Sowrey.org

Maybe it’s just me, but running keynotes every single day of a conference seems really silly, and waters down the value of the concept of a keynote. But I digress. Either way, this morning features Tim O’Reilly (again), Jonathan Schwartz (Sun Microsystems), Fake Steve Jobs (aka Daniel Lyons), Matt Cutts (Google), and Matt Mullinweg (WordPress).

• Another day, another video. This is the sort of stuff that should be delivered to clients, not to people who understand.
• Co-chairs return the stage. Much clapping.
• Housekeeping items.

Tim O’Reilly + Jonathan Schwartz

• Looks back at the past and how things have gone.
• Introduces Jonathan Schwartz, CEO Sun Microsystems
• Schwartz sees blogs being one day achronistic
• Sees one part of his job as communicating, which the internet serves well
  • It’s harder to do it inside the company; so answer both at once
• Most terrifying day when the General Counsel descided to write a blog (turned out to be really good)
• Doesn’t think he’s terrified anyone but the securities group (SEC compliance, apparently)
• Discussion about MySQL — what’s the strategy?
  • Deal is closed and integration is going well
  • Sun acquired a financial asset that is growing like a week
  • MySQL was actually working towards going public
  • Sun sees this as a way of expanding the market as a result of all the downloads
• Open source strategy connecting with the cloud strategy
  • The goal is about delivering value, not *how* that value is delivered
  • You have to reach out to the market with an asset, which will draw them into the network (cloud)
• Sun distributes 50MM Java runtimes a month
• Cloud distribution of databases, not so much to worry about the database and more about making sure you can get the data
• Moore’s Law supporting social networking — the cost to have thousands of cores is trivial
  • Scientific computing, which was traditionally the largest benefitter, is “collapsing” as they don’t get the same benefit
• Working to everything being virtualised
• Efficiency doesn’t lead to less purchase — it usually leads to much more
• Green computing
  • We’ve already hit problems
  • Costs more to run your server in Japan than the cost of the server itself
  • Not many of the CIOs are responsible for their own power bills
  • Sun wants to green their infrastructure to stay competitive
  • A fifth of all energy is just to move air around; very inefficient for cooling
  • Sun now builds data centres in shipping containers for fast deployment anywhere
  • • 1/3 more efficient than an equivalent data centre
• ZFS to be GPL’d

Fake Steve Jobs (Daniel Lyons)

• “It’s great to be here at the peak of the second dotcom bubble”
• This guy is pretty funny in person
• Long intro, but totally worth the time to hear it
• Paranoid about being Twittered like Zuckerberg + Lacy
• Why?
  • It was mostly a stupid prank, but was really boredom
  • Can’t believe he’s doing speeches about it now
  • Was also a part of fear — saw his business being distrupted by the web, so he decided to learn how to do it (hard partly been crucified by an articled “Attack of the Blogs”)
  • What if a transparent CEO went “nuts” and was insane on this blog?
• Why Steve Jobs?
  • Seemed perfect — takes himself too seriously, no sense of humour
  • “Dude, it’s a fucking cell phone! Get a grip!”
  • Started as a sort of comic strip, then started adding news
  • Had 90,000 readers in six months; sparked the manhunt
  • The person who offered the reward to find FSJ was the publisher of Forbes (Lyons’ boss)
• Why does it work?
  • It works because the audience feeds him ideas
  • Has a Fake Noam Chomsky and Fake Vladimir Putin sending him ideas
  • It’s almost a social platform onto its own
• The big discovery is not taking content from another channel and putting it online, it’s about feeding back into the online media and watching it evolve
• Thinks it’s not long before the big media companies figure out how to exploit this

Rob Curry, Dash

• Connected GPS for cars
• Crowdsourced traffic — other drivers provide info back into the system to provide real-time traffic updates
• Can do Yahoo searches based on location
• Can provide (anonymous) data about where people conduct searches (e.g. knowing where to build a new Starbucks based on requests)
• Can subscribe to data sets for search
• Has an interesting long tail

Matt Cutts, Google

• “What Google knows about Spam”
• People spam mostly for money, but also for recognition (e.g. church trying to get more people)
• Build trust and reputation into your system
• Make spams frustated, and they’ll usually stop
• We know most of this stuff, nothing new
• Can register the site on google.com/webmasters/ to be alerted to hacks or issues

Matt Mullinway, WordPress / Automattic

• “AH-kiz-mit”
• This guy doesn’t really seem comfortable on the stage
• 1/4 of traffic comes from the US
• 99.999% of blogs get under 10,000 pageviews a day
• WordPress.com gets 10+ million pageviews to permalink pages
• New feature: (Possibly) Related Posts
  • Introduces a form of personalisation
• A Wikipedia and a half of new content is being generated each month on WordPress.com
• http://ma.tt
• Monotone (theme) will adjust the colour based on the picture in it.