Twitter Users Most Followed by the Web 2.0 Summit Crowd

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 7

I took the set of users^† who posted tweets containing the hashtag #w2s and determined who those users followed. Unlike the list of the most followed users in all of Twitter, the list isn't dominated by celebrities. (A few coders landed in the top 50.) Regular Radar readers will be familiar with many of the users listed below: over 20 of the top 50 are based in the SF Bay Area. Of the over 700 users I identified, a third follow Tim:

UPDATE: Pete Warden has been doing similar analysis to help conference organizers and attendees. He goes a step further and monitors conversations (one twitter user mentioning another user, and vice-versa). Here is Pete's network graph of the recent Web 2.0 Summit.

(†) Data for this post was pulled on 10/27/2009. Using the Twitter search API, I was able to identify 1,500 relevant tweets and over 700 unique users responsible for those tweets. Given that I likely omitted earlier tweets, the results are at best an approximation of the true top 50 list.

My Conversation with Austan Goolsbee at Web 2.0 Summit

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 8

He introduces himself as "another tall, skinny guy with big ears and a funny name." Economics adviser to Barack Obama during the campaign, and now a member of the President's Council of Economic Advisers and chief economist of the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, Austan Goolsbee is a key figure in framing the economic thinking of the Obama administration. Perhaps most importantly for those of us in Silicon Valley, he's an economist clued in to the tech world. His economics papers cover such topics as the impact of taxes on technology diffusion, the impact of internet subsidies on public schools, and the economic impact of leisure time spent on the internet. He's worked closely with Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of Nudge fame, and thinks a lot about the power of default options to shape behavior, a topic that any web developer should also know by heart.

I'll be interviewing Austan Goolsbee on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit. In preparation for our conversation next week, I spent an hour with him yesterday morning. He's a fascinating guy. To give you a taste of the kinds of things we'll be talking about, here's a short transcript of his response to my question about the economic impact of the internet:

Somehow, in my economist heart always lies the revealed preference thing, which is: People are investing tons of their time, tons of their money, tons of their energy into the internet; they wouldn't be doing this for no reason. Regardless of whether we have the data, our presumption ought to be that it's a big productivity improver. But I also think that the evidence on big general-purpose technologies like that is usually that when they're first invented, the impact takes a while to show up, but when it does, boy is it a big time thing, outside just the industry itself, across the board.

If you go back ten years, which isn't that long, the social landscape and the technological landscape are almost unrecognizable. And just that impact, at this early stage, is sufficiently big that you've got to think that twenty years from now, the internet is going to have humongous productivity implications.

Take the health sector. People say "not only does the health sector need to enter the 21st century, it needs to enter the 20th century!" The technology is sufficiently backwards in terms of the information processing - everything's on paper! If you start envisioning healthcare, energy, the government itself -- major league shares of the GDP -- and what the potential is of marrying that to the newest technologies...! Economic potential, historically speaking, tends to be a bit like water. Water will always get to the lowest point. If there's big potential somewhere, it may take a bit of time, but we always find a way to unlock it.

We'll be talking about what Goolsbee would recommend doing differently if we had a "do-over" on the economic stimulus, the importance of innovation to any future economic recovery, education and income inequality, financial services oversight, and President Obama's desire for "iPod government" (which Goolsbee describes as "making [government] simple and easy to use, so that people like it, rather than giving people the third degree and a lot of red tape.")

If you had a chance to sit one-on-one with one of President Obama's economic advisers, what would you ask him? Help me prep for the interview by making suggestions in the comments. It will be tough to do as good a job as Jon Stewart, but hopefully we can come up with some questions that get Austan going!

The Army, the Web, and the Case for Intentional Emergence

by Jim Stogdill | @jstogdill | comments: 19

Lt. Gen. Sorenson, Army CIO, at Web 2.0 Summit

I didn't make it to the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco in November last year so I didn't get to see Army CIO Gen Sorenson present this Higher Order Bit talk in person. However, I thought it was cool that the Army made the agenda and luckily someone posted the video. I finally got a chance to go through it. If you didn't see the talk, or don't have the 20'ish minutes to watch it now, here's a rough summary:

- Because of security and related concerns, it takes a very long time for the Army to take advantage of new generations of technology. We tend to deploy it widely about the time it's becoming obsolete.

- However, we are now beginning to take some advantage of Web 2.0 technologies in, for example, Stryker Brigade collaboration, battle command information sharing, and command and control.

I don't think that slow technology adoption is caused by fundamental first principles, so I don't think it has to remain true. But that's a long discussion for another time. In this post I'd like to focus on Army Battle Command, Web 2.0 and Gen Sorenson's connecting the two. Specifically I'd like to talk about lost opportunity and how the same technologies can constitute a generative platform in one setting and window dressing on a temple to determinism in another.

The lost opportunity I'm thinking of isn't whether Army Battle Command is Web 2.0 enough or not. It's that enterprises tend to see web technologies as an add on to whatever they already have. Plus, they tend to focus on specific technologies rather than the combination of technology, process and policy that make a collection of technologies viable as a generative platform. "Let's add some Web 2.0 to this system; we'll use REST instead of SOAP." But the fundamental question that the web answers isn't whether REST is better than SOAP, but whether emergence is more likely to create innovation than enterprise planning, and the answer to that question is yes.

General Sorenson says in the video that "CPOF brings in Web 2.0 capability, chat, video, etc..." and then comments on "graphics, chat, use of tools..." and stuff like that to reinforce the idea that Command Post of the Future (CPOF) and the Battle Command suite it is part of has Web 2.0 attributes. Like many enterprise technologists, General Sorenson appears to be focusing on rich user experience and collaboration as the attributes that give CPOF a Web 2.0 imprimatur. While that's not unexpected, I think it leaves most of the benefits on the table and untapped.

Putting aside for the moment that CPOF isn't primarily delivered through a browser, a first step toward webness, the reality is that CPOF and other systems like it neither leverage accessible platforms nor contribute to them. It is a standalone (though distributed) computing system with gee whiz collaboration and VoIP. And while it offers some enterprise-style data services, it has none of the features of a generative platform. If I'm in the field I can't readily extend it or build on it to solve different problems, modify its proprietary underpinnings to suit my local needs, or quickly incorporate its information into other applications. If an important aspect of Web 2.0 is enabling the long tail, then this isn't Web 2.0.

I should say, this isn't a post about web 2.0 semantics. However, it's important to understand that the web's power derives from its evolution as a platform. Otherwise it's hard to see what is being missed by the military's IT enterprise (and many other large enterprises).

From the beginning the web has been generative. It wasn't CompuServe. With some basic skills you could add to it, change it, extend it, etc. Jonathan Zittrain, in his excellent book The Future of the Internet - and How to Stop It, reflects on why the Internet has experienced such explosive innovation. He argues that it's the powerful combination of user-programmable personal computers, ubiquitous networking with the IP protocol, and open platforms. Today, the emergence of open source infrastructure, ubiquitous and cheap hosting for LAMP-based sites, open API's, and the intentional harnessing of crowd wisdom has ushered in the web 2.0 era. It's an era of high-velocity low-cost idea trying that leverages the web itself as the platform for building world changing ideas and businesses.

The Internet hosts innovation like it does because it is an unconstrained complex system where complex patterns can grow out of easy to assemble simple things. Simple things are not only permitted, but they are encouraged, facilitated, and often can be funded with a credit card.

I've subscribed to the notion of Gall's Law for longer than I knew it was a law:

"A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system."

(continue reading)

“Technology is the 7th Kingdom of Life” - A conversation with Kevin Kelly

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 7

Or, you may download the file.



Kevin Kelly doesn’t need much in the way of introduction to Radar readers. He is a big thinker looking at the intersection of biology, technology and culture.

Kevin gave a great High Order Bit at the Web 2.0 Summit and I caught up with him afterward. This interview covers:

• The impact of the web on our recent elections
• The rich new possibilities for interaction and collaboration afforded by the web
• The Wisdom of the Crowds vs. the Stupidity of the Mob
• Technology is the 7th Kingdom of Life… looking into “what technology wants”

This last section (at 7mins 30 secs) is the deepest and most provocative. Kevin assumes the point of view of technology to assess its needs and wants. This line of inquiry leads to some surprising conclusions. My favorite quote from the conversation: “We are the sexual organs of technology”
Indeed.

Huffington, Newsom, and Trippi talk politics in a Web 2.0 world

by Sara Winge | @sarawinge | comments: 3

"Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be President," declared Arianna Huffington from the stage at Web 2.0 Summit, the day after the election. In "The Web and Politics" session, moderator John Heileman explores the new world of running for office--and governing once you win--with Huffington, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and veteran politico Joe Trippi.

Politicians and pundits love to talk, and in this case, they're good at it. A few bon mots and surprising stats to whet your appetite:

* Trippi: People watched 14.5 million hours of the official video created by Obama campaign (not including supporters' videos). Obama would have had to spend $47 million dollars to buy those eyeballs on TV. Plus, YouTube viewers went there on purpose, to watch Obama's videos--they weren't interrupted in the middle of their football game.

* Huffington: "The Internet has killed Karl Rove politics." (You'll have to watch the video to catch her funniest line. Hint: it has an Alaska connection).

* Newsom: "I have to watch myself sing "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" on YouTube, and it can't go away. I am desperate to get it to go away....we're in a reality TV series now, in politics, 24/7."

[NOTE: Web 2.0 summit videos are available on YouTube.]

Shai Agassi on Electric Cars

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 11

One of my favorite sessions at the recent Web 2.0 summit was Tim's half-hour conversation with Shai Agassi, the CEO of Better Place. Better Place aims to make electric cars widespread ("the electric car as the de facto standard") by addressing major issues that have held back electric vehicles: affordability and convenience.

In a relaxed conversation with Tim, Shai described an electric car industry that resembles the mobile phone business. Just as telecom companies sell mobile handsets at a discount if one is willing to commit to a contract, their subscription-based model will allow consumers to purchase an electric car at the fraction of the normal price. Car owners will pay additional fees based on the amount of miles they drive and the type of car they choose to own. To support their subscribers, Better Place will also build extensive networks of charging spots and battery exchange stations. They will build the first "Electric Recharge Grids" in Israel and Denmark.

Prior to starting Better Place, Shai was a president at software vendor SAP. The interview briefly touches on IT and enterprise computing.

[NOTE: Web 2.0 summit videos are available on YouTube.]

Visualization of Interests at Web 2.0 Summit

by Andrew Odewahn | comments: 5

To help make the most of this week's Web 2.0 Summit, I wanted to understand the overall audience gestalt - what are the broad themes, interests, and ideas that are important to the people going to the conference? A tag cloud can be a great (but admittedly imperfect!) way to understand these large patterns quickly, so I used a spider to collect a list of keyword meta tags from the various organizations represented at the conference. Here's what I got when I fed them into Wordle:

As in most tag clouds, the largest categories ("Online," "Business", "News," and "Management") are not nearly as interesting as the smaller ones. For example:

• Words like "storage," "data," and "hosting" reinforce the importance of operational competence. (And why we run the Velocity Conference).
• "Search," "advertising," and "marketing" illustrate some of the business models in play, and "banking," "equity," and "venture" represent some of the investors.
• "Content" makes a strong showing, with "Video" beating out "book" by a wide margin. This idea of the changing nature of content is also explored in next February's Tools of Change conference.
• Rich internet application themes emerges from words like "design," "interactive," and "usability."
• At least a few Radar trends, including "biology" emerged. (Of course, so did "baby," so there's obviously only so far this type of tool can go!)
• The diversity of people and companies also emerged, with tags like "insurance," "movies," "art," "travel," "investing," "music," and "science" woven throughout the larger ideas.

So, in all, it looks like many of the themes outlined in the orginal What is Web 2.0 article are still alive and well, but are now reflecting the content types, business models, and interests of a maturing online media universe. Should be a fascinating few days!

Major milestone for ProgrammableWeb & "The Web as Platform"

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 2

Last week marked an important milestone for the "Web as Platform" as the 1,000 API was added to the ProgrammableWeb registry. John Musser (see: Web2.0 Report) started tracking the first few web service API's back in 2005.

How do these 1000 APIs break down by type? The following chart, derived from our database, shows the the top 15 sectors or markets with the greatest number of competing API providers. As you can see there are already 71 mapping-related APIs alone"

Congratulations!

Tim In The LA Times On Getting Serious

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 10

As Tim mentioned earlier this week during tough times it's important to work on things that matter. The LA Times dives into Tim's thinking with a piece published yesterday. From the story:

O'Reilly argues that Silicon Valley has strayed from the passion and idealism that fuel innovation to instead follow what he calls the "mad pursuit of the buck with stupider and stupider ideas." Flush with money and opportunity following the post-dot-com resurgence, he says, some entrepreneurs have cocooned in a "reality bubble," insulated from poverty, disease, global warming and other problems that are gripping the planet. He argues that they should follow the model of some of the world's most successful technology companies, including Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., which sprang from their founders' efforts to "work on stuff that matters."

Al Gore Joins Web 2.0 Summit Lineup

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 26

As I wrote last month in What Good is Collective Intelligence if it Doesn't Make Us Smarter?, at this year's Web 2.0 Summit, we're focusing on how what we've learned from the web over the past decade can be applied to solve the world's hard problems. That's why I'm really excited to see that John Battelle has persuaded Al Gore to join us.

One of those hard problems that requires all the intelligence we can throw at is global warming. And there's no one who deserves as much credit as Al Gore for getting it on our collective radar. Through persistence, vision, and hard work, and a real mastery of the new tools of global media, he made all of us pay attention. His work has been a textbook demonstration of the power of media to change the way people think.

That's Gore's continuing focus, with his role at Current TV. He's also joined Kleiner Perkins as a partner involved in cleantech investing.

When I first saw Gore talk about climate change at the TED conference in early 2006, everyone wanted to know what we could do about it. People are still struggling to answer that question, but it's clear that technology can play a large role: helping us to monitor and measure the rate of change in crucial environmental variables, creating feedback loops that change behavior at both macro-levels (like carbon markets) and personal levels (like home energy monitoring); creating green data centers and low-power devices; creating new forms of renewable energy generation or storage, new materials that require less energy to create; alternative fuels and vehicles. The list goes on and on. (Reminder: we're looking for innovative "web meets world"startups for the Web 2.0 Summit Launchpad.)

Of course, global warming is far from the only "web meets world" theme that we're exploring. The conference will cover everything from the latest trends on the web (the rediscovery of e-commerce as a business model, cloud computing, social networking, mobile applications, and the inevitable platform wars) to politics, global disease detection, personal genomics, private space industry, and even military infotech. Speakers I'm particularly excited to see, in addition to Vice President Gore, include Tony Hsieh (@zappos, for those of you who see him continually on twitter), Elon Musk (who's got to have the coolest portfolio of investments since retiring from PayPal, with SpaceX, SolarCity, Tesla Motors all under his wing), and Michael Pollan, who's completely changed the way many of us think about food. Check out the confirmed speaker list, but keep in mind that there are more yet to come as John and I firm up the program.

What good is collective intelligence if it doesn't make us smarter?

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 25

Two stories I read yesterday morning are worth sharing. The first, an editorial by science-fiction writer Robert Silverberg, was entitled The Death of Gallium, a meditation on the increasing scarcity of valuable elements like gallium, used in flat panel TVs and computer displays, which is estimated to be used up by 2017. Other less rare but equally important minerals are also expected to run out within decades. The other, a New York Times story entitled Asleep at the Spigot, is summarized well by its subtitle: "A thirst for oil comes back to haunt a nation of gas guzzlers." It's a short but poignant history of the many warnings and missed opportunities to change our gas guzzling habits during the seventies, eighties and nineties, when the eventual shortage was apparent, but the political will to make changes was lacking in the face of opposition from companies interested in maintaining the status quo, backed up by a short-sighted electorate.

These stories are a great way to highlight the focus of the 2008 Web 2.0 Summit Launchpad. We've entitled the business plan competition "Web meets world," described as follows:

For Launch Pad 2008, the focus will be on startups in the fields of alternative energies, social entreprenuerialism, microfinance, developing economies, political action, renewable technologies, and the like. We'll be particularly interested in where these companies display significant cross over with the web, of course, but this will not be required.

This might seem like quite a departure for the Web 2.0 Summit, the conference that made its name by celebrating the revolution in the consumer internet caused by the move to the internet as platform, service based business models, and social media. Or is it? After all, I've argued all along that the real heart of Web 2.0 is the ability of networked applications to harness collective intelligence. Yes, you can harness collective intelligence to build amazing internet businesses, as the past five years have shown us.

But what good is collective intelligence if it doesn't make us smarter?

In an era of looming scarcities, economic disruption, and the possibility of catastrophic ecological change, it's time for us all to wake up, to take our new "superpowers" seriously, and to use them to solve problems that really matter.

The potential is huge. In recent months, I've seen fascinating startups for earth monitoring, carbon markets, energy efficiency of electronic devices, and home energy management. There are lots of projects for open government and responsive politics, which in an ideal world should have commercial potential. There are world-changing opportunities in collaborative scientific research, early detection of infectious disease outbreaks, personalized medicine, resource discovery, new materials, you name it.

That's why we've titled this edition of the Web 2.0 Summit The Opportunity of Limits. As John Battelle wrote so eloquently on the Summit web site:

In the first four years of the Web 2.0 Summit, we've focused on our industry's challenges and opportunities, highlighting in particular the business models and leaders driving the Internet economy. But as we pondered the theme for this year, one clear signal has emerged: our conversation is no longer just about the Web. Now is the time to ask how the Web—its technologies, its values, and its culture—might be tapped to address the world's most pressing limits. Or put another way—and in the true spirit of the Internet entrepreneur—its most pressing opportunities.

As we convene the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, our world is fraught with problems that engineers might charitably classify as NP hard—from roiling financial markets to global warming, failing healthcare systems to intractable religious wars. In short, it seems as if many of our most complex systems are reaching their limits.

It strikes us that the Web might teach us new ways to address these limits. From harnessing collective intelligence to a bias toward open systems, the Web's greatest inventions are, at their core, social movements. To that end, we're expanding our program this year to include leaders in the fields of healthcare, genetics, finance, global business, and yes, even politics.

Increasingly, the leaders of the Internet economy are turning their attention to the world outside our industry. And conversely, the best minds of our generation are turning to the Web for solutions. At the fifth annual Web 2.0 Summit, we'll endeavor to bring these groups together.

In short, we're looking for great startups to introduce to the world in the Web 2.0 Summit launchpad in San Francisco in November. Here's how it works: You start by filling out the application form (by no later than September 10.) If you catch our attention, you'll be contacted to provide a pitch to our panel of VCs, who will consider your presentation as if for funding. Six to eight finalists will appear on stage at the conference, with audience voting for additional feedback.

The full list of participating VCs will be announced shortly, but will include both internet and cleantech VCs. So far we've confirmed Chris Albinson of Panorama Capital, Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures, and Mike Goguen of Sequoia Capital.