Sometimes when I write, it’s like I’m reaching out to an old friend without a name or a face. I think of it as some new form of non-physical intimacy.

I’m trying to find my consciousness and merge it with yours, and as weird as it sounds I feel that connection with every myspace message and email I get.

We’re both alone and interfaced with a monitor in silence, and as I craft my sentences and express my ideas my intention is always for you to get an unfiltered view into my thoughts. I want you to take them with you.

I’m opening my head to merge my thoughts with you, and the only way that really works is if I’m 100% honest.

Well said. We don’t have to see people in person to connect at a deeper level. We just have to open ourselves to the possibility and, as Joe said, be completely honest with each other. Even the smallest little deceptions cause us to be more cautious and create barriers to building deep, meaningful relationships.

Joe’s blog and humor are pretty crude. Fear Factor is tame in comparison. If you’re easily offended, skip it. If not, then start reading his blog, look him up on YouTube, and enjoy.

I was speaking with Michelle [Obama] and Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver - we were all doing a big rally out in California. At the end of the rally Michelle Obama said something powerful: "and I want you to leave here and envision Barack Obama taking the oath of office." I created a vision board. I had never had a vision board before. I came home, I got me a board and put Barack Obama’s picture on it and I put a picture of my dress I want to wear to the inauguration.

I have to confess to being a closet skeptic. I believe in science, not magic. But I’ve also been confronted with so many experiences throughout my life that it’s impossible for me not to believe. I’ve seen Law of Attraction in action in my life, in extraordinary ways. But I still always had a disconnect between my left-brain, logical view and my right-brain reality.

Over the past two years, though, I’ve had the pleasure of becoming good friends with John Assaraf,  best-selling author of The Answer: Grow Any Business, Achieve Financial Freedom, and Live an Extraordinary Life (among others) and teacher from the movie The Secret. If you saw the film you’ll never forget the story of how John discovered the power of vision boards – and how it started him on a quest that continues to this day. Watch the clip at right as he retells the story to Larry King, or read John’s vision board story in more detail.

For the past 25 years, John has studied quantum physics and neuroscience, and then applied these findings to help people achieve their goals in everyday life. Drawing upon his unique knowledge, John has developed a process that helps people live the life of their dreams – and now he’s sharing it in his newest book, The Complete Vision Board Kit™.

Now anyone can cut out a bunch of pictures and paste them on a piece of posterboard, but will that actually help you manifest those visions in your life?

Yes, actually it will. Even just the act of creating the vision board helps focus your subconscious. Keeping it somewhere where you can see it on a regular basis helps even more.

There’s more to it than just pasting pictures up, however. You must understand how to activate the power of your unconscious brain to draw towards you everything you truly want.

The Complete Vision Board Kit™ fully explains this process. And it’s actually much more than a book: It comes with everything you need to create your own life-changing vision board: a book, a DVD, and a sample vision board. This kit will walk you step-by-step through exactly how to create a vision board AND retrain your brain to actually start believing that you can achieve all your goals and dreams.

John’s work has helped me bridge the gap between science and faith and allowed me to make quantum leaps in the results I’m getting from my personal development practices (I told him The Answer could have been subtitled "Law of Attraction for the Left Brain").

Want to see my vision board? Personally, I’m not a big fan of paper, and I work at my computer 90% of the time, so I’ve created a "virtual vision board", which I have available as a PowerPoint slideshow, and I’ve also set up as my screensaver, so it automatically kicks on after 3 minutes of inactivity, presenting me with these images throughout the day. I’ve saved it to SlideShare and embedded it below:

Do you use vision boards? Tell your vision board story in the comments below. Feel free to include pictures if you’ve got ‘em.

• Hay guys, Twitterank gives u a twit score. Mine is 110.23! Check it!
• Looks like @brianoberkirch made a funneh. oops
• Now Oliver Marks sez @brianoberkirch hacked twitter omgz
• A MILLIONTY PEOPLE READ OLIVER MARKS AND RETWEETED IT
• Everybody skurred nao

This does raise some interesting issues. For example, if you’re generally a highly credible source, as Brian Oberkirch is, do you have a responsibility to be so reliable that you can’t even crack a joke? I experienced this myself last year when an April Fool’s post I made was so believable that it was prompting calls to LinkedIn customer service (even though I said "April Fool’s" at the end of the post). I took a look around the web at some of the other pranksters (Google being one of the biggest), and wrote about it in April 2nd - The Day After. I still don’t know where the line is, but I certainly don’t think Brian crossed it.

The real problem is in the system that allowed a blogger who didn’t do any fact-checking with other sources to jump on the story under the loaned credibility of the ZDNet brand. It was an honest mistake, and well-intentioned, but it was magnified by being published under a trusted brand. As Shannon Whitley wrote:

Bloggers are not journalists in the professional sense of the word.  It’s not only a misconception, but judging by how quickly erroneous information can spread, it’s a very dangerous idea. […] Amateurs can produce high-quality content and, in a particular area of expertise, can provide more depth on a subject.  However, we should never kid ourselves that the amateurs have the same level of experience, nor do they support the same level of standards as the professional.  Read carefully and watch those banners.  You may see a professional logo at the top of the page, but that doesn’t mean the same level of trust can be transferred to the content beneath it.  I think it’s time that organizations like CNN and ZDNet change the layout of their amateur sites.  It’s too easy to mistake the work of an amateur for that of the professional and trusted journalist.

In general, I agree with Shannon. However, I do think he perhaps has some misplaced trust in those "professional" journalists. I have done dozens of interviews with journalists, and while some adhere to very high standards, others are frankly kind of lazy. I’ve been misquoted numerous times in ways that changed the meaning of what I said. I’ve seen stories that drew obviously wrong conclusions from the facts. I’ve seen factual errors in the stories I’ve been quoted in. Many of the journalists are freelance writers with no formal journalistic training. And on non-critical pieces, i.e., anything in any section other than "news", a lot of publications don’t do rigorous fact-checking. If it wouldn’t lead to a potential lawsuit, they don’t bother.

So while you may want to be a little extra-cautious if the author is designated as a "blogger" rather than a staff reporter, you need to take what the reporters say with a grain of salt as well. If you are going to make an important business or life decision based on the information, check your facts with multiple sources.

BIOGRAPHIES OF SPEAKERS:

James Grimmelmann is Associate Professor at New York Law School and a member of its Institute for Information Law and Policy. He received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was Editor-in-Chief of LawMeme and a member of the Yale Law Journal. Prior to law school, he received an A.B. in computer science from Harvard College and worked as a programmer for Microsoft. He has served as a Resident Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale, as a legal intern for Creative Commons and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and as a law clerk to the Honorable Maryanne Trump Barry of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. He studies how the law governing the creation and use of computer software affects the distribution of wealth, power, and freedom in society. As a lawyer and technologist, he aims to help these two groups speak intelligibly to each other. He writes on such topics as intellectual property, virtual worlds, search engines, electronic commerce, online privacy, and the use of software as a regulator. Recent publications include The Structure of Search Engine Law, 93 Iowa L. Rev. 1 (2007), Virtual Borders, First Monday (Feb. 2006), and Regulation by Software, 114 Yale L.J. 1719 (2005). In 2007, he was named one of Interview Magazine’s “New Pop A-List: 50 To Watch (Age 30 or Under).” He has been blogging since 2000 at the Laboratorium (http://laboratorium.net/). His home page is at http://james.grimmelmann.net/.

Katherine Isbister is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at NYU-Poly, and also maintains an affiliation at the ITU Copenhagen Center for Computer Games Research. Dr. Isbister has written two books: Better Game Characters by Design: A Psychological Approach, and Game Usability: Advice from the Experts for Advancing the Player Experience. Better Game Characters was nominated for a Game Developer Magazine Frontline Award in 2006. Current research interests include emotion and gesture in games, supple interactions, design of game characters, and game usability.

Aram Sinnreich is a Visiting Professor at NYU’s Department of Media, Culture and Communication, where he teaches courses on video games, intellectual property and digital culture. He is also the Managing Partner of Radar Research, a media and technology consultancy. He has written about media, culture and technology for publications including The New York Times, Billboard, Wired News, Truthdig and American Quarterly. As a Senior Analyst at Jupiter Research in New York for over five years (1997-2002), he produced research covering the online music and media industries and provided hands-on strategic consulting to companies ranging from Time Warner to Microsoft to Heineken. Aram’s kicked World of Warcraft, and is now quasi-addicted to Spore.

Mary Flanagan investigates everyday technologies through critical writing, artwork, and activist design projects. Flanagan’s work has been exhibited internationally at museums, festivals, and galleries, including: the Guggenheim, The Whitney Museum of American Art, SIGGRAPH, The Banff Centre, The Moving Image Centre, New Zealand, Central Fine Arts Gallery NY, Artists Space NY, the University of Arizona, University of Colorado-Boulder, and venues in Brazil, France, UK, Canada, Taiwan, New Zealand, and Australia. Her projects have been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Pacific Cultural Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Please visit her site at: www.maryflanagan.com

Liel Liebovitz received his doctorate from Columbia University in 2007. His dissertation, titled “Thinking Inside the Box: Towards an Ontology of Video Games,” examines the personal and social processes of play. Liel also served as associate professor of communications at Barnard College, and taught at Marymount Manhattan College. He is the author of two books of non-fiction: “Aliya,” published in 2006 by St. Martin’s Press, and “Lili Marlene,” scheduled for publication by W.W. Norton in 2008.

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Sinnreich: There’s a land grab going on in academe: every department wants to own games.
Flanagan: A similar land grab happened with film studies. There’s also a lot of money involved in this for grants.
Sinnreich: Growing 30-40% YOY, while film is flat and music is down. Also, military is very interested in this.

Liebovitz: Can we formally define a game?
Sinnreich: No, not possible.
Flanagan: most innovative games don’t fit within clear definitions.

Liebovitz: Why are video games compelling?
Flanagan: there are many innovative ways to define games.
Sinnreich: there is expectation of transformability.

Question: Are video games as a medium likely to have any long term sociopolitical effects? (compare with longstanding debate about argument of impact of TV on crime/politics)

Grimmelmann: TV didn’t radically change human nature. Viewers kept on living their lives.

Question: What about idea of forming guilds in Obama campaign: “yes we can?”. Does this create energy that could be used towards sociopolitical goals?

Isbister: TV was an isolationist blip. Games move us back to doing things together.

Sinnreich: I just wrote on my blog that Barack Obama is the first mashup candidate. He’s black and white, foreign and domestic. Instead of being a flat neutral candidate, he’s more than the sum of his parts. He’s like “Careless Dead” (mashup of “Careless Whispers” and “Dead or Alive”).

Isbister: Constants include: people like to be social. People have emotions.
Flanagan: We do a lot of social activist games. A game is a framework of action/agency. If we frame that so certain types of actions are allowed (e.g., certain types of communication in WoW are allowed) we impact the culture. Must think about how games create epistemological systems.

Question: What is the role of ‘glory’ in video games, e.g., the high scorers list which motivates people to join it?

Flanagan: you have the creatives, who re-skin; come up with new clothes; reengineer the structures. You also have disrupters, who like to vandalize.

Sinnreich: Games are a model for the free agent economy.
Isbister: I tell my students that eventually on their business card, they’ll put on their business card which guild they were in; what their high scores were.
Grimmelmann: rack of medals on a uniform is just a score, in the ‘game of killing people’

Sinnreich: football, soccer are martial games.
Liebovitz: There’s a huge misnomer in games, which is the idea of interactivity. However, when you actually study the game, you learn that you’re operating within a very tiny window of what the designer allows. However, the game is designed so that you think that what YOU are doing is driving your choices.
Sinnreich: Video games are information spaces which can be explored. One of the biggest questions of the era: if you give someone the tools to explore/discover the space, are they exercising free will /agency, or are there actions being overdetermined? Jon Zittrain’s new book is about that.

The first video game I fell in love with was Atari 2600 game, called Number Crunchers. You drive your car over numbers, and whoever goes over the biggest numbers wins. However, there was a bug: if you slid on the number sideways, you got stuck on the number, and you would go to 100 very quickly. That to me was compelling; I had to buy that game.

Grimmelmann: you have to balance between being entirely passive, and giving someone too many options. It’s like dancing, and the tension between being in the lead and the follower role.
Liebovitz: Cheating has become so common in video games, and is written into the code. This is a major subindustry in the code. It’s the “invisible towrope”: you look like you’re skiing but there’s really an invisible towrope.

Sinnreich: there’s a dance going on.
Grimmelmann: one of my favorite children’s books is “There’s a Monster at the End of this Book”, in which Grover tries to stop you from flipping the pages of the book. It subverts the medium.
Flanagan: In Animal Crossing, you can stop and get coffee. There’s a pleasure of discovery in doing that. This is a machine-operated diagetic space. The computer does stuff when you’re not there, to convince you that the world is bigger than just you.
Liebovitz: nothing suggests agency in a game like the ability to stop playing. Question for Isbister:, please comment on relationship between player and character. Games enhance your own powers.

Sinnreich: When I was playing GTA 4, I had to choose whom to kill, but had 2 perspective: my own moral sense of values, and the game’s values.
Isbister: I feel the tension of wearing the narrative suit which doesn’t fit
Flanagan: In the video game “Eve” (?), you start out as a debutante in heels and a ball gown at the opera. The singer turns into an opera singer, who then turns into a monster you must chase..in high heels. There were many blog posts I saw about how this impacted game play…”I really felt like I knew what it was to be a woman.” (laughter)
Flanagan: “Values at Play” is a collaborative effort between a game philosopher and me. We’re exploring what it means to make human values the center of the design. We’re not trying to make decisions about which values are ‘better’, but to think about design issues.
Flanagan: Big theme of game developers conference was growth of independent games, which were winning a lot of the awards.
Flanagan: Values are embedded in a game whether we acknowledge it or not. I just did an interview with Salon.com. They asked, “Do all games have to have shooting?” I recently went to a school to look at a dance game. One of the kids said, “This isn’t a game, because you can’t kill anyone.” What a strange generation to think play=killing someone.
Isbister: bestselling games are always simulation and sports. The key values of these games are novelty and consumption. They make a new version of the sports game every season, and you can’t play the old game.
Sinnreich: Casual games are the way out of the box of ’you have to kill someone’. There are more adult women than teenage boys playing video games in the US right now…especially Nintendo.
Sinnreich: For the first time, all the mainstream console games are truly networked, and all the major games integrate that network functionality into the games. So we’re not tied to games that are stored on little metal disks.

Question: What are challenges of ‘governing’ the economy of a game?
Grimmelmann: Eve Online has a very tolerant attitude to money changing. It’s based in Iceland. I wonder if it’s being used as a channel for currency.

Howard Bloomfield is looking at doing tests of different regulatory regimes in games.

Question: The video game Rock Band recently beat out itunes for music rights to Beatles catalog. Aram, you wrote that the music industry is shifting to getting revenues mainly from licensing.

Sinnreich: The dominant form in which people listen to music now is the playlist. It’s not a question of ‘album’ vs.’ single’. There is not an ipod user who hasn’t experimented with making his own ‘greatest hits’ record. The Beatles catalog is perfect test case for merging the interoperability of video games with a pure consumption oriented medium.

———————-
Audience questions
Question: Can a game not be Calvinball by definition?
Grimmelmann: The contextualizing of Calvinball in regular games is critical. Calvinball doesn’t make sense unless you know croquet, baseball, etc.

Question: “America’s Army” was a video game developed specifically as a recruiting tool. Comment.

L :We’ll never have a truly successful propaganda video game, because it’s too interactive a medium.
Teten: What can managers learn motivating power of video games?
Sinnreich: the Chinese gold farmers who work in WoW, they play WoW in their off-hours because they’re with their friends. When I was at a dot-com, we played Age of Empires on the company’s LAN.
Liebovitz: Heidegger said humans are different from all other animals because they know they’re mortal. Games free us of that onus.

Question: Who’s doing interesting research in games.
Flanagan: Esward Costranova
Liebovitz: JL Sherry, who’s found little correlation between games and violence.
Isbister: ‘pencil test’. Researchers asked people to study a certain interface in which you manipulated a pencil with your mouth—either clench your teeth (frown) or hold a smile. The people who had to hold a smile liked the interface much more.

Community as Part of Your Site Offering: Strategy from 50,000 Feet and Tactics from the Trenches
Sylvia Marino, Executive Director, Community Operations, Edmunds.com

3 person staff running this. I’m the Executive Director of Community Operations. I have my own P&L. We get profitable quite early in the year. I have a community manager, who deals with moderators and members. Senior Product Manager who makes sure community is integrated throughout the site.

We sit in the media group, separate from editorial, but equal to them

Our membership agreement is one of the most copied on the Web

We’ve banned a user and sued him to do that

Consumers engage with others, editors, industry experts, manufacturers, experts

General rule: no soliciting

A: Why do you have both Forums and Social Q&A?

A: Q&A is for quick response.

Forums is for longer-term dialogue

Our customers engage in Edmunds, Carspace, and also elsewhere: YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, widgets, mashups, RSS

Our community tools (e.g., Twitter) have empowered editors.

We have lots of moderators, most of whom are part-time

Consideration Marketing—strategic placement based on what the contest is.

Advertisers used to worry about seeing their ad next to negative conversation but that’s now rarely true. Most advertisers are doing packages.

We’re #3 automotive info site, after General Motors (whole network) and eBay motors . So we’re the only neutral information site.

We use NetworkedInsights, which measures your ROI on your community activity.

Every page and every product is a community opportunity

Read customers.com by Patricia Seybold. First figure out the customers’ needs, and then see if you really need Twitter, blogs, podcasts, Facebook, etc.

We’re a private family-owned company (Steinlauf family)

Dealers tried to co-opt our service to promote themselves. Customers didn’t like having them in forums, but wanted to know about good dealers. So we added dealer ratings/reviews, and now local auto repair service ratings /reviews.

We decided that thinking that our users could spell was a really radical assumption.

—————————————–
Interactive: Creating Experiences For Online Communities
Bernd H. Schmitt, Professor, Columbia Business School, best-selling author, “Big Think Strategy”, with Aliza Freud (CEO Shespeaks), Sylvia Marino, and Olivier Toubia

Q: Who participates in these communities?

Marino: it’s people with needs. Although I often wonder if these people have jobs. For support , to give & receive information, and entertainment. I have a federal court judge, to a woman with 9 kids. I have people who are in every day, and people who come in once every 3 years when their lease is up.

Freud: People of all ages are online, but their purposes vary widely. Moms often go online to monitor what kids over age 13 are doing.

Q: Comment on manufacturer-owned sites.

Marino: User will always have suspicion that negative comments are edited out. When we get complaints from car manufacturers about what is written on our site, our response is always, ‘make better cars. Treat your customers better.’

Marino: some years ago L’Eggs launched an online community for pantyhose members. Real women said, ‘women don’t want to talk about pantyhose’. But it turns out, there were people who wanted to talk about pantyhose: duck-hunters and cross-dressers.

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Integrating Online Communities: From service and product forums to a holistic approach to customer communities
Richard Binhammer, Conversations, Communities and Communications, Dell, Inc.

“Dell has been a leader in using social media to engage its customer community in tech support, product development, and public relations. Initiatives have included corporate blogs, customer-to-customer support (C2C) forums, IdeaStorm for idea generation, online videos, and ratings & reviews. Richard Binhammer will discuss Dell’s current community initiatives and future plans to integrate these diverse programs into a holistic approach throughout the company.”

Launched online communities since 1996.

There are 4000+ conversations about us every day.
We decided to listen, learn & participate.
We estimate we have 2b interactions with clients evey day. IdeaStorm has 9800 customer ideas so far.

Main channels now:
- resolve dissatisfiaction
- Join conversation
- Share content & collect ideas: StudioDell, IdeaStorm, Blog roundtables, Second Life, Digital Nomads (powered by Dell but not officially a Dell site), Regeneration.org (powered by Dell but not officially a Dell site)
- Tell our story: Direct2Dell blog

We’ve done $0.5m in revenues on twitter (from DellOutlet.com)

Our premise: we are a listening company.

When there’s a dispute, we try to take it offline, because of our privacy policies. To solve your problem, I need your Dell ID and other information. We then cross our fingers that the customer will acknowledge that we solved the problem. 90% of the time they will do so.

We are evolving to a model where we don’t treat online as a special type of media. Core group of 40 people in conversations with community team.

Social media is a phenomenal early warning system.
I can name 3 issues (e.g., laptop batteries) where social media warned us 3.5 weeks before anything else of a major issue.

I’ve probably covered half my salary in computer sales.

—————————————–

From BarackObama.com to AT&T: Using online communities to engage, energize and mobilize constituents
Thomas Gensemer, Managing Partner, Blue State Digital

“With nearly a million members, the My.BarackObama.com social network has helped to win a presidential primary, raise enormous funds online, and reshape the role of the Internet in political organizing. The company behind the social network, Blue State Digital, has worked with more than 100 clients in politics and business, to develop new media strategies to grow relationships with customers and advocates. Managing partner Thomas Gensemer will discuss how they have worked with the Obama campaign and clients such as Stonyfield Farms and AT&T to energize and mobilize constituents on their behalf.”

Our tools & programs: the basics. Easy signup. Email broadcast. Fundraising. Event management. Surveys, quizzes, polls. Petitions, tell a friend.

1.6m active profiles.
Over 50K groups & circles
Over 250K user-organized events

List power:
Active users (about 5% of active signups)
One-time users
Profile owners
Low-level actions
Basic signup (deadbeats >35%)

93% of Americans expect companies to have a presence in social media.

Why network?

- self expression & ego
- utility
- Exhibitionism/voyeurism
- Reputation (Linkedin)
- Altruism (actblue, my.barackobama.com, angie’s list)

If you had 10 of your most loyal customers in a room, what would you have them do?

I don’t believe that everyone should have a social network.

1/10 of Best Buy employees have created a profile on BlueShirtNation.com

BMW’s site on Facebook makes sense. It doesn’t require people to join a new network.

Al Gore’s “We” social network hasn’t taken off, because it’s not tied to face-to-face local events. What can people organize around?

Analysis: why doesn’t Whole Foods have a real social network? There’s real affinity, real physical presence.

Key Lessons

Not all networks utilitarian; in fact, most won’t offer utility.
Need shared affinity
Need low barrier ‘ask’
Need ongoing engagement tactic (e.g., local meetings)

If you’re a ‘deadbeat’, you get a ‘thank and spank’ message saying, ‘0.5m people have signed the petition; why not you?’. We work with an organization called Wal-mart Watch.

If we had done what Kerrey did, focusing on MySpace / Facebook, we would be very limited in our ability to message people. We wouldn’t own the data.

110 people now work in new media for MyBO, including people in all 50 states.

I’ve invested in over 75 companies, but I consider myself mainly an investor.
Started my first Internet company in 1998. it took $20m to get to product ship.
2000: 2nd internet company. Took $2m to get to product ship.
We most recently invested in Pond5, which does user-generated stock footage. When we invested, it had a management team, had launched, had revenues. They had only spent $20K.

It’s dramatically cheaper now to get to launch.

No one knows where it’s going.

4 major seminal ideas you must know if you want to be able to function going forward.

1) The long tail.
2) Web 2.0
3) Globalization
4) The singularity (Ray Kurzweil)

THE LONG TAIL

Typical record store has 40,000 tracks in inventory. Rhapsody has 400,000 unique songs streamed monthly.

Barnes & Noble has about 130,000 titles in a store.
Majority of Amazon’s books are sold outside the top 130,000.

Supply side drivers:
-centralized stocking
-virtual distribution
- delivery on demand

Demand side drivers
-internet connectivity
-search engines
- recommendation software
- Sampling tools

WEB 2.0

Web 0: brochureware
Web 1.0: transactional sites
Web 2.0: transactional sites

Uses example of Shakeshack in his neighborhood, which has a daily Flashmob (organized via Twitter)

The Web as platform
You access everything through your browser
The architecture of participation: you are part of something else.
You (and they) own your data

Software as a Service

About 1.5 years ago we changed Angelsoft to a pure SaaS model. We upgrade every 5 weeks.

- no physical delivery costs
- no version issues
- continual upgrades
- perpetual revenue stream (retainer)

Collective intelligence: wikis
Blogs. 6 mos. ago I just launched my personal blog.
Podcasts
Social software
Messaging (Twitter)

Cross-device mobility: computers, smart phones, cell phones, digital signage

Outsourcing:
- most efficient, most effective or cheapest option
- production of things, services, ideas
- Can outsource to companies, teams or individuals
- One-off or long term

Recommends CrowdSpring.com—you post the price you want to pay, and people do the work on spec. Had a portfolio company who used this to design a logo.

Can offshore to contract manufacturers, wholly-owned subs, or teams for hire.

Use a service like Panjiva to evaluate a range of suppliers.

Open sourcing: now being used for applications, tools, information (Wikipedia), and operating systems? Vast majority of websites run on Apache, an open-source toool.

Self-service: slowly pervading our entire world. It includes technical support. You see this with ATMs, gas stations, airline checkin. Retail check-out (including Home Depot).

Communications: wireless, VOIP. Every Mac comes with software to allow 4-way visual chat.

THE SINGULARITY

Ray Kurzweil argues that the rate of change of technology is accelerating at a constant rate. In other words, it’s exponential growth not linear growth.

In medical technology: there’s accretive benefit from explosive growth in computing power and increasing miniaturization. There’s also reverse-engineering of the human brain. Put that together: you can download your brain into a box. He predicts this will happen by 2045.

Matt Mullenweg, CEO, Automattic, “State of the Word”: NYC Edition

Wordpress was born from a blog: I posted that a prior open-source blogging platform really needed to be taken forward. Someone contacted me, and it grew from there. There are now over 90 contributors to the core code, plus thousands of plugins.

Asked audience split between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org. It was roughly 50-50.

Mentioned Wordpress.com is blocked in China, because Wordpress.com doesn’t cooperate with China’s censorship requirements.

Notes from the subversion repository: the place where people document their changes
2007: 1090 changes
2008: 2,840 changes to date, which lead to 11 releases (He apologizes for that number.)

We are at a historical high in # core developers for Wordpress. This team reviews contributions of outside developers into Wordpress.

2007: 2.8m downloads
2008: 11.1 m downloads

Wordpress.com:
2007: 1m blogs , 20m posts, 1.6b page views
2008: 2.4m blogs , 35.8m posts, 6.5b page views

Akismet has caught 5b spam, with 99.925% accuracy, which is much better than success rate of email spam blockers.

Spammers are going to invent artificial intelligence, because they have motivation and $ to do it.

New technique they use: leave complimentary post and link it to a URL that looks like a church or school, but is really a spamfront. Sometimes, the post is copied from a legit comment a few months ago.

I created Akismet to save my mom from reading offensive spam, when she started a blog

I’ve been to 18 Wordcamps, 9 upcoming.

We only organized one; the rest are community-organized.

Three major releases this year: 2.3, 2.5, 2.6

100,000 installs of Wordpress iphone app. Coming soon: stats and comment moderation on your iphone.

Most popular page on Wordpress.com: stats page. “You guys reload your stats like hamsters on crack.”

Behind the scenes, new changes coming: theme directory. All themes will be vetted for safety/security.

There were spammers who bought ads for ‘free wordpress themes’; created a beautiful ‘free wordpress themes’ website; but every theme would have a backdoor or spam links in the footer.

We’re getting 100 theme submissions/ week. They’re all being manually vetted for safety. Now over 100,000 downloads.

Also launching Wordpress Zeitgeist. We’re following the Firefox model. We want to make it one-click easy to upgrade.

6m Wordpress.org blogs (including Wordpress MU, multi-user). About 4m of these are multi-user blogs. I was surprised, because Wordpress MU is much harder to use.
Of these, 5.1m are secure

Plugins are a free market of features.

On a list of activated plugins, here are the most popular:
#145 OpenID
#24 Adsense-manager
#12 Hello Dolly, my favorite
#10 cforms (contact forms)
#9 wp-polls. Lightweight forms of interaction with audience increase likelihood of commenting
#8 WP Automatic Upgrade
#7 wp-cache—performance upgrade
#6 wp-db-ackup
#5 stats
#4 nextgen-gallery. I frequently get asked how do plugin authors feel when you move the plugin into the core. We usually simplify it when we bring it in.
#3 google-sitemap-generator
#2 all-in-one-seo-pack
#1 Akismet

This list is a very good indicator of what Wordpress will look like in the future. By tracking this, we can build features for people before they even know it.

We acquired Intensivate (commenting system) a few weeks ago

Average of 5 plugins per blug. The record is 800 plugins. Therefore, essentially everyone in this room is running their own version of Wordpress. This makes it very hard for people to compete with Wordpress. It’s easy to compete with features (just pay some developers), but hard to compete with community.

Going forward:
-better plugin stats

Hardest part of my job: deciding what should be in core? We believe core should be small, light, fast. It should be faster with every release. Look at popularity of plugins. Look at what bleeding-edge blogs are doing. Sometimes I put in things that I just want. I’m a photographer, so I like the galley feature.

Some people were gaming the download feature; that’s why we don’t consider it the most meaningful feature.

Wordpress 2.7 will include: Dashboard redesign, dashboard comment replies, keyboard shortcuts.

We created a “Bizarro Wordpress”, Crazy Horse, which was the opposite of everything Wordpress does. Very popular.

It doesn’t make sense to download a plugin to your PC and then upload to your server. It should be a direct link between the two servers, each of which is on a 100megabit connection.

Should soon be buttons to add a Google map, photo from Flickr, etc.

When he was in China, as an experiment, he did a search on ‘falun gong’. The search didn’t work, and his internet went down for 5 minutes. He was punished.

Blogging in China is highly self-censored. Your posts can get unpublished if you discuss certain inappropriate topics, so you have strong motivation to self-censor.

When he was there, the Chinese milk story disappeared one day. No blog posts, no news stories.

A lot of people are using Wordpress.org . Long term, I think censorship will be less of an issue.

Themes for 2009 development of Wordpress:
- Upgrades should be super-easy
- Security. Many US government agencies are using Wordpress internally. Showed an impressive list, e.g., Coast Guard.
- Rich Media. I just bought a tool that adds core GPS/bearing data to photos I take. We can incorporate that.
- Multi-modal. Blogging should adopt to whatever you’re blogging. E.g., if you blog a photo it should be formatted differently than just text.
- Wordpress becomes a hub. Bring Facebook/Twitter to Wordpress.
- Fashion and tattoos. “We’re taking the “W” back.”
- Crazyhorse.
- Year of Themes. Themes can do everything plugins can do, and can even bundle plugins.

I can’t take my data out of facebook and run my own Facebook. But I can take my data out of Wordpress and run my own Wordpress.

Backpress = shared infrastructure between different systems that are broadly applicable. Includes: user authentication. People will be able to build other systems on back of this.

BuddyPress = rough equivalent of Facebook network but on Wordpress system. You never know what will happen with Facebook, Flickr, etc. Wordpress can be the safe repository of all that data.

There aren’t that many applications that can get 150 people to get together on a Sunday to meet one another.

Contact information: http://Ma.tt
m (at) mullenweg dot com

We’ll probably always be in PHP and MySQL. Because we’re a platform, we have to be backwards compatible. Apple broke that rule, and it hurt their popularity with developers. I recently loaded a 1992 DOS game and it ran on Vista. That’s amazing.

Buddypress today is not ready.

A prominent musician with hundreds of thousands of users is switching his social network over to BuddyPress.

Wordpress MU lags regular Wordpress by a few weeks.

We’re seeing a lot of Wordpress being taught in journalism schools. I think you’ll see some prominent journalists, e.g., Om Malik, starting their own company and blog. His brand was more important than Web 2.0/Fortune. He has 10 employees now.

NY Times is an investor in Automattic. We’re working with them.

All the CNN blogs are hosted on Wordpress.com .

Wordpress.org and Automattic have only one link between them, which is me.

Automattic has raised 2 rounds: $1m first round, $30m earlier this year. Everyone around the table is in it for the long term. No plans to sell or IPO. We’re trying to build something generational. Inspiration is Craigslist, with 25 employees, massive pageviews.

Wordpress.com now has 230m unique visitors. 30 employees.

When I started Wordpress, I feared it would break the open-source model, but it didn’t. People kept contributing. When I started Automattic there was no IP in the firm, which is highly unusual for a software company.

Any of you could download Wordpress.org today, and start a direct competitor to Wordpress.com . This totally aligns incentives in the long term. There are now about a dozen companies trying to do roughly the same thing.

Aaron Brazell, How to Hit the Blog Big Leagues
Former CTO of b5media
Technosailor.com . 4 writers on this site.

90% of your visitors come from Google. They’re first-time visitors. Important to convert them.

Scoble’s starfish theory: there are people who don’t really know what they want. Scoble is very distributed (Flickr, Friendfeed, etc.), and those different legs touch people with different interests. If you’re a mommy blogger, and there’s a searcher who is visually oriented, you as a mommy blogger will reach her because you have uploaded some good stroller photos to Flickr.

Get to know the top bloggers in your vertical. You’ll learn a lot from that.

Endorses Friendfeed over carnivals as a vehicle to build social capital with top bloggers

PageRank is not as important as subscriber count. (Incidentally, Google doesn’t own PageRank; Stanford does and Google has a perpetual license.)

Problogger has 50,000 readers; very knowledgeable.

My notes:

He avoids being an investor in companies he profiles/analyzes.

Quoting a panelist from a panel he moderated: “We may not do the deep analysis of traditional journalists, but we’re so wired. We’re a collective mind.”
“We don’t need fact-checkers. We don’t need editors”.

Is the internet a breakthrough in human communication?

Social networks still have norms, which constrain what you can do.

Superficial monetization of a social network with advertising is a failure, because it doesn’t fit the social norms.

In beginning of radio: there was no programming because there was no one listening. RCA owned a radio station and made radios. They solved the chicken & egg program by giving away thousands of radios in NY which were tuned to only 1 station, theirs. Then they could go to media guys, and tell them 100% of NY radio market is listening to RCA. Now we can go to Colgate and sell advertising.

Have you ever noticed that all the ads on the different channels run all at the same time? Because you agreed to be captive in exchange for free content.

BUT the net is entirely voluntary. It’s like showing up at a medieval faire.

Most attempts to monetize the net are ill-conceived at best to offensive.

British Airways used to have a promotion: if you buy a 1st class seat, you could bring your wife. Problem: people would bring their mistresses.

Facebook Beacon is making the same mistake. If I buy black lacy lingerie, 3 possibilities:
1) bought it for myself
2) bought it for wife
3) bought it for another woman

In all of these scenarios, I don’t want my wife / network to know about this.

My first wife left (rightly). She said, “During the day, I’m first in my class at Cornell Law. I come home and I do your cooking. Do your own cooking!”

Ultimate terror: 2:45am. If I need to whine, the only person who will listen to me whine is the reason I’m whining.

When I was 25 and my wife left, I was disoriented. It had been my life, my car. When she left, my network fell apart. We have a group that is in need but too embarrassed to ask.

I had grad students whom I paid to play Second Life, and another whom I paid to play World of Warcraft. One was a jock, who created a character called Sweetie. He would send her to bars, salsa with other characters, and then watch her be violated.

No one on a dating site wants ONLY a virtual relationship.

3 P’s of a successful online network
1) Personally relevant. If it’s not relevant, it’s just bad TV.
2) Participatory
3) Physical transition

The hard part of a social network is monetizing it.

How would you feel if a woman you met on First Wives World said, “I’m a therapist, and I want to be paid for providing you some counsel.” You have to be careful about violating norms.

I have a freshman, who has a company. You send him a text message, and he’ll forward them to everyone you know. E.g., when Heath Ledger died, I got 70 messages. Some other faculty said, they had to cancel classes, because everyone was either texting or crying. The students say they get 10 messages/hour, except Friday/Saturday night when they get 40 messages/hour.

The people we’re trying to capture are ‘digital virgins’. I want them to become digital residents.

A lot of people freeze halfway through the registration process on First Wives World. As soon as my activity online is linked to my real identity, I’m nervous.

We’ve done studies of the depth/loyalty of the average 19-year-old employee. They’re both cocky & ignorant.

The alternative to advertising is letting users design it.

Here’s what FirstWivesWorld should do. Tell ETrade: we won’t take your ads. But give us $0.5m to do research on needs of divorced women with money. Because we did the research together, you have an exclusive on this relationship. You cant get this knowledge from anyone else. This is not giving an exclusive on banner ads.

Bud spends $.75b on promotion. Kraft hasn’t gotten past the model of: we’ll sell a product the buyer doesn’t really like, but he’ll buy it if the price is low enough . We call this promotion, even though neither the buyer nor the seller is happy with the transaction.

Companies have both a promotion and an advertising budget. There’s not as big a pressure to justify ROI on the promotion budget.

The flush toilet and the elevator made cities possible.

The iphone may be as big as the automatic transmission.

If YouTube collapses the public broadcasting system, the culture goes away.

We are teaching people to use itunes as a coping mechanism. That is emerging spontaneously from the community.