Adventures In Digital Marketing

There was a load more that went on at FOWA this year and although the event undoubtedly had a few flaws, overall it was well worth attending to get a view on what exactly is going on in the internet world.  Yes, it’s a bit of an overview at times and not perhaps as deep as it could go, especially for such a captive early adopter audience, but that’s conferences for you. 

Perhaps Bryan Carson will alter the format slightly next year (hopefully there will be another one!) to make it less of a crush and non-stop talk-fest.  Perhaps he’ll get a better Wifi provider as well

So, a few mentions to others who spoke at the event:

• Mike Arrington - Techcrunch - good overview of the state of his side of things, with a brief skip over the whole UK Techcrunch debacle! Good to see him in person though.
• Khoi Vinh - NYTimes - excellent discussion on digital newspapers and the problems of balancing essential design with new features and editorial demands.  Also a good look at what is possible with WPF/E in the form of their reader app.
• Stephen Stokols - BT - great speaker!  If you get a chance to see him then so - inspirational talk from such a large telco as BT. Top stuff!
• Stefan Fountain - Soocial - just plain funny :)  Excellent use of the webcam to give  a live demo. :D  a Plaxo killer?  We shall see I guess.

and hello to a few people I met, hopefully we’ll meet again and thanks for the chats about your services etc…

• Mike Cummins, AOL - looks promising from you guys - glad to see you’re moving with the times and knocking down the walls of that garden you’ve been in for oh so long! Oh, and looking forward to getting my 1GB memory stick
• John Allwright, Microsoft Expression Team - thanks for the talk about WPF WPF/E - looks interesting!  Still not convinced it’s anything more than a flash killer, but i’ll take your word for it
• James Duncan, Fotango - good to meet you the other night, if briefly.  Am interested in your thoughts on commoditisation, and whether you see this at all moving into the agency environment in any way, shape or form.
• Deirdre Molloy, Chinwag - nice to bump into you after seeing your name on quite a few blogs recently.  Will definitely be attending some of those events you’re putting on soon.
• Lizzie Bewick, Spinvox - interesting product - will be good to try it out personally.
• Lisa Price, Vitamin/Carson Systems - nice to meet you (and someone who knew of this blog! A breakthrough!) will add you guys to my feed list, and maybe even try to submit an article or two?

Thanks
Howard
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Tara Hunt from Citizen Agency was someone I was very keen to see speak as her area is probably the one closest to my own in terms of marketing and social software.

So, I have to say, I was a little disappointed with her talk but can completely understand why it was like it was.  Basically, it was a little high-level and skimmed over the community aspects of this thing we call web2.0 rather than go into any detail as such as to how she, as head of a self proclaimed agency which "specializes in developing community-centric strategies around product research, design, development and marketing" feels advertisers and marketers can use the community aspects of the internet as developed during the past few years.

As a big fan of this kind of thinking myself I was interested to see if she thought it was really a viable approach for marketers, and if she could see any major pros/cons or problems in getting clients to grab hold of it as an idea.

But, as I say, her presentation, good as it was, skipped over any real detail about the implementation of the technology and tools, and rather focused on an overview of what’s out there and so forth.  Perfectly fine I guess for 99% of the audience, but not what I was hoping for.

I did try and find her in the (rather packed at all times) lobby of the venue but could only see her to shout a quick "i’d like to chat with you later" at her, to which she probably thought I was a complete muppet :) 

It seems that the agency run a few events here and there, so perhaps I’ll jump into one of those if they do them in London any time soon and see what they have to say in more detail.

Howard
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Probably the web celebrity for the day (sorry Mike), Kevin Rose was truly rock and roll (in a not at all as extreme as Motley Crue kind of way) in as much as he slept in late, turned up a bit scruffy and was drinking wine during his talk.

Taking us through the pros and cons of digg, i have to say he didn’t really, for me at least, go into much detail about what digg could turn into in the future.  I was personally hoping for a little bit of comment about how digg might actually be a new form of internet based communication rather than a site in it’s own right, but that wasn’t really covered.  we saw some graphs which were a little hard to make out.

ok - so i’ve actually not got a lot to say about Kevin’s presentation, but ho hum.  maybe i should delete this post

actually - one thing I heard at the conference about digg was interesting. I happened to overhear a couple of blokes say to each other "do you actually use digg?" "no" replied the other, adding, "no fucker does outside the US".

i don’t use it much I have to say - maybe they were right!

Howard
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Simon Wardley, from Fotango, creators of the Zimki platform, gave an
excellent talk that was not only informative and thought provoking, but
probably the most comedic of the whole two days (who would have thought
ducks would be so funny!)

Focusing on the commoditisation of software and web development
services, Zimki is a javascript platform for web development that runs
on top of a distributed server and database environment in which you
pay for what you use - similar, in oh so many ways, to the Amazon S3
and EC2 tools.

Having a chat with some of the team at their stand, the tools
definitely seem interesting, but what I think they might be missing a
trick with is their reliance on JavaScript so heavily (as Alejandro
pointed out - what do the flash guys do then?) and th fact that right
now, their tools are Mac centric - which is nice in principal, but not
very good in the real world when most people are really running windows.

Worth a look, and I hope to have a chat with them and/or Simon himself at some point in the future as I definitely share some of their ideas about commoditisation and the decentralisation of development.

interetingly, Fotango are owned, or at least have a relationship, with
Canon - and knowing their reliance on a certain data-shy CMS tool, i’m
not surprised by the arrival of this platform independent database
platform.

Howard
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Simon Willison’s talk on the openID platform was nothing if
not inspirational.  Although i think he correctly points out that it’s
very early day for it, and it’s not really ready for the majority of
users, he gave a really good overall impression that as a system for a
unified login it’s most definitely a good start and something for us
all to start working on.  I think he spoke a little too quickly for my
Spanish friends though, but what do they know about t’internet?

Basically, openID is a system where you no longer need to remember a load of different usernames and passwords for all the different sites you use - but can, instead, can have a single, individual (wel, you can have several if you so want!) login that will let you into all of the sites you use if they subscribe to the openID system. 

Being a distributed system, openID isn’t reliant on any single provider, and if you so wanted, you could actually setup your own openID server to use if you wanted to. 

Seems like there is a lot of interesting stuff going on in this area, and with the recent announcements from AOL, Microsoft and the like about adoption of the openID format (for example, ALL AOL users (and that’s a LOT of users!) now, immediately, have an openID account by default) it looks like openID is about to become a lot more visible than perhaps it was only a week or so ago.

I think the opportunities for advertisers and marketers in the future could be vast in relation to this -  we need to look more at how this would affect our own particular industry, but my first guess is that anything which helps users to trust and feel in control of the information they share with us, and let’s face it, we often get a bad wrap, is nothing but a good thing and I am sure we’ll be covering it some more on this site in the future as more information on openID comes online.

Simon says he will be publishing the slides and a few other things online in the next few days, and my advice is to go check them out.

Great stuff!

Howard
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