Barry Woudenberg

Here some interesting things I came across in the keynote presentations of this first day of the next web conference 2008.

Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia

Gil talked about insane levels of control to his customers in relation to wikia, which enables community users for instance to change the front page of the website. He actually does something about which many people talk but few actually do it: letting the community take over control of the content of a website. Gil has an enormous amount of trust in his community and talks about his struggles to keep doing so. To me he is quite an inspiration to put so much faith in community and wisdom of crowd. A number of interesting points he made:

• Wikia entails 6000 websites of wikis. When Gil compares wikipedia to wikia in response to a question, he states: “a library (wikia) is bigger than an encyclopia (i.e wikipedia)”
• People are bassically good, and the good ones outnumber the bad ones;
• Wikia does not throw contests or hire people, everyone contributing to wikia must do so from an intrinsic will. He argues people with an extrinsic stimulus will not put as much effort into wikia as the ones who are intrinsically motivated;
• In response to wikia’s latest project: wikia search , a wiki-like approach on search engine functionality, Gil states in response to criticism about the project that wikia search wasn’t to be a finalized product but a start of project.

 Khris Loux

Khris Loux talked, among other things, about OpenSocial and other inititives that should fight content lock in. Interestingly, he mentioned not being able to join google’s opensocial project and contested it being ‘open’. In response to other developments like OpenID and dataportability, it was his thesis that these developments are not in the interest of  big corporations like facebook (because they rely on lock in). His strategy would be that if enough start ups and “big loosers” (like google) who have an interest in  fighting monopolists like facebook could be teamed up, a standard would de facto be created which cannot be ignored. In response to an audience question why any web 2.0 service would be willing to allow portability and give up lock is, Khris replies that it would stimulate companies to always be on step in front of the competition (i.e. portability stimulates innovation, because users would stay faithful because of excellent services and not lock in).
Khris even pointed to a ethical question regarding who owns content put on a website. Currently several major corporations claim IP on content placed on their network. I personally think, this is one of the biggest challenges of the internet the coming year, especially since more and more content is placed online.

to be continued..

Vandaag waren er weer twee interessante nieuwtjes rondom web 2.0. Beiden geven de trend weer dat grote corporaties meegaan in de mantra van openheid en delen die web 2.0 met zich meebrengt.

Nieuwtje 1: Yahoo kondigt aan mee te doen aan het OpenSocial initiatief van concurrent Google. Gezamenlijk hebben Google, Yahoo en MySpace vandaag de OpenSocial Foundation opgericht. OpenSocial wordt met andere woorden steeds geloofwaardiger.

Nieuwtje 2: Microsoft biedt haar Live-gebruikers de mogelijkheid om contacgegevens met 5 andere diensten (o.a. Facebook en LinkedIN) te delen.

Onlangs gaf ik een presentatie over web 2.0 voor een groep ambtenaren. Hierin schetste ik enkele web 2.0 principes en trends. Een van deze trends is openheid, welke zich op verscheidene wijzen manifesteert rondom web 2.0. Er is openheid/transparantie als het gaat om functionaliteit (API), techniek (open standaarden), gebruikers (denk aan profielinformatie op sites als hyves) en content (creative commons). Als het gaat om een trend rondom openheid/transparantie, dan vallen initiatieven zoals OpenSocial en dataportability.org op. Mijn stelling is dat deze initiatieven een poging of er op z’n minst van de schijn van lijkt te hebben dat web 2.0 diensten werkelijke transparantie, en user control over hun content nastreven waarin de gebruiker bepaald en wat en waar er met zijn gegevens gebeurd.

Read the rest of this entry »