Life is grand

“Welcome to the O’Reilly… I mean it@cork Web 2.0 Conference” is how Tom Raftery began the it@cork Web 2.0 Conference this past Thursday. After all the buzz about O’Reilly vs. it@cork this was thankfully one of only few mentions during the conference.

The conference was pitched at a high-level with more of a business and marketing bent than technical development. Some good points were made and I met some of the people behind Irish Web 2.0 (including Bernie of IrishEyes.) Also had a talk with Salim Ismail (formerly of PubSub), Walter Higgins (Sxoop) and the ever friendly Robert Burke (Microsoft.) I also got to meet a very good friend from the U.K for the first time. Thanks for the drinks Derek. On that note I have to recommend Preachers pub in Cork city. Great music, very friendly barstaff and the craic. However I wouldn’t recommend the Jägermeister and Apple Sourz shot combination. Hoo boy.

Argolon has done an excellent job reviewing the conference with posts for each talk. it@cork have also put up the files from each presentation.

Some points that interested me:

• Shel Israel quoted Technorati’s blog count figure (40mil) and Salim quickly countered that PubSub has counted closer to 100mil. One must also not forget the huge numbers blogging in Korea and China.
• Shel mentioned that Wells Fargo and C|Net had both invited him to give internal talks on blogging. This was to do with blogging behind the firewall.
• Shel pointed out that blogging is allowing customers to see that they can trust and like the “lower echelons” of companies even if they aren’t charmed by the upper echelons. e.g. Robert Scoble and others bringing a human face to the “Evil Empire” aka Microsoft.

• eBay auctions last on average 7 days

  which is too fast for Google to index. New breed of search engines required according to Salim.

• The “hidden web” (or dark data/net) is massive (400 times bigger than the public web) and is the next step for the web (Salim). Unlock databases, expose them to the web.
• From a show of hands in the room nearly everyone was using a feed reader.
• Salim thinks we are into Internet 3.0 and it revolves around events (watching as opposed to searching.) Apparently the PubSub engine (which is not database driven) can handle millions of events a second.
• Every company has an email server now. The next common server product will be the “event server” according to Salim.
• Nooked.com are using Google Analytics for their stats according to Fergus Burns.
• Walter Higgins is using Perl for his PXN8 product. He reckons that language/technology choice is much less of a factor these days.

All in all a good conference and I look forward to more progress from the Web 2.0 community in Ireland.

I am off to the it@cork Web 2.0 Conference today and then onto the Ring of Kerry for a three day weekend starting tomorrow. I should be able to post something about the conference this evening but will be offline from then on.

Have a great weekend all and enjoy the great Irish weather we are having.

IT@Cork in Cork, Ireland are holding a half-day conference on Web 2.0 this coming 8th of June.

It may only be a half-day but the speaker lineup is well worth attending for. Shel Israel is the same chap who co-authored Naked Conversations with Robert Scoble. Salim Ismail is a founder of Pub Sub and should have some very interesting things to say. Rob Burke I know as a local Irish fella and he will have some good insight into Microsoft’s Atlas.

Myself and one other from The TSSG will be attending. Drop me a line if you are attending and we can meet up.