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Defrag Conference ‘08 Day Two

Charlene Li’s preso, AWESOME. Slides here. Among the best guotes, and there’s a lot of them, “Open will be the new norm”. Charlene did a great job of describing what the next few years in web 2.0/social media are likely to entail. Talking about trusting Google was big for me. I put everything up there in the google cloud, for lack of a better option really. Google is ubiquitous now, sure I could roll my own, use Yahoo, etc, but no one else does. I really do worry that not only could google decide that doing evil is easier and more profitable than not doing evil. A few months ago we all saw what a gSlap would look like when gmail was down for what? 4, 6 hours? People, including me, were freaking out! We’ll see.

Neeraj Mathur from Sun, not so awesome. I think only Sun, could turn Social Media into a rather boring, over equationed, enterprise-ified concept. Not “friends” but contacts. Equity built by some formula, and displayed like a progress meter. Kudo’s to Sun for trying, but I think they’ve taken it too far and made it “too Much”.

Eric did the sponsor bingo card raffle, great prizes. I’ve never been a sponsor bingo’er, but the idea does appeal to me, especially if you have each sponsor pony up a prize valued at $250 or more, awesome idea Eric!

Eventvue was in the house, literally and metaphorically. Defrag used Eventvue’s cool community building site to let all of us defraggers connect, and talk. It was cool to follow the defrag08 twitter stream, and interact with people I’d never metn and never heard of, but who are clearly thought leaders! I do wish Eric had set up a twitter wall, I’ve found that those are hella fun to watch. People invariably end up standing there staring at the screen for a few minutes, seeing the tweets fly by.

So overall, Defrag = good times, great conversations! Thumbs up. Eric did a bang up job, keeping things moving along. An extra special hard task since there weren’t any breaks between sessions.

As is usual for conferences, the best part was the conversations in the hallway. I had a great conversation Jonathan Yarmis about the music industry and the future or lack there of for them. It was cool to sit and throw ideas back and forth, talking about all the ways the RIAA has completely screwed the pooch, by fighting tooth and nail for $1 now rather than work towards the $2 they’d get if they embraced the current technological environment.

I also had a great conversation with Rob, and Adam from Eventvue, and Fraser from Adaptive blue; talking about twitter, Facebook, and Glue over beers. That kind of conversation is just so great and can’t be replaced. I can’t imagine attending a conference and not having these types of conversations with people that I’ve just met.

Tags: Conferences, Defrag, Technology