Two of my colleagues Ian and Sam are taking in the renamed Web 2.0 Conference Summit in San Francisco.

With the impressive set of speakers on the programme, its hardly surprising that they are churning out an interesting set of postings from the sessions, on their personal blogs.

After arriving in SF from the International Semantic Web Conference in Georgia they immediately got stuck in to the Summit programme.

So far Sam has posted from the following sessions:

• The Next Internet Infrastructure
  
  

  An open services archictecture. needs to be freely licenced, hostable, extendable and be capable of supporting a emergent ecosystem.
  The web contains plenty of open content, but islands of authentication. Authentication needs to be first order in next generation architecture that is becomes possible to extend the way we do things on the web now to things that we currently can’t because of the lack of inbuilt trust mechanisms. i.e. you can’t apply web principles to healthcare, finance etc yet.

• Advertising 2.0
  
  

  The panel predicts the emergence of a new network not of content producers but of content distributors.
  Shifting dynamics of web advertising – away from measuring success in terms of direct response to advertising and toward brand building which has been more prevalent in traditional media, but which has the potential to be much more accountable & measurable as user behaviour becomes more visible across the web and through time. To me, this needs to dovetail with the ideas explored in the previous session around making identity data available while preserving anonymity.
  

• Enterprise 2.0 Mashups
  
  

  Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com is on stage now. He makes the claim that Salesforce are doing for enterprise services what Amazon is doing for infrastructure, i.e. removing the “muck” and enabling innovation. He characterises one aspect of salesforce as an “Elastic Database, that scales” and in that regard, I can see a lot of overlap with some facets of the platform we’re building. If I were in hyphen overdrive, I might describe Bigfoot , as ultimately-flexible-data-storage-discovery-and-retrieval-as-a-service (but with added semantic goodness, of course).
  AppExchange is a marketplace for business services built on the salesforce platform, and I see parallels between it and the Content Orchestration components of our platform, like Silkworm and Symphony. These sorts of components are all really about making it easy to compose applications by plugging together bits of data and functionality from all over the web.
  

• Ning
  
  

  Marc Andreessen and Gina Bianchini from Ning are up now. Gina says they launched their first products a couple of months ago, but I remember checking out Ning at least a year ago.
  Oh dear, they’ve ground to a halt, looks like the presenters aren’t immune from the connectivity problems either.
  

Whilst Ian has so far commented on:

• Yahoo!’s Web 2.0 Strategy
  
  

  The first workshop of the first day. I got into the room early and am right at the back in the corner… next to the power!! Why, oh why don’t these conferences ever sort out the power? That’s what comes of choosing a 150 year old building to host the conference, beautiful though it is. Onto the workshop…
  Brief notes only…
  First up is a set of slides describing Flickr’s building blocks of participation which is very similar to our thinking at Talis:
  user generated content – not licensed from providers but contributed by users
  user organised content – tagging, categorising
  user and publisher distributed content
  user developed functionality – exposed api etc
  The discussion moves onto tagging and how it gives social context particularly through the recent introduction of geocoding.
  

• Whose Data?
  
  

  I’m now sitting in the Whose data is it? workshop which is just starting. It turns out that the workshop now has a new title “Open Data Workshop” which sits very well with our work on open data licences
  First up is Marc Hedlund who is referring to the O’Reilly open data quote that Paul blogged on a little while back. Hmm, he’s even referring to open data licences, but only mentioning Creative Commons by name. Points out that all the big map providers use MapTech data and then moves on to describe the OpenStreetMap project, one of my favourite examples of the new open data movement.
  

• Hmmm SOA?
  
  

  Being more resource-oriented than service-oriented, I approach this session with trepidation.
  First up is Carol Jones from IBM to talk about a trio of software patterns for Web 2.0. The first is “Software as a Service” which has the following characteristics:
  Service, not software
  User-driven adoption
  Value on demand
  Low cost of entry
  Public infrastructure
  Most importantly… tight feedback loop between providers and consumers

• It’s All About the Infrastructure
  
  

  One thing that strikes me about all the talks and presentations at this conference is that they all assume ubiquitous net access. Kind of ironic then that the wireless access here has gone the way of oceanic flight 815. So, since this is the web and I like to link in my posts, having two out of three page requests fail makes for very little blogging from me at the moment. Even though I’m sitting right under what looks like a huge wifi access point bolted to the ceiling and have great signal strength, it’s completely wasted when DHCP and DNS are out. You’d think at the Web 2.0 conference they’d actually have wireless that worked, wouldn’t you?

  By some ultimate form of serendipity we just had Debra Chrapaty from Microsoft with a 10 minute presentation which gave me the inspiration for this post’s title. The presentation was a rather interesting tour of the new data centres that Microsoft are building. Truly awesome investments. It also illustrated the depths of competition that Google and MS find themselves in – literally competing for electricians to kit out their data centres.

I look forward to many other good posts from the intrepid duo on the last day of the ConferenceSummit.

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