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Man, I miss those old Wendy’s commercials!

Rich Hoeg has a session at Defrag entitled, “Social search in the corporate environment,” and was kind enough to send in this description:

Where’s the beef? Have you ever wondered whether all these Web 2.0 tools can be effectively utilized inside the firewall? Come see how a Fortune 100 corporation uses social search, blogs, wikis and podcasts for their technical workforce. You’ll be taken upon a tour of various applications, and Rich will explain what worked … and what didn’t.

I love hearing about what *didn’t* work! Thanks, Rich.

We’ve got a session title on the board entitled, “Can identity be a filter for information overload?” Ian Glazer, an analyst with Burton Group is moderating. Here’s the thing: I want help figuring out who Ian should be talking to.

With that goal in mind, a couple of points:

1. This topic is consistently rated as one of the topics that people REALLY want to hear about.

2. The idea is simple: shouldn’t my “identity” help me to more effectively deal with information overload? Shouldn’t it help me find things I wouldn’t normally find and filter out those things that I know I won’t want. Shouldn’t our computers, software and technology get smart enough to know me? I think this goes beyond personalization — I’m not looking to explicitly set up preferences. This should be an implicit act.

3. “Identity Management” is something I know a bit about, and I know that there aren’t any established identity companies doing any of this effectively. Now, to be sure, these companies tend to focus on the enterprise not the interweb. But still, isn’t *anyone* working hard on this? I know folks are — what I want to know is who are the people I should really be talking to about this stuff. Who’s going to blow my mind with a prototype? Who’s the entrepreneur with a big vision that can change this whole field?

So, help us out, won’t ya? I’ve got Ian Glazer of Burton Group moderating the session — and we’re looking for every good idea you have. Lend a hand.

I’ve been reading a meme lately that goes something like, “tech has gotten boring,” and all I can say is “not in my world.” Sure, maybe if you’re obsessed with the valley-echo, things may seem a little ho-hum, but I’ve been working on the Defrag agenda, so I’m just damn excited!

To that end, I thought I’d start detailing the agenda a bit with both some informal thoughts from me, and some “official” session descriptions as they happen. So, let’s get on with some of the *interesting* things happening at Defrag:

1. “Strategic Intuition and Defrag“: Professor William Duggan is opening the conference with this session. I was introduced to Professor Duggan’s recent book (Strategic Intuition) via Phil Becker. Phil’s wife, Kathi, saw Bill speak at the University of Chicago and immediately recognized the value it held for the defraggy crowd. Professor Duggan’s research focuses on the process by which strategic decisions get made. He details his work through examples as diverse as Napoleon and the Buddha. When I picked up the book, it was a mere matter of paragraphs before I was seeing that the brain processes he details are one of the “big pieces” of what we’re trying to solve with regards to information overload.

We all know that too many tech conferences simply replay the same speakers all of the time. I’m incredibly excited to watch Bill’s talk frame things for us in a way that sets us all off on a different path, and immediately removes us from the “echo chamber.”

2. “Is the flow just too much? Lifestreaming at the edge”: Anyone who knows me knows that I’m impressed by Stowe Boyd’s brain. One of the big pushes around information overload is always how to “limit” things. Declaring “email bankruptcy” is a pretty common happening for folks that come back from vacation (or travel) to find 1000s of email messages, feeds, bits of news and tweets that haven’t been read. Hell, I’ve done it.

What fascinates me about Stowe’s thoughts are his immediate reactions against this surrender. He would rather take us the other way - claiming that perhaps our metaphors of work and living inside of this “flow” aren’t quite caught up to where the technology is trying to lead us. Could it be that we’re all just horribly behind the curve (or flow)? I’m not sure, but I know that Stowe will make us think, and I’m betting that he’ll start to open our eyes to how it is that re-imagining our metaphors around interaction can help to reshape the technologies and tools we’re dealing with.

3. “Fixing Foundational Information Channels — Email, Calendars, RSS, etc”: Following along the same lines as Stowe’s thinking, this session starts with the premise that something is broken in our foundations. Email imagines every message as a letter (a discrete object vs. a thread or networked send). Calendars are silo’d islands of non-interoperability that hearken back to days of paper and the rolodex. And RSS, new as it is, is still delivering us “object-oriented” feeds, and not contextually-driven usefulness. In all three cases, I admit to being completely lost. So, I went out and recruited some smart folks that I know you don’t normally hear from: Ilya from AideRSS, Yori from Timebridge, Deva from ClearContext, and Pete from Mailana. It will all be moderated by the always-on-the-ball, Jeff Nolan — and I can’t wait. Do you want to help us start re-framing the problems here? I hope so.

4. “Observing The Invisible Through Aggregating Information Tomography”: Yep, it is a mouthful. In fact, when Marty Betz (of FirstRain) came to me early on and said he wanted to present this topic, my only response was, “that’s great, but what the hell is it?” Marty went on to explain that much of what he works on is how to take “cross-sections” of information, and how using those cross-sections will unveil things in data that we can’t see by simply digesting one discrete bit (like, “so and so is now CTO of company X”). Once I got it, I immediately said “yes.” Come and find out how looking at information and data sets sideways can reveal things you’ve never seen before.

Now, I ask you: does any of that sound boring? Yea, I don’t think so either.

Come join us (and do so now to lock in the early bird rate).

I’m trying to slow things down a bit on a Friday (it has been a crazy busy week) - not that I’m succeeding, but I’m trying.

This piece by Om Malik  caught my eye this morning. Note the “you must read me” title: “Why Silicon Valley Should Be Worried.”

The gist of the piece is simple: ValueClick, Platform-A, Microsoft and now Google have pointed to weaker advertising revenues, and, as a result, “the valley” is about to enter a real rough patch and should be worried. Now, I don’t necessarily disagree with Om, but I’d frame things in a bigger perspective.

Much (most?) of the “web 2.0″ wave has been riding the idea that you give stuff (content, services, etc) away for free and make your money through advertising. Readers of this blog know that I’ve been calling for a shift back to the enterprise side of things since last year at this time. Was I early or just taking a longer time-frame perspective? I leave that to you to decide.

Either way, my sense has been and still is that a whole raft of startups (and bigger companies) will get hurt as ad revenues suffer in a weaker economy. Specifically, startups that have based their business model on ad revenue and are now facing the end of the funding line are in for some trouble. And that’s a natural thing. The excess of the web 2.0 wave has to get replaced by real business models generating real revenue (and striving towards or achieving real profitability).

None of that is to say that enterprises aren’t cutting back on spending. They are. But no one (at least no one I’ve read) has taken IT spending towards a flat or negative trend. Enterprise IT spending is still up year over year (and will continue to be). Sure, that spending will get pickier — that’s the name of the game at this point.

At the end of the day, the “enterprise” will break into two camps: one camp that’s focused purely on cost-cutting and efficiency measures, and one camp that’s still sorting through big picture, strategic problems. You can argue that defraggy topics cross both sides, but I do think that ultimately Defrag is about “big problems.” In that vein, I’m happy to report that we’ve seen absolutely no signs of slowing on any front. Registrations are humming, sponsorships are selling (out), buzz is building, and the agenda is getting to the point where I’m starting to get very excited.

Feel free to escape the doom and gloom of the valley (and elsewhere). Defrag’s substance, participants and abundance offers one helluva fun port in the storm.

Chris Shipley (of DEMO fame, and advisor to Defrag) has written a great post about the trend(s) that she’s seeing as she prepares for DEMO.

The Web 2.0 Cycle Has Come to a Close.For much of the last three years, technology industry pundits have hyped Web 2.0 as the Big Thing that fundamentally changes the business of the Web. We think it’s pretty clear now that Web 2.0 has been more of a hype cycle than a business cycle.

Unlike the Dot Com cycle before it, the Web 2.0 phase hasn’t created tremendous business value for entrepreneurs or their investors. But the social Web - the true definition, we think, of this most recent wave - has sparked tremendous innovation. It has given us the “operating systems” for social networks, the culture of conversation and engagement, the discipline of rapid and disruptive development, and the technology basis on which to build reliable, scalable Web applications. In short, it’s delivered a platform on which to build the next phase of the Web.

I have to say that I agree.

Chris goes on to talk about building a “smarter web” — one where information finds you, and yet you don’t lose “serendipitous discovery.” This (obviously) is a topic near and dear to our defraggy hearts. If we’re really going to deal with the tremendous amounts of information at our disposal, and do so in a way that seeks to leverage this abundance (versus limiting it), then technologies and tools are going to have to get us there. One note here: There’s so much talk of scarcity these days — isn’t it nice to have a subject that is completely about abundance?

Go read the whole piece, as Chris really puts it all together. We’ve entered the next “building phase” of the internet; we always do in recessions. Forget the echo chamber. Walk away from the hype of yesterday. Join us as we start building what’s next.

Pete Warden has written the kind of blog post that puts a big smile on my face: why you should attend Defrag. I’ll let Pete speak for himself, but check it out.

Today’s my end of the quarter (essentially), so it is a day for cleaning up and reflecting prior to being “outta here” for a bit.

It has been an especially good quarter for Defrag. Our list of sponsors is looking awesome, and we’ve inked some great partnerships with the folks from Saugatuck, Forrester and Read/Write Web (just twitter-announced today).

My plan with this post was to do a bit on “how defrag is different” -something I like to do once or twice prior to the event. But, because of my mood or the weather (cloudy), or something, I’m just not feeling it (it seems a little too “in your face” for me today - and I’m normally a very “in your face” kind of person). So, random thoughts:

1. As I’ve been saying, we will not be loading you down with a traditional “conference bag” at Defrag. Yes, we’ll have something to contain the few handouts we’ll have, but the truth is that I don’t believe in printed show guides (they’re simply a WASTE), and I know that most conference bags end up in some dark hole in the corner of a closet in your house (another waste).

2. I’m always a bit amused when I tell potential sponsors that Defrag is literally run by my wife and myself. I either get the “oh that’s great,” or the “really?” response. I’ve never had one person doubt our ability to pull it off (we have history proving we can), but I have had several folks ask me why “conference companies” need teams of people to run conferences of similar size. Now, in one sense, I know why — because those teams are usually running more than one event (sometimes dozens). In another sense, I’m still a bit confused. A conference is a LOT of work (don’t get me wrong) to pull off well, but for shows 500 and under, it really is possible to do it with two people (Chris Pirillo and Ponzi come to mind). The only real caveat is that A) the two people have to know what they’re doing (experience) and B) at least one of those people has to both love selling and love the content focus.

3. I’m really looking forward to digging in on the content side. Honestly, I’ve kind of been waiting a little longer this year because I wanted to see what other conferences (focused on similar areas) were talking about - and then zag where they zigged. I recently had someone comment on how our content all seems very “high level” and a bit amorphous in title. My gut response was that yes, it does — for a reason. I know that our attendees would rather go to a session on “knowledge networking and ambient intimacy” to discover what the hell we’re talking about, than hear about “measuring engagement in social media” (ie, topics they know about already).

4. A bit on attendees: for us, that’s a misnomer. I’ve tried to explain to sponsors how engaged our audience really is. I’ve not done a good job of it. Attendees are actually participants — I demand it. If you want death by powerpoint, please go register for some other conference. If you want to converse, inform, pitch in, learn, laugh and be dragged in unexpected directions, then we’re the conference for you.

5. Wifi: the never-ending subject of “wifi sucking at conferences” keeps coming up. Good wifi at a conference is not hard. It is simply a matter of dollars spent. Trust me, Defrag will have *great* wifi this year (last year, our wifi received a standing ovation on morning 2).

6. Topics I’m excited about: 1) Finding serendipitous information through context; 2) Fixing foundational information channels (email, calendars, rss); 3) Pulling the thread on user data (implicit and otherwise); 4) dealing with unstructured vs. structured data; 5) strategic intuition (*how* it is that great decisions get made - and how that relates to defraggy topics). And so much more….those are just the ones I’ve been working on.

7. I’ve been thinking about two things Seth Godin blogged about recently: A) having pre-signed up for “discussion tables” that force people into some uncomfortable social meeting spaces, which I know they’ll thank us for later; B) how to arrange the keynote seating so that we’re not simply “row after row” -and give the room maximum energy (I’m not sure I’ll solve this one, but I’m thinking - and open to ideas).

8. One goal I’m striving for: breaking out of the echo chamber, I’ve heard it all before at the 1 million other tech conferences box. I’m digging digging and digging to find interesting people that we don’t normally get to hear from (or ones that we do hear from put into different settings and angles). You should come away from Defrag going, “wow, I never expected to hear, learn, talk about X.” This was embodied last year by David Weinberger opening the conference with a poem by Rilke. Here’s what you won’t hear: the same old valley folk talking about funding the next great innovative google-killer (ugh).  [sidenote: okay, maybe that was a bit in your face.]

9. It occurred to me that I emailed with or talked to nearly every Defrag attendee prior to last year’s conference. Why? I’m not sure. I guess I really do wanna know what people are looking for prior to getting there. Bottom line: I don’t just want “buts in the seats.”

10. The next three months are going to be really exciting as we ramp toward a true agenda and the communal involvement picks up. As always, be in touch (enorlin AT mac.com).

11. Lastly a big “thank you” to everyone that’s been involved so far. I’m very fortunate to have two partners (brad and phil) that listen, push, advise and joke with me on a regular basis about how to really achieve quality (easier said than done). Beyond Brad and Phil, the sponsors I’ve interacted with so far have been incredible, and the notes, registrations and blog posts from attendees and speakers is really what keeps us going. Finally, a big quarter end “thanks is not enough” to my wife, Kim. When I say that everything good that happens at Defrag is a direct result of her, and every mistake that happens there is a direct result of me, I mean it.

If you’ve ever had the experience of loving your times at a neighborhood, family-owned restaurant (vs. Chili’s or TGI Fridays) –well, that’s what we aim for Defrag to be…..I can’t wait for next quarter…

I’ve started to see some articles surface that are highlighting the problem of “defining enterprise 2.0.” I’m more than sympathetic to attempting such feats. Back when we started Digital ID World, “digital identity” was such an out-there concept that for the first two years of the conference, every single presentation (no joke - EVERY SINGLE PRESENTATION) began with the presenter telling us *their* definition of digital identity. Needless to say, it got tiresome — and actually, one of the ways we knew that digital identity was getting real was in year three when no one felt the need to define it any longer. That’s my “free tip of the day” to the enterprise 2.0 crowd. Measure adoption by a lack of need to define.

That said, we’ve long used a pretty fluid idea of what we mean when we say “Defrag” (the conference), so I thought it might be useful to review the “evolution”:

1. It all started with that guy named Feld. Brad was posting about an investment theme he was figuring out and he was struggling with what to call it. It went from “intelligence amplification” to some other things I forgot to “the implicit web.” The core idea, though, remained the same: we have a problem of “information overload,” and we need better tools for dealing with it.

Brad’s initial blogging A) led to us starting Defrag, and B) (importantly) insisted on crossing the enterprise-consumer barrier. This was not simply “collaboration” or “productivity,” rather it was a bigger problem that ended up (we discovered) encompassing those two things.

2. The second iteration of Defrag (the idea) happened as I started to talk to people about this new conference we were launching. I needed an analogy to help explain things. The one that stuck (if badly) was the “brainstorm.” Roughly: what we’re doing with the internet is recreating the brainstorming session. We’ve handled co-location (physical space) and simultaneity (time), and we’re even working on who’s in the room (identity), but what we haven’t done yet was develop tools that helped us (as individuals and groups) turn data into knowledge at a faster pace. We needed to get some *velocity* on the process of insight. This analogy led directly to the tagline you see on Defrag today: Accelerating the “aha” moment. (For those of you interested, the original tagline for Defrag was “assembling the disparate bits.”)

3. The third iteration of Defrag occurred between the launch of the conference and ran through the conference itself. It was a communal process of part self-identification and part-critical thinking. At the end of it, we discovered that a bunch of themes related to Defrag: the attention economy, the semantic web, enterprise 2.0, web 3.0 (ugh), information overload, the implicit web, social networking (especially in the enterprise), even knowledge management and search.

That iteration has not led us to some concrete definition. Rather it helped me to write this overly-broad statement: “As online data is growing and fragmenting at an exponential pace, individuals, groups and organizations are struggling to discover, assemble, organize, act on and gather feedback from that data. In the largest sense, we’re all looking to augment the pace at which we achieve insights on raw data — to acclerate the “aha” moment. ”

You see? It doesn’t *quite* capture it.

4. We’re standing now in the fourth iteration - what I’d call the iteration of intersections. What we know is that we have this really big problem. We can define that problem as “information overload” broadly, but even that might miss the mark slightly. The problem actually gets highlighted by putting a bunch of terms on the board and letting a Venn diagram overlap to outline what we’re talking about. Those terms, then, include: the implicit web, enterprise 2.0, semantic web, collective intelligence, (social) networking in the enterprise, next-level discovery and some others I’m probably forgetting.

Let me be clear: Defrag is not about being all things to all people. There are some technologies that simply don’t apply. We’re not trying to be the big-tent circus of web 2.0 that brings everything under one roof (not that that’s bad, that’s just not us). What we are trying to do is bring together disparate parties that might not necessarily see themselves as working on the same problem, and get them to see that “aha” — maybe so.

Its a big, nasty, hairy, meaty problem - and it generated a lot of really good stuff last year. We’re gonna do it all again, so I hope you’ll contribute to the conversation and join us.

As a bonus, Read/WriteWeb is writing about the problem today, and we’re reading.