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This post is slightly overdue, but I wanted to thank everyone for coming out to BarCampEarthToronto.  I hope everyone had a good time.  Working with Ryan, James, Maria, Dave and Dmitry was great and I hope we can work together on something in the future.  On a related note, the location and date of the next DemoCamp will soon be announced, so keep an eye out for that.

I’d also like to thank our sponsors who helped make BarCampEarthToronto happen:

Bonasource, Clay Tablet Technologies, Navantis, Names at Work, Peter Dawson, Radiant Core, RedFlagDeals.com, RMail, Tucows, and the St. Louis Bar and Grill (Oakville).

My post about a possible format for future BarCamps (or a spin off) lead me to registering PeopleTagging.com.  I was shocked to find the domain still available, especially considering googling the phrase leads to TechCrunch as the second result.  I have some ideas for the domain, but don’t know if I have the time to do anything with it.  One reality of running a self funded startup is that we don’t pay ourselves particularly well, so well it makes me feel slightly sleazy, I am willing to flip it should someone make a compelling offer.

Well it’s half done now.   The BBQ had to be rescheduled (new date TBD) because of the wet weather, but Saturday went really well.  The MSN offices turned out to be just about perfect for the crowd size we had with a nice mix of smaller and larger conference rooms.  Everyone I’ve talked to so far seems to have had a good time at BarCampEarthToronto.
You can check out some pictures from the event on Flickr.

There has been some talk about the next event and whether there should be more structure, but at the moment I’m wondering if it might be more interesting with less structure.  When I was at university, there was a student club that you could join if you spoke a foreign language and wanted to practice it.  They created buttons that you could wear with “French,” “Japanese,” etc on them and the idea was that if you saw someone wearing one of these buttons and you spoke that language you would go up to them and engage them in a conversation in that language.  Unfortunately, I’m monolingual and I don’t know how successful the program was, but I wonder if something like that could work for a Barcamp (or spinoff) event.  I’ve always found the most interesting conversations often happen in the spaces in between sessions.  Perhaps we could try taking the unconference to the next level: no sessions.  Create a wiki where you could sign up, state what you’re interested in, and then at the event create interest-tags that people could wear.  I can think of a few ways it could work.  You could have “I know about:” tags and “I want to know about tags:” or simply “Interests:” tags.

Would this work?  Is this something that people would be interested in trying?  You tell me.

BarCampEarth Toronto will be happening this Saturday at the MSN offices downtown!  The venue is smaller this time around, but hopefully that means we can create a more intimate and creative environment.  Because we are limited to 75ish attendees this time, we really want to stress that those who come to the event are expected to participate. Participation means coming ready to discuss and share either by leading a group discussion or actively participating in one. BarCamp is about community involvement, so if you’re just *sort of* interested in checking it out, please consider giving someone who is really interested in participating your spot.

We will be having a BBQ on Sunday at Dufferin Grove Park and everyone is welcome to come to that.  If you want, you can bring your family.  Your kids will be the ones building Web 5.0 afterall.

For more info, please check out the wiki – http://barcamp.org/BarCampEarthToronto

I didn’t see it and judging by the box office numbers, neither did you. So what did we learn from Snakes on Plane’s lack of breakout success? Well, hopefully something we already knew, being a hit with bloggers doesn’t mean you will be a hit with “real people.” As countless Web2.0 companies have found out and many more will, being featured on TechCrunch et al won’t make you a success by itself. With the help of trackbacks, comments, and aggregators the blogosphere can act very much like a feedback loop. The biggest audience for most blogs is other bloggers.

I think a lot of people misread the hype around this movie. Having buzz is great, but when the buzz is “man this looks dumb” you have to wonder how that will correlate to success. We like making fun of bad movies, but most of us don’t like actually watching them. There were lots of jokes about Gigli remember, but no one saw that either.

I wasn’t looking forward to the stream of crappy movies that Snakes being a blockbuster would have brought anyway.

Since Business Week ran their infamous story about Digg, I’ve been thinking about how you might be able to monetize a site like Digg.  Ultimately, I think it will end up being a more sophisticated form of contextual advertising than we are seeing right now.

As the hype around Web2.0 has grown, marketers and PR people have been struggling with ideas about how to interact with sites like Digg.  Spamming stories to Digg is more likely to damage a company’s reputation than anything else, so how do they get their message out this user base? 

The dirty little secret of Web2.0 is that “interactivity,” “tagging,” and “user generated content” are really code words for data mining.  As the recent leak of AOL search data has shown, how you interact with the web reveals a great deal about you.  What stories you digg can also say a great deal about you.  Digg is using this data to build a Recommendation Engine.  So if you dugg the story about nVidia’s latest graphics card and you dugg a story about Apple’s new OS, maybe you’d be interested in the story about awesome graphical screensavers for your Mac. 

I think Digg is going to use this data to build their own contextual advertising system.  They could stick with traditional contextual text ads and simply target their ads more effectively than Google can because of the sophisticated data they have about their users.  They could charge higher rates and they wouldn’t have to split the revenue with Google (although they might have to split some of it with Federated Media depending on how that relationship is setup).  

Beyond traditional text ads, they have a few other options that would be more controversial.  Using the recommendation engine, they could allow marketers to seed stories to certain interest groups.  This could work a variety of different ways, they could simple show the stories/link to the stories on the recommendations page or they could allow users to digg the stories and allow them to reach the front page.  If they did this transparently and their targeting was accurate enough, users might not mind.   The reality is marketers are trying to do this anyway and they would pay for it.

 
The success of such a plan is dependent on Digg’s continued growth.  Running your own ad system requires considerable mass of both users and advertisers.  Ultimately it may make more sense for Digg to feed the data to Federated Media or another partner and let them integrate it with their larger network of sites. 

Well only 2 contests…  If you haven’t already, you should enter the two Back to School contests we’re currently holding on RedFlagDeals.com.  In the first you can win a $2000 custom built PC from NCIX.com, click for more details.  In the second you can win one year’s supply of Kraft Dinner.  That’s 365 boxes.  Yum!  Click to enter that contest.

In the KD contest we’re hoping to collect some interesting data on student media consumption.  This sort of thing (a contest on one site) is hardly the most statistically relevant way to do such things, but it should be interesting none the less.

Sorry for the lack of updates.  I’ll try to keep it more consistent moving forward.

If the 2.0 bubble should burst, we’ll probably look back at the current issue of Business Week in which Kevin Rose is declared the $60 million dollar man and say that’s when we all knew it was going to go to shit. (No disrespect to the digg guys, even they were calling the article ridiculous in the comments on digg when this story made their front page.)

Could your company survive if all of the VC money dried up?

Clear Sky isn’t venture backed.  In fact we aren’t backed at all.  RedFlagDeals.com was founded in late 2000, back when the bubble had burst and Internet advertising had collapsed.  With no expectations the site was able to organically grow into a popular site and profitable company.  The companies that advertise on the site now are the big guys like Home Depot, Labatt, and the banks.  They’ll likely keep advertising should Web2.0 go dry, so I’m not overly worried about us, but I am worried about other people we know who could have their chances undermined by others’ undue hype.

Sorry for the lack of posting.  Part of my excuse is that I’ve been helping plan the Toronto chapter of BarCampEarth.  What is BarCampEarth?

BarCampEarth — a simultaneous compendium of Barcamps around the world to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the first-ever BarCamp taking place August 25-27, 2006. 

As I mentioned in a previous post, David Crow and Jay Goldman are unavailable, so a new group was needed to organize the event and I volunteered.  The group that is organizing the event this time around is: Dave Forde, James Woods, Ryan Coleman, Dmitry Buterin (with help from Maria Smirnova) and myself.

You can check out the wiki here. 

The main challenge at the moment is finding a suitable space for roughly 100 people at a reasonable cost.  If you know of any, please let us know through the wiki.  Also, if you’re interested in sponsoring the event (max of $250 per sponsor), you can send me an email.