Prepping for our panel on Openweb at the AO Innovation summit
So in keeping with the spirit of an openweb, here are the questions I’ll be starting off with - that I’ll poise to my fellow panelists at next week’s AO Innovation Summit.
The panel is made up of Doc Searls, Ross Mayfield, Joe Kraus, Toni Schneider and Mark Flecther - so we got the right dudes (where are the dudesses? Well Kim is up right before us - but that ain’t good enough!)
Anyway - I wanted to make sure to spread out the discussion as far and wide as possible and engage the audience in interactive conversation.
So we’ll have an IRC chat up on the wall and I’m driving it - so….
To Mark Fletcher/Bloglines: “since the aggregator business is quickly looking like it’s going to be a commodity, what value added do you see Bloglines adding?”
To Doc Searls/himself: “Doc - you’re one of many ‘advisors’ that Technorati has signed up who help them. David Weinberger puts ‘Technorati Tags’ at the bottom of each of his blog posts, Peter Hirshberg sells Technorati’s services to Madison Ave and even Kim Polese is helping out Technorati. How do you help Technorati and how is Technorati showing the world how to make money off of the ‘open web’.”
To Joe Kraus/JotSpot: “Joe – by making JotSpot a platform, you enable others to make money off of you. Yet they know that you are – in a way – locking them into your platform by becoming reliant upon you. So on one side JotSpot is the Openweb, while at the same time its not ‘open source’ – as your proprietary technology is attempting to be a platform. So you have made your own reconciliation between open and closed – and you and your investors have invested in that. How do YOU see the Openweb?”
To Ross Mayfield/SocialText: “My brother Ross has been at the forefront of this, and I use 13 different Socialtext Wikis. Your company Socialtext is offering a hybrid service/software application that blends open source code with on-line collaboration and support services. You’re demonstrating the new kinds of hybrid models that are possible in the ‘open web’. What other sorts of business models are possible with the ‘Openweb’?”
To Toni Schneider/Yahoo (woooHoo!) “Tony – as you know I was an early user of ODDPost and your purchase by Yahoo sort of marked a new era for Yahoo. All of a sudden small little startups were being bought again. Om Malik wrote in Biz 2.0 about how the path to liquidity today is via purchase, rather than IPOs. So now you’re inside of Yahoo – and we’re all seeing the results of that DNA experiment that Jerry Yang talked about - when he announced the Flickr purchase. How do you see this DNA spreading inside of Yahoo – and what does it mean for the relationships between the Openweb and Yahoo?”
So there you have it - a different kind of conference. Imagine actually knowing what the panel will be talking about - ahead of time! And then engaging the world in a discussion of it - with well thought out and controversial dialectic.
