Mario Sundar's Speakeasy

(Source: My Flickr coverage)

Quick Update: Looks like Jeremiah is headed over to the event right now (4/16; 8 PST), and I’ll be following shortly. A little unsure of schedules at the moment, but I’ll be live blogging (text) the panel discussions I attend starting 10 PST. Check out Jeremiah’s video stream for live video coverage.

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Even thought I’ve only attended the first half of the opening day of Web 2.0 Expo 2007, I feel like it’s a precursor of similar learning experiences over the next three days. If I were to pick just three salient features of my experience today, it’d have to be the following:

1. Ustream! Live Video Streaming

(Jeremiah testing out his uStream camera on the tripod)

When Jeremiah told me we’d be live streaming video a la Justin.tv, I thought this is cool? Starting at about 7:30 AM, we were live all the time until around 12:45 PM, breaking in between when I live-blogged (text) the community evangelism portion, while Jeremiah made the rounds of the expo corridors, getting feedback from the attendees and allowing for interaction with the chat room attendees, which at one point of time numbered ~50. That’s a great start!

2. Community Evangelism Panel

(from l-r: Deborah Schultz and Anil Dash – the Community Evangelism panel)

3 minute video here. Here’s my live blogging post.

Of course, I wanted to be at the Community Evangelism panel w/ discussion moderated and instigated by Anil Dash and Deborah Schultz. It was quite a roundup of basic concepts, tools, case studies and questions answered by experienced community evangelists. I also had a chance to talk to Deborah about some of my community experiences over the past month and I look forward to continuing the conversation.

3. Meeting fellow evangelists and enthusiasts

Now, the most satisfying part of any conference is meeting friends, like-minded peers and one such community manager I had a chance to meet in addition to Deborah and Anil was Michael Rubin, Director of Customer Experience at Netflix.

(w/ Michael Rubin, Director of Community Experience @ Netflix)

Michael and I had a great time talking about the many community leaning initiatives and features one can expect to see from Netflix as well as some of my own endeavors at LinkedIn. I did recreate to him, my past history of raves, rants, belief, and evangelism on my favorite online DVD store and the power of it’s community! I’d definitely keep updating you on my conversations w/ Michael.

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I also had a chance to meet with Mike Doeff, whom I’d met at a recent Photowalking show, and Yulia Smirnova, a business graduate student with expertise in marketing.

(from l-r: Mike Doeff and Yulia Smirnova)

It’s definitely exciting to meet individuals who are so passionate about their area of expertise, that not only do they have blogs but also venture out on a Sunday morning to catch the first panel discussion on the first day of a educative web 2.0 show.

Nice start to a show…The next three days are going to be exciting.

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Kudos to my friend Dave McClure and the other organizers, who’ve pulled off such a humongous event with great finesse. I did read Zoli Erdos’ post on Expo Cal and the opening day… I’ve got to say, both Jeremiah and I, did not have the registration problem (5 minute video here) nor the power outlet issues. But, I’d definitely be bummed out if I were stuck without a power outlet.

Tomorrow’s going to be another crazy day of panel discussion, one after the other, culminating in a series of parties, ALL of which you will hear about. So for the latest scoop on the Web 2.0 Expo, come back to the blog tomorrow! And if you’re reading this, do check in throughout the day for a live video stream of the program, seen through the eyes of Jeremiah and me.

Same blogs (Mario & Jeremiah) + video stream, Different time (Tentatively starting 11:00 AM PST). Also, both the above video captures, courtesy of Jeremiah’s friend from Hawaii.

Filed under: Miscellaneous