Widgety Goodness ‘07
By Ian Ozsvald • Dec 8th, 2007 • Category: EventsOn Thursday I attended Ivan’s Widgety Goodness 07 conference - the first web-widgets conference for Brighton.
Caveat - I’m not really the target audience for the conference. I’m a developer and entrepreneur, I’m not a widgeter, I don’t need ‘widget provision services’. I was curious about the content so went to check things out.
On the plus side there were two really interesting talks from Colm O’Connor of Joost and Khris Loux of js-kit.
On the downside there were six pitches (about 1/3 of the talks) from companies selling their widget distribution networks+services. There was nothing for me here and they didn’t try to educate. Worried that I was the only bored geek in the room I asked around - it seems I wasn’t alone.
Colm’s demo of writing a widget which you can interact with whilst watching their ‘tv’ service was neat. I’ve been waiting to see someone integrate wikipedia with the TV experience for a long time - bonus points for these chaps.
Khris was the odd one out in the crowd - he had a nice ‘widget’ toolkit which doesn’t seem to depend on selling advertising space (pretty much everyone else seemed to sell advertising via widgets).
js-kit work on several tools - the one I loved aims to preserve the integrity of a conversation - a company using their kit can filter which comments are shown on their blog but they can’t entirely delete them - the originals are still available to a curious user. This is right out of the Cluetrain Manifesto and it made the conference for me.
The fact that JetBlue and HBO are using this in their websites makes it even more exciting - evidence that some corporates ‘get’ the idea of an honest conversation is heady stuff.
Ivan catered the event well and the after-party had plenty of wine. I met a variety of interesting people near the coffee - some of the speakers and others from corporates and start-ups. The mix of jeans and suits is one of the reasons I just love working down here.
There are some other reviews here and here.
Next year I’ll hope for more education and less pitching - aside from that kudos to Ivan, Emmeline and team for pulling it all together.
Ian Ozsvald is Co-founder of ShowMeDo.com, £5 App monthly meets, OpenCoffeeSussex fortnightly-meets, general pusher of the idea: Brighton-is-great-and-everyone-in-tech-should-work-here.
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Hi Ian, I’ve been thinking about this lots because it really matters to me as a member of the digital brighton community, a sponsor of Widgety Goodness, a friend of the organisers, and one of the speakers too. And because there seems to be a polarised reaction. There’s been loads of positive feedback too. So it’s got me thinking ‘why?’.
From what I’ve read and found the people feeling disappointed, who feel they were over-pitched and under-educated, seem to be developers. From that worldview, these are people that know what widgets are, and what the nitty gritty in the ‘how’, not the ‘why’. Monetization, especially in the bad old web 1.0 ways, isn’t interesting or exciting. I can understand all of that.
As the event matures, maybe next year Ivan and team can consider a tracked approach, like at Future of Web Apps for example, where you have the developers track and the ‘marketing’ track. I think this would address the difference (although there are overlaps for sure - like you, developers and entrepreneurs can be the same, but some attempt to delineate) in interests. What do you think?
Also, can I encourage you to say which you thought were the six pitches?
Sorry we didn’t get time to talk on the day, perhaps we can grab another coffee some time in the new year.
Hey Will, cheers for pitching in.
First off - you’re not one of the ’six pitches’ though I can’t say who the others were (I’ve thrown my notes away). I had actually planned to edit my post before publicising it to say that I liked your whooping-up of the local scene, but that’s a bit late now (my bad!).
Feedback for you - you did a great Whoop-Up, you used humour, you told us how you work and what you like doing - that’s cool by me. I didn’t get much education from your talk but you didn’t try to ram a sales pitch down my throat, overall I thought you did a good job - more talks like yours would be fine. Friendly+useful companies are good to know about to ping to other people.
The other six varied - the 2nd speaker spoke at times like he was going to put up a rate card and flick business cards into the audience…this was a real turn-off for me and his talk followed the video-welcome which was a flat way to start the morning
I can imagine any geek paying for a ticket and then being given sales talks feeling short-changed. Other geeks said the same - it is the lack of *useful* education that was the killer for me - lots of up-pointy Graphs of Success don’t teach me anything, I want to learn useful skills.
The blog write-ups I linked to above were each positive, as you suggest it seems they were written by non-geeks and they got good information from the conference.
‘Monetization’ is exciting and interesting! It is something I think about all the time as I grow ShowMeDo. I wanted interesting and novel ideas…I got 6 talks on ‘we build widgets and we stick advertising in them’. Not exciting and not interesting! Reminds me of…banner ads and flashing Flash monkey-punch ads.
Having said all of this - I really didn’t want to be down on the conference - Ivan+team did a great job of bringing a whole new conference to Brighton. I’m darn impressed that they made it work and had such a large turn-out with such a large set of speakers (even if I didn’t like them all).
Maybe a tracked approach is the right way to go - I’d certainly be keen to get educated, not sold-to, at future events.
Re. coffee - I’m always good for coffee, it would be good to play with ideas for building the scene down here
Ian.
OK, I do totally get what you’re saying. Thanks for responding. I’ll mail you re: cawfee.