Ten Things We Learned At Web 2.0 Expo (Including How to Monetize Twitter)

10. That the computer company SAP is not pronounced “sap” and apparently it is the “IBM of Germany.” So if you see someone with “SAP” on their badge, you get the picture… (one person excused our ignorance as being specific to Los Angeles and commented, “It's okay, most of you just learned about this great new country called Germany.”)

9. That people who use the phrase “signal to noise ratio” metaphorically usually have the lowest.

8. That, as Digg Business Dev Guru Bob Buch taught us, your talk on user interface design can be made exponentially more memorable by passing out actual chocolate chip cookies.

7. That an “anti-pattern” means the catalog of poor practices around something, and you should always ask about things you don't understand. I avoided the anti-pattern panel because I thought it was some kind of esoteric coder-type deal. Not the case.

6. Tim O'Reilly, conference founder and popularizer of the term “Web 2.0” is a grandfather. Oh, and there will NEVER be a Web 3.0. Web 2.0 basically means everything that happened after the dot com crash. If you need a Hollywood analogy, it's Terminator, then Terminator 2 — not Terminator 1.0 then Terminator 2.0.

5. That if you want people to read your book, throw it at them. (Thanks Douglas Rushkoff — I'm so excited to read!)

4. Cloud Computing for Dummies — i.e. companies like Amazon or Google Docs or Gmail run a service known as “Cloud Computing” and you can rent space on their service. This has happened in the past five years and is useful only to the extent that you don't get wrapped up in a panel because you thought it sounded cool.

3. Crowdsourcing just means getting the people who you like to like you back. It is the wave of the future, as social capital, social culture and the current economic climate have basically relegated many of us to working in trade.

2. That a “conference donkey” is basically someone who adds nothing to the conference whatsoever and has no apparent reason for being there — (via “What They Don't Teach You At Stanford Business School“).

1. That most people who use Twitter as a search engine are either trying to market (even in the most vague sense of the term) or searching for information relating to themselves. If this is the case, Biz and Ev could potentially build a business model around leaving the basic update posting/communication function of the site free, while charging people to search. (Twitter is organic human powered search, possibly the only thing that GOOG doesn't have a corner on at the moment.)

Extra credit: Technology and meatspace finally turning into one and the same (case in point: plants that TWITTER when they're thirsty). A major focus in '09 is on human relationships that are the IRL infrastructure of social media. Welcome to the age of Cost Per Warm Fuzzy Feeling — see you in the Tweetosphere.

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