it@cork Web2.0 Conference - Shel Israel
it@cork Web2.0 Conference
Event type: Conference
Date: 2006-06-08
Rating: 3 out of 5
Shel Israel was the first to talk and really pitched the presentation at those who knew little about Web 2.0 or blogging. The bulk of the presentation was built around the themes in the book he wrote with Robert Scoble (Naked Conversations). Some of the shows of hands during the various talks indicated that he could probably have moved the level up a notch. The majority seemed to be well aware of most of the technology. However, it was still a very worthwhile baseline to start from. His Hugh Macleod cartoons sprinkled throughout the presentation kept us all smiling and thinking.
Some of the main points he touched on were:
- He prefers conversations to monologues
- Cluetrain vs Extinction Management
- The Cluetrain Manifesto
- Hugh Macleod “Blogging requires passion and authority. Which leaves out most people”
- Word of Mouth on Steroids
- Microsoft image transformation via bloggers like Scoble and the 2500 internal others
- Publishable, findable, viral, syndicatable, linkable
- Blogs become normalized!
That last point has been an obsession of mine for several months now. Rather than thinking in terms of 100m bloggers worldwide, think in terms of the the 30 Billion SMS messages sent in 2005. That’s where we need to get to.
I disagree strongly with Shel on his comment that 1600 Web 2.0 companies all going after the consumer and all building their revenue model around advertising are going to fail. Last time I checked, every single TV station I watched had Ads and they seem to be working ok.
One audience member asked if “most blogs were not just monologues with very few comments and not really conversations?”.
Shel replied that if you are interesting and passionate and post on other blogs then you will get many comments. This is far too generalised a reply. As Gavin said the previous night - you can write a 2000 word masterpiece and get zero comments, then you link to something stupid and get hundreds! I think it still depends on your audience. I know many people personally who read every blog post I make and discuss the points with me but have never commented once as it is not something they feel comfortable doing. The world will always be full of lurkers. I received a great comment on my personal blog recently from the subject of the blog post - by phone!!
Overall I didn’t learn much new from Shel’s presentation but I’m sure many in the audience did.
[tags]Web2.0, Web20, it@cork, Shel Israel, Hugh Mcleod, Naked Conversations, Cluetrain[/tags]