Tech Crunch reports that iGoogle has been the fastest growing app in the Google family:

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I am just about to renew my first year’s subscription to the Adobe Connect web conferencing platform. Adobe Connect is a competitor to Web Ex built on Flash, which is already installed in 97% of browsers. I’ve been using the platform for a year now and find it to be a very cost effective way to do web presentations and training. I have the plan aimed at small business which costs $500 per year. For my renewal, Adobe has upped the number of people I can host in a conference from 15 to 150. I have Adobe Connect linked to a discounted audio conferencing system from Premier Conferencing. It is very simple to schedule a meeting on the platform. All I need to so is fill in a form and the system generates an email to the participants with the log in and call in information.

The platform is elegant and simple to use. It has modules that allow you to capture video from your camera so you can bee seen by a group; I can share any application on my mac; chat with participants; so simple polls.

I use Adobe Connect a couple of times a month to do presentations and demos and people on other end really seem to like it. It has been a great investment for me.

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatconnectpro/productinfo/features/

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Tim O’Reilly is always interesting and so insightful. I have written up some notes from an interview that he did at web 2.0 in Germany:

http://uk.intruders.tv/Web-2-0-Expo-Berlin-Fireside-chat-with-Tim-O-Reilly_a242.html
In this interview and in recent posts about the social graph, Tim O’Reilly really clarifies what is at the heart of successful web 2.0 applications:

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/11/opensocial_social_mashups.html
#It’s the data, stupid. (Formerly “Data is the Intel Inside”)

This means applications that can use data from multiple social networks.

# Small pieces loosely joined

This means aggregating relevant data from its source rather than requiring the data to be moved from one application to another.

I agree with Tim that these are the two key principles of any successful web application and they are at the heart of our new web app for conferences: Swift.

Here are my notes:
“The best 2.0 companies are collecting really assets in data: flickr, del.icio.us, and cddb. Find new areas where there is unexploited data. Facebook tapped into building the social graph as a new domain asset.

Once you have a really large data set, people are not going to want to start over. That is where you have your advantages.

The point is to put me the user back at the center: I don’t want to see their tweets; I want to see their photos and with somebody else I want to see where they are right now.

We have all of these great datasources and they are not interoperable yet.

What is really has the potential to change things is when somebody says you are in charge of your data and you are able to delegate and say my family tree is at genie.com; my books are at amazon; and use that data please.

I’m excited about the new user interface metaphors in the iPhone.

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Here is my list in no particular order:

The Joni Letters” by Herbie Hancock
“It’s Not Big It’s Large” by Lyle Lovett And His Large Band
“Raising Sand” by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss (this is my favorite album of this year)
“The Reminder” by Feist
“Hope & Glory” by Ann Wilson
“Magic” by Bruce Springsteen
“Dylanesque” by Bryan Ferry
“Revival” by John Fogerty
“Up Front & Down Low” by Teddy Thompson
“Love” by The Beatles

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Here is my take on the NYTimes Top Ten list this year:

MAN GONE DOWN
By Michael Thomas. Black Cat/Grove/Atlantic, paper, $14. This first novel explores the fragmented personal histories behind four desperate days in a black writer’s life.

OUT STEALING HORSES
By Per Petterson. Translated by Anne Born. Graywolf Press, $22. In this short yet spacious Norwegian novel, an Oslo professional hopes to cure his loneliness with a plunge into solitude.

I have a new friend and neighbor who is Norwegian so this has been on my request list.

THE SAVAGE DETECTIVES
By Roberto Bolaño. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27. A craftily autobiographical novel about a band of literary guerrillas.

This book has been sitting on the bedside table for some time. I’ve just started to read it and I am already deeply engrossed.

THEN WE CAME TO THE END
By Joshua Ferris. Little, Brown & Company, $23.99. Layoff notices fly in Ferris’s acidly funny first novel, set in a white-collar office in the wake of the dot-com debacle.

This novel was one of my favorite books of 2007. It is an incredibly funny satire of office life. A must, must read.

TREE OF SMOKE
By Denis Johnson. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $27. The author of “Jesus’ Son” offers a soulful novel about the travails of a large cast of characters during the Vietnam War.

I did work my way through this and found it to be beautifully written. Now I’m reading the critics who really found it wanting and am having second thoughts.

Nonfiction

IMPERIAL LIFE IN THE EMERALD CITY: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone.
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95; Vintage, paper, $14.95. The author, a Washington Post journalist, catalogs the arrogance and ineptitude that marked America’s governance of Iraq.

This book was recommended to me by several trusted reader friends. I’ve read many of the Iraq books and will read this as well.

LITTLE HEATHENS: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression.
By Mildred Armstrong Kalish. Bantam Books, $22. Kalish’s soaring love for her childhood memories saturates this memoir, which coaxes the reader into joy, wonder and even envy.

THE NINE: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court.
By Jeffrey Toobin. Doubleday, $27.95. An erudite outsider’s account of the cloistered court’s inner workings.

Jeffrey Toobin’s book is a surprising page-turner. I plowed through it. It is absolutely critical reading if you want to understand how the Supreme Court works and influences/mirrors social policy and culture.

THE ORDEAL OF ELIZABETH MARSH: A Woman in World History.
By Linda Colley. Pantheon Books, $27.50. Colley tracks the “compulsively itinerant” Marsh across the 18th century and several continents.

THE REST IS NOISE: Listening to the Twentieth Century.
By Alex Ross. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30. In his own feat of orchestration, The New Yorker’s music critic presents a history of the last century as refracted through its classical music.

I have become newly interested in 20th century music through my subscription to the BSO. I find myself enjoying the new pieces as much or more than the earlier works. This is definitely on my book list to read soon.

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I gave a talk to Sun’s marketing group yesterday on lead generation with web 2.0. Here is the gist of it:

In the web 2.0 world where applications are built around individuals, marketing is done one-to-one as people share information with one another or find it through aggregators, referrals, and search. Groups are out. Email blasts are out. Traditional direct marketing is out. Web 2.0 social tools are organized around individuals and what Stowe Boyd calls their “networked self-expression.”

With the publishing tools in blogs, podcasting, and Facebook, you don’t need to belong to groups to share.

So how then do you reach and influence people?

You must tap their existing networks by creating information they need and want to share. Find the influencers and hubs and integrate into their networks.

For the presentation, I shared a couple of screen shots of Swift for Facebook, our application that enables sharing of information and intention at conferences and events. With Swift for Facebook, you are able to share events you are attending and your intentions for them. When you add an event or update your status in Swift, a notification is sent to your Facebook mini-feed. You can share your events and conferences with your friends and with other attending a conference.

(We’ll be previewing Swift for Facebook later this week so if you want to be on our list of early testers, please email me kathleenceo at gmail.com.)

Through the peer to peer network around an event, a new network of highly qualified people is convened.

Podcasting can be another means to generate leads with web 2.0 technology. We have had great success with building a highly qualified audience for our Negotiating Tip of the Week podcast series. To date, we have had over 1.2 million downloads are we are now averaging about 3,000 downloads a day.

Now that we have built this base, we are doing dynamic ad insertion to promote a newsletter for the Harvard Program on Negotiation. You can listen to the ad by Bill Ury by going to Negotiating Tip of the Week on iTunes and sampling any one of the podcasts. The ad is dynamically inserted into the podcast without any manipulation of the underlying MP3 file. With podcasting you can very efficiently create high quality media to serve niche audiences. And with ad insertion you can build specific calls to action within that media.

The next phase of the Swift platform will bring podcasting and Facebook networking together. With Swift you can record your meetings in digital media, publish them to Swift as podcasts, dynamically insert messages into them and use Facebook to network around this media.

I closed with a short discussion of blogging and lead generation. Blogging is another way to build a niche audience that can be tapped for leads. I am also an advocate of creating thought leadership blogs with multiple authors on expert topics. This has been done very successfully by Francois Gossieaux and Hylton Joliffe for the Fast Forward Blog. Francois and Hylton assembled a really smart group of bloggers writing on the topics of enterprise search and new enterprise technologies. Bloggers cross published in the Fast Forward blog and on their own blogs. (See this post from Bill Ives as an example.)

Web 2.0 tools have the promise to greatly reduce the cost of B2B business development. At yesterday’s meeting at Sun about half of the group had Facebook pages and many were on Linked In. We will certainly see more and more tools that serve this function in the coming year.

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