Note:  Defrag is the new PC Forum, if you’re familiar with that.

Josh  Schachter, Founder of del.icio.us, was joined by three other speakers (J. B. Holston, CEO of Newsgator) in a last minute panel discussion.  The second Keynote speaker was unable to attend.

Note to self:  What do you do if one of your panelists has a strong accent, a slight “mumble” or deep voice, a less than perfect sound system in a large square room?  How do you blog when you can’t track what’s being said?  Answer:  I don’t know.

Note about notes to self:  They’re not really to self are they?  You are reading them and it’s obvious (at least I hope it’s obvious) that I am inviting your comments and insights.  I could keep them to my self, but I want and need your thoughts.

Also, how much can one person multi-task?  Can I a) listen to the speakers, then b) evaluate what they’re saying – which better be new to me or I’m wasting time being here – then c) type it – while  they  are  on  to  the  next  point, AND make private notes to myself in notepad?  But the guy right next to me, and younger than me, seems to be doing just that.  PLUS he want to take a picture of the speakers and email it to me for this post!  All concurrently.

The discussion was about the spectrum from keeping knowledge to yourself vs. sharing and collaborating.  There are situations where you do not want people to “collude” in a negative way – joining together to game a system.  Sharing corporate information with others outside of the company, etc.

The “next generation” tends to highly value sharing almost everything, sharing profiles, sharing ideas and work in progress.  They believe that communication with others is essential to learning. 

What are the rules?  What are the rules of Wikipedia, for digg or del.icio.us?

It keeps coming up – is this a generational phenomenon – older people believe that private is private.  Younger people seem to believe that private information, maybe all information, is public.  (This happened with my post on blogging – was it “appropriate” to publicly share – with strangers- so much private information about how my wife and I deal with life/work issues?  Are you, the AltSearchEngines readers strangers to me?  I write for you, you read, you leave comments and we sometimes email back and forth.

This is quite a question – I have never met Nitin Karandikar – is he a stranger? No, he’s a close friend – we have shared interests, we have shared information off-line about ourselves,  I spend a great deal of time communicating with him.

Using del.icio.us, one company put up all of their favorite bookmarks with a company tag so that they could follow the “group think” of the company, but outsiders, if they knew about the tag, could also learn what is going on inside of the company – the corporate firewall had (known) holes in it.

Re: Feeds and information overload.  (Newsgator).  How do we help individuals from information overload?  This is a common question at Defrag – there may be many ways to have the information find you, but the can you manage all of it?

Del.icio.us is just one framework – instead of attaching and forwarding interesting articles via email, you bookmark them and others who are in your group receive that information, so the same ends are achieved.

One of the speakers has 300 blogs that he tracks,  (The number of blogs or RSS feeds that one “tracks” seems to be the modern “male” – in the stereotypical sense – measure of importance.  I could be wrong.) But of those, he favors 20.  Ah.  Then he’ll get an email from a trusted friend – and trusted friends tend to be in the same “space,” saying, did you see such and such on this ___ blog?  One of his 20 – and around it goes.

The del.icio.us CEO, on the other hand, doesn’t use an RSS feeder at all. No surprise, he uses del.icio.us.

Kaila and I have this problem,  95% of the search engine material that she forwards me I have already seen.  That’s my job.  That is discouraging to her – plus her time is valuable.  But I need that 5% that I don’t know about! 

Sean from Read/WriteTalk is here, and this is his mantra, “information finding you instead of you trying to find information.  More on that later.

Observation: The last generation (my father and my father in law) had one job – or at least one career.  My generation has not just multiple jobs, but multiple careers.  I was a banker for 17 years.  Now I’m a blogger.  Go figure.

The next generation:  Multiple jobs – at  the  same  time.  Kaila does not just work for VortexDNA, she works for multiple companies at the same time.

Final note to self (for ASE conference):  How do you get good questions from the audience without getting the bad, rambling ones?

This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 3:00 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.