Bob's Blog

I was fortunate enough to be asked to speak at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week. Whenever I have a conversation regarding web 2.0, I get two key questions: 1- What the heck is Web 2.0 and 2- How is Web 2.0 different then the Web 1.0 bubble. Speaking to an audience of Web 2.0 converts, I decided to speak on the second question because I truly believe that this time it is different, and for the better. Here

The best part of this event was the opportunity to spend time with the other Keynote speakers, particularly Bezos and Schmidt. It is rare that we get time to simply hang out with each other, but the Expo had a great Green room, complete with a dartboard. Jeff ‘Jeffy Jeff’ Bezos cleaned me out after three straight games of cricket, but it was fun nonetheless.

Here are some of the points I covered in my speech at the expo:

Web 2.0 – What’s different:

The Creators are Users
The first dot-com boom was trailblazing. Everything was new: how people might use it, how others might make money off of it, and even how we access it. People experimented with all of these different variables, with an eager audience consuming the hype. Everyone knew this ‘World Wide Web’ was something special, but nobody knew where the path would lead. The trailblazing was led by smart people, but the web was new to them as well. The web was open to anything, and people experimented with new business models. To put it bluntly, nobody, including the consumers of the web, had a clue as to what was going to work on the web.

This time, sites and applications are being developed by people who grew up using the web. They know what should work on the web because they have spent countless hours and years exploring it. During Web 1.0, exposure to the web was a small slice of a business person’s life.

Web 2.0 involves a great deal of openness and sharing between participants, rather than the 1.0 world of content creation and distribution, 2.0 is founded on providing an interesting place for visitors to share. But this sharing isn’t the only difference between generations:

Showing monetary success is easier earlier
Prior to text ads, advertising was the exclusive domain of advertising agencies. These agencies would negotiate banner buys, create the banner and run it. There was (and still is) considerable cost in this process, so it was restricted to sites that generated enough traffic to be worth the effort. This meant that until you could show millions of pageviews a month, you were showing very little. Advertisers, and their agencies, simply didn’t have time to deal with thousands of smaller sites.

Google Adwords changed that. Now you can start a site, plug in Google advertising, and focus on building the site. Google takes care of the advertising. Sure they take a healthy cut, but start-up companies don’t need to staff up a costly ad sales department to see monetary returns.

Solutions are meant to be shared
In Web 1.0, people were building worlds to meet every possible need of the user. These sites fought for users and attempted to build massive closed worlds.

Web 2.0 is represented by companies who’s business plan is dependent on the success of other sites. Companies build widgets to plug into MySpace, or added to your own blog. Digg exists to highlight content on other sites. Web 1.0 was about trying to create destinations, 2.0 is about sharing.

We are building with better tools
Sites of yesteryear required developers to create everything, with little comparison sites out there. Today, developers have a strong tool chest to pull from and an army of developers to bounce ideas off of. From PHP to Ruby on Rails, tools are available to speed development. The open source phenomenon is great for group-building of platforms and solutions that creates new foundations for others to extend.


2.0 is a wonderful glimpse as to what the web is becoming. I can’t wait to look back on Web 2.0 from an even more exciting place in the future!

We always struggle with where to go to lunch. Sometimes you just want to try something new. This is where the wheel of lunch comes in. I was shown this when touring the CNet studios in San Fran but found it works pretty well everywhere. You type in your zip code and spin the wheel. A local spot pops up with a link to where you can learn more.

This data comes from Yahoo Local. YL is a nice directory of local businesses. The goal for Yahoo is to compete with the Yellow pages and thus their advertising dollars. These pages offered much more than just a phone number. These YL pages offer hours, maps, comments and everything else that Yahoo can collect on the business.

Yahoo Local is great, but it highlights the importance of paying attention to these pages. Since the pages are culled form the rest of the web, some of it may be out-of-date, wrong, or negative. Stay on top of Yahoo Local, Google local and others that seem to be springing up daily.

The Masters is one of two times a year that I get to visit Augusta National. The other is in the fall for to play in a long-standing ‘Brass Hat Invitational’ with my dear friend and Augusta National President Billy Payne. Billy started this in the late eighties when we were working to attract the Olympic games to Atlanta. We put in a lot of hours to bring the 1986 Olympics to Atlanta, with Billy leading the way.

One night during lengthy planning meetings, Billy came walking in with a six pack of beer in each hand and the ugliest hat on his head. This hat was a shiny brass looking hat with the Olympics logo on it. Apparently, this item made it to Billy’s desk as something for us to consider. The room fell quiet until a big grin came upon Billy’s face. We all broke into laughter over the now famous ‘Brass Hat’. While it never made it as an official Olympic souvenir, the hat lives on with us.

Billy invites us down each year to see who gets to wear the hat during the Brass Hat Invitational and again during Masters week. This year, while chilly, offered another great year of golf and friendship. This year though, I was additionally impressed by something one of my friend’s grandson Marc shared with me, called Twittervision.



Twitter is to blogging as blogging is to web pages. Not so long ago, before blogs, authors would publish to a webpage. This involved creating a webpage, adding it to your site and publishing the site. More recently, blogging platforms allowed easy publishing of short stories, like these. Because blogs are easier to publish, they could be done more frequently, and often were.

Fast forward to Web2.0ville. Now with seemingly more cellphones than people, Twitter arrives. This service allows people to maek very brief updates, allowing people to easily notify friends of what is happening with them, their cats or anything that suits their fancy. I’ve had an eye on Twitter, but Marc shared with me a nifty extension on this, known as TwitterVision.

TwitterVision applies geo-location data to these twitter posts. As people post, the map moves around to the specific comments. It can be quite addicting to watch the comments float onto the screen, almost evesdropping on conversations around the globe.

As I sat there wearing my Brass Hat, we all huddled around Marc’s screen and took bets on what was going to be said next. We almost missed dinner during all the fun!