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:
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!
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! 🙂 )
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
Hey, thanks for the updates, very interesting stuff. Future of blogging = FriendFeed etc? These are becoming more important, but I still think there’s room for articles, or monologues. Perhaps the real revolution will be in terms of how the conversation afterwards is developed – I already see lots of people commenting on blogs through FriendFeed/Twitter etc rather than just on the page where the article is put out.