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Getting Ready To Join Web 2.0 Expo, Already In Progress

I'm late to the party for Web 2.0 Expo -- I spent the early part of the week at the InformationWeek 500 Conference, and now that I'm here in New York I'm eager to catch up with my Web 2.0 peers. I've found previous Web 2.0 events in this series made fundamental changes in the way I look at Web publishing, so I'm curious to see whether this event will be equally mind-blowing.

The conference has been going on all week, but for me it starts Thursday. Highlights of Thursday's conference: Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor at NYU who studies social media, delivers a keynote in the morning with the title, "It's Not Information Overload, It's Filter Failure." Shirky is always a provocative speaker -- his talk at Web 2.0 Expo in April described how Web 2.0 phenomena like Wikipedia made good use of an intelligence surplus that had previously been wasted watching Gilligan's Island.

Later that day, Second Life blogger Wagner James Au looks at "the post-hype state of virtual world marketing: What works and what doesn't."

Friday's keynote is Arianna Huffington, publisher of the political blog The Huffington Post.

Later, Jay Adelson, CEO of Digg, looks at organizing chaos and the growth of collaborative filters.

Ben Huh, organizer of the site I Can Has Cheezburger, will give a presentation titled, "Because We Make You Happy," about how simplicity powers popular sites like his. I understand teamwork has a lot to do with it.

more animals

Dan Lyons, aka "Fake Steve Jobs," presents on the Real Future of Technology.

The Future of Browsers got a lot more lively with the recent introduction of Google Chrome, and the last-minute addition of a Google representative to that panel.

Likewise, I expect the conference organizers didn't expect a Friday-afternoon discussion of Wall Street and technology to be quite so relevant to today's headlines.

And Best Buy will present on employee-led innovation.

So what were the presentations from previous events that were so outlook-changing for me? Not the Shirky, although it was quite thought-provoking.

The first was a presentation at the Web 2.0 Summit 11 months ago by Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter and Blogger, talking about how successful applications require more constraints, and fewer features. This went beyond the usual diatribes about creeping featuritis and application bloat -- Williams argued that successful applications are tools that do less. His own Twitter limits messages to 140 characters each, with no support for formatting, multimedia, or even hyperlinks. Facebook was limited to college students until it took off. YouTube limited users to 10-minute, low-resolution videos. And Google competed with cluttered Web portals like Yahoo by offering a clean white page with a logo, text box, and two buttons. The more decisions you ask people to make, the more difficult it is for them to act, Williams said.

The other world-changing Web 2.0 presentation was, for me, from Web consultant Niall Kennedy, about how the Web is no longer about building successful Web sites and getting readers to come to them -- instead, Web publishers want to use feeds, search engines, and widgets to bring content directly to where the audience is. I don't think that's entirely true today, but it's an important Web trend and will grow in significance.

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