Michael Slater Last week’s Web 2.0 Expo had an overwhelming amount of content. Like any large conference, the quality was uneven, but there were some great talks and a lot of good ones. Here’s some highlights and random factoids about AIM, Ning, WordPress, and MySpace. Last week’s Web 2.0 Expo had an overwhelming amount of content. Like any large conference, the quality was uneven, but there were some great talks and a lot of good ones. Among the main-session talks, <a href="http://www.shirky.com/">Clay Shirky</a> gave a wonderful talk on the implications of the web. I especially liked his view on the “cognitive surplus” created by the shift from rural to urban lifestyles, and how this has historically been consumed by alcohol, and then by television. Now this cognitive surplus fuels wikipedia, and all the other forms of user participation on the web. Where does the time come from? Just a fraction of the time spent watching television. <ul> <li><a href="http://blip.tv/file/855937">Video of Clay’s talk</a>.</li> <li><a href="http://www.shirky.com/herecomeseverybody/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html">Transcript of Clay’s talk</a></li> </ul> I’m halfway through his new book, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1594201536/buildicom-20">Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations</a>, and it promises to be a worthwhile read. The most entertaining talk of the conference, by a long shot, was from <a href="http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/">Fake Steve Jobs</a>, also known as Dan Lyons in his day job at Forbes. The <a href="http://fakesteve.blogspot.com/">Secret Diary of Steve Jobs</a> is one of the best pieces of technology satire around. <ul> <li><a href="http://blip.tv/file/858285">Video of Dan’s talk at Web 2.0</a>.</li> </ul> <a href="http://web2expo.blip.tv/#864781">Videos of all the other keynote presentations</a> are also available. Among the most technical talks, and the only one with any real Ruby on Rails content, was Gregg Pollack’s excellent talk on <a href="http://www.railsenvy.com/ArtOfTestingWebApplications.pdf">The Art of Testing Web Applications</a>. (We proposed several Rails-related talks, but they didn’t make the cut; apparently the organizers chose to avoid most technology-specific talks this year.) Many of the <a href="http://en.oreilly.com/webexsf2008/public/schedule/proceedings">presentation files</a> have been posted, and more are likely to be added soon. Here’s an assortment of random factoids from my notes: <ul> <li>70% of <a href="http://current.com">current.com</a> users are on their computer at the same time they’re watching TV</li> <li>There’s 2.43 billion photos on <a href="http://flickr.com">flickr</a></li> <li>28 million people a month share a video on <a href="http://youtube.com">YouTube</a></li> <li>MySQL is downloaded 70,000 times a day</li> </ul> <ul> <li><a href="http://aim.com">AIM</a> stats: <ul> <li>Delivers 2 billion instant messages every day</li> <li>Has had as many as 14 million simultaneous users</li> <li>AIM sees a usage drop when there’s a popular show on TV, and then a peak when it ends</li> </ul></li> </ul> <ul> <li><a href="http://ning.com">Ning</a> stats: <ul> <li>Ning has about 250,000 individual social networks</li> <li>70% of the networks are active (used in last 30 days)</li> <li>Adding 1 million registered users per month</li> <li>Adding 1,500 new networks a day</li> </ul></li> </ul> <ul> <li><a href="http://myspace.com">MySpace</a> stats: <ul> <li>117M unique users last month</li> <li>100 billion rows of data in the database</li> <li>85 gigs of bandwidth</li> <li>5 million concurrent users</li> <li>200K to 400K new users per day</li> <li>11% of all on-line minutes are spent on myspace</li> <li>50 million messages sent per day</li> </ul></li> </ul> <ul> <li><a href="http://wordpress.com">WordPress</a> stats: <ul> <li>54 million unique visitors in the U.S. each month — one in four people</li> <li>99.999% of WordPress blogs receive under 10,000 pageviews a day</li> <li>In aggregate, there are 10+ million pageviews a day to permalink pages (45% of traffic)</li> <li>An amount of content equivalent to 1.5 wikipedias is created on WordPress each month</li> </ul></li> </ul> 2008-07-24T01:00:49-07:00

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Web 2.0 Expo Highlights and Factoids

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2009-03-19T11:30:42-07:00