Bill’s Blog

Overall the conference was worth attending.  I had several excelent conversations and learned quite a bit about what’s happening in the web 2.0 world.  I’ll put some more summary thoughts together and share them in another post.  I spent some time in the Nokia overflow suite.  It was a great way to see the conference and have power and coffee handy at the same time.  Plus, I met Charlene Li, whose research I read, and who had interviewed Josh Bancroft for her upcoming book.  It’s a small world.

I only got to see the first half of Day 3 before heading to the airport.  Day 3 had different topics from the other two days.  I’d heard so much about Jane McGonigal that it was good to finally hear her speak.  I loved the Dash connected GPS demonstration.  And I thought the discussion with Randall Stevenson (CEO of AT&T) was excellent.

Here are my notes:

Web 2.0 Conference Day 3 notes
Conversation with J. Craig Venter

• DNA and sequencing the human genome
• Privacy implications?  Congress passed law protecting people
• Bio bricks idea – building small components of DNA
• Very Sci fi

Jane McGonigal

• reality is broken… doesn’t work as well as our favorite games
• Network games work better than reality because
  • Better Instructions
  • Better feedback – scores, graphs, data
  • Better community – everyone agrees to the same rules and narrative
• Global mass exodus to virtual worlds = rational behavior
• Many people spend 16+ hours / week playing games, 10 hours / week thinking about games and $1.5B
• What are we going to do about this?
  • Option 1 – make games more immersive and more exciting
  • Option 2 – make reality more like a game; Jane’s focus
• Signals
  • “my car is a video game” – blog post about a hybrid car
  • Chore wars – claim experience points for house work
  • Passively multiplayer online games – experience points for everything you do online
  • Serios – put a game on top of your everyday activities at work; virtual currency assigned to requests / responses
  • Cruel 2 B Kind – attack people with actions of kindness (Game invented by Jane)
  • World without oil – fictional scenario of world without oil; people lived as if it were real
• Forecast: gaming communities will demand that ordinary reality will work more like their favorite games; non-gamers will also flock to this
• jane@avantgame.com for more info

Rob Currie, Mark Williamson – Dash

• unveiling content platform for your car
• devices for your car that connect to the internet – wifi or cell network
• use device to crowd source traffic patterns – your device sends info back to the cloud
• Can send messages directly to the car – through SMS and browser plug-ins
• Can move content from the web to the dash device – through their online interface
• Shows how to do this for yoga places in LA and then uses upcoming to find jazz performances in SF
• Showed zillow search of houses near you
• List of all open houses near you from craig’s list
• These devices are awesome!  Where do I get one?

Brady Forrest moderates a panel on mapping
Erik Jorgensen, Brian McClendon, Bruce Radloff

• who pays for map data?  MS buys data from various companies
• Tom Tom collects their own data.  Opportunity to collect more data from driving the streets
• New data source for mapping is coming form driving around and filming
• Geospam?  Yes, something we deal with
• International focus?  Where are consumers and ad $$ today?  Where will they be tomorrow?  PRC, India, western Europe… but you need global coverage
• Many countries still don’t want their information shared outside their borders

Randall Stevenson, CEO of AT&T

• AT&T of today is very different from the AT&T or yore
• Long distance is pretty much free, everyone uses their mobile phone these days
• Why is internet so slow?  Public policy.  Working with local governments to change the legislation.  25 Mbit pipes in Texas.
• We’ve never constrained what people can do with their bandwidth
• Are you a huge fan of net neutrality?  We’ve never discriminated who runs on our network.  Comcast blocks P2P.  We don’t block P2P usage.  We don’t block anybodies content.
• 700 MHz – huge opportunity.  The best spectrum we’re going to find for a long time.  Data consumption growing 4x annually.  We need more capacity.
• Just paid $2.5B for a company with no revenues, to get their spectrum.
• Supportive of open access, but not sure there’s a business model.  Can someone pay for the spectrum and make a business out of it?
• How do you feel about Google’s market cap?  Envious.  All about the growth potential.  Google is growing faster than we are.  Very capital light model.
• We’ll put 15-16% of revenue into infrastructure this year.
• Is google succeeding because they’re riding on the investments you’ve made?  Yes.  Does it upset you?  No.  It’s been happening with other companies for years.
• Don’t regulate something until there’s a problem.
• If anybody ought to have an ad supported directory assistance is should be us.  Will you use adsense?  No, we’ll develop it ourselves.
• About Steve Jobs… how is the iPhone deal going?  It’s going great.
• Edge?  Because Steve wanted it that way. It covers the entire country.  Doesn’t like the speed either.
• Magic 5 – local, long distance, high speed, wireless, video – how are they doing?  Well.  It all starts with wireless.  It all starts with wireless.
• Watches his 23 year old daughter – wants wireless and broadband.  So started selling stand alone DSL.
• Wireless is cannibalizing wired
• What policy changes would you make?
  • Economic strength is most important to our business
  • Rules and regulations slow telecommunications
  • Individual regulatory approvals are problematic
  • Technology has bypassed the regulations.  The rules aren’t keeping pace with the regulations
• IMS platform – letting people develop on this platform.  What is this?
• Open access is ok, but it means that AT&T won’t subsidize unlocked phones
• Will iPhones be available corporate billing?  Yes, but won’t give a date.

Big Media: Friend or Foe?  Moderated by Josh Quittner
Amy Banse (Comcast), Quincy Smith (CBS)

• Amy (Comcast) – need to manage excessive use; 0.01% of users use this.  If they upgrade to commercial services, no issue.
• The future – super fast pipe with all of his entertainment
• Largest ISP – 12.5M data subscribers
• Amy – we believe cable TV will be around for along time
• Quincy – internet is a huge opportunity for us; new content, new uses
• Last week one of the biggest clips on youtube was david letterman.  CBS claimed it as views and let it continue.  It’s good for CBS.
• Amy: TV viewing is going up; has gone up every year for the past 30 years.  Online viewing isn’t cannibalizing tv viewing
• Any: people don’t care about online video vs tv video.  They just want video.  We need to create an interface to let people find video wherever they want it.  No battle between cable and internet.
• Amy: we’re not afraid of Google
• Quincy: we like the watercooler effect – facebook, last.fm, etc.  We want to be in the conversation.  Acquire, partner as necessary.
• When will you tear down the artificial barriers based on geography?  Our barriers should be smaller.  It’s a rights issue.

Quote of the Day: Current TV’s Om Malik – “most of TV sucks”

Another awesome day at the web 2.0 conference!  Day 2 kicked off with Steve Balmer and a Popfly announcement.  It ended with some innovative new web 2.0 startups.  Here are my high level notes.

Web 2.0 Conference Day 2 notes

Steve Ballmer

• 80k employees at Microsoft
• said Vista launch was phenomenal
• is Google still a one trick pony?  What he means is that most tech companies start with their core and then fill out around it.  Microsoft has both desktop and enterprise businesses, and they are adding devices and entertainment and internet.
• What do you make of the 100k developers on Facebook?  Threat?  Ballmer says there are probably more than that.  He says 100k companies.  Any exciting app will have a developer story, but doesn’t replace an OS.
• Web experiences will continue to get richer and be more programmable.  Desktop apps aren’t going away.
• Announcement: Popfly is now in open beta
• Demoing Popfly.  Amazing!  Creating small apps in seconds.
• Quiksilver website – thousands of videos hosted with WindowsLive and Popfly
• Do you think google docs and spreadsheets is a good product? If you want to collaborate on a fairly simple thing, then yes. If you want to do what our customers do with office, then no.  Plus Office Live has better collaboration.
• Compared MS search with a three year old playing with the 12 year olds…
• Have to do search well to do advertising well; have to be good at community and communications; also have a strong ad platform – all payloads, all media, on all platforms; have a lot of ads you sell on behalf of other people (syndication business)
• Rumor is that MS isn’t making money on the Facebook deal.  Interesting.  Ballmer was coy, but said it was a learning experience and an investment
• aQuantive acquisition – great tools, algoritms, customer intelligence / data
• MS will buy 20+ companies a year for the next five years.  Mostly small – $50-200M
• steveb@microsoft.com if you have a company worth buying
• Yahoo merger?  Coy response.  If we didn’t believe we could do well, we shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing.  We think we can do well with our independent path.  But, if it makes sense in the future, we’ll do it.
• 80k people – how do you stay nimble?  How do you partner?  People act autonomously and focused on their own projects.
• What do you do when you buy a company that runs Linux or open source?  Sometimes migrate, sometimes not.

Meg Whitman – Ebay

• Advice for people as your market starts to slow down?
• Biggest risk – search & find
• 40% of business is fixed price
• Meg sells her kids used sporting equipment on eBay
• Best thing sold – Mickey Mouse Skis – only 200 made, but made a lot of money on them
• Paypal is 85-90% of eBay payments
• Should paypal try to integrate with social network services?  Info not shared, which is a big deal.  Could paypal become your online identity?  Possibly.
• You can’t manage your own online reputation because you’d never allow any nagative comments.
• Tim O’Relly – You tend to become what you disrupt.  Meg – certain growing up that isn’t inconsistent with innovation
• Merger with Yahoo?  So much work to do to get full potential of Skype, Paypal, and eBay.  That’s where the focus is today.
• Still bullish on Skype despite write down.  Huge potential still.
• Earn out was causing issues with how we ran Skype.  We want to continue to grow the company without the profit / revenue metrics.
• Looking for a new CEO for Skype
• Craig’s List – we own 30% of craig’s list
• eBay is #1 classified service in 400 companies worldwide
• How to encourage more women in technology?  Non-answer, but pointed out that eBay has done things to make it more friendly to women
• Internet Retail Sales Tax?  Understands why state govmt would want a tax.  If there was a standardized sales tax that could be implemented, it wouldn’t have a big effect on e-commerce.
• Retaliation on buyers and sellers – mutual feedback withdrawal is very popular.  Feedback is a living thing.  Lots of ideas on how to make it better.

Panel Discussion on Facebook Platform – Moderated by Dave McClure
Seth Goldstein , Ali Partovi , Keith Rabois , Lance Tokuda

• What % are you betting on Facebook vs other networks?
• Big moments in computing history – creation of DOS, Google, and Facebook platform
• 60-70% of facebook apps have a slide app on their toolbar?
• How do you measure success?

Mary Meeker – presentation at morganstanley.com/techresearch

• Consumers are the #1 users of semiconductors for the first time in history (2003 / 2004)
• China surpasses the US in the use of high tech devices
• US GDP relative to rest of the world is declining
• Non-US penetration in non-US is leading in many areas
• Lots of other good data on internet trends – check out the presentation

Viacom CEO

• News: Free Jon Stewart – everything of his will be on the web
• Google lawsuit?  Is their solution good enough?  Non-answer.
• Online revenues $500M+ or about double last year

Niall Kennedy – Hat Trick Media – Widgets

• what is a widget?  Describes components of a widget.
• Starts with a bit of technology.  Unusual for this conference.
• Total internet share – Myspace and Google both about 5% of traffic
• Adwords widgets – interactive widgets. Interesting!
• Mobile widgets – mini apps done with html, javascript, and css
• Blog sidebars – amazon wishlists, quote of the day, twitter updates, etc.
• Niallkenedy.com
• Widgetsummit.com
• Hattrickmedia.com

Bill Tancer – Predictive power of Web 2.0

• weblogs.hitwise.com – his site with lots of data

VP of Engineering (Google)

• talked about creative applications created as gadgets for your google home page
• hockey stick graph of users who are creating widgets – 20k+ gadgets today
• Billions served each week
• 63 gadgets with >1M 7 day active users
• 50% of traffic outside the top 25 apps

Morgan Webb – Gaming Panel

• Activison
• Digital Chocolate – Pixar of mobile games
• Monetize the social value of the interaction, not the content.  Interesting idea.  Difficult to implement.
• Activision guy – mainstream threading is 4-5 years out

700 MHz Panel
Ram Charam, others

• “Beach front property” – low power usage, 1/5 the numbers of towers
• Open Access is a big deal… need a deal with AT&T or Verizon to put an app on a mobile phon
• John Batelle asks – why not turn the beach front property into a national park – give it away
• martin@fon.com – will send you all the routers you want to do municipal wireless

High Order Bit – Amazon VP of Product mgmt and Dev Relations
Adam Selipsky

• 265k people using their services (AWS)
• Flexible Payment service – very customizable payment service
• 10B objects stored in S3 – 2x Q2 07!!
• Transactions / second = 27,601 – increasing dramatically

Launch Pad

• tripit.com – travel planning and integration.  Very cool!
• Realius.com – real estate game…
• G.ho.st – global hosted operating system.  Virtual computer on the web

There was one more session from Day 1 that I wanted to mention.  It was a presentation done by Veoh and My Space.  They had some interesting points.

Aber Whitcomb, co-founder & CTO MySpace

• developed Myspace in a month
• initially time to market was more important than scale
• advice: keep things simple as ong as you can – simple architecture, simple orgs
• re-architect as you grow
• focus on keeping the site running vs cost savings
• so of the shelf solutions worked for myspace as they scaled – all custom
• scale out vs up
• leased nation wide backbone
• developed distributed file system – saved costs
• now have 400 people in their technical organization
• Advice: get a product out fast – fix it later
• Advice: take input from your users
• Advice: don’t cut corners on redundancy
• Advice: test vendors first – bake off

Dave Burkhardt – VP of technical operations, Veoh

• VeohTV – DVR software for PC
• CDN issues include reporting inaccuracies and random performance issues in remote geos
• Managing bandwidth is critical
• Advice: show growth
• Advice: use 3rd party monitors like Gomez and Keynote
• Show growth history (helps with investment or growth claims)

I took some very detailed notes, which I won’t post here.  I think the highlight of the day was the dinner with Rupert Murdoch and Chris Dewolfe.  I was very surprised by both of them and about their relationship, which appeared to be strong.  I continue to be impressed at the quality of the speakers and conversations that are at this event.  Today’s speakers included:

• Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)
• Marissa Mayer (Google)
• Bruce Chizen (Adobe)
• Evan Williams (Twitter)
• Mike Moritz (VC)

It was obvious that social networking sites are on this rise.  The facebook and myspace guys were both confident in their companies future.

A few highlights from Day 1

Session with Ebay’s Max Mancini

• leverage external developers as much as possible by opening up your platform.  When someone does something cool that you want to pull back into the paltform, acquire the company.
• if you enable people to innovate and make money, they’ll create things you never imagined
• innovation.ebay.com

Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook)

• Strategy is to break even (keep expenses in line with costs).  Must be nice.
• Spends time on recruiting through referrals
• IPO is “years out”
• Future apps from facebook?  Think ads
• Whose data is it?  The users data

Marissa Mayer (Google)

• Talked about Google Health
• 66% of people use search first to find health related issues
• told stories of people diagnosing heart attacks and other medical conditions using google
• Wants to create personal health records you can access from anywhere

Anssi Vanjoki (Nokia)

• Announced the N810.  My comment: Sounds cool, but has only wifi connectivity.  They should have put a phone in it!
• 1 Billion people have Nokia devices today

Bruce Chizen (Adobe)

• Premiere Express already being used on sites like mtv.com
• Photoshop express (hoster version) on the way
• Flash player will become a communications tool (add VOIP and IM)
• 10 years from how, all adobe sw will be hosted online

Revolution Money (Ted Leonsis & Jason Hogg)

• neat idea – credit card, debit card, gift card all in one
• lower fees
• PIN based credit card
• revolutionmoney.com
• They call it the web 2.0 payment platform.  Not sure I saw the web 2.0 connection.

Evan Williams (Twitter)

• There is value in constraints
• What can we take away to make something better?

Mike Moritz (Sequoia Capital)

• 20% of TV viewers skip commercials
• Pretty boring talk overall…

OK, I know it’s very late.� Turns out I have a life

Martin Mikos – MySQL

The great database in the sky

Proposes an idea of opensourcing your data into a grand database

�

Brad Garlinghouse & Ethan Diamond – Yahoo

Web 2.0 changing from geek experience to mass consumers

Success in the future is driven by complete user experiences rather than technology or features

New web = connect, belong, express

Yahoo mail – 250M active monthly users

Showed very tight integration of email and messenger

�

Roger�McNamee , Ram�Shriram Venture Capital

�

• Question: if I can fund my own business, why do I need you?� In that case, you don’t need us.� Encourage people to fund their own business.
• Why is IPO market closed?� Public markets only looking for clear profits and growth.� Unless you’re building a big business, use M&A as your exit strategy (Ram)
• Roger – in the transformation business.� Not private equity, which is about extracting cash
• This was fascinating.� It made me want to be a VC.�

Gary Flake�from Microsoft gave a demo of photosynth, which combines client and server processing to do some very cool photo processing.� I can’t wait until they let you upload yoru own photos.

Disruption: Harnessing the Collective Intelligence
Jim�Buckmaster , Richard�Rosenblatt , Toni�Schneider , Owen�Van Natta

��

• Just at the beginning of a world where everything is going to be connected
• Give up control to your users (e.g. translation of wordpress)
• Don’t believe others when they tell you it’s a bad idea
• Focus on what you believe in
• It’s ok to try and do things differently
• Things that didn’t work in the past are working now.� Don’t be encumbered by the past

��Marisa Mayer – Google

• Slow and steady doesn’t win the race – speed matters
• Key reason they chose AJAX for apps was speed
• Google maps home page grew to 100k in size.� Too big.� Launched 70k version – traffic was up 25% over the next few weeks!
• Instant feedback = steeper learning curve
• Same is true with uploading videos.� Used to be 24-48 hours while youtube was instant.
• Browser support – should see much richer support for client side scripting in browsers;
• Mobile space is still too slow – need to see real advances in mobile hardware.� In the mean time, three screen experience is still going to be around.
• The big learning for me here was to decrease our page sizes and page load times.

Wednesday’s conference was a different format.� It was basically one big session.� There were many great speakers.� My favorite was the Net Neutrality debate with Vinton Cerf and Bob Pepper.�

Jeff Bezos – Amazon.com

Talked about Amazon S3 and E2 service

Why are people so excited?� Amazon takes care of the heavy lifting in terms of servers and hardware

70% of time, energy and dollars go into undifferentiated heavy lifting

Aws.amazon.com

His definition of web 2.0 = computers talking to computers

Web 2.0 business practice = EC2 = self serve, easy to use, etc.

Converting fixed costs to variable costs – pay for things once (storage, Alexa), then sell it “by the drink”

Biggest cost for data center = lack of utilization

�

Bruce Chizen – CEO, Adobe

Adobe reader and Flash is on 700M devices – their ability to reach users is greater than anyone else

Don’t view html and the web as competition

People standardize on PDF because it does something html can’t do

Flash action script VM now handed to Mozilla as an open source project

Hinted at more open source coming from adobe

Mentioned “cooler” – open standards color mgmt for the web and print

Focus on what we’re really good at – making stuff look really good and be secure

Adobe labs – ebook reader coming shortly (will be able to leverage flash and dynamic read flow)

Good reading devices coming soon as well

Apollo – connected and occasionally connected; run-time client that renders pdf and html and swf in once client within a browser or as desktop app (connected to the web)

�

Vinton Cerf and Bob Pepper

Bob is against net neutrality

• Consumers should have the right to connect their own devices to the net
• Terms of service should guarantee you the right to go and get whatever content you want
• Right to get legal apps
• Sufficient info so consumers know what they’re buying

�

But we need to understand that networks need to be managed

Right way to handle net neutrality is on a case by case basis using case law, not through govt regulation (which leads to price regulation and other legislation)

Requires swift enforcement

Gave example of trial where bellsouth paid for people to move up to a high speed access to watch movies

�

Vin

If there was enough competition, we wouldn’t need net neutrality

Switching is hard

Ample evidence of current duopoly (and in some cases monopoly) being anti-competitive. e.g. opposed to municipal broadband

Consumers are at risk.� We need to do something to protect choice.

Doesn’t agree that price regulation is the end result of any regulation

Doesn’t like the case by case approach, since it takes a long time and doesn’t establish a framework

�

Mary Meeker

Slides – www.morganstanley,com/techresearch

Fast talker, lots of data

Google and Yahoo are clear drivers in advertising.� Amazon also a leader in internet

If skype were a carrier (and it isn’t), it would be the #3 phone company in the world – China Mobile #1, Vodafone #2.� 7% of all international calls on skype

60% of all internet traffic is unmonetized video

�

Robert Carter – CTO Fedex

Atoms and Bits

Video of fedex plane network around memphis.� Ant Farm�

Bits�

Velocity and visibility� allows physical network and virtual network to be connected

Creates value by changing the way society is conducted

Access to information and goods changes society and lifts the world economy

�

Jonathan Miller – CEO AOL

Observation – no public web 2.0 companies.� They’ve all been bought.

�

Ray Ozzie – Microsoft

Note: read his email on the changes needed at MS

And http://www.hypercamp.org/2005/11/09

Doesn’t believe the web should just replace the PC.� Use the web for what it’s good at and the PC for what it’s good at.

The keynotes were in the afternoon.� Tim O’Reilly and John Batelle started out reviewing the six tenants of web 2.0.� They also talked about last years conference.� Finally, they announced the Web 2.0 Expo April 15-17 2007.

Next came Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.� Here are the notes I took on his talk.

�

Why did you buy youtube?� Google video really took off earlier this year.� You tube was growing faster though.

Talked about the shift in software from desktop to data center hosted apps (on LAMP and REST)

People don’t work for money, they work for impact

Google is consensus driven.� No single decision makers.

Develop 2007 strategy by asking 29 questions and assigning them to teams to evaluate

Ubiquitous broadband is coming.� Disks will be optional.

�

Joichi�Ito�- World of Warcraft

�

4 pillars

1. Strategy

2. Achievement

3. Narrative

4. Community

�

Paper he recommended on “Ensemble”

�

Virtual and physical worlds are merging.� Think beyond Virtual.

�

�

Ben�Trott – Vox

�

Open data is an important as open source

All products have import and export buttons – allows users to have control of their data

Vox links with google, amazon, and yahoo (flickr) to share data

Each service has different APIs (google, amazon, flickr)

Great demo of integration

�

A Conversation with Barry Diller and Arthur Sulzberger
Barry�Diller , Arthur�Sulzberger, Jr.

�

Nytimes online (paid site) would be the third largest newspaper (behind NY Times and Boston Globe)

Barry Diller still believes the talent pool is limited and we won’t see lots of excellent content coming out

Authur agrees with Barry

He said he believes it’s good that users can post content, but they’re betting on quality information (processed, though about, corrected)

Editorship is not going away.� It is going to get more important.

�

Jack�Ma – CEO of Alibaba

�

14M+ companies registered and using their sw

AliSoftware – sw for small businesses

Is web 2.0 the same in China?� Lots of user generated content in China

Some areas growing faster than US – e.g. IM, online gaming

Others slower – e.g. myspace

Common mistakes US companies make in China?� Entrepreneur attitude needed in China (as opposed to professional managers).� Find the right people.� Can’t buy the market, need to cultivate the market.� Patience needed.

So many opportunities – why do something the govt doesn’t want?� Instead focus on the opportunities that are legal

This was a truly inspiring session led by Jory Des Jardins.� Her panel included:

Jory Des Jardins, Co-founder, BlogHer LLC
Caterina Fake, Co-founder, Flickr
Jessica Hardwick, Founder and CEO, SwapThing.com
Lisa Stone, Co-founder, BlogHer
Jenna Woodul, Executive Vice President and Chief Community Officer, LiveWorld

I took a lot of notes on this one.� I was very impressed with the expertise and passion expressed by this panel.� They are all clearly invested in what they do.

My notes:

Start out as a business.� Much harder to move to a business model once you’ve started.

What is a community Killer and other interesting questions…

• Inattention; not paying attention; need people in there everyday
• Caterina Fake (Flickr) – spent lots of time greeting every new user and introducing them to each other
• Flexibility – community is made up of lots of different people
• Allow the community to create what they want (using your tools)
• Get out of the mindset of “we have to be this way or that way)
• Don’t lie (Walmart RV example)
• Much more difficult to grow via advertising; better to grow organically (friends inviting friends)
• Need a good “Abraham” to grow the community; passionate early community members or founders
• Being passionate about making money off of your audience is not a good strategy
• Blogher asked the community if they could include ads; separated things out based on the response (some have ads, some don’t)
• What is the community about?� What does it feel like?� How do we set it up to feel that way?
• Trust is necessary – implicit or explicit – “we all go to the same school” or “I’ve invested a lot of time into this forum and know the people there”
• Trust with a company – one company let’s users ask them any question about their car
• Dove’s campaign for real beauty – no ads about Dove and no one is encouraged to talk about Dove.� Yet it’s great advertising.
• When building community – ask your users what they want� involve them in product development
• Communities tend to take on the personality of their founders; create with a diverse team
• Reputation is the single most important thing on the swapthing site.� Build their own reputation system.� Can I pull my ebay reputation over?� No initially.� Partnered with Rapleaf – tagline: more profitable to be ethical. Allows user to own their own reputation and take it across multiple communities.� Some question as to how transferable reputation really is.
• Need to be transparent – if you pay people to write, moderate or host, tell your audience.
• How to grow?� Should benefit you and your users – Flickr example: bring five friends and we’ll give you three months of PRO access.� Emailed everyone who commented on her blog a $5 tea gift certificate.� Allow people with PRO accounts to give away PRO accounts to two friends.
• Need a niche – decide what you are the best in the world at
• Be your own best advertiser – talk with people about your site

� How have you scaled?�

• Blogher – Opened up community editorships on first come first serve basis; “beats” determined by company – 62 people doing this now

� How to combat spam?

• Swapthing – Turned the problem over to users (avg lifespan is 41 min)
• Jenna – Liveworld – may need to use structured moderation
• Lisa – Each of the 62 editors is empowered to mark anything as spam; all blogs in their blog directory are reviewed by hand

Start small – don’t try to do too much initially.� e.g. Yahoo autos had sections for all car types.� Narrowed it down to European car.� Users eventually rallied for a SAAB section and it was added. �

How do you address lurkers (people who visit but don’t post).� Study says for every posted, there are 5-10 people lurking.� Write in an open tone and make sure your users know the door is open for them to contribute � Integrate content and community in your site.� Don’t keep them separate. �

Importance of offline component to developing community?� Definitely important!� Communities that encourage and enable users to meet offline.� Can use an “about” section to encourage users to meet up.� Slashdot doesn’t do this very well.� Flickr does this well – almost every day around the world. � Swap circle for Harleys went from 3 to 1072 after Sturgis Harley meetup. �

Flickr – advertising doesn’t work on user generated content.� Doesn’t do ads on user generated content.� Very successful – serving ads on aggregated content (e.g. Tokyo tag has tokyo hotel and flight ads) �

Blogher – different experience.� Let’s people sell ads on their sites.� Bloggers can choose companies and entities they don’t want to see on their site.� Advertisers are beginning to loosen up.�

Mary Hodder led this session on Video on the Web.� Her panel included:

Mary Hodder, CEO, Dabble – Video search and community

Josh Felser, CEO, Grouper Networks

Mike Folgner, Jumpcut/Yahoo – let’s you mix and remix videos

Tod M. Sacerdoti, Founder and CEO, BrightRoll

And here are my raw notes:

Copyright issues – significant issues today for all video sites