Speakers in the News »

10/28/05
JOEL GREENBERG

Joel Greenberg (pictured above), who will be leading the "What People are Really Doing on the Web" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival, has posted an interview on his podcasting site with Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson. In addition to his duties at Wired, Anderson is the main proponent of the theory of the Long Tail. According to his blog about this idea, Long Tail is the notion that "our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of "hits" (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly-target goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare." Hear more about this concept via Greenberg's fascinating podcast.

10:43am CST | +

10/27/05
DANAH BOYD

Research about Friendster conducted by danah boyd has now been published online. As noted in the introduction to one of these essays: "By incorporating social networks in a community site, Friendster introduces a mechanism for juxtaposing global and proximate social contexts. It is this juxtaposition that is at the root of many new forms of social software, from social bookmarking services like del.icio.us to photo sharing services like Flickr. Capturing proximate social contexts and pre-existing social networks are core to the development of these new technologies. Friendster is not an answer to the network question, but an experiment in capture and exposure of proximate relations in a global Internet environment. While Friendster is not nearly now as popular as in its heyday, the lessons learned through people's exploration of it are increasingly critical to the development of new social technologies." Boyd will lead the "Designing for Global and Local Social Play" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.

10:27am CST | +

10/26/05
MENA TROTT

In a Venture Voice interview with Mena Trott, plans were announced that video capabilities have been added to the new version of the TypePad personal publishing system. Trott and her husband Ben founded Six Apart four years, and the company has now grown to more than 100 employees. Winner of the Best Weblog category at the 2002 SXSW Web Awards for her personal site Dollarshort.org, Trott also spoke on the "Future of Personal Publishing" panel at the 2003 SXSW Interactive Festival.

11:10am CST | +

10/25/05
ELISA CAMAHORT

Elisa Camahort , who will participate in the "We Got Naked, Now What?" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival, adds her insights to the ongoing splog problem in an insightful post on Worker Bees Blog: "Spam is destroying, or at least inflicting significant harm on, what most people consider a vital part of what makes a blog, a blog: the conversation. It seems like most spam-fighting tactics focus on creating barriers that impact spammers and non-spammers alike. We all know blocking IP addresses is virutally useless, so the solutions seem to be to requires people to jump through hoops it's assumed the automated comment spam bots can't jump through. I haven't a better idea, but I wish there was a way to go after comment spammers that didn't treat us all the same. All these great minds musing about Web 2.0 might want to spin some mental cycles on this problem, or Web 2.0 will consist primarily of automated comment spammers commenting on splogs, while the rest of us take our interactive, disintermediated toys and go home!"

12:12pm CST | +

10/24/05
JOEL SPOLSKY

The ongoing backlash against the "Web 2.0" concept is perhaps best articulated by Joel Spolsky in a recent post on his blog: "The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day. . . Not only that, the very 2.0 in Web 2.0 seems carefully crafted as a way to denegrate the clueless 'Web 1.0' idiots, poor children, in the same way the first round of teenagers starting dotcoms in 1999 dissed their elders with the decade's mantra, 'They just don't get it!' I'll do my part. I hereby pledge never again to use the term 'Web 2.0' on this blog, or to link to any article that mentions it. You're welcome." Author of the book "Joel on Software: And on Diverse and Occasionally Related Matters That Will Prove of Interest to Software Developers, Designers and Managers and to Those Who, Whether by Good Fortune or Ill Luck, Work With Them in Some Capacity", Spolsky is scheduled to speak on the "Sink or Swim: The Five Most Important Startup Decisions" panel at the 2006 SXSW Interactive Festival.