I am writing a new post for Ugotrade. But it is taking quite a bit of research, so thank goodness for Posterous.  Posterous really is positioned perfectly between Twitter's micro blogging and my penchant for macro blogging on Ugotrade. 

At the moment I am going over my notes on  "Web Meets World " start ups - particularly the ones I heard pitch at Web 2.0 Summit.  I am really interested, of course, in projects that are part of the grand scheme of instrumenting the world. The best start up pitches I heard did seem to score high on Guy Kawasaki's Reality Check test .  Now I think I should order Guy's book - see video on Reality Check here!  I snapped Guy signing copies at Web 2.0 Summit (see below).

As my friend Jonathan Hochman said on Day 1, "if everyone here [Web 2.0 Summit] shut down their website it would be the end of the intenet!"  Which is why I still have many more pictures from Web 2.0 Summit to post!

Here I am with some legendary bloggers who know each other very well, Steve Gillmor (check out Steve Gilmor's interview with Dan Farber and post here - a piece of blogging artistry contextulizing some of the key threads of Web 2.0 Summit),  Dan Farber, Gabe Rivera, and Michael Arrington.

OMG! I am not sure if I can blog the inside story of the Web 2.0 Summit Media Center entirely. But suffice to say I learned a lot about Web 2.0 in a few hours there.

I'll say it again! From the primordial ooze, who gets to define the data rules!

Of course, part of the magic of Web 2.0 is that Wikipedia's collectively generated content ranks top in Google.  But I got a first hand look at how super star bloggers conjure up page rank and influence when they hit post. Oh, just in case you were wondering, we are checking out whose post on John Battelle's interview with Jerry Yang, CEO, Yahoo came out top in Google. 

Not mine, of course!  I am still working on my Web 2.0 Summit posts - oh well that is one problem with writing 5000 word articles.  But, I take heart, Steve Gilmor said to me 1000 word posts, at least, are the way things are going in blogging these days. Was he pulling my leg?

And, the picture was snapped with exquisite timing by the artist/super star blogger Brian Solis' Flickr, www.briansolis.com, bub.blicio.us

Tim O'Reilly announced the new O'Reilly report, "Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution," at a Twitter Meetup in the House of Shields across the street from the Web 2.0 Summit.  Biz Stone, Twitter founder, looks like he is enjoying himself. Twitterati packed the pub, including Tony Stubblebine, CEO/Founder, CrowdVine Social Networks. Tony was Twitterer #20.

Blogging via email on Posterous seems a perfect complement to Twitter to me. Mitch Kapor turned me on to Posterous. He is an angel investor. Mitch posted these pics of Chandler and Cosmo, in their Election protection T-Shirts, to demo the awesomely easy email posting to me when I visited Kapor Enterprises on election night.

I feel like a new era of spontaneous blogging has begun for me.  I am not abandoning Ugotrade though. I will have a long post coming up on soon about the amazing work going at Mitch and Freada Kapor's incubator of the future - a child and dog friendly building South of Market where business, technology and social investment are working together to create a better future.

Also check out  Guy Kawasaki's posterous blog. This post of Guy's gets so many hits he decided to use it to promote his book, Reality Check.

(download)

Click here to download:

Web_2.0_Summit_-_Twitter_Meetu.zip (150 KB)

I sat down for my bag lunch at Web 2.0 Summit next to Tom Conrad, CTO of Pandora. The Palace is packed with C level execs. Jonathan Hochman, a Wikipedia veteran, said 'if everyone here shut down their web site it would be the end of the internet." 

I asked Tom what he thought would come of Tim O'Reilly's call to "work on stuff that matters," in these difficult times.  Tom said that after the .com bubble burst people worked on things they had a passion for.  But, and he laughed a little, the things people had a passion for turned out to be quite quirky from some perspectives e.g. exploring the possibilities in aggregating a bunch of book marks. 

One good thing, Tom noted, that might come out of the current shake down of the whole business world, which is not just a .com collapse this time, is a return to the kind of passionate, collaborative idea hatching that went on in Michael Arrington's backyard, back in the day.  This was what produced so much of what we know as Web 2.0 today.  And a return to that modus operandi, perhaps, would not be a bad thing. Oh the press room is full of A list bloggers too - will post some more pics tomorrow.

(download)

Click here to download:

Tom_Conrad_and_Michael_Arringt.zip (85 KB)