Web 2.0 Thoughts from Foo Camp 2006

By Dawn Foster (15 posts) on August 31, 2006 at 11:35 pm

Last weekend I had the opportunity toattend FooCamp (Friends Of O'Reilly), an amazing event hosted by O'Reillymedia. It was truly the best event I have ever attended with theright mix of brilliant people, thought-provoking discussions,networking opportunities, and fun activities designed to simulatecreative thinking. It is a bit hard to summarize what was a non-stopweekend event into something that fits within a blog, so I will tryto focus on the highlights and thoughts about the topics discussed.

Traditional Media vs. New Media:

It is not unusual to hear people makeextreme arguments on both sides of the traditional media / new mediadiscussion with some arguing that blogs and other new media are justfads that will quickly fade away while others argue that new mediawill completely replace traditional media. Jay Adelson and Kevin Rosefrom Digg.com led an interesting session about democratization /disintermediation of traditional media, and most of us seemed toagree that the two are complementary and both will continue to beimportant.

Traditional media excels in areas whereyou have limited distribution (only so many people can be invited toWhite House press briefings, for example). Fact checking and accuracyalso allow traditional media to act as a definitive and reliablesource of information over time with copies forever housed inlibraries. With this accuracy comes a speed trade-off that blogshave been able to use to their advantage. Bloggers can quickly getinformation online before it has been completely verified, andcorrections can be made by other people via comments or posted asupdates when more information is available.

Traditional media will need to adjustsome of their business practices in response to new media. Opinionand editorial pieces are being eroded by new media, and some of thesmart traditional media companies are embracing this change andadding blogs to their mix. Competition for advertising dollars isreally hitting the traditional media. Local newspapers are losing adrevenue to other advertising mediums with classifieds being thehardest hit now, but the revenue loss is also moving into otherareas. Bloggers who do original reporting (like TechCrunch) ratherthan relying on mainstream reporting will get more attention and moreadvertising dollars, which will continue to erode the ad revenue fromtraditional media.

Capturing Passion

KathySierra gave a fascinating talk about passionate users. Peopletend to be passionate about the things they do really well, and whensomeone is both passionate about and good at some activity, they havewhat Kathy calls a higher resolution experience. They pick up onthings that the rest of us would not; the really great Jazzmusicians, for example, hear musical nuances that the rest of us justdo not have the resolution to hear. Learning increases thisresolution.

People can get very passionate aboutonline experiences like World of Warcraft, Second Life and others.Keeping users constantly engaged is one way to facilitate this higherresolution experience and passion within a user base, and to keeppeople engaged, you have to avoid interrupting the flow of theexperience. If the software interrupts and users become aware of thetool, the flow and outcome are disrupted; therefore, focus on theend result, not the tool. It is not about the tools, but what you dowith them that matters. Pictures and surprises get people'sattention.

On a related topic, AnnaleeNewitz talked about fan culture, which she defined as freecollaborative narratives often incorporating elements of commercialculture. Fan culture seems to have some of the most passionate userscoming together on a topic. We also had an interesting discussionabout how more of these fan communities seem to be based aroundscience fiction. I am not sure whether this is because we had areally geeky audience or because science fiction tends to inspiremore fanaticism.

Art of Community

Danese Cooper, Karl Fogel, and I led asession about the Art of Community, and we had a great discussionaround the topic. We talked about how open source and other developercommunities tend to start with a more tangible end goal, while othercommunities (social networking, communes) tend to be more about theevolution of the community than about the end goal. The tools alsotend to be different across different communities with web 2.0communities having intuitive user interfaces, while developercommunities tend to use the technical tools that developers arecomfortable with. The barrier to entry is also a bit higher for manydeveloper communities while anyone can easily get involved in web 2.0communities. We had an active and engaging discussion withparticipation from many different people, and more of my thoughts onthe topic of communities was previously postedhere. We even had a mascot for the session.

Web 2.0 Fact or Fiction

Geir Magnusson led a discussion aboutWeb 2.0: Fact or Fiction starting with the caveat that he reallydidn't know much about web 2.0, so he was hoping to learn from thegroup discussion. We talked about the definition of web 2.0 as a newmethod of using data: collective intelligence / user created content(MySpace, blogging, Digg) along with combining existing data in newways (mashups using Google Maps APIs). The web 2.0 market is stillfairly immature, and in many cases, it is not yet clear which siteswill prevail; for example, will MySpace be replaced by one of themany other social networking sites?

The current web 2.0 market can also becompared to the dot-com bubble, but with a number of differences. The current buzz, frenzy, and venture capital investment generated byanything web 2.0 remind many of us of the dot-com bubble. Lookingback to the bubble, we were creating products that the market was notquite ready to embrace often mistaking our own enthusiasm for aproduct (we are a very small minority of the overall market) withmass market needs. The difference now is that people are ready forthese products. Young people today are embracing sites like MySpacein droves and many non-technical people are creating blogs to talkabout their passions, families, kids, pets, hobbies, or work. Thebarrier to entry is also lower, which pushes venture capital fundinglater into the start-up process. During the bubble, companies werebeing funded based on presentation-ware alone without any customersor solid business model. Digg.com was started with less than $5000and had a sizeable user base and product prior to receiving venturecapital dollars to expand the business. At this point with web 2.0,we can only wait to see which sites become successful in the longterm and which sites will fade away into oblivion.

DionHinchcliffe also has a great summary of several web 2.0discussions at Foo.

A key element of Foo was also aboutusing fun activities to stimulate creative thinking and facilitatenetworking with JaneMcGonigal as our Chief Play-Maker (she just completed herdissertation on the historical intersection of ubiquitous computingand experimental game design). She has a greatsummary of our foo play on her blog.

Categories: Open Source

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