Ben’s Blog

Got settled into the hotel yesterday and registered for the conference.  The Westin is a nice place - I could definately get used to the big HD LCD TV and the king size “heavenly bed” in my room.  The downside: wireless internet here is terrible which makes staying in touch with the office rather difficult.  My goal is to not return to an enormous pile of email!

The keynotes this morning were very enlightening - I had no idea how widespread web 2.0 initiatives are in the corporate community.  For instance, I learned that fedex has a facebook presence and a desktop app written with Adobe Air, and the CIA uses a host of tools coined intellipedia that includes everything from a wiki tool to presentation of online media.  Over lunch I sat next to a reporter for PC Magazine and she told me all about some of the cool things she’s uncovered while covering emerging web technologies.  Perhaps the most interesting was the fact that Comcast (the cable/digital phone company) actively monitors twitter and responds within minutes to any customer who tweets about their experience with Comcast.  To my amazement they even got back to me about my tweet about this and I messaged a couple times back and forth with their rep who knew a couple people in Grand Rapids.  Talk about the shrinking world.

After lunch I went to a couple break out sessions - the first was all about social bookmarking sites, how they’re used, how they can be improved and ways to integrate them into some of our own tools.  I left with a whole new vocabulary and a greater appreciation for tagging.  Next I attended a very collaborative panel discussion n blogging.  The panel ended up being the entire room, and sadly half the time was wasted going around a room of over 150 people and letting each person introduce themselves and their blog.  It got better from there - there were nuggets of useful information disbursed between all the self indulgent discussions.  I then realized that for the most part these people were bloggers and they were simply converting their blogs to “verbal” for the captive audience.

To keep it brief, those were the high and low lights of the day - I wrapped up with a little time spent socializing in the vendor demo pavilion.  I saw some cool tools, many of which seemed like little known sites with some very cool ideas.  I also chatted with a couple Microsoft gurus about their new initiative to compete on the itunes U space.  The zunes are nice and their product looked very sleak (and open source) but I think Apple has that market pretty well cornered at this point.

I’m thinking of walking around Boston again tonight but there is a heat index of 103 today and I just had a beer so I feel like taking a nap.  Maybe I’ll go watch some news, wait for the sun to set a bit and then venture out on the subway to see what I can find.  I invested in a one week pass to ride the subway and busses which has made getting around very easy.

Ciao!