Notes from the Geek Out panel at MasterMaq's Blog

By Mack D. Male | February 11, 2006 at 5:03 pm

Here are some notes from the Geek Out session administered by Robert Scoble, Will Pate and Kevin Marks:

Sounds like they have some topics to discuss at first, followed by some good questions at the end.

Kevin is talking about microformats, specifically tagging. We’re also getting a demo of the Blog Finder and Explore features on Technorati. Microformats can be used for tags, events, names, addresses, etc.

Kevin just entered “canada” into the Explore feature, and every post on the page was from my blog. Something cool about seeing your blog appear on the big screen in a presentation

Scoble is talking now, about sharing information through del.icio.us and using other Firefox extensions.

We’re going around the room sharing favorite Firefox extensions, some of which include: Session Saver, Fangs, PDF Download, Download Status, Signatures, Fasterfox, Web Developer, Firebug, etc.

Will Pate is talking now about his blog, and how he uses Drupal for customization. Specifically he is focusing on the aggregation of content capabilities.

Kevin just showed an awesome animated graph of the long tail of posts in response to a question about the A list and how to break in. Basically if you get a single inbound link, you’re above average!

Scoble reiterates that he’s interested in mapping, and thinks that within a year someone will have “put this room up on a map”. He’s talking about taking the basic mapping capabilities and making them extremely relevant and useful.

Will wants better tools for “normal” people, things like posting from within Microsoft Word, etc. He also says user interface is very important!

Scoble is interested in the photo sites like Riya and Bubbleshare.

Someone asked about Web 2.0 and all of the new products we’re seeing, and both Scoble and Will seem to think we won’t really see a slowdown of new ideas, even though the big three pick up companies along the way.

Scoble says the new advertising based business model will allow a lot of new companies to grow. Sounds a lot like the idea behind Live.com if you ask me!

One Response to “Notes from the Geek Out panel”

colin Says:
February 11th, 2006 at 8:18 pm

I don’t agree with Scoble on advertising because you need a lot of traffic to attract advertisers or you have to be a slave to Google (which still needs traffic), i.e. popularity rules, not quality. I micro-payment system would be more balanced, but there’s no clear winner on something which would be such an obviously painless payment system – perhaps MS is hedging its bets as it’s mentioning Microsoft Points a lot in terms of going beyond XBox Live with that. Perhaps payment by SMS is the most likely route which is a major payment system for content in the UK and the rest of Europe on mobiles.