The three sessions I attended this morning were:
- The People Formerly Known as the Audience
- Marketing Analytics for Web 2.0
- Vulnerabilities 2.0 in Web 2.0: Next Generation Web Apps from a Hacker's Perspective
Two of the three sessions were really good. Surprisingly the worst session was Marketing Analytics presented by Google but I'll get to that a little later.
The first session "The People Formerly Known as the Audience" by Derek Powazek, Heather Champ
was focused on Hybrid Media in 3 Steps.
Step 1 - Talent is out there
- Community is Grown, not built
- Design for Selfishness
Step 2 - Find the Good Stuff
- Editors, moderators find it for you
- Tagging, commenting and user generated content to create, aggregate interesting areas (clouds),
example for all above is Flickr, Threadles.com
Step 3 - Communities Make Money
- example - Yahoo Games Wii Site , made right legal decision but did not respect the community
- be careful, do the right thing, opt in or out, member generated comes with social guidelines (perceived), inform your community of money aspects, pay them if it's right.
Session 2: Marketing Analytics for Web 2.0 by Brett Crosby of Google (Formely of Urchin)
So basically I got very little out of this session. Brett is a nice guy, I met him at a Yahoo party a few years ago and I bought Urchin to measure my properties analytics. Urchin is (was) a great product I still use, no, not Google Analytics, I've hardly played with that yet. Anyway the only Web 2.0 part of his talk centered around identifying events you want to track upfront and code each individual event so you can measure it. This makes sense but does bloat a pages code IMHO.
What was really disappointing about this talk was that is was in the Marketing and Community track and the title and description of the talk would lead you to believe you would get some substance. However it was pure pitch for Google Analytics and other products that tie into it. This talk or sales speech should have been in the Product & Services track where it belongs. Google really blew this one. Instead of education and informing it tried to sell.
Alex said he would post his presentation on the iSEC web site.
This was a fascinating session. Basically the speaker scared the heck out of the audience by delving into how insecure "Web 2.0" applications can be. Having said that he pointed out some problems and what you can do to protect your data for known problems.
You can view his presentation for all the details, but in a nutshell I'll be taking security of my data even more seriously than before.