Alberto Saavedra 2.0

Those of us who are not yet Web 2.0 entrepreneurs to justify a trip to the event where the second generation of Internet technology is presented to mainstream people: Web 2.0 Expo and did not win the Web 3.0 definition contest to get tickets, were preparing to follow the conference in a time-shifted fashion like how we did it for previous Web 2.0 events: reading Web 2.0 Summit coverage, finding live-blogging posts or listening and watching podcasts of selected presentations. But this year, thanks to live streaming, the virtual experience was enhanced.

Jeremiah Owyang’s business casting and Robert Scoble’s live streaming were two experiments to show the behind-the-scenes experience of this event and with Chris Pirillo made Web 2.0 history by streaming the Social Media Revolution panel as this 15-minute video mashup can attest.

The World Live Web is a term coined by Alex Searls and has been used to differentiate static content production from content that stimulates conversations and participation - blogs, wikis, podcasts, vlogs. But services like Twitter/Jaiku (status microblogging), Talkshoe (live online talk radio shows) and Ustream/Stickam (live online television broadcasts) are going to re-define the term as they mature.

And here are some of the resources found around the web with coverage related to this event, presentation files and slide shows are being added as available and the talks are ordered by popularity using the session stats.

• A Conversation with Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon: (video interview) (liveblog)
• Built to Last or Built to Sell: Is There a Difference? (video clip) (WebProNews)
• Launch Pad Day 1 (liveblog): Spock, WebEx, inpowr (audio)
• High Order Bit: Introducing Apollo (audio)
• Eric Schmidt in Conversation with John Battelle: (video) (highlights) (audio)
• State of the Web 2.0: Measuring the Participatory Web (ReadWriteWeb) (audio)
• Mobile 2.0 (audio)
• Jeff Weiner in Conversation with John Battelle: (video clip) (WebProNews) (audio)
• Launch Pad Day 2 (audio) (Webware): Swivel, Vidoop (video), Tellme
• Web 2.0 for the Enterprise: Is It Soup Yet? (video clip) (audio)
• High Order Bit: Architecture for Humanity (audio)
• High Order Bit: Joost: P2P Television (audio)
• High Order Bit: The Other Local (audio)
• Ignite: (Potenco video) (Information diet) (Happiness hacking) (Justin.tv)
• Tagging that Works (Agile Partners audio) (slides)
• Web2.Open ()
• High Performance Webpages (slides)
• The People Formerly Known as the Audience (liveblog)
• Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches (slides)
• Media 2.0: How Web 2.0 is Transforming Traditional Media (liveblog)
• Building Web 2.0: Next-generation Web Platforms
• Social Networking Winners & Losers: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
• The New Hybrid Designer: (ReadWriteWeb)
• Web 20-20: Architectural Patterns and Models for the New Internet
• Starting Up 2.0: Strategies for Pitching, Financing & Growing Your Web 2.0 Startup (WebProNews)
• Venture Capital 2.0: Bright future or broken forever? (WebProNews)
• The Social Media Revolution: You oughta be in pictures (and podcasting and vlogging) (video clips) (audio)
• Emerging trends in Search Engine Optimization & Search Engine Marketing (liveblog)
• Top 5 Dos and Don’ts for Measuring Web 2.0 (liveblog)
• The Need for Feeds: Understanding RSS & Blog Marketing (liveblog)
• From Pages to People: Behavioral Targeting (liveblog)
• Implementing OpenID (ReadWriteWeb) (audio)
• An Overview of Badges and Widgets: The fast rise of viral web parts (ReadWriteWeb)
• Using widget syndication for online marketing and measurement (ReadWriteWeb)
• Open Source Business Models for Web 2.0 (ReadWriteWeb)
• Click the Big Red Button : Tips & Techniques for Optimizing Conversion and A/B Testing (WebProNews)
• Writing Voice Mashups with Mechanical Turks and Maps (audio) (slides)
• Case Study: Digging into the Technology Behind the Development of Digg (audio)
• Rich Internet Application Platforms (audio)
• API and Mashup Best Practices (audio)
• The Challenge of Agile Development: Avoiding half-baked design (audio) (slides)
• Immersive Experiences: Lessons from Game Designers (audio)
• Reality Bites: The future of gaming + Virtual Worlds 2.0 (audio)

These are also some selected highlights from the conference.

• Web 2.0 Expo Wrapup
• Web 2.0 Expo’s Top 5
• Web 2.0 Expo at a glance
• Thoughts on Web 2.0 Expo

There was also a parallel unconference which was open to anyone: Web2.Open, some slideshows are also published. Michael Wesch, the creator of the famous video “The Machine is us/ing us” which was used for the introduction to the first keynote of Web 2.0 Expo gave a talk in Web 2.0 Open, a video clip explaining how the well-known video was conceived is available.

Labels: internet, knowledge sharing

# posted by Beto : 2:32 AM  0 comments

This blog has been quiet for some time, mainly because I have been building a new site that will come soon and this URL will be used for more general stuff. But today I break the silence to mention two cool services. I haven’t heard of TalkShoe before but it was coming on my river of twitts today with Leo Laporte’s announcement that this week’s TWiT was going to be recorded live, the experiment called TWiT Live had Robert Scoble, Doc Searls, Wil Harris and Alex Lindsay.

The cool stuff with TalkShoe is that you can call in and join the conversation, Jason Calacanis - who is moving from blogging to microblogging - called and share some of his thoughts on monetizing Twitter and there are also other interesting discussions proposed by the callers, I haven’t heard Doc since Gillmor Gang’s last episode and it was really good to listen to him again. The interaction got enhanced with another experiment launched today: Twittervision, which is a Google Maps mashup using the Twitter API, that it’s going to make it easier to explain the value potential provided by Twitter.

So today’s TWiT was an interesting experience with comments popping in Twittervision as some subjects were mentioned in the show. My favorite podcast is the Daily SearchCast and they have a chat room to receive feedback when recording the show live, since Twitter is the evolution of IRC I think live shows will need this kind of interaction so we can send our comments from IM. The next step is Twitter meme tracking and personalized views, I am sure someone is working on it right now

Labels: internet

# posted by Beto : 1:50 AM  0 comments

Last year, Google showed their commitment to the open source community by funding 419 projects - assigned to 40 organizations - to introduce students around the world to Open Source Software Development. I was one of the lucky ones that got accepted and completed my project with a great organization: XWiki, today Chris Di Bona announced that Summer of Code 2006 is a reality and XWiki is participating this year too.

So if you develop open source this is your time to act, just read the Mentor FAQ and see how you can get your organization and favorite open source applications involved, you have until May 1st to submit interest to participate and you can even get 500 USD for your organization by mentoring a student and getting someone to work on that pending feature that you wanted so much to get done.

I haven’t seen any restriction on the number of projects, so if you have a project idea, propose it to your organization and submit the application, open source development will win. And if you are a student you have to get ready to apply on May 1st, I will write some of my experiences from last year’s program on an upcoming post, in the mean time you can read the Student FAQ

Last year’s hispanic open source community participation was low, so to increase it this year I have done an unofficial translation of the mentor FAQ for spanish readers of this blog.

Labels: internet

# posted by Beto : 1:31 AM  0 comments

The move from Blogger to WordPress was motivated by a need for more flexibility (tags) and identity (own domain name), and since I was working with Javascript libraries like script.aculo.us I also wanted to have Ajax functionality so I was testing BloxPress integration with various plugins when my one month vacation began.

When I got back to work on the design of this blog I found various interesting plugins that I want to use but I don’t want it to load slow for every visitor. So, thinking from a micromedia perspective, I choose to organize the plugins following an edition approach:

• Feed Edition. If you are a heavy information consumer just grab the full feed and add it to your favorite aggregator. You can also subscribe to a category feed or to the comments of a post.
• Mobile Edition. Mobile devices have limited display capabilities so this blog uses Alex King’s Mobile plugin to adjust the content for mobile users.
• Simple Edition. The essential plugins, the detail is below.
• Extended Edition. Some nice to have plugins to integrate other services like image/photo hosting, automatic translation, map visualization and others are incorporated in this edition.
• Experimental Edition. Is the web the ultimate API? Hive 7, An Ajaxian Virtual World raises the bar of what can be done in a browser, Ajax design plugins/themes go to this edition.

With this approach a reader can select the edition to read and I can plan the integration of plugins using an iteration model. This first iteration focuses on simplicity - or what Scoble calls anti-marketing design - and usefulness - the added value for a visitor using a browser when reading this blog. Here are the plugins/features that got selected for the Simple Edition.

Publishing Essentials

WordPress 2.0 provides a light core publishing platform, the following are the must-have features I need to start this micromedia adventure:

• Bilingual. I want to write in English and Spanish so I choose Gengo Multi-language plugin’s.
• Spam Protection. I like Akismet web service but I decided to protect this blog with the stable Spam Karma 2 plugin.
• Syndication. This blog expresses points of view but doesn’t cover breaking news, to fill the void I get headlines from web sites like memeorandum using the inlineRSS plugin.
• Edition Selection. To change between editions, I am using the Theme Switcher plugin.

Search Extensions

This blog is about web search so the search box is available in the header and it has a couple more features than what the WordPress basic install provides:

• Extended Search. To allow search in comments and other pages with an Ajax interface I use the Ajaxified Search Everything plugin.
• Highlighting. When you are searching for something, you skim - instead than read - the content. The Search Terms Highlighter plugin allows to detect terms from internal/external queries to help you skim faster.
• Metrics. To store what readers are searching on the blog the Search Meter plugin is used.

Ads Extensions

This blog also talks about online advertising so it should have some ads, I believe that ads should be useful for the reader so if they aren’t you have the option to hide them, the advertising features are based on Problogger Clean theme.

Data Organization Extensions

This blog embraces knowledge sharing and additional information about the post has to be included to identify relations, here are the extensions added:

• Tagging. A post usually covers various topics and tags allow to describe these semantic associations, I choose the powerful Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin for this functionality.
• Location. A post can mention different places but you need geographic coordinate information to have a better identification, Geo plugin is used for this matter.
• Comment Reading. When a post has various comments it’s not so easy to follow the conversation, Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin enhances the reading experience.
• Metrics. Statistical attention metadata is useful to identify trends, basic information is how many times a post had been viewed and WP-PostViews plugin is used for this.

Javascript generated metrics, microformats integration, post rating, sitemap generation, link tracking and OPML integration are planned for the Simple Edition and will come in next iterations, but first let’s finish the introductory posts.

Labels: internet

# posted by Beto : 1:20 AM  0 comments

Hola, bienvenidos a la nueva dirección de mi blog, hasta que el nuevo diseño esté listo puedes visitar mis anteriores artículos en mi blog CPA en español.

Hi, welcome to my new blog, until the new design is ready you can read my prior posts in my CPA blog.

Labels: internet

# posted by Beto : 1:12 AM  0 comments