Webvisions 2007

I spent Thursday and Friday of last week up north in Portland attending and speaking at the annual Webvisions conference. Webvisions is a regional conference now in its seventh year that promises to provide "a glimpse into the future, along with practical information that you can apply to your Web site, company and career."

Photo courtesy of Patrick Haney

The last conference I attended was SXSW and it is now clear to me that SXSW is its own, special thing that cannot be contained by the mere term "conference." Webvisions does not exist on nearly the same scale, but that has its advantages. The accessibility of the speakers and general easy nature of the organizers made Webvisions very enjoyable. Many of the speakers were first-timers or relatively new to public speaking, which was good because the topics were different than those currently floating around the blogosphere and regurgitating in the larger conferences. My talk was focused on potential sources of inspiration for how we might model and architect our social networks moving forward. I was primarily looking at the field of ubiquitous computing and biological forms of organization to see if I could tease out some ideas for more adaptive, less bounded social networks. There are two things I would like to address from my talk:

1. The word nemesis was mispelled in one of the slides. This slide was borrowed directly from Jeff Veen (through creative commons and his direct permission) so I will gracefully duck that punch and send it his way.
2. During my discussion of entomology, I kept referring to a Queen Bee. This is, of course, ridiculous. I meant Queen Ant and I appreciate your understanding.

Thank you Brad Smith of Hot Pepper Studios for throwing the event and Nick Finck of Blue Flavor and Digital Web for reaching out to me and inviting me to submit a proposal to speak at the event. Thank you also to all those who attended my session or grabbed me in the hallway afterwards. I spoke with Brad and he indicated that producing the podcasts may take some time so we're going to have to be patient. In the meantime, I have embedded my slides here or you can download a PDF of the presentation .