Okay, I am getting an even later start on this, the third installment of my reports from the Web 2.0 Expo, than I have on previous ones. There is so much going on that I got back late to my hotel room and flopped into bed and just now have been looking up on Twitter two of the speakers from the conference (Christina Wodtke of LinkedIn and Sarah Milstein, who spoke yesterday on Effective Twitter for Communication & Product Integration) and am now following them there.

Talk about two sharp women who discoursed learnedly and astutely on many aspects of Web 2.0 and social computing. Milstein maintains the Tweet Report on Twitter and has a book on Twitter coming out. She knows Twitter like few others and Twitter really is the wave of the future for keeping up on everything is so many fields. It will be huge in healthcare alone, for instance. See Phil Baumann’s free ebook for instance, 140 Health Care Uses for Twitter:
http://philbaumann.com/2009/01/18/free-ebook-140-health-care-uses-for-twitter

I am incredibly privileged to be at this gathering and only wish that many medical librarians had the budget to attend as well as teachers and academics and anyone who runs a small business and needs to grasp how the Web is transforming the commercial landscape and every aspect of marketing. There is really no field that could not glean insights from attendance here.

And I am able to report only on the sessions that I attended—there are many going on that I am not attending, being only one person and a very tired one at that—I was up late at a “birds of a feather session” about healthcare. Attendees included an NIH researcher, an attorney in a federal agency who chose to keep which one to herself, staffers of health plans, etc. We got into a lively discussion about the HealthCamp movement, a subset of the BarCamp movement.

There was so much going on I have to type as quickly as I can in order to get this submitted before heading off to the third day of the Expo in a few hours!

The first session I attended yesterday was Accessibility in a Web 2.0 World by an expert on Web design for the disabled for the British charity AbilityNet, Robin Christopherson. Christopherson is blind and it was fascinating and (no pun intended) eye-opening to watch him maneuver his way around his computer screen with the aid of a screenreader (a synthesized voice that described for him what was happening in his computer screen).

Christopherson demonstrated in striking fashion the barriers that people with various types of disability (visual, hearing, and neuromuscular) encounter with Web page features those of us sans such handicaps don’t regard as anything more than momentary nuisances if we see them as impediments at all. A portion of his talk was on the huge problem that the blind have in accessing much of the Web because of the every more prevalent use of CAPTCHA

Given the need to design Web sites with maximal accessibility for all in mind for reasons of basic human compassion and solidarity and for the simple hardheaded reason of staying in compliance with laws on disability and for pragmatic reasons of not excluding potential customers from marketing campaigns and customer service assistance everyone who has anything to do with Web site design (which includes everyone from librarians to one-person small businesses these days) should educate themselves about the kinds of issues Christopherson addressed. Kudos to the organizers of the Web 2.0 Expo for including him on the program.

I then heard a talk by Transforming IT with Cloud Computing by Trae Chancellor of Salesforce.com. We have all read about the pioneering work of Salesforce in moving as much of the day-to-day computer-based operations of their own business into the cloud and then helping legions of customers do the same, so it was fascinating to hear straight from him how they did it. It has been amusing to see the divide here between those who extol the virtues of the supposedly innovative concept of cloud computing and those who grumblingly maintain that there is nothing whatever new in the idea of cloud computing, that the Internet has been cloud computing from its very inception.

I then went on to Milstein’s incisive presentation of the business case (particularly in customer service and for reputational reasons) of adroit leveraging of Twitter. Like Wodtke the day before, Milstein took many questions from the audience and answered every one with courtesy and keen intelligence. The caliber and professionalism of the presenters here is extremely high. Kudos, again, to the organizing committee. Makes me feel better that my own proposal to present was rejected. I am nowhere near this level!

One of the best things about this conference is the chance to mingle and network. For example, I met the brothers Stuart and Michael Goller of the startup Voice Tech Group, Inc. who gave me a first-hand look at their Tazti (pronounced “tasty”) speech recognition program. It really sent me back to the original version of Star Trek (yes, I was born in 1963)—it was fascinating to watch Stuart speak into the microphone and say, “Open Tazti. Open Amazon. Search David Halberstam…” and have the results pop up.

This is designed for average computer users (e.g., multitasking college students). I asked immediately if they have approached organizations for those with various forms of paralysis and neuromuscular disorders. They already have one such partnership with the Ohio River Valley Chapter of the Arthritis Foundation and kudos to that group for the bold step of piloting this promising technology for their patient group, thereby also helping to establish whether it could be more widely adopted and utilized by people with neuromuscular disorders and other forms of disability. It is heartening to see small companies and foundations working hand in hand on projects like this. Given the growing numbers of disabled veterans who will need to be able to access the Internet for occupational and health information reasons, I can’t speak highly enough the willingness of the Ohio River Valley Chapter of the Arthritis Foundation to test this software. Keep us posted. Talk about potential leaps in the quality of life for thousands of people.

Of possible of interest to those who follow content creation, copyright and the digital content industry I had a very absorbing chat with Iain Scholnick, chief executive officer and president, ImageSpan

I am still reading and cogitating about the implications for the entire digital content industry of such deals as the one ImageSpan announced at the conference here:

In the meantime, I recommend this cogent discussion of some of the issues involved here:

Stayed tuned for more on this topic. Scholnick struck me as a very articulate, shrewd person with a genuine commitment to protecting the interests of content creators. Rather interesting to run into this attitude in the midst of a conference with a very, “Information wants to be free” ethos. I look forward to delving more into this issue.

I have to wrap up this entry for now. I didn’t even get in this post to discuss Tim O’Reilly’s keynote in much detail. Mr. Web 2.0 himself. It was exciting to see him in the flesh after having read about him for so long. One thing, though, bothered me. Like many others in the Web 2.0 sphere, he extolled Patients Like Me for its pioneering efforts in patient-initiated and led clinical trials. But we have to tread warily in the very complex realms of clinical trials and not laud the mere act of accumulating masses of user-generated content without some sort of system of filtering out of the mere anecdotal or sloppy. The founders of Patients Like Me, Jamie and Ben Heywood, have done huge amounts for those with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and patient empowerment in general. But we have to guard against overweening enthusiasm outweighing good science and best practices. Neuroscience is not a rah-rah, “Let’s put on a clinical trial, kids” sort of enterprise.

It is now 3:34 a.m. and I am only now commencing the second of my two reports on the first day of Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco. (One does have to get some sleep upon occasion.) I spent much of the first day getting registered and the first half of that first day attending the Watching Websites: A Report from the Frontlines of Web Monitoring by Alistair Croll and Sean Power. That was such a superb presentation that the bar was very high for the next one I attended (and the program is so full here and the options so plentiful vis-a-vis subject matter and quality of presenter that making choices is agonizing).

But I lucked into getting the chance to hear Christina Wodtke of LinkedIn discourse on the topic, Designing Social Websites. All of us have read ad nauseam in trade publications in our various professions and in the popular press and have heard presentations at conferences in our various fields (e.g., education, librarianship, healthcare administration and marketing) about social networking and the various aspects of Web 2.0. Did we really need another overview? If the speaker is as talented and as intelligent as Wodtke the answer is a resounding, “Yes–absolutely.”

Basically, these days some kind of Web presence is a no-brainer. Even the tiniest of small businesses tend to have a Web site. But now there is increasing pressure from consumers and a compelling business case for sallying forth into the uncharted and peril-ridden territory of user-generated content such as online communities and for leveraging the power of Twitter.

On the matter of Twitter, I was surprised that the personal sites of Croll, Power and Wodtke lack “Follow me on Twitter” buttons. I look for those immediately when I visit the sites of speakers or writers I have come across. I asked Wodtke why so many sites lack Twitter buttons. She said that Web users may be experiencing button fatigue, presented as they are so often with an array of Web 2.0 services such as Delicious and StumbleUpon. But Twitter, it seems to me, is so much powerful than those other services for viral marketing that the case for a Twitter button on the homepage of every Web site that covets traffic is undeniable.

The other quibble I had is that Wodtke quoted a Morgan Stanley analyst to support a point she was making, as if that meant case closed. Uh, given the recent performance of such analysts their credibility these days on any subject is open to question. Let’s try other founts of wisdom for a change, shall we?

Still, I was impressed by how open Wodtke was to questions from the audience. She asked us to work in groups and as each reported on their ideas for creating online communities of various kinds, Wodtke tactfully and with quicksilver acumen would suggest strategies for each scenario put forth by the various attendees and analyzed engagingly and valuably what we had all just heard. Anyone putting on a conference these days on marketing or public services in any field (say those who work for healthcare networks or in county government or public libraries) should add Wodtke to the list of speakers. And I would think she would be a superb consultant. She is well known and yet has a charmingly self-deprecating style and spoke quite interestingly of the revamping she is working in at LinkedIn vis-à-vis making it better able to reflect the wide variety of ways people can be connected these days via the social networking tools that Wodtke covered so well in her talk.

This conference is a must-attend gathering for almost anyone in any realm of economic activity these days: nonprofit management, healthcare, corporations large and small. This isn’t fluff, folks. This is monetizable knowledge acquisition. I have never attended this conference before and I have learned more in the first day of four than I have learned in years of reading.

For example, I asked during Wodtke’s talk who all was here from healthcare. A very nice gentleman from the US Department of Veterans Affairs came up to me later and we had a very good talk about the VA’s drive to meet the social networking needs of the new young veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I hope tonight to connect with more people in a session devoted to healthcare.

Yes, the Web 2.0 movement sometimes consists of little more than hot air. But there are astute people like Wodtke that distill it all down to the essence of how best to employ social computing in ways that benefit all concerned.