It was my first experience of a pubcamp and all in all it was a worthwhile experience. Below is a very short summary of what and who was involved.

iTechne CEO Jed White had a few interesting stories regarding his childhood, which he then tied into today’s evolving tech scene, interesting, but not super engaging.

The CEO of Acidlabs, Stephen Collins, then gave a good lesson on why organizations should be more open to collaboration and allow workers to work socially online, as this can foster more creativity and innovation in the workplace.

Stuart Clarke the Homepage Daily editor then gave a short speech on how ‘edited’ web 2.0 content can still be very viable and work well as a business model for the future, provided there are ‘no boundaries’ in what you write and you have no problem ‘offending everyone’ who reads.

Ian Lyons from Pureprofile gave the most interesting talk in my opinion. He managed to put into understandable terms what the Semantic web really is, what it will become and how to get ready for it now. The basis of his speech was that at the moment, you find what you want on the web, but with the semantic web, the web finds you information, based on a set digital identity that you have created.

Janine Cahill from Futurejourneys spoke about staying ahead of the web 3.0 paradigm shift. The Viva9 CEO threw out some interesting figures on ad spend – US online spend US$21.7B in 07’ – 26% up since 2006, – performance deals account for 57% of total online advertising spend.

The BDT talk was very entertaining and had a 4 step system to becoming a media mogul.

• Step 1 – The Opportunity
• Step 2 – Business Model
• Step 3 – Software development
• Step 4 – Content.

As well as mistakes: -

• Mistake 1 – Thinking too far in front,
• Mistake 2 – Ethics.

One of the most thoughtful and funny presentations came from Tim Noonan from Tim Noonan consulting. Tim’s been blind his entire life and talked about how web 2.0 platforms are 38% less accessible than web 1.0 platforms and 1/5 people in the western world are unable to use the Internet as it currently is. Makes you think.

That’s my very quick, very brief, wrapup of pubcamp 08 Sydney.

Feel free to add anything I’ve missed in the comments

Looking forward to the next one!