote about how one company views the stories that emerge from their community as a key metric of success. Great stories are inherently viral and can have a profound impact on decision making in an organization.

Think Bigger: Most large companies are satisfied to have small communities; basically bringing a focus group online. Doing so misses the potential of the online community to transform your business. Consider how Intuit is now embedding live community directly into their application - allowing users to seek help and get questions answered directly.

Transformative communities blur the lines between company and customer and portend a future where retail ecommerce sites go well beyond ratings and reviews and provide problem solving, shopping mentors, product development and other services directly from the community. Where internet sites are co-evolved (from interface to feature-sets to codebase) in cooperation with community, where complex applications (desktop and cloud-based) meld standard functions with community functions. Communities are certainly helpful in providing feedback on customer behavior but that is just one small part of the story.

Automated Infrastructure Podcast on IT Conversations

Adam Jacob and I did an IT Conversations podcast with Phil Windley last week, which I really enjoyed. We started with a summary of Adam's excellent Web2.0 Expo session, covered the phases of startup growth using virtual infrastructures like EC2 and 3tera, and discussed how Puppet shifts us to "Infrastructure as Code". We even got into the challenges and opportunities of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance for startups.

Adam also talked a lot about iClassify, his open source systems management tool. He announced iClassify at the Web2.0 Expo, and will be discussing it in-depth at Velocity next month.

You can download the podcast here.

Missed Twitter Questions from Jonathan Schwartz Interview at Web 2.0 Expo

In the Jonathan Schwartz interview at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco yesterday, I screwed up. After learning we weren't set up for audience Q&A with microphones, I thought, "well then, I'll just suggest to the audience that they twitter questions @timoreilly, and I'll check my phone during the interview." I kept checking, but no questions. Bummer. Not till I heard complaints afterwards that I hadn't asked any of the questions did I do a little digging, and discover that I had twitter set to show me only @ replies from people I'm following. Bad idea.

To all of you in the audience, a big apology for the screwup.

However, I did collect all the questions after the fact, and forward them on to Jonathan to answer by email. The questions and Jonathan's answers are below. I've presented it as if it were a twitter interview, snarfing up the questions from tweetscan, and then getting Jonathan's twitter image from his own feed. [Another big oops: that isn't really Jonathan's twitter feed. Will take out links till I get the correct one. Thanks to Scott Ruthfield for the heads up.] But in reality, he answered the questions by email, after I sent him the whole group in one email message.

triplebsoul : question for Sun " how is sun planning to balance environmental issues with scaling computing needs (power consumption, etc) "
2008-04-25 12:32:48

JonathanSchwartz: Sun's going to stretch the limits of engineering and our collective imagination to make the world's most efficient datacenter infrastructure - from OpenSolaris power management, to Blackbox datacenters. And although that's obviously important to our business, and to the planet, what matters most in managing environmental risk is the world's appetite for power - if that continues along the pace it is, we can slow the growth of power demand through datacenter innovation, but I doubt we can stop it. Every 100,000,000 new PC's in the world creates the need for many, many, many megawatt power plants.

cynthiagentry : ask JIS about the role of academia in the future of Sun, and in the future of Web 2.0
2008-04-25 12:32:46

JonathanSchwartz: It's hugely important. The majority of the world's change agents, media consumers and entrepreneurs graduate from universities every year. There's a reason Sun stands for "Stanford University Network." That's the world from which we spawned, that's the world we focus on with open source technology (you might remember we just concluded an agreement with the People's Republic of China's Ministry of Education to build a national curriculum around OpenSPARC and OpenSolaris - made possible by our IP being free and open...).

Sierralog : Question to Jonathan: Did you ever assess the success of you corporate blogging in terms of "ROI" and if so, how? Thx
2008-04-25 12:31:51

JonathanSchwartz: No. It just seemed like an IQ test. If I talk, people that are interested listen. If I don't speak up, they have nothing to hear.
 

amitc : Q for Jon: Beyond MySQL, Sun boxes and Java, what else does Sun has to offer Web Devs, PMs & Entrepreneurs?
2008-04-25 12:29:44

JonathanSchwartz: Um - that's certainly a good start, isn't it? :) I guess the majority of our focus within the next twelve months will be around our data management and storage offerings - starting with ZFS, and the potential of dual-licensing it under the GPL to see its growth within the Linux environment (alongside MySQL). As you'll see with our rolling out of network.com services, we plan on offering a ton of developer infrastructure as a service, as well.

buildakicker : How can this web2.0 help out or even work within the government?
2008-04-25 12:29:29
 

JonathanSchwartz: Hm - that's up to the government, no? We serve a lot of government customers, and they're very, very interested in network computing. Governments exist to serve the people. The people have internet connections. Put two and two together - you get governments interested in the web.

JesseStay : does he anticipate a fallout of original MySQL users or fork in the mysql code and how will they handle that if it does happen?
2008-04-25 12:26:30

JonathanSchwartz: I'm not anticipating a fork - Marten Mickos (SVP, Database Group at Sun, former CEO, MySQL) made some comments saying he was considering making available certain MySQL add-ons to MySQL Enterprise subscribers only - and as I said on stage, leaders at Sun have the autonomy to do what they think is right to maximize their business value - so long as they remember their responsibility to the corporation and all of its communities (from shareholders to developers). Not just their silo.

I think Marten got some fairly direct and immediate feedback saying the idea was a bad one - and we have no plans whatever of "hiding the ball," of keeping any technology from the community. Everything Sun delivers will be freely available, via a free and open license (either GPL, LGPL or Mozilla/CDDL), to the community.

Everything.

No exception.

coogle : One question I have for him is how the Sun acquisition of MySQL is going to impact the open source space and Sun long-term?
2008-04-25 11:12:36

JonathanSchwartz: It's going to open a flurry of doors for MySQL, and it's going to open a flurry of doors for Sun. It already has - as I said, the MySQL team just closed the single largest deal in the history of MySQL, a $10m deal to a global technology company. I'm pleased as punch with the progress we're making there, and we're deluged with inquiries from traditional enterprises (vs. Web 2.0 companies) wanting to know how to get enterprise support for a product they've used in development, but have, until now, not felt comfortable putting into commercial deployment. Now they feel comfortable deploying it - and we're right there with them to help make it happen.

And we're investing heavily to build a whole spectrum of products optimized for MySQL - stay tuned, you'll start seeing some amazing stuff.

rghanbari : For Jonathan Schwartz: What does Google app engine mean for Sun? Programming/deployment model makes Sun platforms irrelevant
2008-04-25 11:07:50

JonathanSchwartz: You know, one wonders how we can generate nearly $14,000,000,000 in revenue when I keep hearing technology x, y or z makes Sun irrelevant. Microsoft tells me MSN Search makes Google irrelevant. Not sure I buy that. OpenOffice doesn't make Microsoft Office irrelevant, either, it creates competition (that's why we have about 100,000,000 users!).

Competition's a good thing, it creates choice. Rumor has it developers like, and value, choice. Throw a sheep at me when that stops being true.

andrewsavikas : EC2 and AppEngine get a lot more attention that sun's grid (cloud) offerings. why is that? who's using sun's grid?
2008-04-25 11:05:47

JonathanSchwartz: Tons of high performance computing customers use our grid - we never targeted the mass developer. But stay tuned, you're going to see a lot more about network.com within the next 6 months.

GraemeThickins: Please ask Schwartz how much time he spends/day writing for his blog & how that's changed over past year; also, does he Twitter?
2008-04-25 11:03:33

JonathanSchwartz: Yes, I Twitter. No I won't tell you my user ID.

And the amount of time I spent writing my blog depends upon what I have to say, and what's going on in our business. It varies dramatically, unlike the amount of pressure I feel from the imaginary editor that sits on my shoulder telling me it's been two weeks since I've posted anything pithy.

mkrigsman: Ask Jonathan Schwatrz why IT departments are so scared of web 2.0 proliferation. Awkward question for him, but he's a big boy.
2008-04-25 11:02:10

JonathanSchwartz: The companies I talk to aren't scared of innovation, they're in love with it - it's a source of business value and competitive advantage. Companies scared of IT are likely to be buried by their competitors that aren't.

Sun's customers, bluntly put, are those that see IT as a weapon. Those that see it simply as a cost... good news, they'll be able to reduce their costs, given clouds and free services and labor arbitrage, to near zero. But we'll be far more focused on those delivering the network services to them that make that transition possible.

It reminds me of a discussion I had with the CIO of an oil company. He started the meeting by telling me "I don't understand why Sun's still around, IT's a commodity to me, who cares?" Until I reminded him his business just delivered more in quarterly profit than we delivered in annual revenue. And his business was built upon selling a...

Commodity. In his case, oil.

Commodities are where are all the money is, just ask Google, Verizon, Goldman, Sachs or Exxon. But commoidities also require R&D - those that couple the two, R&D and an ability to navigate commodity markets, tend to do rather well.

timoreilly: Thanks a lot for agreeing to take all these extra questions, Jonathan!
 
 

JonathanSchwartz Thanks, again, Tim - it's always a pleasure to hang out.

Web 2.0 Expo SF Launchpad: Six New Startup Stars

This year's Launchpad at Web 2.0 Expo SF features six new Web 2.0 startups that have captured our interest and attention:

1. Acquia
2. Triggit
3. Chirp Interactive
4. Oortle
5. JobScore
6. TradeVibes

Here's a brief description of each of these cool new companies:

Acquia is an open source software company providing products and services for the wildly popular Drupal social publishing system. At Acquia, we believe that open source development and social publishing technology have the power to connect people and unleash their collective creative potential in order to achieve great things.

Triggit makes it quick and easy for web publishers to monetize their sites with advertising. Using a cross platform web application, publishers can now drag and drop ad units directly into their pages, optimize efficacy and track the results. Triggit takes the pain out of monetization.

Chirp Interactive (www.chirp.com) creates solutions that help you discover relevant and interesting friends, content, and information that helps you stay connected with your friends and derive value from your relationships. Our first product, chirpscreen, helps you discover and share the content you care about. The items displayed can range from photos and messages from your friends, to items you may want to purchase, to public pictures on topics of interest. We source this content from sites like Facebook, Flickr, eBay and Twitter to provide you with an engaging, interactive display of content that you can easily share with friends.

Oortle enables people to share rich media with each other in real-time, using their existing social networks & connections. Oortle's "synchronous web" applications span social networks and take user engagement to the next level. Our first product Photophlow has been praised as a live version of Flickr, and has demonstrated a dramatic increase in user engagement on Flickr photos with its chat, social search and synchronized photo viewing. Today we are also demoing our second product Videophlow, an application for sharing & watching YouTube videos in real-time with your friends.

JobScore empowers employers to recruit cooperatively. Today, companies spend billions of dollars recruiting online, only to disqualify and discard virtually every resume they receive. The JobScore Network makes it easy for you to efficiently build your own candidate pipeline and zero in on qualified job applicants. Then, you can share resumes with other employers, exchanging your un-hired resumes for qualified, interested candidates. JobScore is a win-win: we privately connect your un-hired candidates with similar jobs and offer you on-demand access to the qualified people you need.

TradeVibes is the best way to discover and research hot new startups online. It's a platform for our community to share, discuss, and evaluate information about these companies. TradeVibes is also a tool for finding and sharing news and opinions about companies. By using the collective wisdom of our community, TradeVibes separates the best startups from their competitors. Here is a link to a TradeVibes product video screencast. TradeVibes was founded in 2007 by four early employees of PayPal who shared a passion for entrepreneurship and cool new startups.

The crowd will be discussing the Launchpad on Meebo starting at 1:30 PM PST.

[disclosure: dave mcclure is an advisor/investor in 2 of the startups listed above: Oortle & TradeVibes. LaunchPad startup selections were made by our VC judging panel, not by either of the conference co-chairs brady forrest or dave mcclure]

A Successful Experiment

During Web2Open yesterday, we ran an experiment that turned out to be a big success. Because it felt like a model that could be extended and used by others--but it hasn't been blogged about widely--I'll explain here what we did.

We started with the idea that we wanted to hold a conference speed-dating event. But we didn't have a natural set of pairs who'd want to meet, like VCs and entrepreneurs, or writers and agents. What we did have were a number of well-known experts and a bunch of thoughtful attendees. So we ran small speed Q&As with the experts: we set up five tables, one each for programmers, designers/UI specialists, marketing/community experts, businesspeople and undeclared, and then we had five experts--Clay Shirky, Kara Swisher, Matt Cutts, Saar Gur and Tim O'Reilly--each hold a nine-minute informal Q&A at a table. Every nine minutes, the experts switched tables until they'd hit them all. The whole thing took 50 minutes, plus lots of lingering afterward. It had great energy, and people were smiling the entire time.

Why'd it work? It was intimate (about a dozen people gathered at each table), engaged and informal. All which provided a nice contrast to the general conference. And it required no prep on the part of the experts (except their life work, of course): they just showed up and chatted.

What would we do differently next time? At least two things. 1) We didn't have a bell to signal the 8-minute mark or that it was time to switch tables--so we shouted. That was too much like we were yelling at people. 2) Afterward, Tim said, "That was great, but I wish I'd had time to ask the participants questions." Good point. It would be cool to increase the time per table to at least fifteen minutes and let the experts do some asking--or possibly make it all questions from the experts. (Update: Clay adds two more good suggestions: Make it an hour, with four 12-min sessions, and spend 12 minutes at the beginning introducing the speakers, to give them time and context for the initial questions.)

How would you adapt and use speed Q&A?

Web2Open: Announcing Speed Q&A

Web2Open, a free unconference within Web 2.0 Expo, starts tomorrow, and we've got a new twist: after some really good speed-dating suggestions from you, we've been inspired to try speed Q&A.

Here's how it's going to work: we'll have 50 minutes, five prominent people and five tables, one each for programmers, designers/UI specialists, marketing/community experts, businesspeople and undeclared. The prominent people--who are, I'm delighted to announce: Clay Shirky, Kara Swisher, Matt Cutts, Saar Gur and Tim O’Reilly--will each hold a nine-minute informal Q&A at a table, and then we'll ring a bell to have them switch tables. The session is tomorrow (Weds) at 2:40p in the Web2Open rooms, second floor of Moscone West. With strong attendee participation, this really ought to be a fun and interesting experiment.

I've describe the other pre-scheduled Web2Open sessions below the fold--an intriguing collection of conversations that doesn't even include the ones attendees will create on site.

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Nice Take on Web 2.0 Expo from Information Week

It's among the most satisfying part of my job to seed new ideas, see them spread, take root, and eventually flower. In the process, they often morph into something unexpected, hopefully richer and better than originally imagined. But sometimes they take disappointing side-turns. So, for example, seeing Eric Schmidt equate web 2.0 to Ajax was disappointing. Especially since he went on to describe "Web 3.0" as small applications loosely connected and distributed virally, with data in the cloud, able to run on any device (my "software above the level of a single device") -- all things I'd originally described in my What is Web 2.0? paper. But it's great to see a media story get it right.

In Information Week'sWeb 2.0 Expo preview, Thomas Claburn got it just right:

The Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco 2008, which runs April 22 through April 25 comes at an inflection point in this rapidly growing arena. Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), one of the major players in the Web 2.0 space, stands on the brink of being acquired by Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT). Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is sluggish, which limits the capital available to Web 2.0 startups. Indeed, four years after the term "Web 2.0" entered the industry vernacular, many forward-looking innovators are focused on mobile services and Web 3.0, also called the Semantic Web.

Nevertheless, the conceptual underpinnings of Web 2.0, the Web as a platform, have proven to be sound. It might even be fair to say that Web 2.0 has won.Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Microsoft, and Yahoo are busy building upon the Web as a platform, along with thousands of startups and other large companies like Adobe (NSDQ: ADBE), IBM (NYSE: IBM), Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL), and Sun.

Yet there remains a need to explore Web 2.0 in a conference format because some of its major issues remain unresolved...

The article goes on to outline some of those big, unresolved issues covered in the conference: user control of data, privacy, security, the nature of "open" in an always-on and connected world, the importance of integrating new mobile and semantic web applications, business models beyond advertising, especially in a world in which Web 2.0 platforms are becoming serious business infrastructure. Good stuff. This should be the best Web 2.0 conference yet.

Precisely because we're getting through the giddy stage of "everything ajax, everything advertising," and returning to an understanding that the internet as platform means far more than that, there is more innovation today than there was last year, even as some of the froth seems to abate. Web 2.0 is becoming real for mainstream business in a way that was unthinkable only a few years ago. As Claburn said, "Web 2.0 has won." Everyone understands that this is the new game, not just something for consumer startups. Everyone in the computer industry, everyone in mainstream business, needs to learn the new rules, exploit the new opportunities, and help to invent the future.

This is a better time to be an internet entrepreneur than in the giddiest moments of 2006 and 2007. More real work is getting done, more real problems solved, than at any time since we first called out the resurgence of the Web in 2003/2004 with the name Web 2.0.

Velocity preview at Web2.0 Expo

At the Web2.0 Expo this month we have a small preview of some of the topics and speakers at the Velocity Web Performance & Operations conference.  (Radar readers get a 20% discount by using "vel08js" as a discount code... and yes it works with the $300 early registration discount!).

Failure Happens
Friday @ 11:00 am, Room 2009

Artur Bergman and I will kick off the day with an entertaining/informative/eye-opening review of the year’s biggest failures, disasters, and painful lessons learned.

We'll review incidents by underlying root cause with a focus on what could have been done to prevent it. We promise not to be too harsh on anybody, although we will give special attention to particularly ironic failures or those that are "entertainingly coupled" to absurd marketing claims.

(Hint: Send your boss to this talk if they don't understand why you and your whole team need to go to Velocity.)

Even Faster Web Sites
Friday @ 1:30 pm, Room 2012

Steve Souders is the co-chair of Velocity and author of the bestselling book High Performance Web Sites. At the Expo last year Steve gave an incredibly popular talk on the 14 best practices he developed while working as the Chief Performance Yahoo!.

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Small Business Hacks at Web2Open

We've got a cool new development on the Web2Open front: Jen Bekman, Don MacAskill and Bryan Mason will be joining us for "Small Business Hacks," an open discussion moderated by Tony Stubblebine.

Particularly neat is that each of them has worked on a Web 2.0 company with a different business model. Jen started 20x200 as a site connected with her gallery; she sells emerging artists' work directly to new collectors. Don is the founder and chief geek at SmugMug, a photo-sharing site that runs on a subscription basis. Bryan is the COO of Adaptive Path, a firm that consults on Web 2.0 design and usability. And Tony is the owner of CrowdVine, an online social-networking service currently focused on corporate sales.

The session is 1:30 - 2:20p on April 24, and with a good mix of perspectives from among the panelists and participants, it ought to be a very lively conversation. Meantime, if you have any small biz hacks to share now, go ahead and post in the comments.

Troll Whispering at Web2Open

Earlier today, Teresa Nielsen Hayden posted the guidelines she uses for moderating the comments on BoingBoing. Of course, not everyone agrees with her take-no-prisoners approach, and her post has drawn some fire. But whether you're a fan (which I am, big time), there's no question that Teresa's advancing our collective understanding of online community dynamics.

If you're grappling with an online community yourself, or if you're just interested in learning more, plan to join Teresa at Web2Open--along with Christy Canida of Instrucables, Amy Muller of Get Satisfaction, and Kirrily Robert of Metaweb--for a juicy discussion of community dynamics. Our "Troll Whispering" session, scheduled for the afternoon of Weds, April 23, will be a great place to share your successes and challenges.

PS. For a dose of inspiration, check out Teresa's own site, Making Light, where she uses the pretty much the same moderation system she does on BoingBoing: it's home to some of the most thoughtful comment threads on the Web.

Seeking Ideas for Conference Speed Dating

Last week, I came across conference speed dating. I immediately fell in love with the idea and wanted to try it at Web2Open. But I'm not sure how to set it up. Seeing as the Open is a community-based event, I'm hoping some of you will have stellar suggestions for making this work.

The basic idea with conference speed dating is that you have two kinds of people who'd want to meet--say VCs and entrepreneurs, or agents and writers, or farmers and chefs. You designate seats for people from the first group, and you let people from the second group meet with them for five minutes each. Then you ring a bell, and while the first group stays put, everyone from the second group moves on to another VC or agent or farmer. The whole thing lasts about 45 minutes, and everybody makes contacts that might pan out into something cool. Awesome, right?

The tricky part for the Open (and the Expo) is that we won't have natural categories like that. So we talked about asking prominent community members to volunteer for the first group (Tim O'Reilly, consider yourself invited), but then we weren't sure how to organize the second group. Assume we can accommodate 20 pairs at a time, and that we'll have 10 five-minute times slots. What happens if more than 10 people want to talk to Tim? And what if somebody from the second group wants to talk to only some of the people in the first group? Or if we have way more than 20 people for the second group and they all want to talk to everyone from the first?

Is there a simple and fair way to set this up in person at the Open? Or on a Website that people can access during the conference? We have a wiki for the Open, but we don't have a ton of programming time. (Btw, we're cross-posting these questions to the Expo/Open CrowdVine.)

Announcing Web2Open 2008

Great news: On April 23 and 24, Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco will host Web2Open, an unconference that anyone can participate in.

To promote connections among attendees and complement the Expo sessions, this year's Open emphasizes discussion sessions over presentations. That means your participation is really key, whether you share your successes, your challenges or your questions.

In addition to the traditional open-grid sign-ups where attendees fill in the sessions you want to discuss, we're also pre-scheduling a handful of roundtables and seeding them with people who are passionate about the topics. These sessions include Social Responsibility for Web 2.0 Companies; Small Business Hacks; Troll Whispering; UI for Emerging Technologies; and iPhone Development. But wait, there's more! We're also organizing three Expo/Open hybrid sessions: presentations in the main conference that will be open to all Web2Open attendees, followed by discussions in the Open. Stay tuned for more info on those.

You need a badge to attend the Open, but you can register gratis using the the code websf08opw (this free badge will admit you to the Web2Open sessions, Expo Keynotes, Show Floor and Launch Pad). Thanks to TechWeb (formerly CMP) and O'Reilly for making this possible.

Btw, Tony Stubblebine and I are co-organizers. See you there!