This’ll be my last post from Silicon Valley for a while. I’ve been here for two full
weeks and I’ve had a fantastic time! I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mike Arrington for letting me stay at his house and
making me feel so welcome – thanks Mike! It’s been a hub of Web 2.0
activity in the house over the past two weeks. Fred
Oliveira‘s been here working on edgeio, the
product Mike and Keith Teare are building which
will be in beta mode very soon. And Gabe Rivera of memeorandum fame has been staying here too. We’ve
all had a great time and I consider them friends now. It’s also spawned an actual Web
product, the Web 2.0 Workgroup. Mike, Fred
and I came up with the idea while sitting on the TechCrunch sofa drinking diet cokes,
eating over-sized American pizza and watching The Daily Show (or something like that).
The idea went from concept to website to an expanding network of Web 2.0 blogs very
quickly, attracting such luminaries as Dave Winer
and John Furrier to join. The Web 2.0 Workgroup will
continue to grow organically, which is the beauty of it.
The Web 2.0 conference
was a real thrill for me. The words ‘energy’ and ‘enthusiasm’ are ones that I’ve been
associating with my experience of the conference. I’ve seen a lot of cynicism and even
criticism of the bubble-ish nature of the conference, but it’s difficult for me to
identify with that because my experience was overwhelmingly positive. Perhaps that only
proves I’m a conference newbie in Silicon Valley, but I’d like to hope I always maintain
my enthusiasm for the Web and its growth. It’s exciting when people are building so many
great products and services on the Web platform. I wanna be in the middle of that 🙂
I’ve met a lot of amazing people while I’ve been over here. Too many to list, but one
highlight was the spicy noodles
dinner with the father of RSS Dave Winer, the
Workgroup founding fathers, and father of News Readers 2.0 Gabe. It was also great to
meet the people I’ve been working for over the past months – Susan Mernit, Marc Canter, Dan
Farber, and others I’ve done projects for. I also met my book co-author Josh Porter and briefly met Tim O’Reilly. Plus I met people I’ll be working with in
future (or hoping to, in some cases). I met so many great people and I ran out of time to meet others. Apologies to
those people who I didn’t get to meet.
I’ll be back in Silicon Valley soon, with my family this time. I hope I can get a US
working visa, because this is the place where I belong. In the meantime, I’ll be back in
New Zealand pumping out the Web 2.0 posts on Web 2.0 Explorer and Read/WriteWeb.
