Panel on Rebuilding the World with Free Everything, with:

• Doc Searls – Linux Journal
• Katherine Druckman – Linux Journal
• William Hurley – evil genius project
• Chris Anderson – Wired Magazine
• Dave Taylor – filmBUZZ

“Free” is the future of business. Steve Larsen says the world has more than 500,000 open source code bases now — all free. That’s a tall challenge for a huge pile of building material. Linux Journal presents a panel of creative hackers and business crafters to discuss constructing the future.

Free as in freedom and free as in beer. Freedom gave us the internet. Free is the title of Chris Anderson’s book.

By giving away content for free, it means more eyeballs. One model for magazines is to lock up content for a time period, say, 30 days; another model is to open up the content immediately, recognizing that a certain percentage of people will like to subscribe to the long form magazine content.

Starbuck’s should give out free iPhone cases with their logo on it. This is a huge marketing opportunity.

There are things that become common knowledge as they evolve. For example, server monitoring has become a free service. Companies in this area are giving away the 90% to concentrate on the 10% of stuff that requires consulting and is profitable.

Was there a connection between “The Long Tail” and “Free”? Definitely. Free is enabled by infinite shelf space. The near-zero marginal cost of an extra Amazon listing enables the “free”. The fascination was in researching the history of a very misunderstood word, which is becoming an economic model and defining business for the next era.

The internet is our biggest marketplace, but we’re just getting our sea legs now and understanding how it works. There is this enormous invisible energy and building materials that are making the surface we’re walking around on. But this is how things work: you invent the medium frst and then figure out how to monetize it later.

Wired Magazine pays among the highest rates in the world: about $3 a word. So an exclusively online publication of Wired would still cost about 50% of a paper publication, because of the human costs.

It’s hard to think about what the premium product should be and what people will pay for. But you can get around this by building the product with the community … and they will give you the business model. Most people understand there is economic reality and that you need to make money: they will accept that the monetization is there. If you build a community first, you build trust and people will be ready to pay money for services.

The patronage model may not work well and is where the “starving artist” comes from. It violates economic principles. In fact, you want the opposite, which is for the market to figure out how much something is worth.

If you’re in a nosedive, “free” is not the problem. The problem is the underlying paper, product or service. Whether it’s free or not is irrelevant.

Not everything has to be a profit center in your business; some things can be loss leaders in order to make money elsewhere.

Reddit accounts for 20M uniques and 40M pages view per month … and costs nothing. This is user-generated content that costs Wired nothing. So Wired has the mass audience with the magazine, and the very specific and granular with Reddit.

In the coming years, as bandwidth increases, there will be a complete breakdown of the movie distribution model.

The monetization of free is difficult. For example, someone needs to click on adwords in order to make some money. But this is just a problem of content. If you have nice content that’s updated consistently, you should be getting good CPM rates. Google sinks or swims based on their abilty to match ads to content.

How to combat misconception that just because the software is free, the services are not? The answer is to disappoint people and to say no.

It is factually true that micro-payments have failed to date. One of the reasons is that the process of paying is so high. If the transaction were less difficult, there would be more micropayments.

How can free apply to products with a very high cost base? There is a company that gives away electric cars and sells you the electricity. There are a lot of monetization opportunities in services as well.

Open question: would the iTunes store make more money if Apple just gave away iPods for free?

Another model is to give away free derivatives of work. The problem will be distribution for the free stuff. How do you incentivize distributors?

Keynote session at SXSW, with:

• Chris Anderson – Wired Magazine
• Guy Kawasaki – Alltop

In 2006, Chris Anderson introduced the concept of the Long Tail. His soon-to-be released book will talk about the power of free. Will his theories stand up to the tough questions of venture Silicon Valley venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki?

If you want to create a freemium product, where do you set the bar? You don’t want to cripple the service, but you don’t want to set the bar too high to the extent no one will feel compelled to subscribe to the premium product? Twitter has crippled the product too much, to the point where it’s easy for Facebook to replicate the service and potentially catch up.

Free is the best way to maximize your reach because it lowers peoples’ barriers to entry. Converting 5% of a big number is the business model of free. The marginal cost of distributing a book is zero, so it should be free, since the optimal method of reading a book is still in paper.

Each one of us is our own platform and we each need to figure out how to convert our reputation and brand into money. That’s all of our jobs: build our audience the right way and give them something of value that keeps them there.

The problem is that our publishers are not making money from authors’ keynotes. For example, the music industry is perfectly fine except for one part of it: distribution and sale. The issue is, authors and musicians are now misaligned with their publishers and record labels. The question is, can labels and publishers represent bands adequately in social media?

What if someone follows me and I send them a direct message with a link to a free pdf? Is this a good model? “My test for spam: if I do it, it’s clever marketing. If someone does it to me, it’s spam.” -Guy Kawasaki

The word “free” is one of the most misunderstood words. Free is a word that’s laden with meaning. And the meaning has changed over time. Twentieth Century free is where products had a real cost, so you had to pay back the free quickly. Today, everything costs less to nothing, particularly digital media. Freemium is the inversion of the free sample model. Here, you give 95% of your product free and charge for 5%. Virtual worlds are experimenting with every possible way to charge and 5% of the population seems to be a good model. But people misunderstand how hard it is to convert 5% of people.

China and Brazil are the future of “free”. We have the first true truly competitive market, which is one where marginal costs are low. If you do not make your product for free, the market will do it for you by pirating your stuff. People then use piracy to cause celebrity, and celebrity to create cash.

Could Starbuck’s give away free coffee to attract and retain customers? Absolutely: it would be easy for them to do that.

The word free has a powerful meening in english, where we take the best part of the words (ie., freedom) and apply these associations to sell products. Imagine a flag in your head which pops up every time you hear a price and it raises barriers to you purchase. There is no correlation between free ad cheap. Utility comes first, price second. People now expect two levels from almost product: a simple, free version and a premium version.

Are people more motivated by something they lost, or by not getting something they could? Things that you don’t have and want loom large; that ’s what tradtional marketing has done. Some information wants to be free and some wants to be expensive. You can have Guy for free on Twitter, or his customized version for thousands as a speaker.

On YouTube, the quality of video is not as important as the relevance. Same thing with companies: nowadays, you can start a company for almost no cost.

Open-source is free as in kittens: you have to look after them. A lot of the free stuff we have is because we support it communally.

Panel on “Appfrica: How Web Applications Are Helping Emerging Markets Grow” with:

• Jonathan Gosier – Appfrica
• Erik Hersman – Ushahidi / Afrigadget / WhiteAfrican.com
• David Kobia – Ushahidi
• Rose Shuman – Open Mind – Question Box
• TMS Ruge – Project Diaspora

Everything we thought we knew about Africa is wrong. Technology is leading growth, developmental aid is hurting it. The continent is incredibly rich while the people remain poor. How is technology (specifically the web and mobile devices) changing the narrative of sustainable economic growth in the African diaspora?

Aid organizations have not yet figured out how to use tools that have been there for years. For example, they’re just getting on the mobile bandwagon now.

In terms of trade versus aid, there are more trade-based initiatives. There are more opportunities to invest, rather than to just write a check. It’s not an attitude of anit-development aid, but rather to say: “give Africa a chance to find its own solutions.” If things are never being built up from the ground, nations will continue to remain dependent on development aid.

It is a must to have developers who live in Africa. You might as well not do it, if you’re bringing in developers from outside Africa. You need people with experience on the ground, people who are familiar with the issues. A western turn-key solution will not work.

Some of the exciting initiatives include:

• The Kamusi Project – online translations
• Ushahidi – mobile news reporting
• Project Diaspora - Mobile banking

Open source is playing a huge role in Africa, where anyone in the continent can contribute. Ushahidi is an example.

Africa is a very oral place, so ideas spread through word of mouth. Some of this is happening digitally now through text messaging, but most of it happens in a village context.

A wish of the panelist is to conduct more collaborative conversations with the West, rather than what too often occurs: the West talking down to Africans regarding technology.

Google and Grameen Bank are some of the larger companies with enough foresight to think about and invest in Africa right now.

Mobile has 30% penetration in Africa, which works out to about 300M people. Only 5% have access to the web, which is about 50M people. SMS is the one big communication technology in Africa. The fastest growing areas are Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Kenya, Egypt. However, what’s more important than carving things out regionally is to think about rural vs. urban or rich vs. poor. Also, develop for what exists now: broadband is not there yet; people keep their cell phones for seven or eight years; etc.

“This technology will make you better is not a good argument, because ‘better’ is a questionable paradigm to strive for. Better for whom?”

A challenge is made: the panelist needs a laptop to take back to Uganda, by Tuesday evening.

sxsw, sxswi, sxsw09, sxswi09, afridev

Panel on “Breaking Boundaries: Mobile Web Access in Emerging Economies,” with:

• G Kofi Annan – Annansi LLC
• Charles McCathieNevile – Opera Software
• Matt Womer – World Wide Web Consortium
• David Rogers – OMTP Ltd

In many regions, the mobile phone is the primary tool for Web access. As mobile Web connections increase in developing nations the impact will be significant. This panel examines the differences between mobile Web access in developing and developed regions and how the mobile Web can affect social development.

Why is the mobile web interesting in the developing world? More people have access to a mobile phone than to clean, running water. More people have a mobile phone than a computer. About 80% of the world has some sort of mobile coverage, so it’s obvious to say that mobile should be a point of online access. People in the developing don’t use mobile phones just for mobility. They are using it to access the internet with browsers like Opera Mini.

The uniqueness of the emerging economies is that mobile products must be adapted to how these economies are growing, so you need to analyze usage patterns, get feedback, and iterate often. Closed systems will not work because the barrier is too high; you need to be using open source software. Open source is also good because it avoids duplication of efforts.

In developing markets, the top applications are Facebook, MySpace. People are using this for entertainment and for connecting socially. There are many local sites that are big in their respective countries as well. Some examples of leading-edge applications in emerging economies include mobile banking, health care apps, and agriculture.

There’s a tendency to think that what we have in the West is what developing countries should aspire to. But if text is working, then that’s what should be used. There are a lot more options with text at this point and that’s what should be explored. What matters are the design challenges of “being local”, as you attempt to cater to locals and travellers. For example, the mobile capacity inside Australia matches demand (actually, you only really get about 2/3 of what is advertised). Because of the congestion of international lines, you only get about 10% when you travel outside of Australia.

Emerging markets are often in physically hostile environments. There is a unique opportunity now to provide a platform for the government or humanitarian organization to create a network that would constantly monitor the environment and give an early warning of impending natural disasters.

In developing markets, there is demand for either the most expensive smartphones, or the cheapes phones. There is not much demand in the middle: you can either afford the most expensive gear … or you can’t.

Panel on Building Your Brand with Web 2.0 Tools, with:

• CC Chapman – The Advance Guard
• Dave Delaney – Griffin Technology
• Saul Colt – FreshBooks
• Loic Le Meur – Seesmic
• Chris Brogan – New Marketing Labs

Getting attention for your brand (personal or company) is easier than ever thanks to the ole’ interweb but doing it with “zing” is still key to building a following. Learn and ask question from the people who have built brands and careers by doing it with “zing”

Building a brand is easier than ever before thanks to the internet. It’s like broadcast TV, except everyone has their own show if they want it. The way you communicate online will tell people more about you than your resume ever will.

Question: How should people manage and balance personal vs professional life as you brand yourself on Facebook and other platforms?

Answer: This question is most often asked by GenY as they post their college pictures online and transition to job hunting. Generally, you should be “you” online and remain authentic and true to yourself.

Question: What’s the story of how you all started? Did you start from zero?

Answer:

• “Mostly everybody starts out from zero. I started blogging … because I wanted to start blogging. Just be yourself and do it. If you’re building a brand, you have to figure out what’s right for the brand. For example, Twitter is not right for some brands. It’s a ‘weird, scary feeling’ when people start listening to you … but it’s nice and proves you’re doing something right. Keep doing it.” -CC Chapman
• “When someone criticized me, I actually thanked them, saying I had learned a lot from the criticism. We later became friends” -Loic Le Meur
• “You can never ever have the last word on the Internet.” -Saul Colt
• “Some brands are just not ready to talk to the consumer. They’re just not … and they will fail if they try.” – CC Chapman
• “Be helpful. Don’t talk about yourself, rather, be helpful to others.” -Chris Brogan

Question: How involved do you get into your clients’ social media strategy? Will you tweet on their behalf?

Answer: “Clients need to learn how to do this for themselves, although they need hand holding and training in the beginning. They need to understand what a troll is and how to deal with them. But ultimately, a client needs to drive their own car.” -CC Chapman

Question: Where should I focus my energies?

Answer:
“Spend a little bit of time everywhere and figure out what works best for you, and then spend your time there.” -Saul Colt
“If you use Ping.fm, you can broadcast to many services at once.” -Loic Le Meur
“If you do the multiple one to many thing with Ping.fm, you’re not generating conversation.” -Chris Brogan

Question: A lot of startups focus on stealth mode. Should they do this? And should startups have a double “O”, like Google?

Answer: “Don’t fear competition, share as much as you can, and track the feedback and online conversation.” -Loic Le Meur

Question: (unintelligible)

Answer: “Social media is a marketing channel. But we never approached Twitter as a marketing channel. We see it as a relationship channel. Frankly, talking about online invoicing is boring, so we talk about other stuff, like movies.” -Saul Colt

Question: How about building brands in local communities, rather than on a national or international level?

Answer:

• “One of the things you can do is to organize local events, like PodCamps and BarCamps and Geek Breakfasts, to bring people together and build a community. ” -Dave Delaney
• “Use Twitter to have small conversations and to reach out locally. Twitter is like a box of Legos: you build something one piece at a time.” -Chris Brogan
• “If you start speaking with people, they will buy at *your* store … just because they’ve spoken with you” -CC Chapman

Question: What about “re-branding” in an open and transparent society, for example, when a product sucks?

Answer:

• “Please remember that your legal team is your legal counsel: they are not your company’s operating officials.” -Chris Brogan
• “Never criticize your competitors. Never do it as an individual either.” -Loic Le Meur

Question: Most of our clients’ budgets are drying up, so they are turning to new media. We have two types of clients: those with ideas that suck, and those with no ideas at all. What opportunities are there 

Answer: “Seek out Beth Kanter”

Question: (missed it)

Answer: “Read Shel Holz’s book ‘Tactical Transparency’” -Chris Brogan

Question: Business don’t expose who the individuals who are blogging or twittering on their behalf. What’s the best practice?

Answer:
“Your competitive advantage is your personality” -Saul Colt
“The slippery slope is connecting with the person and not the brand. What happens when that person leaves? For example, when Scoble left Microsoft – what have they done since then?” -CC Chapman
“Dell is handling it well, with @RichardatDell, @LionelatDell, etc.” -Chris Brogan

SX09-286, cake, sxsw, sxswi, sxsw09, sxswi09, social media, brand, loic le meur, cc chapman, chris brogan, julie haddon, saul colt, reputation

There are no cheat codes for community. No Charles Atlas shortcuts to make your pet project the one to rule them all. Want people to think you’re awesome? Be awesome. This panel promises a bullshit-free look at how you might tune out the jibber jabber, tune in to those who matter, put your head down and make your online service a little bit more epic each day. We’ll dissect Bike Hugger, Photojojo, Metafilter, and other examples of Web charm for what *you* can do. Today, and tomorrow. And the day after. Which is how you will become what you want to be.

According to Oberkirch:

Marketers get into this mindframe, this thing, of looking for the latest “tactic”. As we know, this doesn’t work. Instead, “Do Epic Shit”. One of the companies that “Does Epic Shit” really well is Threadless.

Here are some tips on how to be more awesome:

• Apprentice yourself to great work. Draw inspiration and learn from what others are doing.
• Give side projects some front & center time. This will become your future, after all.
• Focus on delicious details. Growth is about doing small things right. There are huge payoffs from tweaking small things.
• Go long. We have no attention spans. But things take time. This is one to one … get into a long time horizon.
• Share. Generate more value than you capture.
• Ironically, it takes courage to do the things you love.

In short, don’t treat people like you’re just interested in selling something to them. Talk to them like they’re human beings. Marketers are using to talking AT people; now, learn to engage them in a conversation.

Finally, model the behavior in your organization. Show people what works. Show them new things.

SX09-574, sxsw, sxswi, sxsw09, sxswi09, roux, brian oberkirch, panel

Steven Johnson of outside.in talks about “The Ecosystem of News” and “old growth media”. This live blog post is mostly paraphrased:

It is now conventional wisdom that the newspaper as we have come to know it for last century is over, or will be in a matter of years. The question is whether we’re going to spend our time grieving over the loss, or whether we’re going to use this moment as an opportunity to invent something even better. We’re inevitably moving from the “paper of record” model to a something more distributed, a news ecosystem, but that doesn’t mean we can’t consciously define the shape of that system. So let’s figure out what values we want to preserve from the older newspaper paradigm, and what values we want to improve upon — and then let’s go build it!

To understand the future of news, you need to look at the past. If you wanted to find out news about the Mac in the 80’s and 90’s, you read MacWorld; only breaking news would make it to the New York Times. In the early 90’s, the channels started to widen, and a few years later, the web arrived. New Apple sites started popping up and later Apple brought out its own official websites. Nowadays, there is a huge diversity of information about Apple … and the lag to get new information is seconds. The level of sophistication of blog posts also far exceed what any newspaper would even attempt.

The metaphors we’ve used for the changes in media tell us a lot about the changes going on. Ecosystem is a good metaphor: it’s complex and different from an assembly line. Yesterday’s ecosystem is a barren desert and today’s is a thriving jungle. This is a good indicator of the future of the news information.

People are panicking about two things:  1) news organizations are going to disappear and 2) important bits of information, ie., “news”, will disappear as well. People decry the alleged demise of war reporting and of investigative journalism: bloggers are not likely to get out of their pajamas to report on these things. The web doesn’t have an intrinsic ability to cover news better; it just covers news faster.

But now think about the ecosystem of political news during the presidential election: political blogs like DailyKos to YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and the candidates’ own websites, all the news was well covered … and in fact, thrived online. There are more perspective, depth, and surface now.

Really, we now realize we were living in a desert disguised as a rainforest!

When you pick up the New York Times, there are only a few stories you are interested in. But when you walk in your neighborhood, there are dozens of stories you would like to know better … and that will never be covered in the NYT. This is the long tail and the Times will never even attempt this. And this is what the best can do. In fact, the Times itself is now launching local Brooklyn blogs.

We have grown from reading MacWorld to expecting to see an instant keynote of Steve Jobs. We take it for granted that we can do things like geotagging news … but the old growth media did not bring this to us.

It is possible that investigative reporting will not thrive. On the other hand, the new ecosystem may free up traditional media to do what they do best: war reporting and muckracking.

There is an objection to the ecosystem of news model: it is complex and there is more noise than ever before. Can we expect the general public to navigate the new ecosystem with the same skill and discretion (and digital literacy) as we can?

The funny thing about the newspaper today is that their online audience is growing faster than their print circulation is shrinking. Measured by pure audience interest, newspapers have never been more relevant.

The implied model of every news organization is “all the news that’s fit to link”.

The ecosystem of news model predicts we will have a layer of “NEWS”:

• Professional journalists
• Professional bloggers
• Non-profit journalists
• Amateur bloggers
• Direct events
• Public data – API’s (every local government will have an API to its own data)

and a layer of “COMMENTARY”:

• Pundits / Columnists
• Bloggers
• Scholars

and a layer of “CURATION” (ie., of deciding what’s good or not):

• Social Media
• Professional Editors
• Aggregators
• Group filters

and a layer of “DISTRIBUTION”:

• Traditional media
• Aggregators
• Viral word of mouth

The tragedy now is that the financial meltdown and some over leveraging by news organizations is cramming what should have been a decade-long transition into the space of just a few years. This is a tragedy for two reasons. First, it inflicts a lot of stress and damage on news professionals who are doing excellent work. Also, it distracts us from building the new model by attempting to shore up the failed model of the old growth media.

SX09-2131, sxsw, sxswi, sxsw09, sxswi09, news, media

Dan Willis from Sapient talks about how “Everything you know about web design is wrong” (this post is live-blogged and mostly paraphrased):

“Just as early filmmakers struggled to break free from the conventions of live theater, after 10+ years Web designers are still trapped in the structures of the past. Forget pages, linear text and other archaic vestiges of design’s print ancestry; the separation of content from presentation has already changed everything.”

In essence,

• Everything we know about web design is what we know about print design; many websites are just print magazine in disguise
• They rely on the headline format and then become a text experience
• The film industry evolved dramatically into a new art form: “one plus one equals three”

We don’t know what transcendent web design will look like yet, but here are some leads into it (this is part of the new grammar of web design):

• Random voyeurism: an example is Flickrvision
• Self-aware (but uncontrollable) content: data is getting smarter and smarter all the time with metadata and the semantic web; as the medium transcends, you will see more and more self-aware data
• User-created context: context matters — it is everything; print publishers control the context, but this doesn’t happen online; the web is about the single user and the choices they make. Fighting the user and controlling their data will fail gloriously.
• Ambient awareness: (ie., “peripheral vision”); Mozart has been described at the same time as both trivial and profound: same thing with Twitter. Individual updates are insignificant; taken together, there’s something profound going on. It’s not a flash in the pan, because it’s something that deals with human beings. Each update is a dot in a pointillist painting … and it will lead to something. This is something going on right now and we will discover what that something is soon. And then someone will try to monetize that
• Experiential content: the experience of a rollercoaster itself is the content; it’s impossible to describe the experience unless you ride the rollercoaster yourself. Same with mmporgs. In a theme park you design where the rides are and you put the elements in place, but then the user becomes the author and designer of her experience. The web designer needs to share space with the user, who become an author, crafting their own experience.

So, take chunks of content and relate them by metadata, so the user can navigate this. The user drives the context and the newsroom becomes the engine for content. The newsroom no longer controls the experience, but facilitates it.

Look and feel is no longer helpful for designers or for people outside of design. Visual design disguises lots of flaws … and wins awards. But design is not an end, it’s a means to an end. Design solves problems. Designers need to step up and define the problem … and then solve them.

This is a disruption. Will designers step up? Do they have the skills? Do they have the interest? Design is moving and designers will have to change as well.

Think about the TV dinnner. Design today is like that tray: don’t let your peas touch your steak or your potatoes. Interaction, info, visual, and information architecture are all compartementalized today. But for the 21st century, the model is not TV dinner, it’s jambalaya. So many ingredients and variations of spices go into jambalaya. You can identify exactly what those ingredients are before they go into the pot … but once it’s cooked, you can no longer separate out the ingredients. And good jambalaya is life-changing stuff.

Tips for transcendent web design:

• Organize cross-discipline teams; exploit and protect expertise
• Design for specific users and their specific needs
• Embrace your ignorance
• Don’t be distracted by business models that don’t beging and end with the user
• Don’t be distracted by technology

Article: http://www.dswillis.com/sxsw/everything.pdf

dan willis, sapient, sxsw, sxswi, sxsw09, sxswi09, web design

I’ve published a curriculum for social media literacy at the college and graduate level.

This is based on my experience teaching the subject at the University of Miami School of Communication and on the presentations and workshops I’ve given. The coursework and some of the topics are also inspired by Howard Rheingold’s class on Virtual Worlds / Social Media:

In a few short years, the Web 2.0 has profoundly changed the communication landscape. With the advent of new social media tools, more and more people are participating and engaging in the conversation online. As former members of the audience become the creators of content, corporations and media organizations lose control of the message. After an overview of how and why we got here, this course will guide you through what works with social networks, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, media sharing, lifestreams, tagging and other social media tools. Since these tools and services are so new and continually changing, students’ degree of knowledge about the internet is not relevant. For continued effective communication, using these tools is not optional, it’s required.

The course will explore the new media landscape in terms of online expression, social networking, identity management, community building, and citizen journalism. How is social media changing the way you work and live? What are the implications for you and for the organizations you will work with? What opportunities and challenges do individuals, news organizations, and businesses face regarding communication, identity/brand management, and community building? How do we understand, participate in, and leverage communities in our current age of many-to-many media?

This course is grounded in practice, and students will be required to participate in social networks, forums, blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, folksonomies, and virtual worlds. Class discussions, presentations by students, readings, and examples of emerging technologies and media will bring us greater understanding of the issues and practice of social media. We will also learn from case studies, invited speakers, and our own learning journals, new effective strategies and applications of these platforms.

The class is highly participatory both offline and online. Between the weekly scheduled class meetings, this course’s discussion continues in a variety of online and virtual environments. Those who complete this course will know how to use blogs, tags, wikis, social networks, Twitter and Flickr productively, and have a framework for understanding and evaluating new social media tools and platforms.

The full syllabus including the course topics and coursework is on the wiki. This syllabus is distributed under a Creative Commons license.

We had another great meetup at RefreshMiami last night at Yahoo! Hispanic Americas. Adam Singer presented a “Coffee 2.0″ social media case study, Michael Montgomery spoke about microformats, I presented “You, the online brand“, attached below, and Davide Di Cillo presented his new Twitter social football service, Twootball:

Just why did Davide create Twootball? He says:

I was in an unfortunate bind: I am Italian and I love soccer. Of course, I wanted to create a Twitter application about soccer.

But then I realized that no one in Italy uses Twitter, and no one here watches soccer!

So I had to make a Twitter application about American football …

LOL!

The presentations were great and it was fun to catch up with everyone afterwards at Novecento’s.

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