Copacetic

Speakers : Salim Ismail, Shel Israel, Walter Higgins, Robert Burke, Fergus Burns

Web 2.0 : Openess and sharing, giving power back to the community

Shel Israel: What is Web 2.0 and who cares anyway?

Nobody trusts marketing, they trust people like themselves.

Cluetrain, its about conversations.

Web 2.0 levels the playing field.

Web 2.0 tools : blogs, podcasts, VideoBlogs, Wikis, TBD

Hugh McLeod: Blogging requires passion and authority. Which leaves out most people.

Blogs: Websites, reverse order, links, comments, unfiltered, publishable, findable, viral, syndicatable, linkable.

Conversations, Not Tech, 2 guys on fence, from cave to Web 2.0; one to many, Word of mouth on steroids. (e.g. IRC, Skype, Firefox, 100 million users)

42 million bloggers worldwide.

2500 blogging inside Microsoft. No blog policy in Microsoft. Now not seen as so evil.

Maybe we can trust these guys (Microsoft).

I decide what I want to see in terms of advertising.

75K new blogs daily. 1.2m new posts daily, 1 post per second; corp watchers, toe-dippers and abandonment

Similar themes to Marc Canter (jd) blogs as your web presence.

No recorded cases of IP being leaked via a blog.

Web 2.0 Features;

• Control moves from organisation to community
• Companies enable, people share
• Products and services for free or very cheap
• Usually built on Open Source (mashups are easy)
• Internet based distribution, sales, support, marketing collaboration, recruiting etc.
• Companies can locate anywhere

Some examples of blog based businesses

• Riya
• EnglishCut
• Krugle
• BlueRidge
• La Fraise

Put the customer at the centre rather than at the edge (La Fraise).

Salim Ismail: Is Web 2.0 = Dotbomb 2.0? Does Web 2.0 Make Sense?

Services vs data
Manipulate and use data rather than present it
Real time
Data aggregation
Social Networking

Examples: Flickr, Buzznet, pubsub, technorati, feedster etc.

Blogs are exploding

A syndication eco system has evolved – Ping Servers, Ping aggregators, RSS, Atom, FeedMesh

Blogs: Knowledge management inside the firewall, Marketing/PR/CRM outside the enterprise (all text based)

Information on Web is hidden
Visible : HTML, Text, search engine crawlable, difficult to analyse
Hidden: XML, structured, Lives in walled garden, Not easily available, can be syndicated, databases, firewall hidden.

Hidden web is 500 time bigger than visible web.

Google is touching less than 0.5% of all the worlds data.

Structured blogging – Fill a form rather than free text.

Syndicate the XML along with the blog post.

Pay ebay, auto-trader, monster to publish structured information, why?

You post a film review, and other people can aggregate it…

MySpace page is a blog, but they don’t call it that.

Web 2.0 vs Internet 3.0

• Messaging – 80′s email – whats your email address – sending
• Request response – 90′s web browser – whats your website – searching
• Publish/Subscribe – 00′s 3rd App – whats your feed – watching

3rd App: Blog Agggregator, feed reader.

Over time you will only have one alerting app on your desktop (no more icons in bottom right).

Web 2.0 is really Internet 3.0

Businesses are event oriented.

All business systems are based on data.

But businesses don’t run on data, they run on events,

• New customer
• Price change
• Delivery notice

Within the enterprise syndication of information events as a paradigm will take hold

• Sales lead management
• Internal announcments

Outside the Enterprise

Low cost XML information distribution – price changes, supply chain, product annoucements

25% savings for properly implemented pub/sub systems.

Syndicate offers to sell, job adverts, price changes, special offers.

VC model is threatened because new startups don’t require anything like the same amount of capital.

Databases are terrible at managing event tracking e.g. report back to me when this event occurs.

Microformats is the format, structured blogging is what you do with it.

Fergus Burns : Web 2.0 – An Irish Perspective

Lots of web 2.0 companies

Model has morphed many times

We use LAMP stack

Startup costs Excite 3m, Jotspot 0.25m.

Don’t get hung up on technology

All web 2.0 have a database, need to monetize this?

Customers, whose going to pay?

Cost of customer acquisition is zero, but customers are one click away from never using your site again.

Barrier to using del.icio.us is zero.

Orkut, big in brazil, nothing in US.

Release early, release often. Product must work.

What business model? Google: The model that is working so well for us tooka couple of years to really get right.

Initially they planned to sell the search server, but then switched to the advertising model.

Cluetrain: Markets are getting smarter faster than companies are getting smarter.

Opportunity cost is the biggest cost.

Team is key. Would you have invested in Microsoft in 1978?

Funding : EBay, Stamps, coings, books, no brainer pass – bvp.com

Skype – 25 VCs passed before they got funding

Use VC pitches as a learning exercise

Operations – What is driving your business, where are the customers and revenues coming from?

Headaches – Keep going

Exit – e.g. no US incorporation.

Ireland and Web 2.0 – Need an ecosystem

Walter Higgins : Developing Rich Internet Applications

PXN8

RIA – Internet applications that behave like desktop applications

RIA Technologies – JavaScript, Applets, Flash

This talk focusses on JavaScript

Developed in Perl

Perl is a language in decline?

Perl, Python and Ruby – dynamic, agile languages, no compilation required, rich object literals, greater productivity, less code

Domain specific languages – solve a specific problemm blur line between code and configuration

Rake – build tool written in Ruby

JavaScript for client side – extensive use in Google Maps

JSON – JavaScript object notation

Seperate presentation layer and event layer (unobtrusive JavaScript)

XMLHTTPRequest – synchronous vs asynchronous

CSS – Cascading style sheets

Scriptaculous – Position, opacity and other effects

Data – not pages – XML and JSON

Rich Enterprise Applications – Live Tables, Sortable and column draggable tables, Lazy combo boxes (evaluate secondary boxes based on inputs from previous boxes).

Robert Burke – Enabling Web 2.0 with ASP.NET “Atlas”

ASP.NET : Data driven web applications

Standards compliance : XHTML, CSS Supportm Accessibility

The right abstractions : Membership, roles, personalization

Principles of Web 2.0

• Harnessing collective intelligence
• The web as a platform
• Importance of data
• End of software release cycle
• Lightweight programming models
• Software above the level of a single device
• Rich user experience

Atlas :

• High productivity platform for AJAX style applications
• Free to download
• Works with every browser – IE, FireFox, Safari, plans for Opera
• Atlas control toolkit – Open Source project

Cool Atlas demo.