March 28, 2006

Just back in from my family's epic road trip to DisneyWorld. 4,600 KM round trip with three kids in the back of a minivan - through 13 states and countless gas stations/coffee stops. Nice to be home.

Now trying to get back on top of email and prepare for my panel session this coming Friday.  I'm moderating a morning session at the iSummit 2006 event here in Toronto, and really looking forward to this one.

The conference is completely sold out, and the line up of speakers and panellists is really impressive. The organizers have done a terrific job pulling together an agenda that includes senior execs from all of Canada's major media companies, and many US players too - Bell, Alliance Atlantis, Corus, CHUM TV, Rogers, AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Warner Music, Nelvana, and many others.  Plus I'm excited to see participants from the new media universe - with people from Creative Commons, OurMedia, Organic, Bryght, PubSub - and representatives from two of my essential daily online destinations: Pandora and Rocketboom.

My own panel session is titled: "Web 2.oh! A web renaissance?" - which promises to be a great and timely topic to get our collective teeth into.

Jason Roks, one of the event producers, sent me a link to some terrific advice from Guy Kawasaki on "How to be a great moderator". I really like his first point about not over-preparing the panellists. I had spent some time pulling together a list of juicy questions that I was thinking of sending out to my group in advance, but after reading Guy's piece I've opted not to. Hoping to get much more spontaneous flow out of the panellists this way.

I'm hoping to tap the brains of both the smart people on my panel and the audience to get a read on how much value people are seeing in Web 2.0 stuff right now. There's still a great deal of sizzle around the whole idea of Web 2.0, but what does it all mean to the average business (and to Marqui customers, in particular)?

How much of the Web 2.0 stuff is just hype, how much of it is of real worth? Where’s the ROI in rounded corners? Is Newsweek’s take on “The New Wisdom of the Web” valid and appropriate? Are we really talking revolution here, or is it more an evolution (and one that's been going on way longer than the iceberg tip of media coverage would seem to indicate)?

Now that the "Live Web" is letting us (finally!) do all the stuff we’ve always wanted to do, what kinds of stuff should we/will we choose to do? And what problems still exist for us to tackle - what holes still remain to be plugged as we settle our Brave New World?

Lots and lots of ground we could cover in this one. I'll report back after the show and let you know where we wind up.

Posted by at March 28, 2006

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