I spent the day at the Defrag conference today. There was a bunch of interesting content and Eric Norlin and crew did a great job recruiting top minds to the event.
I was sitting next to Ross Mayfield (Founder, President of SocialText) as he blogged the the first two sessions in great detail. First up was Dave Weinberger (Cluetrain Manifesto) who talked about the Implicit Web (Ross’s coverage), followed by a panel on Social Intelligence (Ross’s coverage) led by Jerry Michalski and including Joshua Schacter (Del.icio.us), JP Rangaswami (BT), and JB Holston (Newsgator).
We then had break out sessions, and I joined the one Seth Levine led on the subject of platforms. Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoo) and a dozen others had some great thoughts on Andreessen’s three types of platforms and the group agreed on one sure sign that a startup is clueless.
Meanwhile, Brad Feld (who was “blown away“) led a huge discussion of about 50 people about OpenSocial. This came just moments after conspiring with Alex Iskold (Adaptive Blue) to launch their ClosedPrivate counter-strike. I didn’t get to listen in but could hear the raucous laughter that emits from many a Feld meeting.
The afternoon was really awesome, with great talks by Alex Iskold, Dick Hardt (Sxip Identity, one of the most engaging presenters you’ll ever see), Doc Searles (Cluetrain Manifesto, Linux Journal), and Ross Mayfield (SocialText). I really wanted to see Peter Semmelhack of Bug Labs (open source hardware – although I couldn’t quite figure out what this had to do with Defrag/Implict web), but couldn’t be in two places at once.
Dan Farber has excellent detailed coverage of the day as well on ZDNet.
I’ll round up day two tomorrow.
