Geek Gestalt

Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, gave his unique view on Web 2.0 and other issues at the Web 2.0 Expo Friday morning.

(Credit: Corinne Schulze/CNET News.com)

SAN FRANCISCO--If there's one person in the world of Web 2.0 technology--or tech in general--who hasn't yet been skewered by the infamous blogger Fake Steve Jobs, get ready: He's coming for you.

In a frenetic keynote address Friday morning at the Web 2.0 Expo here, Fake Steve--otherwise known as Forbes writer Dan Lyons--gave his unique take on the world of technology, the people who drive it, and the future of media.

Fake Steve began his talk with a discussion about the issues related to surviving backlash from audience members at conferences. I was rather pleased to see that as his prop, he used an article I'd written earlier this month on the subject.

Of course, as is his style, he lampooned the concepts in the story. He pointed out that in some ways, the article had focused on Web 2.0 Expo and so he said that based on the story, he had been fearing getting in front of 5,000 angry audience members ready to jump him if they didn't like what he had to say.

"I just want to apologize in advance for the next 25 minutes, for the 25 minutes you're never going to get back," Fake Steve/Lyons said. "Please don't Twitter attack me."

He also teased Social Media Club club founder Chris Heuer for comments he made to me for that story.

"Time is our most valuable asset, and if it's being wasted, we're not going to take it," Heuer had told me. "We want our time to be well-invested."

To Fake Steve, that comment was well worth a bit of his wit.

"If you're the founder of something called the Social Media club, you've got a lot of balls talking to me about wasting my time," said Fake Steve, adding that as he understood it, the club was for people to talk about what's being talked about on Facebook.

"It's like Webkinz for adults," Fake Steve said of Facebook. "It's the biggest waste of time ever invented."

He proceeded to explain how, over the course of the time that he's been writing his Fake Steve Jobs blog, he has pretty much killed his reputation with some of his antics. The point? That it doesn't really matter what people think of him or what he says.

"I have no reputation," he said.

Some examples of those antics: His portrayal of Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak as a baboon, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison as a pimp, Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz as a My Little Pony doll--"I did that before I knew he was (speaking at Web 2.0 directly) before me"--Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer as Uncle Fester and, perhaps best of all, his take on Microsoft's shipping of Vista, which he had portrayed on the blog with a picture of an elephant defecating and the headline, "Vista drops tomorrow."

"So," he continued, "Oh God, I hope no one impugns my reputation. I'll never get that job at BusinessWeek."

He then continued with a history of how he came to start his blog. He explained that as he saw traditional media organizations getting their lunch eaten by bloggers, he wanted somehow to join the new generation of media players.

So he said that he asked Forbes.com, the Web venue of his employer, Forbes magazine, if he could start a blog. They said no, he reported.

Instead, he began his own blog, and began--with impersonating Steve Jobs as if he was really saying what he felt instead of being little more than a PR voice like many corporate bloggers--being Fake Steve Jobs.

Right away, he said, he attracted a large audience--90,000 unique monthly viewers after six months--and a worldwide manhunt to figure out who he was.

The best part of that, he said, was when Forbes' editor put out a bounty to uncover his identity.

Even better, Fake Steve said, was when he wrote to the editor offering to write the blog for Forbes.com.

"He wrote back, 'Oh, Fake Steve, you're a genius, we'd love to hire you,'" he said.

So, rather than carry on the subterfuge, he told Forbes that he was, in fact, Fake Steve Jobs, and thus began his official relationship as Fake Steve with his own employer.

Ultimately, though, he said that the best part of the experience of writing the blog has been that it has created what he called a "platform" for others to come and "perform" via the comments section.

He said there is one commenter, known as Fake Vladimir Putin, who appears nowhere else but in the Fake Steve Jobs blog comments section.

And that, he seemed to say, is really the essence of Web 2.0.

At least, it seemed to be. With Fake Steve Jobs, the snark level always makes it a little difficult to tell what the real message is.

O'Reilly Media's Tim O'Reilly said he had his phone on the wrong Twitter setting to receive audience Twitter questions during his Web 2.0 Expo keynote interview with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

(Credit: Twitter)

Update: This story now reflects Tim O'Reilly's mea culpa for not asking audience questions sent in via Twitter.

SAN FRANCISCO--After all the hooplah over interactivity--or lack thereof--during keynote speeches at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in March, I've been thinking a lot about how conferences can incorporate the backchannel.

That's why I was pleasantly surprised to see Tim O'Reilly, who runs O'Reilly Media, which is the co-organizer of the Web 2.0 Expo here, invite the audience for his keynote conversation with Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz to Twitter him questions to ask Schwartz.

He pointed out that the dynamic of the room didn't allow for audience members to stand at microphones to ask questions, so instead, he said, people could send him questions via his Twitter account (@timoreilly), which he would then be able to check on his mobile phone.

This can be a nice way to bring in the audience and it can showcase the ways that audience members can now interact with the people onstage at conferences and symposiums.

As I wrote in my earlier story, it is becoming increasingly clear that audiences want to be able to have a say in what is being discussed onstage, and technologies like Twitter, Meebo, instant message, and others make it more likely that not only will those in the audience be able to talk silently among themselves, but also to communicate with the speakers.

O'Reilly Media's Tim O'Reilly encouraged the audience at his keynote interview with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz to Twitter him questions, but didn't follow up by asking any of them.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

But, sadly, O'Reilly never actually checked his phone to see if there were any Twittered questions from the audience--either those in the room or those following from outside--and therefore wasted this golden opportunity to bring the backchannel into the conversation.

There's nothing wrong, per se, with not incorporating the backchannel in such a keynote address, of course. At Web 2.0 Expo, the keynote addresses are shorter than at many conferences, and so I can easily see why keeping the discussion solely between those onstage makes perfect sense. And in fairness to him, there were really only a few minutes left in the time for the talk when he posed the opportunity.

But it still felt like a little bit of a slap in the face for O'Reilly to offer the audience the ability to Twitter questions and then not follow through.

Afterwards, I Twittered O'Reilly to ask him why he hadn't asked any of the questions I'm sure he must have gotten. He hasn't responded yet. But if I hear from him, I'll update this blog.

At just before 3 pm pacific Friday, O'Reilly Twittered publicly that he had accidentally had his cell phone set to the wrong Twitter setting and that it was only showing replies from Twitter users he was actively following.

It's good of him to address the issue and explain why he didn't follow through on his offer to the audience.

Flickr's The Commons project is an example of how the site's users can bring useful context to information from a single source, in this case the Library of Congress.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

SAN FRANCISCO--In return for the huge amount of work Flickr users do to tag photos on the popular photo-sharing site, they should get the benefit of the algorithms the service uses to bring meaning to the data.

That's how at least some at Flickr feel, according to Kakul Srivastava, the service's director of product management said in her talk, "The next generation of tagging: Searching and discovering a better user experience," at the Web 2.0 Expo here Thursday.

The idea behind that theory is that as Flickr users proactively add tags to countless millions of photos stored on the site, the service is able to draw some very specific conclusions about the behavior of those users and the things that are happening around them.

This graph shows how, over time, Flickr users have continued to add a tremendous number of tags to the photos on the service, a rate that continues to grow.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

And no wonder: The sheer amount of tags users have added over the four years the service has been operating is breathtaking: according to Srivastava, if you took the average text size of all the tags added to Flickr photos and laid them out, it would line the floors of 14 Wal-Marts.

"It's an incredible amount of content to parse, to reveal, and to take the meaning of," Srivastava said.

Unfortunately, I would have to say that the talk didn't deliver on its title: Srivastava didn't share anything particularly new with the audience, discussing mainly things that were probably already well-understood by most in the room.

Still, it was an interesting presentation, particularly because Srivastava talked about some of the ways that Flickr has evolved over the years, and what it's possible to learn based on how it's grown.

One of the most notable changes has been what she termed the increasing sophistication in the way Flickr users tag photos.

At first, she suggested, people were mainly tagging photos to add context about themselves. Then, gradually, they added context about other people, and then found ways to express shared experiences through their tags.

The best example of that--though more complex than what most people get involved in--is Flickr's The Commons project.

Within the first hour after the Library of Congress photos went up, Flickr users had added 150 tags to them. Within 24 hours, users added 11,000 tags.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

This is a project that launched in January with the U.S. Library of Congress as a pilot partner. The idea was that the Library of Congress provided a large collection of archival photos for the Flickr community to add tags to for additional context.

The reach of the Flickr community was immediately obvious, she suggested. The project launched with no tags, and within an hour, users had added 150 tags. Within three hours, the number was 767 and by the end of 24 hours, fully 11,000 tags.

Beyond that, Flickr users were able to add all kinds of contextual comments to the photos. Srivastava pointed to one such photo, a picture of a stream of dock workers leaving work at the end of the day, which had several user comments appended to it.

One of them was quite striking. The user noticed that all the African Americans in the photo were on one side of the stream, while the whites were on the other.

"Looks like 'quittin' time' was a segregated as the rest of life," the user commented.

Where the Flickr user community's participation in The Commons project is useful is in bringing personal context to images that previously had none.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News.com)

For Srivastava, that kind of comment is deeply important because it adds significant cultural meaning to a photo that otherwise was just another in a large collection.

Another notable emergent behavior on Flickr, she said, is the ability to determine when some sort of newsworthy event is going on, simply because of the use of a tag.

For example, she pointed out that traditionally, "Popemobile" wasn't a very common tag. But all of a sudden, she said, it was being used by a lot of people in the Washington, D.C., area, and by virtue of that, it was possible to see that something was going on around the Pope's recent visit to the United States.

In the end, Srivastava's talk didn't break new ground, but it did illustrate the ways that Flickr sees its users explaining the world around them through the use of tags. The concept itself may not be news, but tying it together and thinking about the many ways tagging on a site as popular as Flickr adds meaning is a worthy exercise.