E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Web 2.0 Expo In Berlin – Day 3 Highlights

After the brief hiatus from yesterday, where life won the everlasting battle of work / life balance, here we go again with the next blog post from the series of articles on the highlights from the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin that I attended last week. In this case Day 3. Day 1 and Day 2 can be found here and over here, respectively. I have also shared a number of pictures on my Flickr account and later on I will be putting together the rest of the snapshots I took while I was in Berlin. Thus stay tuned.

Oh, something else that I think you should go ahead and check out. There have been plenty of blog posts on the topic of the Web 2.0 Expo and everything, but if I were to recommend a single one resource for some amazing coverage through live con-blogging that would be the blog from Adam Tinworth, over at One Man and His Blog. Head over to his blog and read through his posts and you will see what I meant when I wrote amazing coverage!

Also, like I have been mentioning all along in the various highlights blog posts, I have decided not to embed any of the slide decks from the event and just point you folks to the lovely piece of work from Slideshare where they have put together a nifty presentation pack, where you can watch through all of them as you may see fit. So, I am just going to embed that specific pack for the last time, so you can have a look into the various presentations that were used for Day 3:

From here onwards, I will try to detail what Day 3 of the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin was like and, to be honest, I can certainly say that it was one of the best days I have had in a long time while attending a conference event and I am just hoping this entry will try to make it some justice, because there is plenty of ground to cover. So let’s go!

To get things started with the day, the first hour and an half was dedicated to a bunch of keynote speaker sessions, some shorter than others, but all of them briefer than the usual keynotes covering a wide range of topics and thinking that, instead of me sharing with you all what they were like, since, once again, the Wi-Fi was not as good as what it could have been, I am going to make it easier for you folks and link over here to the YouTube videos that have already been shared for each of those speaker sessions (Notice as well that previous keynote speaker sessions are now available as well over here, if you would want to catch up with any of them!) and then perhaps add a line or two on each of them and see how it would go from there:

- John Lilly in Conversation with Brady Forrest: If you would want to find out some more on what’s happening around the world of FireFox and where it would go from there into the near future as our preferred Web browser in the 2.0 space!

- Tariq Krim (NetVibes): On what it means to be a Web 2.0 entrepreneur in Europe where the Internet is a saturated market already; where social attention is cannibalising media attention (revenues); and where there seems to be a unique opportunity for entrepreneurs!

- Luis Suarez on Thinking Outside the Inbox: I am sure there would be very little that I would need to add on this one (Specially if you have been following this blog for the last 9 months!), but I can certainly describe the experience as rather intense and re-energising: early morning, no slides, only 10 minutes, try to convince everyone that challenging your Inbox and moving away from it is a gradual process that you need to start (And no-one else!) if you would want to make it work. It begins with you. You are the one who has got to challenge it and make it work according to your needs and not everyone else’s! … Loved it!

A number of different folks have been blogging about such session and helping spread the message around and I could say all sorts of things about it (Thanks much!), but most of you folks already know it, so I am going to keep it short and just embed the 9 minute long video that was recorded:

- Patrick McDevitt on Tele Atlas (Slide deck here): To me describing what the future of application development and design would be like, that is, a co-creative process between developers and end-users based on the powerful interactions coming up through a community of passionate end-users engaging and providing feedback on how to improve your already existing, or new!, products! It will not get better than that! And Patrick already shared how they are doing it themselves and how much they are benefiting from the entire approach!

- Dion Hinchcliffe on There Goes Everybody: Focusing the Power of People and Today’s Network on Opportunity, where he may have hinted how we may be reaching the tipping point of creating copycats of already existing Web 2.0 applications (i.e. Twitter & its Twitter clones, anyone?) and it may well be perhaps a good time where we shift gears and start thinking about providing some real business value exploring other options or ways of integrating more of the Web 2.0 applications into the day to day, business as usual, business processes. That’s certainly where the next challenge is, indeed, as well as a huge cultural shift within the corporate world pointing towards a much more engaging and participative knowledge sharing culture.

From there onwards, we all took off to enjoy a coffee break and I had the great pleasure and the honour of hanging out with some of the folks I have been following, and admiring!, for a long while now. Folks like Dion Hinchcliffe himself (We finally got to meet up face to face after all of this time!), Martin Koser (As insightful as always!), Björn Negelmann (Ever so smart in his commentary and always preparing for the next event!), Jemima Gibbons (More on her later!) and Ronna Porter (First time we met & thoroughly enjoyed the conversations with her on the impact of social software within the corporate communications world!) are just a few! Too many to include them all in a single blog post!

However, there is one person I met on that Thursday that I am going to single out, and for many many reasons (Far too many than I can put together over here!) and that is JP Rangaswami (Author of the essential Confused of Calcuta). By now there is probably very little that I can say about JP that may not be known to those folks working around the area of Enterprise 2.0, but for those who may not be familiar with him, JP is one of those leading thinkers provocative enough to shake the ground in such a way that would make you think about a specific topic without you wanting, nor realising, about it and then getting the best out of you!

I have known, virtually, JP, for several years; I am a big fan of this blog for a long while now; we follow each other in Twitter, connected in Facebook and whatever else, yet this was the first time we ever met face to face and to me, the entire conference was worth it just to shake the hand of one of those guys who is helping us all make our jobs easier by breaking through the ground in the 2.0 space. Yes, that’s JP. That’s the impression he will leave on you. It will help you get on the right direction with just a few words!

And it is funny I am saying all of this, because this year, time and time again, we kept missing each other on various events and the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin was the one where we finally met! And I had the privilege of watching him do the next keynote speaker session on the topic of Web 2.0 vs. the Water Cooler: How Web 2.0 Has Changed the Way We Communicate at Work.

In it, JP basically drew the lines of how the corporate world operates and he did that in very very simple terms: Directories, Groups, Communications & Scheduling, all along with the growing need to search and find relevant content and connections to help get the job done! Yes, that’s right, that is basically what a corporation is solidly based on; in such simple terms. Then it is up to us to make it more complex, cumbersome, burdensome to a higher degree that we no longer know what we do and where we work. Simplicity rules!

At the same time, he touched based on the topic of the younger generations entering the workplace and providing a solid account of how they are going to change the way we operate and collaborate with our peers. You can imagine how by now I just kept on nodding rather heavily as I felt rather identified on how I have shifted myself to their model of interacting by moving away from corporate e-mail and it surely was interesting to see how I no longer felt like I am alone in this from the perspective of what other companies are doing or continuing to embark on. Very inspiring and refreshing!

I could go on and on and on detailing what JP’s session was like. Along with the one from Stowe Boyd, which I talked about in a previous entry, it was, by far, my favourite session from the entire event! Worth while attending the event just to listen to JP … and learn! If you would want to find out some more on what it was like check out what other folks captured live during the session. Stunning!

From there onwards, to me that was the end of the conference as I had already planned a lunch meeting with my team and a small group of IBM social software evangelists and we went back to the hotel. Then later in the afternoon we had a very good (And productive) meeting discussing and shaping up activities for 2009 and right after getting ready for a bus tour around the city from where I took a whole bunch of pictures I will be sharing in my Flickr account very shortly. Then dinner and drinks with them and a brilliant way to finish my stay in Berlin and attend the Web 2.0 Expo.

Mind you, there are still a couple of things I would want to mention, before I wrap up. First one is the fact that another good friend of mine, Suzanne Minassian (Product Manager from Lotus Connections) was also one of the speakers (Too bad it was at the same time as JP’s session!) and detailed quite a bit as well how IBM has been embracing social computing within and outside the corporate firewall using technologies like our very own Connections. Recommend checking it out if you would want to find out how I have managed to successfully walk away from corporate e-mail using such social tools …

Then, finally, the other session I would want to recommend, but that I couldn’t attend was the one from Tom Raftery on Electricity 2.0: Using the Lessons of the Web to Improve Our Energy Networks (Slide deck can be found over here). There is very little that I would need to say about this one, since another good friend, Andrea Vasceralli (I wish I would have been able to talk to him much longer!), managed to record it and put it up in his own blog over at Electricity 2.0 – Tom Raftery’s Keynote (Web 2.0 Expo Berlin). Believe me, it is worth while the 37 minutes it lasts!

Oh, one very very last thing, I promise. I know that plenty of folks keep asking me to explain, much more in detail, what it is that I do at work being part of that special team of social software evangelists that Gina Poole (Along with Wolfgang Kulhanek, my direct manager) has been leading for a while. Well, instead of me detailing all of that, I am going to take a different approach this time around…

I would go ahead and ask you to go to Jemima Gibbon‘s blog, once again, and read Inverting the Pyramid, where you would be able to go through an interview Jemima did with Gina where she gets to explain what working for the Social Software Programs & Enablement team is like. Then you will understand, perhaps, a bit better what I meant, a bit over a year ago, when I wrote that I was just landing into my dream job!

What a perfect way of finishing up the series of blog posts on the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin. Yes, I realise there are far too long blog posts, but I am hoping they will help serve as a taster of what it was like being at such an amazing event as the Web 2.0 Expo itself. Hope you enjoy reading through them just as much as I did capturing all of these thoughts, as well as experiencing it live! And from here onwards, regular blogging will resume as usual, but for now … till next time! …

Have a good one everyone!

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Social Networks, Networking, Conversations, Dialogue, Connections, Communication, Web 2.0 Expo Europe, web2europe, web2expoeu, web2expoeu08, w2eb, Highlights, Travelling, Business Trips, Twitter, Live Tweeting, Berlin, Germany, Flickr, Pictures, Slideshare, Stowe Boyd, stoweboyd, IBM, Gina Poole, Walk the Talk, Thinking Outside the Inbox, No-email, Re-purposing E-mail, Adam Tinworth, One Man and His Blog, Coverage, Live Con-blogging, John Lilly, FireFox, Mozilla, Brady Forrest, Tariq Krim, NetVibes, Entrepreneurship, Patrick McDevitt, Tele Atlas, Co-Creation, Dion Hinchcliffe, Martin Koser, Frogpond, Björn Negelmann, Jemima Gibbons, Ronna Porter, JP, JP Rangaswami, Confused of Calcuta, BT Design, Simplicity, Suzanne Minassian, Lotus Connections, Connections, Tom Raftery, Electricity 2.0, Andrea Vasceralli, Wolfgang Kulhanek, Dream Job

Web 2.0 Expo In Berlin – Day 2 Highlights

And here we go with Day 2 of the highlights from the Web 2.0 Expo I attended last week in Berlin. Day 1 can be found over here. Again, and like I have mentioned previously, I will not be embedding any of the slide decks from the event itself. Instead, I will try to make things easier by linking to this lovely Slideshare presentation pack where you can eventually grab them all from there. At the same time, and to make it even easier and for each of the highlights entries I will be embedded the code over here so that you can flip through them at your convenience and go back and forth between the various decks and my two cents of the sessions I attended and which I also live tweeted while at the event.

Finally, if you are interested in checking out some of the pictures I took during the course of the event with my Nokia N95 you can have a look at them in my Flickr account. I have already started uploading a bunch of them and tag them appropriately, but if you feel you would want to contribute into that tagging effort, by all means, go ahead and do it. More than happy for folks to do that to help me identify most of the folks coming up on each of the snapshots.

Thus with all of that said, here is the embedded presentation pack so that you can refer back to it as you may see fit:

And now, without much further ado, here are the highlights from Day 2 of the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, starting with the various sessions I attended during the course of the morning & early afternoon:

- Better Media Plumbing for the Social Web with Stowe Boyd

Without any doubt in my mind one of the best sessions from the entire Expo and not only, because of how innovative the topic is, but also because of how provocative it was. Stowe, in a very clear and concise way establishes the ground of where the next generation of blogging will be going. And believe it or not, it’s not going to be in the Blogosphere! Funny enough, if we have all been saying that Web 1.0 would need to evolve into a much more participative and engaging medium, it looks like with the way things are going in the 2.0 blogging will have to do its own bit to move along.

And that’s just what Stowe went through on his session. Basically touching ground on the concept of FLOW, which is where social computing would be moving into. Provoked more than anything else by the biggest success factor in the adoption of social software, both inside and outside of the corporate firewall: communities!

Yes, that’s right! The next generation of blogging will need to evolve to become even more conversational and go with the flow (Never better said!). Conversations are starting to converge in multiple social networking sites and as such applications like Twitter or Friendfeed (And a whole bunch of other microsharing sites) are the ones gaining ground from this concept of flow.

Does that mean that blogging as we know it is going to have trouble? Probably not. I still see the opportunity of blogging evolving somewhat some more before turning into that flow, but you can already start getting some early signs that you need to start moving on once your blog stops getting comments and people discuss your posts in those flowing social networking sites! Get ready!

Stowe’s session eventually changed my mind about Friendfeed, where so far I haven’t been a very heavy user of it, thus I am planning to give it another go and see if it would stick around this time. We shall see…

- A Web Interface to the Real World: How We Made MOO – Stefan Magdalinski

Moving on into the next session, I decided to attend Stefan’s session on MOO, as I have always been a big fan of everything MOO. But what I didn’t realise till I was at the session was how much the company has evolved over the course of months going from just a single product to 23!!! And always taking into account an amazing user experience and quality of their products! And all of that for a truly global company! Fantastic!

I can certainly recommend you have a look into the slide deck he put together, because he describes the entire transformation process that MOO has gone through, and much more importantly, how they have managed to be very successful! Incredibly inspirational to say the least and with plenty of stuff to learn by everyone who will be starting small, and build up from there! That seems to be where we are heaving in the 2.0 space and MOO is a living (And leading!) example of that!

I am now even more fond of making use of MOO products than I was ever before! Yes, that’s the kind of effect that this particular session can create!

- IBM: Web 2.0 Goes to Work – Gina Poole

This was probably the session that I knew the most of! More than anything else, because I do work for Gina Poole! And all of the stuff she talked about during the course of the session is the stuff I am involved with on a daily basis! (Yes, I know! I told you I was landing in my dream job!).

She just basically covered much of the ground of how IBM is making extensive use of social software, both inside and outside of the corporate firewall, to help its knowledge workers collaborate and share knowledge much more effectively not only amongst themselves, but also with customers and business partners alike. You can grab a copy of the slide deck over here, at the same time that you can go through my extensive live tweeting over here about her own session.

One thing that I was very excited about throughout the whole session and during all of the time I have been working on this program to help accelerate the adoption rate of social software within IBM is that Gina, VP Social Software Programs & Enablement, doesn’t only talk to people about Enterprise 2.0 She actually does it as well! She walks the talk! Having multiple spaces where she hangs out with her social networks and you can get a glimpse of what she is up to is not something that I can say / see about most VPs I know. Yes, I know, refreshing!

And she is on Twitter, too! How cool is that?!?! (Oh, wait, my entire team is on Twitter, too! How cool is that, eh?)

(Oh, before I move into the next session I attended, let me point out to you another one I was really interested in, but which I couldn’t make it, because of a conflict: Niche Online Social Networks FTW with Lee Bryant from Headshift. You can find the deck over here and I can tell you that from what I heard and read it surely made an impact! Thanks much, Lee, for that lovely dinner with CJ! I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to the next one, too! )

- A Conversation with Martin Varsavsky & Tim O’Reilly

Unfortunately, this session, like the ones following up, was taking place on the main auditorium from the Web 2.0 Expo Congress Centre in Berlin, so you know what happened then. Wi-Fi was just too erratic to keep up with some meaningful live tweeting, so I decided to just listen and put everything away!

The conversation itself was good, although perhaps a bit too short, but it surely was entertaining from the perspective of absorbing a few tips on what being an entrepreneur in the 2.0 space is like, specially during these special times we are going through… But, like I said, a bit too short, in my opinion.

 - Keynote shorter speaker sessions’s – On a spree!

The following chunk of sessions were actually like jumping on into a roller-coaster! Too much stuff to digest in just a little bit of time and still struggling with the Wi-Fi connectivity, so here is a little bit of what I remember from those sessions:

Rather inspirational presentation from Saul Klein, where he explained that the real challenge for Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 starts now with the current financial crisis as it would help businesses & startups become much more smarter and innovative in their approach to reach out to larger audiences and make a business out of it. In the current environment, where plenty of things seem to be rather negative, Saul’s positivism was just fantastic! Very much needed!

In Case of Turbulence: Open Source Hardware’s Next Challenges: As provocative as it may  sound, from the title and all, I must say that Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino surely put together the next challenge for us to dive into. If we have been having Open Source software for a good number of years, can you imagine having Open Source hardware? Well, I couldn’t. Well, I may have changed my mind. Like I said, thought provoking and one to keep an eye on over the course of the years and see how much it would differ or not from Open Source software…

Redesigning Drupal.org: An Exercise in Open Source Design : In this particular session Leisa Reichelt just basically touched based on what I strongly feel as the near future, if not a reality altogether nowadays, of what software development & design would be like from now on: a co-creative activity driven by your community of passionate users (Yes! I know, who would have thought about that, eh?)

Suw Charman-Anderson, once again, as ever inspiring as usual, dived into the world of The Email Problem and How to Solve It. There is very little that I can add to that, other than as enlightening as usual and hitting home very close with my giving up on e-mail at work new reality. But more on that later …

And, finally, Ben Hammersley wrapped this set of short keynote speaker sessions with plenty of food for thought sharing his thoughts on how Web 2.0 could make a difference, moving beyond from just the fun and cool (silly) 2.0 applications, to those which can have an impact and change us and our society as we know it! … And the challenge is ON!

From there onwards, right after lunch, I didn’t get the opportunity to attend any of the other sessions scheduled for the rest of the afternoon, since I had to take some time off to go through those press interviews as well as do some more serious social networking activities catching up with folks. However, the outcome of one of those press interviews was this one with the fine folks from We Magazine. The rest we would have to wait for a little bit till they are up and running, available online.

And that would be it for the highlights on Day 2. The evening was spent having a lovely & peaceful, but equally energising and inspiring, dinner with a couple of folks where, funny enough, we talked about everything but 2.0. Yes, I know! Shocking! But loved it!

Now, let’s go for the final blog post on the highlights for the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin … Day 3 … Stay tuned!

(Oh, my … I nearly forgot to mention it … You may have seen how I didn’t mention Rafi Haladjian as part of that set of keynote speaker sessions, right? Well, that’s because Rafi kindly reminded me I still need to get for myself a Nabaztag! Do you have one yourself? I am *so* getting one! (Then I would know what the true meaning of "Let All Things Be Connected" would be all about! ))

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Social Networks, Networking, Conversations, Dialogue, Connections, Communication, Web 2.0 Expo Europe, web2europe, web2expoeu, web2expoeu08, w2eb, Highlights, Travelling, Business Trips, Twitter, Live Tweeting, We Magazine, Berlin, Germany, Flickr, Pictures, Slideshare, Leisa Reichelt, Leisa, Face to Face, Stowe Boyd, stoweboyd, Flow, Tim O’Reilly, Skills, Communications, Marketing, Business Value, Connectivity, Wi-Fi Access, Accessibility, Scalability, TechWeb, Friendfeed, IBM, Gina Poole, Walk the Talk, Stefan Magdalinski, MOO, Lee Bryant, Headshift, Martin Varsavsky, Saul Klein, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, Suw Charman-Anderson, Ben Hammersley, We Magazine, Thinking Outside the Inbox, No-email, Re-purposing E-mail, Drupal, Open Source Software, Open Source Hardware, Design, Rafi Haladjian, Nabaztag

Web 2.0 Expo In Berlin – Day 1 Highlights

Like I have mentioned yesterday, this is the next blog post of the series of my highlights from the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin that I attended last week, where I will try to share some additional insights from the ones I have already shared over at my live twittering account on @elsuacon and the pictures I will be uploading into my Flickr account, as time goes by. This series of entries may well be on the longer side, so you may want to get a cup of coffee / tea, sit back, and read on.

I am also going to point out to you something incredibly helpful that the Slideshare folks have done, which is basically put together all of the slide decks under a same single frame and which I will keep referring you folks back to it every now and then, as I will not be embedding or link to the direct decks (To keep things easier for everyone). Just that single, master one. This one:

Thus with all of that said, here we go now with the highlights from Day 1 (Tuesday 21st of October). As you would be able to see from the Agenda itself, this was the first day, where, for a good chunk of the day, there were a number of workshops on various different topics, including the ever interesting Leisa Reichelt (@leisa) as well as the always insightful Dion Hinchcliffe (@dhinchcliffe) who both were covering a number of interesting topics related to Web 2.0 and the state of things.

You would be able to see as well how there were a number of other different workshops and you may be wondering whether I attended any of them or not. The quick and short answer would be No!, I didn’t. My day was already packed with one of my favourite activities of every single conference I get to attend: networking. Yes, indeed, the purest form of social networking around at the moment: the face to face networking!

And that’s what I did! So during those first few hours of the event I talked to a whole bunch of good friends (And several fellow IBM colleagues, but more on that later on!) with whom I had the opportunity to continue some of the conversations we have been having all along: folks like Martin Koser (@frogpond), Emanuele Quintarelli (@absolutesubzero), Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd), Tina Kulow (@tkkinstant), a couple of folks from TechWeb, and so on and so forth, are just some of the people I spent most of my morning, early afternoon.

Then from there onwards I spent a good chunk of time at the Media Center talking to various other folks, i.e. media bloggers, at the same time that I finalised the details of a number of press interviews for the rest of the week, one of which came out after a wonderful conversation with Dominik Wind for We-Magazine, that I blogged about yesterday. Really nice start of the conference so far, don’t you think?

From there onwards it was time to head over to the kick off Keynote speaker session with Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) where he spent a few minutes sharing with us where we are with Web 2.0 and how we may have already entered a tipping point of providing an extended business value from various different social software tools, as opposed to just a few fancy meaningless applications.

In Web Meets World Tim got to expand further how more and more we are seeing how some social software applications are starting to not only have the appeal and become very resourceful, as well as helpful, but to have an immediate impact on how we experience things beyond the Web itself. I tell you, if you are ever looking for plenty of examples of social software applications doing some serious business out there Tim’s deck would be a good starting point!

At the same time you will find it would be quite an interesting trip down the memory lane of the Internet and entrepreneurship hinting some interesting points on how to tackle the current financial and economic crisis we are going through at the moment and succeed in the market, at least, in the Internet economy. Plenty of food for thought on that one, too! For sure!

From there onwards we had a short quick break, before it was the turn of a dialogue between Tim O’Reilly himself with the ever entertaining Yossi Vardi talking about what it takes to be an entrepreneur nowadays and how to succeed at it. Here is what various other folks thought about that conversation.

And, finally, the last event of the first day was the Startup Ignite with Brady Forrest, Lukasz Gadowski, Mike Butcher, Christophe Maire, which I think was just the perfect mix with what we have just witnessed in the last couple of hours and something that made me remember the Startup 2.0 event in Barcelona: lots of incredibly good talent, energy, imagination, focus, commitment to succeed, yet very few skills in engaging an audience and market their own product!

Yes, that’s right! Just the same as with Startup 2.0 in Barcelona, earlier in the year, Startup Ignite at the Web 2.0 Expo was refreshing from the perspective of getting an exposure to some of the ideas that people have come up with in the Web 2.0 space (Some of them really smart and some others wonderfully crazy!), yet, most of the participants failed to capture and engage the audience with compelling messages due to lack of some essential marketing & communication skills.

One of the things that these young entrepreneurs seem to keep forgetting more and more is that if you want to make your startup a HUGE success you need to engage fully with your audience, with those folks who would be using your application, as well as those other folks who may be able to provide additional funding for your endeavours. They should always remember you only have got one good opportunity to provoke a good impression. If you miss it, you will probably miss out altogether!

Those folks need to start paying attention as well to the small details, because in such a competitive 2.0 world as today’s that would remain the main key differentiator from the next killer 2.0 app. and just one of the bunch!

From there onwards we finished up Day 1 of an intense and very refreshing day, but I still carried out for a few more hours, meeting up with my entire team and a small group of IBM social computing evangelists with whom I went out for dinner and then a few drinks… But not to worry, in another separate blog post I will mention to you what my team and that bunch of social computing evangelists got up to that week! Stay tuned! For now, Day 1 of highlights is done. Now on to Day 2 …

(However, and before I move on to Day 2 and its main highlights, I would surely want to comment on something that has increasingly become one of my worries, when going to conference events, and which it looks like it is continuing to happen all over the place. My good friend David Terrar put it rather nicely over at Woeful WiFi at technology conferences, but I just thought I would comment on it as well.

If you have been following my live tweeting throughout the various conference events I have been to this year you would know by now how in most cases my number #1, and possibly the only one, rant I have been having all along, has been the appalling connectivity experience at the events. Well, the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin last week suffered pretty much from the same issues as with most of the other technical conferences I have attended this year, specially on the main auditorium for the keynote speaker sessions.

I do realise that it is not easy to put together decent wi-fi connectivity at this kind of events, since it requires lots of effort and a huge investment, yet, organisers need to understand as well how the frustration keeps raising more and more, because we just cannot take the most out of the entire event and in a way we all feel rather frustrated. I am not sure what the right solution would be like, but somehow I feel that we all need to keep trying harder, if we would want to keep attracting live attendees for these events.

So, yes, the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin suffered from the very same problems, which is why I could only do half live tweeting when I would have wanted to share plenty more with you folks, alas, the wi-fi while in there had other plans. Must confess though that in the smaller rooms, it was just brilliant and I was able to capture plenty of great thoughts, which I am hoping to develop further more in these series of blog posts.

But, again, we need to do better, for our own credibility and responsibility to keep spreading the message on Web / Enterprise 2.0 and the kind of impact it is having, not only in the consumer space, but also in the corporate world! We cannot keep hiding the overall message, just because the network is not working. I do know we can do *much* better than this! Let’s try harder on the next one!)

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Software, Social Networking, Social Computing, Social Media, Collaboration, Communities, Learning, Knowledge Sharing, KM, Knowledge Management, Remote Collaboration, Innovation, IBM, Networking, Social Networks, Social Networks, Networking, Conversations, Dialogue, Connections, Communication, Web 2.0 Expo Europe, web2europe, web2expoeu, web2expoeu08, w2eb, Highlights, Travelling, Business Trips, Twitter, Live Tweeting, We Magazine, Berlin, Germany, Flickr, Pictures, Slideshare, Leisa Reichelt, Leisa, Dion Hinchcliffe, Face to Face, Martin Koser, frogpond, Emanuele Quintarelli, absolutesubzero, Stowe Boyd, stoweboyd, Tina Kulow, tkkinstant, Dominik Wind, Tim O’Reilly, Yossi Vardi, Startup Ignite, Brady Forrest, Lukasz Gadowski, Mike Butcher, Christophe Maire, Startup 2.0, Barcelona, Startup2.0, Skills, Communications, Marketing, Business Value, David Terrar, Connectivity, Wi-Fi Access, Accessibility, Scalability, TechWeb