Friday, June 22, 2007

Web 2.0 at the Dana Centre

On Wednesday night, I went along to the Dana Centre to attend the Web 2.0 discussions there. It was an interesting evening with the following speakers lined up for a quick intro and then group discussions around things like identity, preferred social networks, mobile, security and so on. All interesting stuff, including the chat in the pub afterwards. At this point in time I think there are a number of really interesting trends in computing. The Mobile and Web2.0 trends have a lot in common about how people communicate, collaborate and organise to meet up. Naturally this is all open to abuse, and I am starting to hear people talk about identity a lot more now than say 2 years ago ... probably about time as well. A lot of people are concerned how this affects the young using all of these tools today and how they interact with each other in more tranditional social environments such as school. On the other hand, I hear a lot of people talk about the social networking trend being a great leveller and remover of nationalist boundaries, perhaps a bit of a hippy ideals is required :)

Anyway, the speaker lineup was ...
  • Gareth Mitchell - BBC World service 'Digital Planet' presenter
  • George Hadjigeorgiou - General Manager, communications and community projects, Yahoo Europe
  • Aleks Krotoski - Technology Columnist, The Guardian; researcher, University of Surrey
  • Tim Malbon - Creative Director, Interesource
  • Alison Wheeler - CEO of Wikimedia UK, Wikimedia Foundation
There is an interesting cross over where people think about the new 'trend' in social networks to be a web phenomena, however I believe this started back with the boom of mobile phones back around 7-10 years ago. I still think people keep their closest friends on their mobile, maybe on their social networking site, but they tend to use Web 2.0 sites to reach out a little further to find new and interesting people/friends/colleagues. I got my current job through LinkedIn which to me at least makes me believe this isnt all just a fad!