Next in my Web 2.0 series, I’m covering the panel by Joseph Smarr, Chief Platform Architect at Plaxo, called Data Portability, Privacy and the Emergence of the Social Web.

Here’s a link to the Web 2.0 page outlining the purpose of the session and a bio of Joseph Smarr.
I gave this session ***** of 5. It was excellent – very informative and to the point. I walked away from this session with lots of great ideas.

Here are my notes:

Today

- Social web is broken: Users have to re-create account, profile, re-find friends, re-establish relationships
- Dilemma: If you build another community you build another silo with all the issues above or create a widget within another walled garden

Emerging new Technologies and ‘Standards’

- OpenID
- Microformat
- DataPortability
- Social Graph
- Jabber
- Opensocial
- OAuth

The main social building blocks

- Who I am
- Who I know
- What’s going on?

Who I am

- Create a portable, durable online identity that is available across sites
- Open ID
o Sign-up with an existing account
o Link and share your profile data between sites
o Also make it possible to leverage your credibility
o You can point multiple accounts to one opened account
- Rel=me (XFN)
o Consolidate your online identity with me-links
- Social Graph API (Google)
o See what users said about themselves

Who I know

- Build and maintain real relationships
- Contact APIs
o Find people from your current address book
o Leverage previously established relationships
- OAuth
o New technology standard that allows you to share private data between trusted sites, giving control to the user, basically how much private data they want to share from one site to another
- Friends-list portability
o Continuous discovery across multiple sites. See Flickr’s new Friend Finder. Also see Dopplr. Important for new communities !

What’s going on?

- Stay-up-to date with the people you know
- OpenSocial: Allows you to build social apps that can run anywhere
- RSS/Atom allows you to syndicate your activity to share with others. Can be combined with OAuth in order to control the flow of private data
- Jabber (XMPP) allows to real-time upstream data between sites

Outlook and opportunities

- Be an Identity Provider (i.e. Yahoo, AOL)
- Be a Content Aggregator (YouTube)
- Be a Social Graph Provider (Plaxo, LinkedIn, Facebook)

A Day in a Life of a User (see below)

- John checks a new site
- Using openID he can quickly start to participate
- Using a social graph provider he can quickly connect to his friends
- He adds a piece of content that gets circulated to his friends

A day in the Life of a User: Web 2.0 Expo

Conclusion

- The social web is opening up and fast!

Next in the Web 2.0 series is my notes on Sticky Eyeballs: How User Experience Wins Market Share, a session I gave *** of 5.

Whilst I’m still mulling over the panel discussion I moderated at the AltSearchEngines Get Together (I’ll post about that next week, but in the meantime David Hardtke over at Surf Canyon blogged about it yesterday), I’m at Web 2.0 Expo and thought you may be interested in my notes from some of the presentations that I’ve attended. The first in my Web 2.0 series is a panel titled: “Community Building: Good, Bad and Ugly”.

Web 2.0 Expo, San Francisco, Apr 22 - 25, 2008

Meet the panelists:

Dawn Foster (Community Manager Jive Software)
Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research)
Bob Duffy (Community Strategist at Intel for OpenPort)
Kellie Parker (Community Manager PC World & MacWorld)

Here’s what the session covered:

Online communities are being created for almost every group of people imaginable (technical and non-technical). However, it’s not a simple case of build it and they will come. Passionate communities entail considerable forethought, attention to technology, and a dose of know-how to manage the unruly.

Hear more about:
1) Techniques for building strong and productive communities.
2) Ideas for resolving community issues and getting the community back on track.
3) What to do when a community or a few community members seem beyond hope (the dark side of the force).

My score: *** of 5.

And here are my notes covering the speakers’ reflections:

The definition of Community:

- Very simple - People with common interests interacting with each other online

Why is community important?

- Getting feedback on products, services
- Building brand loyalty through two-way communication
- Not just Company-to-Customer communication

Important things to consider when creating a community:

- Build versus join
- Train your bloggers
- Key is the people, not the companies
- Company (hosting the community) is like a landlord and the critical skill set of a community manager: Passion about being part of the dialogue, be a good networker and be diplomatic.

Some challenges in building communities:

Driving traffic:
- Find the passionate people.
- Get the word out through blogs and podcasts.
- Keep in mind the goals, i.e. is it to achieve a certain goal like get someone register.
- As a community manager always be polite – appreciate any feedback.

Some tips:
- Do not over-engage with the community
- Engage them when they arrive with general ease-in questions
- Growth Momentum is in ‘external’ (customer-to-customer) and semi-private communities

Measuring the success of communities – metrics:
- Measure against a goal and objectives
- Referral links from other sites
- Increased logins from existing, number of new registrations
- Number of messages posted
- Not necessarily number of leads as an outcome but awareness building
- Number of comments being posted on topics

What’s the future of communities:

- Sharing across communities and community destinations
- For companies the number of static pages versus community driven pages will shift significantly towards community generated content
- Data portability

Next in the Web 2.0 series is my notes on Data Portability, Privacy and the Emergence of the Social Web, a session I gave ***** of 5.

In a general shopping survey conducted last month by Opinion Research Corporation 1,092 consumers surveyed still feel there is room for improvement. The main complaints are misrepresented items (that the item they receive does not look it did online) and a lack of customer service.

Opinion Research Corporation Survey - Online Shopping

Still, nearly nine out of 10 consumers in the survey say they shop online and over 1/5 buy over the Internet. So, despite these barriers, consumers are attracted to online product research and shopping.

And the recent Shop.org study, conducted by Forrester Research: “The State of Retailing Online 2008”, indicates that the only way is up. US retail e-commerce sales will rise by 17% to $204 billion in 2008. Delving deeper, Forrester analysts points to the “tale of two shoppers” as those spearheading this rise – the online bargain hunter and the affluent convenience shopper.

And these stats are making waves in the healthcare industry. Our industry’s biggest ad spenders – big pharma – are watching the consumer exodus from the traditional. According to a March study by Cegedim Dendrite, US direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketers say they plan to increase their online marketing spending this year and decrease spending on traditional media.

Cegedim Dendrite Study - US DTC Pharmaceutical Marketers

This is certainly good news for our network of merchants and partners. As Butch said to the Sundance Kid: “Stick with me Kid….”

I’m heading to San Francisco next week to attend the Web 2.0 Expo and participate in Charles Knight’s AltSearchEngine pre-conference, the AltSearchEngines Get Together on Monday, April 21.

AltSearchEngines Get Together

I’m excited that Charles asked me to moderate a panel discussion on the topic “Users First: Give them WHAT they want, the WAY they want (and need)”. Judging from the breadth of experiences the panel speakers have and their companies’ varied approaches to search, this will be a lively discussion.

Some of the questions we’ll cover are:
- What makes a good experience? How do you connect with your audience? How do you create a seamless experience (end-to-end)?
- What is your approach to user retention and stickiness?
- How do you get the user / consumer involved in the process of designing and building a better experience?
- User Distractions – Display Ads, AdSense-type programs or other paid sponsorships. How do you approach this dilemma? How do you find the balance?

Next week I hope to give you the highlights from the panel and the conference.

Let me introduce the speakers and the companies they represent. In no particular order:

Jaideep Singh, CEO and Co-Founder of Spock

Jaideep Singh is a co-founder and CEO of SPOCK. Prior to SPOCK, Jaideep was an early stage venture capitalist at Clearstone Venture Partners. He got his MBA from the Wharton School in 2002 and a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Arizona in 1991. He also completed all the required coursework for his MS in Computer Engineering. From 1992 to 2000 Jaideep worked in various marketing and engineering roles, mostly at Wind River. He started his engineering career at IBM.

About Spock

Spock is a people search engine that helps you find friends and colleagues on the Web. Spock combines two very powerful forces. First, our technology organizes web content about people into easily understood search results. We search for information on biography pages, social networks, news sites, blogs, directories... pretty much every place imaginable on the internet. Second, the Spock community contributes information to help enhance the search experience. Spock users can add tags, pictures, and web links or simply vote on existing information to increase its relevance. By contributing information about people in your life you improve the search experience not only for yourself, but for everyone.

David Hardtke, Chief Scientist of SurfCanyon

David Hardtke, Ph.D., Chief Scientist, worked for 13 years in experimental particle, nuclear and astrophysics. He has conducted experiments at CERN, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, Brookhaven National Lab and at the South Pole Station. Immediately prior to joining Surf Canyon, he was research scientist and lecturer in the physics department at UC Berkeley. David specializes in searches for very rare patterns hidden in enormous (many terabyte) data sets using advanced automated statistical data mining techniques. He is the author of over 70 papers in referenced journals. David holds a B.S. from Duke and earned his Ph.D. in Particle Physics from Ohio State in a remarkable three years.

About SurfCanyon

Using semantic real-time implicit personalization, Surf Canyon develops Discovery for Search™. This patent-pending technology is embedded in a browser extension that can work with virtually any third-party search engine, and assists users in finding relevant information that's buried within the often overwhelming amount of search results.

Siva Kumar, CEO of TheFind.com

Siva Kumar is a seasoned entrepreneur with a history of building successful information technology and software companies. Prior to TheFind.com, Kumar co-founded eight other venture-funded start-ups in his career: Onebox (acquired by Openwave), BridgeSpan (acquired by Hall Settlement Systems), Impresse (acquired by PrintCafe/Creo Systems), Seven, Vialto (acquired by Cisco Systems), Scalent Systems and Telera (acquired by Alcatel). Currently, he sits on the boards of both TheFind.com and SPOCK and previously served terms as president of Scalent Systems, president and CEO of Impresse Corporation and chairman of Onebox.

About TheFind.com

TheFind.com is a shopping search engine that delivers comprehensive, visually compelling results for products. TheFind specializes in lifestyle goods in the apparel, health & beauty, home & garden, kids & family, and sports & outdoor categories. From the most popular e-commerce sites to the most unique, hard-to-find brands, TheFind.com uniquely crawls the Web to find over 200 million products and shows the most relevant and popular products right on the first page of results.

Rob Rustad, Director of Marketing at Collarity

Rob Rustad, Director of Marketing at Collarity and Founder of everythingOnDemand has over twenty years of experience helping early-stage technology companies gain traction in the areas of product development and marketing. Previously, Rob served as the Vice President of Marketing for Imperito Networks, and he was a Senior Director of Marketing for Excite@Home. Rob has guest lectured for the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business MBA program and has provided professional course instruction for Seybold Seminars. Mr. Rustad holds an MBA from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business, and a BA from Michigan State University.

About Collarity

Collarity is a recognized leader in the category of behavioral content and ad targeting. We currently serve millions of unique users and hundreds of millions of page views every month, through our website customers. Collarity's mission is to improve a site's monetization performance by delivering more relevant site search results, content recommendations, and targeted ads - all driven by the anonymous behavior of the site audience. After adding Collarity Compass Services to a website, visitors find the content they need and visitors are exposed to ads which they respond to more often. Web publishers experience higher revenue from increases in both page views and advertising click-through rates.

Last week I tested out Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers and Answerbag to see how active its communities are and whether I would receive any ‘real’ answers, i.e. not SPAM. I did receive a couple of rude remarks, but that aside, I am pleasantly surprised that I did receive responses from other users within a day or two and that it was valuable advice from other consumers.

Why am I surprised? I truly thought my question would be quickly buried in the thousands of questions posed, but evidently categorizing questions and answers works well for both those posting queries and those that help respond. I also thought I’d be barraged with SPAM, rude comments and merchants taking the opportunity to carry out a little guerrilla marketing. Again, I received two stupid comments, compared to three valuable ones. Not bad.

Answer posted on Yahoo! Answers

Answer posted on WikiAnswers

So, if you have any burning questions, try out the online Q&A communities. There are lots of people online willing to share their knowledge and experiences with you.