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I’m really pleased to announce that Josh Bernoff is speaking. Josh is one of the most experienced and long serving analysts and co-author (with Charlene Li) of the book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. His session is entitled “Using Widgets to accomplish business goals”.

Josh has been at Forrester since 1995. Josh’s research, analysis, and opinions appear frequently in publications like The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Broadcasting & Cable, and on national television news programs. He writes a column for Marketing News, a publication of the American Marketing Association. Josh has keynoted major conferences on television, music, marketing, and technology in Barcelona, Cannes, Chicago, London, New York, Rome, and São Paulo.

Groundswell

Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and recutting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you in social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon — the groundswell — that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works. Most companies see it as a threat. You can see it as an opportunity. In Groundswell, two of Forrester Research’s top analysts show you how to turn the force of customers connecting to your own advantage. Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff show how leading companies are gaining insights, generating revenues, saving money, and energizing their own customers. Whether you’re in marketing, research, support, sales, development, or even running the whole enterprise, there’s targeted advice here for you, backed up with real-world ROI to prove it works. Groundswell is based on hard consumer data and experience with dozens of companies, large and small, from Procter & Gamble to Ernst & Young to a tiny but wildly successful winery in South Africa. Hoping to learn how to take advantage of communities, blogs, wikis, Facebook, or YouTube? We’ve got lots of examples with proof they work.

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David Armano is assembling his panel for the session Micro Interactions: Can portable experiences go mainstream

People, Places + Events

Our panel will discuss “micro interactions” from the perspective of
portable, distributed content and functionality. We’ll discuss
the potential or lack of for all this to go mainstream.

I’ll be speaking at Widget Web Expo and have assembled a fine panel of professionals including:

Brian Morrissey: Adweek

David Malouf: Motorola

Ian Schafer: CEO, Deep Focus

Steph Agresta: Internet Geek Girl

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Wikis, widgets, blogs, mashups and social networks - sounds like WidgetWebExpo

FORTUNE: Web 2.0 goes to work

Web 2.0 goes to work

By Michael Copeland

On the eve of the latest and largest Internet gathering this year, O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Conference and Expo, Forrester Research dropped a report that concludes that companies will spend $4.6 billion on Web2-related technologies by 2013. What that means for you, fellow office dweller, is that Forrester believes the world of wikis, widgets, blogs, mashups and social networks will increasingly find a way into your work life.

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It’s in the widgets - the web site as solid destination is dying widget by widget. Intel pushes it all along a bit with a Mash Maker, though I think we’re going to have to invent some new terminology for this soon. Effectively you are creating your own website out of parts on the fly - I think.

Intel Mash Maker: Mash-ups for the masses

Intel wants to make the whole Web editable, just like a single Wikipedia page.
The chip giant on Tuesday will make a beta available of Intel Mash Maker, a free browser extension that allows users to modify Web pages and combine information from different sources. Its first beta works with Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7, though at this point the features are far more mature in Firefox, Intel said.

What’s different is that the actual mashing up of information on Intel Mash Maker happens on the client, rather than the server. So instead of making a different Web application to, say, plot real estate listings on Google Maps, Intel Mash Maker lets people add a widget that adds visualization to the real estate listing site.

The idea is that people can create their own customization to Web pages, either by copying existing widgets or customizing widgets to different Web pages. A person who has a widget that displays leg room on Expedia flight results can modify it for another travel site, for example.

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Marc Canter, founder of Broadband Mechanics, opera singer and larger than life evangelist for the mesh, is on a roll. If you want some notion of how widgetized content fits into a larger context, Marc’s your man.

The value of open social networks for widgets
Everybody is in favour of open social networks where widgetized content can roam freely from one place to the next - but not everyone agrees on what the definition of open social networks is. This session will take a look at the myths and reality of social networks and ask what can be done now and what do we have to do next to achieve openness - if that is indeed a good idea.

Marc’s voice How to build the mesh - #3: Shared Structured Content Servers

OK - now that we’ve shipped a few networks and I’ve written up how one’s ID, Persona and Groups (#1) and persistent ubiquitous content (#2) are important domains in building out the mesh, I’d now like to focus on a domain which has been bubbling up for years and which will also play a key role in the mesh - shared structured content servers (#3). Call it micro-content, micro-formats, tagging, meta-data, semantic web, shared knowledge bases or what have you - the idea is that content comes along with extra ’stuff’ associated with it and that all that content and data is available on public, shared servers - where a community can contribute to it - and it’s overall value goes up.

Marc Canter is the CEO of Broadband Mechanics, purveyors of a white label social networking platform called PeopleAggregator. Marc started a company called MacroMind - which became Macromedia. That means Marc and his team created the world’s first multiple player (now called Flash), the world’s first multimedia authoring system (Director) and the first system where one could create a file once – and play it back on multiple platforms.

That was in the 80’s. Marc created Interactive Music Videos, Interactive TV Talk shows, scalable content and what’s now called Ajax in the 90’s.

PeopleAggregator outputs widgets and personifies all of the standards and principles of open social networking - eg. providing control to end-users to output and control their own user data. Marc will talk about how to “build the mesh” and how open standards and proprietary formats must live side by side. Marc blogs at marc.blogs.it

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I’m highlighting the great speakers we’ve got, starting with David Armano of Logic+Emotion who is putting together a panel for WidgetWebExpo. David Armano is VP of Experience Design with Critical Mass, a professional services firm with a sweet spot for creating outstanding experiences.

Micro Interactions: Can portable experiences go mainstream?
Whether we call them widgets, modules, desktop applications or something else, we are increasingly seeing more interactions happen that are distributed, portable and yes—small. From rich interactive banners, to do-it-yourself Web widgets—the internet is more fragmented than ever before. Thanks to search engines, we know that your home page is less relevant than it used to be. And advanced interactions in small places like Apple’s iPhone have shown us that meaningful interactions can happen in small, portable chunks. The question is—will this all go mainstream? Join our panel of experts as we discuss how micro interactions may or may not change our digital behavior.

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Rajil Kapoor, a VC at Mayfield Fund, he gets it. It’s always nice to read someone else writing your thoughts exactly. I’ve been banging on this theme for two years now, here’s my theory in Rajil’s words:

It’s All About the Database…

The web is evolving fast from a simple web page/website destination model to one of distributed data (which is synonymous with content) and applications that appear wherever the user needs them the most.

This may seem like a simple shift but the effects on the ecosystem are profound and new winners will be created.

Sure, you have to have a destination - but in many cases its becoming a showcase site vs where the real action is.

The extreme examples are widget businesses

Why is this happening? Very simply, because the user is pulling the web in this direction.

A website is really nothing more than data and applications on a page so it makes sense that a publisher puts some structure around these items, makes them discrete, and “atomizes”/redistributes it everywhere.

Get that last line. I’ve been pointing out for a while that a web site is little more than a bunch of widgets thrown together under the control of the publisher. Blow it all up, throw it to the winds and let the great unwashed public decide where the parts should logically land. Brilliant. But although Mayfield can feel chuffed to have investments in this space, we’re only now seeing the start of it. It’s such a massive paradigm shift that it will take ten years to play out. Today’s winners will probably be burned up in the supernova of distributed content we’ll see during that time as we refine our tools and learn to live with a web without our large reference websites.

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Gigya - Boost Widget Distribution and Get Real Time Tracking

DOUBLECLICK LAUNCHES WIDGET ADVERTISING THROUGH RICH MEDIA

Widget Ads Provide Media and Creative Agencies with Virality, Content Delivery and Consumer Behavior Metrics

New York, March 17, 2007 - DoubleClick Inc, a premier provider of digital marketing technology and services, today announced the support of widget advertising within the core DART for Advertisers (DFA) ad serving platform through the creation of the new Widget Ad rich media format. Widget Ads enable media and creative agencies to integrate a viral component into any campaign to allow consumers to “snag” or “grab” the ad onto their personal homepage or social network page. Widget Ads allow brands to move beyond strictly paid media and help them to build an ongoing interactive and engaging relationship with consumers.

Widget advertising is a growing trend, especially within social networks. According to eMarketer, 22 percent of marketers surveyed used widgets as a social media marketing application last year. They predict that this year, the number of marketers who plan to use widgets will double to 47 percent (Source: December 2007, “Social Network Marketing: Ad Spending and Usage).

“Widgets are part of a fundamental change within the online marketing arena,” said Ari Paparo, vice president of advertiser products for DoubleClick. “Widget Ads provide audiences with the ability for self-expression and identification with well-loved brands while providing marketers the benefits of virality and engagement along with the measurability of traditional online channels.”

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