Don’t forget to head over to BarCamp Brisbane tomorrow. I will see you there. If you recognize me don’t forget to say hi!

Here are the details from the website for those of you who missed it:

• Who? Anyone who is interested in technology, the Internet and related topics. We have room for 200 people, so bring your colleagues.
• What? A good opportunity to share ideas and projects and to work with like-minded individuals.
• When? 10am-late on 24th November 2007
• Where? BarCampBrisbane will be held at East Brisbane Bowls Club (Mowbray Park, Lytton Road)
• Website? The BarCampBrisbane blog is located at: www.BarCampBrisbane.org. We’ll be posting updated information about the event there.

Signup and RSVP

Attendance is free. Please RSVP for our November 2007 event here so we can make sure there’s enough space. Everyone is encouraged to present, so when you RSVP, include what you might like to talk about.

• Join the facebook group
• Join the mailing list
• http://barcampbrisbane.org
• BarCampBrisbaneOrganisation page
• http://flickr.com/groups/362038@N21 - flickr group for photos

Mick Liubinskas pointed me to this interesting factoid today. The Two Billionth Flickr photo has been uploaded - and it was taken in Sydney.

While this isn’t exactly ground breaking start-up news, the fact is that Flickr is often cited as ‘the Web 2.0 app that started it all’. Sure there were others that came before - Google in particular had some very Web 2.0 approaches baked in - but Flickr really made things soar.

A combination of Tags, Participant Generated Content, Commenting, Management Blog, Ajax goodness, simple elegance and a Freemium business model all came together to give us a shining example of the future of web-based applications.

And then came the acquisition by Yahoo. It inspired a gold rush.

So I think it’s fitting to point out the 2 Billionth photo and take small pleasure that it was taken in Australia.

MixOnCampus is an academically focused extension of the Microsoft web-developer outreach events and it will be happening in Brisbane (20th Nov) Melbourne (26th Nov) and Sydney (30th Nov).

From the site:

The event is inspired by the sheer bulk of students and lecturers who miss out on industry events each year due to high costs, timing, lack of invitations or other factors. This always kinda irked me - why should universities, high schools and TAFEs miss out on the good stuff? Mix On Campus has been timed to happen just after exams finish in each state, so come along, chill out, forget the final few weeks of hellish study and get happy with like minded web design and web developer students from all around your city! Speakers will cover the latest web trends, web technologies and talk about career opportunities technology students can look forward to. You’ll be learning new skills, getting an insight into the tech tools of today and tomorrow and making new industry connections. We’ll also be giving out a bunch of prizes, and it’s also a great chance to come along and learn about the latest web tools from Microsoft. It doesn’t matter what institute you’re from (high school, uni and TAFE students & teachers included), you’re all welcome to join in the fun.

And best of all… I will be speaking at the Brisbane event along with my business partner Ashley Angell.

It’s great to see these sorts of events being held around the country. Hopefully it will encourage more university students to think about entrepreneurial pursuits.

Well done to those who have made it possible:

• MSOZACADEMIC
• University of Technology, Sydney
  
• Queensland University of Technology
  
• RMIT University School of Computing Science and Information Technology
  
• Microsoft  
• AIMIA

Check out the event homepage and be sure to register.

Note: This is a post based on my post on “Are you Paying Attention?“

Disclosure: I am the chair of the APML workgroup and, as such, have strong bias towards open formats, user control and transparent exchanges between vendors and participants.

Facebook have just announced their all new “Facebook Ads” System. The idea, is to further integrate ads into the news feed and enabling users to ‘endorse’ and therefore propagate brand messages. Users will also be able to subscribe to brand updates as ‘Fan-sumers’ (update: This term was apparently coined by Jeremiah Owyang from Forrester Research - not Facebook themselves).

Advertising as we know it is indeed dead. Word of mouth has always been more powerful than messages shouted from on-high. And now, with Media 2.0 reducing friction to zero and increasing visibility toward 100%, Word of mouth has never been stronger - or more important.

Your words now echo for all of time - and they get louder as they travel.

So moving towards a world where sites can enable brands to better facilitate and moderate the word of mouth network seems obvious. The problem, though, is with the fundamental thinking at these organizations.

For example, the name Fan-sumer is disgusting. FANatical ConSUMER? It’s far worse than User Generated Content! Sure it’s just a name, but it is a revealing insight into their line of thinking.

Word of mouth is not sanctioned, it just happens. Ultimately the best you can do is join in the conversation by listening, learning, asking questions and building fantastic products that people want to talk about.  Asking users to give away ‘free steak knives’ to their friends, however, only reduces every one’s credibility.

As usual, the underlying idea is interesting, but the execution is clearly focused on empower brands to infiltrate the conversation rather than helping participants control their experience. It’s almost a form of legitimized peer-to-peer spam.

As a true solution for social advertising it is not a write-off, but the execution needs a lot of tweaking to be truly about engagement and personalization with a true sense of trust based endorsements from your friends.

In what some see as the continued decline of the print industry, PC World Australia is due to shut down it’s operations in January 2008.

Many, including myself, see this as part of a larger trend of readers - particularly tech savvy readers to begin with - who prefer to get their news from more intimate, interactive and real-time sources such as blogs and popularity engines like Digg.

This has, for some time now, raised questions about traditional publishing and its place in the new media landscape where readers become participants, and participants demand more personal, self-expressive and immediate access to news.

Questions such as “How can traditional publishers compete?”, “How should traditional publishers change their place in the ecosystem to take advantage of the new landscape?”, “Is there real revenue to be generated from social media?” and so on.

These issues are tackled on a daily basis by Media 2.0 Workgroup member Scott Karp over on Publishing 2.0 (Disclosure: I am a founding member of the Media 2.0 Workgroup).

As an example, Scott’s latest blog post is titled “NYTimes.Com Aggregates Third-Party Content, Marks Transformation of Media“. This is a dramatic shift for the NY Times. They have gone from (primarily) creators of original content for print to aggregators of content online. Does their brand differentiate and insulate their aggregation play from other pure aggregation products?

Only time will tell…

Future Exploration Network is running an Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum in Sydney on 19 February 2008. The event website is at www.futureexploration.net/e2ef.

According to the announcement on Ross Dawson’s blog, the event will focus on the following areas:

• Clarifying the meaning of Enterprise 2.0.
• Showcasing relevant case studies.
• Addressing concerns.
• Identifying success factors.

Event details so far are as follows:

About Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum

Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum will provide a pragmatic overview of how Web 2.0 and social media technologies are being applied inside the enterprise to create business value. This unique half-day event will be centred on case studies of how leading Australian and global organisations have benefited from these technologies, and the key factors in successful implementation.

Enterprise 2.0 tools include:

• Blogs
• Wikis
• Online applications
• Social networks
• Podcasts and video
• RSS
• Tagging 
• Mashups
• Virtual worlds

The line-up of speakers and presenters is far from complete, but already includes:

• David Backley, Chief Technology Officer, Westpac Banking Corporation
• Ross Dawson, Chairman, Future Exploration Network 
• Joshua Gliddon, IT Editor, Australian Financial Review
• Brian Haverty, Editorial Director, CNET Australia
• Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School (by video)
• Sheryle Moon, Chief Executive Officer, Australian Information Industry Association 
• Euan Semple, Independent Advisor, Social computing for the business world (by video) 

The Future Exploration Network is taking the lead on holding these much needed conferences on cutting edge topics in Australia much like those you would expect to see in the Bay Area - I encourage you to check it out and attend if you can.

Photo by NickHodge

PodCamp Perth occured on the 27th and 28th of October and by all accounts there was a lot of geek fun to be had. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it, but here is a set of links and excerpts which will more than set the scene.

From Nick Hodge’s blog:

Apart from the personal name brands such as Cameron Reilly, Stilgherrian, Duncan Riley, Leslie Nassar, Bronwen Clune, Richard Giles, Myles Eftos, Gary Barber, Nick Cowie… the conversations and discussions made me think.

• What is a brand?
• Separating brand from name
• Being critical of your employer: is it OK.
• Transparency/honesty
• Geeks having a responsibility to use technology for good

Other places to read people’s feedback and thoughts:

• Matt Vapor’s Blog
• Luke Evans: the who’s who at Podcampsydney
• Tama Leaver on Podcasting in Education
• Simone set up a Flickr photo pool
• That funny tatooed geek Grum with his Grumblr Feed
• Wolfbyte.net, high on pain killers because there was an alien implant in his big toe.
• KerryJ from Neotenous Tech has many posts, and I have her on camera with her geek story
• Duncan Riley has some inciteful feedback, especially on unconferences. Time for more UN, less conference
• Stilgherrian’s first thoughts. I wonder what his crikey.com.au article is going to be about?
• Adam Purcell on PodCamp Perth. It’s partly his fault the Podcamp occurred.
• The Boomtown Rap from Ross.
• Paul from The Taste Blog

Nick also did a great set of six ‘Geek Stories’ interviews that you can watch on10.

Photos can be found on flickr.

It’s great to see more events like this in Australia, however as Duncan highlights in his coverage:

• Crowd was a different mix to perhaps what I expected, a lot of people in education, teachers, uni folk etc. Always interesting to get different view points.

• If Podcamp was suppose to be an unconference (which is what I was told) then it proves that Australian’s don’t understand unconferences. I purposely didn’t do a set speech, spoke for 5 minutes then tried to encourage audience discussion. Towards the end it started to work, with discussion amongst the audience with me just watching on. This was cool, but it was the only session I saw during the day that got close to this. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it’s just my expectations were different

• The guy from Apple didn’t have Leopard yet, or an iPhone.

We need to see more entrepreneurs at these events - people walking the walk. We also need to get used to participating rather than listening. And why is the Apple guy so poorly equipped?

Post your personal stories in the comments…

Gooruze is a new social network for professionals involved in Online Marketing.

With $41.6 billion being spent in online advertising in 2008, a place for online marketers to gather, learn best practices and share experiences is certainly an interesting opportunity.

Gooruze has all the social networking features you would expect. You can make friends, write blogs, rate content etc. The best and brightest appear on the front page.

It launches out of the gate with some heavy weight supporters - ‘Founding Gooruze’ - including my friends Duncan Riley and Brian Solis (Brian is a fellow member of the Media 2.0 workgroup).

More interesting to me, however, is that Gooruze is actually the latest is a growing list of vertical community sites powered by vibEngine and affiliated (in one way or another) with Vibe Capital. Vibe Capital is run by Huband and Wife team Rachel and Clay Cook who are prolific Australian entrepreneurs and investors. This particular venture is also co-founded by Matthew Macfarlane.

Their efforts behind the scenes have helped spawn high-profile Australian Web 2.0 companies such as Mig33, Tangler and of course their own Minti parenting community (also running on the vibEngine).

The approach of carefully building and supporting one vertical community at a time differs dramatically from vanillia platform plays like CollectiveX, Ning or KickApps where users are left to set up their own communities. It seems that Vibe Capital, through their vibEngine based communities is currently more of a content play.

In either case, however, their sort of big picture thinking and horizontal execution of vertical opportunities is the sort of ambition that I love to see, learn from and promote in the Australian community.

Clay and Rachel, along with the people they have gathered and cultivated around them, show by example how companies can start and live in Australia while successfully reaching out to the rest of the world.

Congratulations to everyone involved. If you are interested in Online Marketing then Gooruze is a great place to get started, or take your work to the next level.

Welcome to Blognation Australia.

My name is Chris Saad and I’ll be your host. To begin, I thought I would give an overview of Web 2.0/Tech activity down under and explain my approach to covering the local scene.

Some backstory…
Blognation Australia is dedicated to covering Australian start-ups with a global perspective.

I am a proud Australian, but I am also a global citizen – as we all are. I’d like to see my fellow Aussies play and succeed on a global scale. I believe we are more than capable of taking on the best and the brightest anywhere in the world to deliver unique and exciting products and companies.

With this in mind, I’m going to set a high bar when it comes to critical review of start-ups. I hope that the Australian community will rise to the occasion by thinking big and delivering ambitious projects. I look forward to helping to share the message with the world.

Tangler - Australian Web 2.0 Startup

People
Australia is full of bright, passionate people. People who understand how to mix business and pleasure. How to create products that people love and how to find creative solutions to day-to-day challenges.

Australian culture, however, is often a mixed bag when it comes to entrepreneurial spirit. Generally speaking, while many of us are ready to strike out and run our own companies, a number of social and practical problems sometimes limit the scope of our ventures.

• We typically think local (city, state or country). We don’t spend enough time thinking about local and world-wide trends to make sure we are not re-inventing the wheel.
• Many of us are not comfortable with self promotion or promoting our ideas.
• We usually prefer the cash and perks of a big company over building equity in our own companies.
• We are a little too concerned with holding onto our own little piece of the pie (because we think there is so little pie in Australia).
• We usually don’t fund our ventures to world-class standards.
• Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, our culture does not really encourage failure as an inevitable and useful stepping stone along the road to success.

While this might seem fairly pessimistic, my intention is to help define some of our challenges so we can overcome them together. I also want to highlight our strengths so we can learn to leverage them for great successes.

Strengths like…

• Common sense (something that seems all too uncommon these days)
• A great work ethic
• Smart, highly skilled programmers
• Creative designers with excellent taste
• Competitive cost of living
• Stable a political environment
• Strong economy
• Fantastic casual attitude - Aussies are just as happy powering through business challenges as we are playing cricket at a BBQ.

Another key trend occurring at the moment is the Web 2.0 gold rush to the US – the Bay Area in particular. Having spent time there myself I can tell you that the place is full of Australians.

I understand the impulse – I have it myself.

That being said, the good news is that the unique voice and perspective Australians bring to Silicon Valley is seeing them placed in great positions of influence and power. For example, Duncan Riley is one of the key writers over on Techcrunch, Josh Catone writes for Read/Write web, Frank Arrigo runs the world-wide evangelism team for Microsoft.

ThePodcastNetwork - Australian Web 2.0 Startup

Companies
There is no shortage of Australian companies large or small with their eye on the latest generation of Web-based opportunities. A great place to start is the Top 60 list by Australian thought leader Ross Dawson of the Future Exploration Network. There is a post about it on Read/Write Web. There is also a direct link to the list.

I look forward to bringing you news from all these great companies, as well as companies you have not heard of yet. The bigger and more ambitious the project the better. I want to see Australians thinking beyond Hotel Reservation Systems and Content Management Systems and look to enabling truly unique social interactions.

I also look forward to hearing more about start-ups working together to complement each other’s strengths and weaknesses and more enterprises supporting start-ups.

Capital
Local capital is a problem in Australia. There is plenty of it going around, but most local Angels and VCs do not typically understand the web. They prefer to bet on traditional or tangible industries rather than try to understand the ethereal nature and value of eyeballs, Attention and Intention.

I have literally heard investors saying ‘We can’t find the right teams/companies to invest in’ and I have heard Founders say ‘We can’t find investors willing to give us the right deals’.

Through the commentary on this blog I hope to help more VCs and Founders get together. VCs will need to understand that Founders need world-class funding to achieve world-class results. Founders will need to understand to accept slightly lower valuations than their US counterparts. Everyone needs to think bigger.

Investors also need to be more creative - thinking of new, nimble and accelerated models for helping start-ups start, develop and commercialize their ventures with a global focus.

I look forward to hearing from investors who are actually making deals in the space and I want to hear from founders who have found great partners.

Minti.com - Australian Web 2.0 Startup

Politics
We live in a great country that boasts a stable economy, super low unemployment rate, great social services and a fairly moderate political climate. This frees people to take risks in their personal lives and strike out to try new things.

There are, however, infrastructure and small-business support glitches that can be improved with time.

We need faster, cheaper bandwidth and hosting. Governments also need to better understand the start-up scene. Grants and Incubators are not necessarily the answer. Better bandwidth, better facilitation and faster results are key.

Leadership/Community
The community is starting to heat up in Sydney and Melbourne thanks to the Tangler, Atlassian, ThePodcastNetwork and some specific Microsoft people. Twitter is also filled with Aussies. I congratulate them all. Perth is also kicking off a PodCamp event. Brisbane has recently had a few blogging conferences and a few networking events focused on Investors.

I look forward to seeing the activity increase dramatically and helping to promote the events before they happen and covering the excitement with photos and videos from the community after the fact.

Conclusion
While I think we have plenty of challenges, the Aussie spirit to face challenges head on means we end up with stronger companies ready to take advantage of the opportunities of the global marketplace.

I look forward to hearing from the community and promoting the projects and companies coming out of Australia to the rest of the world.