the reflexions insider

Now that the Web 2.0 Expo is over I’ve begrudgingly returned to the east coast. For a New Yorker in the web development business, the bay area is like a mythical forbidden city where technology people are a kind of ruling elite. There’s no doubt that New York is a hotbed of web innovation, but web companies are still small potatoes compared to the other industries that call New York home: finance, fashion, art, music, publishing (and you thought Rodney Dangerfield had a hard time getting respect).

Coming from New York the energy around the valley is palpable. The cities themselves are woven into the history and culture of this industry. Names like Cupertino and Mountain View conjure up glowing corporate logos. And then there are the legendary hotspots like San Jose, Palo Alto, San Mateo.

At the Web 2.0 Expo you could almost sense the 6- and 7-figure deals taking shape in the bustling corridors of the Moscone Center. The San Francisco Chronicle had a special column dedicated to the event in the Business section. Web engineers, social media gurus, user experience consultants, web 2.0 designers. All there. And all using this new, amorphous language that seems to spout from Tim O’Reilly like beat poetry.

Just a few of the terms that [...]

Image by wwphotos via Flickr

Tuesday’s keynote was given by Eric Schmidt, CEO and Chairman of Google, Chairman of Novell, etc, etc. There were two items of note: 1) the announcement by Schmidt that Google has just released a presentation application to their office suite, and 2) the fact that Schmidt’s appearance came on the heels of the announcement by Microsoft and AT&T that they will ask federal regulators to challenge Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick for 3-odd billion dollars.

Incidentally, while booth size shouldn’t always be the measure of the relative importance of a company at a trade show, it was telling that Microsoft’s booth was in the “low rent” section and looked like the marketing department had paid for the trip by ransacking their couch for spare change (See the photo I snapped to the right. If you squint your eyes you can kind of make out the Microsoft booth among all of the people who are looking elsewhere). [...]

Image by gkpsecretariat via Flickr

This is a thought-provoking if somewhat pretentious video that was played as an introduction to the keynotes by Tim O’Reilly and Jeff Bezos on Monday, April 16. I captured this on my Casio Exilim so apologies if it’s a little jumpy in spots:

We just heard a Conversation With Jeff Bezos in the main conference room at the Web 2.0 Expo.

To my disappointment, and despite much speculation on Slashdot, there wasn’t much controversy about the One-Click Patent issue.

This is somewhat ironic, given that only a few years ago it was Tim O’Reilly himself who sponsored a bounty for prior art to overturn One-Click. I suppose here in 2007, now deeply entrenched in the Web 2.0 meme, expecting Tim to grill Jeff about One-Click at his own conference is expecting a bit too much.

From the Slashdot article:

Millionaire tech publisher Tim O’Reilly once vowed to torpedo Amazon.com’s 1-Click patent. Against a backdrop of widespread outrage over Amazon’s aggressive use of the patent, O’Reilly created a contest to find prior art to undermine the IP claim, and thus invalidate the patent. However, O’Reilly quietly dropped the campaign; saying he would never disclose it because he trusted Amazon.com CEO Bezos not to use it.

Following that cockle-warming tribute to his integrity, Bezos became a regular star turn at O’Reilly’s web evangelism conferences. These days, O’Reilly’s VC fund AlphaTech Ventures is supported by Bezos, and represented by the same firm [...]

This week I’m attending the Web 2.0 Expo put on by O’Reilly at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.

The highlight so far today has been a talk by the architect of Flickr comparing the Flickr File System with the Google File System, or at least what limited information is public about the GFS. The talk then moved on to a discussion of Content Delivery Networks (a la Akamai) for large-scale content caching and delivery. What’s your favorite cache expiration policy?

This is the blog of Dan Leslie, all around nice guy and a principal at Reflexions Data, LLC, a web development firm based in Westchester County, New York. We use open source tools to solve business problems with an emphasis on flexible, forward-looking technologies including PHP, Python, and Ruby on Rails.

I’ll be posting on a more or less weekly basis about some of the topics near and dear to my heart, or at least my daily inner monologue. These will tend to coalesce around the intersection of web development, open source, social media, technology, philosophy, politics, culture, and the 21st century business landscape that’s only starting to come into focus.

Even if you think Vernor Vinge is a nutcase (or, as i do, maybe just ahead of his time) you can’t argue with the assertion that the developed world is on the verge of a kind of self-induced evolutionary great leap forward. The wave isn’t just about to crest. It’s accelerating. And we, those privileged first-world souls who are the very ones fueling its development, have a front row seat.

Next week I’ll be reporting from the O’Reilly Web 2.0 Expo happening april 15-18 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA.