trendpreneur

In the red corner today, a startup that caused a bit of buzz at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Plista’s presentations grabbed my interest from the start, since Dominik (speaking, above) outlined the information overload problem in stylish detail. Of course, it’s a pretty big problem and there are plenty of ways to solve it — Plista focuses on the recommendations approach.

The key components seem to be collaborative filtering and use of social graphs to build up a recommendations system that works across different sites; this allows for some interesting user tracking and the creation of central information profiles that can then be tailored to different output. A really interesting idea was the preference Doppelganger, someone who likes the same stuff you like — this is something I’ve vaguely touched on in the past.

While someone might like the same things as me, so I can use their behaviour to predict my own, I’m actually quite interested in the social graphs around that person and how they resemble mine; how the influence web bends around them compared to mine; and how that person’s key information sources differ from mine (are they reading a blog I’m not?). I guess this is more meta-informational than based in product recommendations, but there’s such a huge potential for discovery here. On the other hand, we once again run into privacy issues. My preference profile is going to be very diverse, do I really want people interested in the same technologies as me told which bands I like? To what extent are we really similar? And how do the different preference dimensions interact with each other? (Maybe people who use Open Source software prefer organic, eco-friendly products. Maybe they don’t.)

But back to Plista. An engaging presentation and a product that looks interesting, especially due to its cross-domain, supra-web type nature. An information overload company worth watching, even if it isn’t solving the problem in the same way I am.

(A bit more about Plista at CNet and Crunchbase.)

Okay. It isn’t Friday. Let’s not let that spoil the spirit of the thing…

The Expo’s over, leaving behind an Internet littered with #w2eb, #web20expoEU and variations thereof. To future attendees looking back, or even present ones still trying to stop their heads from spinning so fast, it can be quite hard to figure out exactly what happened. So without further ado, some aggregated links to help serve as a reminder:

• Official site – a decent hub to everything else.
• SixGroups aggregate site – Fairly hard to navigate overall, but was excellent ‘livestreaming’ tag aggregation during the event.
• Presentation files both on the official site and slideshare.
• Tweets about the expo (#w2eb was the main hashtag I saw in use).
• Couple of good blogs covering the expo, far more thorough than I: BerlinBlase, One Man & His Blog. Not to mention the TC LateCrunch and Pitch wrapups.
• Flickr photos matching: web2expoEU, w2eb. Plus there’s some video scattered about; try Documentally on Qik.
• Last but not least! Everything I’ve written about it. There’s more to come in the form of column pieces, of course.

This Linkfest will likely be updated as I travel around the web, but feel free to let me know about anything really obvious I’ve missed, while I mutter to myself about the information-filtering problem this event itself encompasses.

By all accounts, I’m one of the lucky ones.

To the best of my knowledge, I have never missed out on a career opportunity because of my gender. On the contrary, opportunities have been open to me that I would not have qualified for if I wasn’t female.

To the best of my knowledge, I have never lost out on something to an equally qualified male candidate.

To the best of my knowledge, my gender has never inhibited my ability to learn, to understand technology, to communicate or to get stuff done. Personality traits and work ethics don’t count.
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Timo Arnall just gave a really interesting presentation covering many of the issues that surround designing for the web in the world. Online content is increasingly reaching into our lives, whether via iPhone perma-connectivity or twitter SMS spam, yet the ways in which we interact with the web are still restricted. Not only by technology — for example, GPS and GPRS coverage varies by location — but by attention. Like their desktop-chained counterparts, small devices still require 100% of our focus.

Some of the aims behind the ubiquitous web movement are to get people engaging with the world differently — for example creating a ‘network of things’ where everyday objects are connected in new ways with digital content and information. This ranges from RFID stamps to barcodes, but one of the more promising examples given was that of Urban Seeder, where users create individual codes in the forms of beautiful patterns, and ‘plant’ them (including wearing them!).
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Let’s play a game. I’ll talk about a product currently on the Internet marketplace, and you have to decide whether it’s Web 2.0 or not.

The user-base numbers in the millions, with many concurrent users forming part of a large community. However, this community’s segmented — partially enforced by the community structure, partly self-organising. Community features include belonging to a particular group of users and having friends lists, chatting directly and in groups, and participating in activities together. There’s emergent behaviour — community members doing things that the organisers never envisaged, and sometimes don’t approve of!

There are other similar products out, and while this particular one has made some superior design and marketing products, its main lock-in is data. Customers invest a lot of time in their use of the product, and switching to a different product means abandoning this time and data; they also lose their community attachment, which can be a strong draw.
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