Rule #15, “Aspire to be the dumbest person in the room”

Just completed 2 days of amazing sessions at WebContent 2007 - where my “Blogzilla” presentation was well received.

Made some amazing connections: Jason Fried at 37signals, Zaga Novakovic from centiv, the wonderful people at duo consulting who put the whole show on, Calvin Hendryx-Parker of Six Feet Up, and Salim Ismail who just joined Yahoo as the “head of Brickhouse” (which is the new product dev center).

There were many others- and some great sessions- of which I hope to share more on later. Taxonomy vs. Folksonomy by Seth Early of Earley & Associates- was a fascinating look at how we categorize and organize information in the web 2.0 world.

Howard Tullman of Experiencia gave a great pep talk on change management in Internet time.

There was also more mentions of RSS, RDF, CMS, CSS, SEO, than I’ve heard in a long time.

When I do a mash-up of this conference with the 2007 AAF conference in my head- it all points to one thing: We’re headed for a new model of marketing built upon some kind of profile/open-id system that will allow us to opt-in for targeted marketing in exchange to discounted/subsidized content.

My personal highlight from the event, was being asked to re-run the Blogzilla intro as a warm up act for Salim’s first presentation when he was running late. Apparently, my presentation was one of the fun ones. As soon as I obtain permission for the mashup content in the video- I’ll post it live to share.

There will be more analysis and interesting information coming- but for now, all I can say is- I’ve never seen so many people at a conference say they would definitely return next year. Hopefully, I’ll be there too.