The researchers found that the majority of conference attendees already had a Twitter account (95.1%) and many of those who did actively used it to tweet during the conference (67.5%). 74.1% of the attendees send between 11 and 20 messages per day and 51.2% discussed topics via @ replies and DMs.

As to what the conference goers shared, it was discovered that nearly half the tweets were simple plain text messages while tweets with links to web sites only accounted for 10% of the messages. In other words, the Twitterers were using the medium to share the information they were learning at the present moment as opposed to posting links to information already available on the web.

The participants were also asked open-ended questions like "Why do you think Twitter encouraged the discussion about topics?" and what the added value of Twitter at conferences was. In response, the survey participants answered that Twitter gave conference goers a greater sense of community and encouraged discussion in the backchannel, often allowing them to discuss things in more detail than the "guys on the stage." Other participants noted that Twitter helps you connect with people who have similar interests, provides networking potential, and allows those who could not attend to gain value from your experience.

Unfortunately, the data collected comes from only five conferences and forty-one different attendees, so the sample size isn't what we would consider to be large enough to draw any definite conclusions. However, based on these initial findings, it does seem to show that a good majority of conference goers today use Twitter to share information and interact with their network when attending these sorts of events.

Structure 08

Our friends at GigaOm are holding the first annual Structure 08 conference on June 25, 2008 in San Francisco. It will focus on innovations in Internet infrastructure and speakers include Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.com, and Greg Papadopoulos, CTO of Sun Microsystems. ReadWriteWeb readers can get a 10% discount to Structure 08 - register here and enter the discount code "RWW".

Google I/O

Google I/O is a two-day gathering for developers "to share knowledge about Google's own developer products and web application development in general." Google I/O will be held at the Moscone Center in San Francisco on Wednesday, May 28th, and Thursday, May 29th, 2008.

ReadWriteWeb has 10 free tickets to Google I/O to giveaway, valued at $400 each. Simply leave a comment (with an email address - not published) to be in to win. The first 10 comments that say "I can attend, gimme the ticket" will win.

2008 Semantic Technologies Conference

Now in its fourth year, SemTech 2008 will be a great place to learn about the commercialization of Semantic Technologies.

TECH cocktail

TECH cocktail is a series of mixer events founded by Frank Gruber and Eric Olson, "open to bloggers, technology enthusiasts, entrepreneurs and other business professionals interested in the technology arena in under recognized technology communities."

The next conference will be held May 29, 2008 at Loyola University, Kasbeer Hall, 25 East Pearson, Chicago, Illinois. RWW readers can get a discount by entering "rrwrocks".

Those are just some of the excellent Web Tech conferences upcoming. If you know of others, please add to the comments.

Those of us unable to attend should be able to see some of the highlights live via Robert Scoble's cellphone and the streaming video service Qik. Speakers include the WSJ's Kara Swisher, NYT's Brad Stone and Amazon CTO Werner Vogels. Presenting companies, which both Richard MacManus and I helped select, include:

How "under the radar" are these companies? Some of them aren't so much at all, it's an increasingly competitive startup market for media to be first on. Nonetheless, the UtR folks always put on a great conference. It's one of the few tech events where sessions are as worthwhile as conversations in the hall. I'd planned to be there myself but have been incapacitated by the SXSW flu.

Check out this very well produced video from our friends over at Webware from last year's Under the Radar.

You're likely to see a lot of press about DEMO over the next few days, we've posted a toolkit for tracking the event, but below are some of the arguments for and against the continued relevance of this high-profile event. The live video player below from BitGravity may make you want to turn down your volume but that's what it's like here at the event, too.

After interviewing hundreds of companies interested in launching products here at DEMO, executive producer Chris Shipley chose 77 companies to present. There's a wide variety of products being shown here and this is the 16th year the event has happened.

DEMO's critics

Many people are critical of DEMO and these tend to be the most common critiques.

• The high price of entry is limiting.

It costs more than $15k to present at DEMO once you've been selected. In exchange for that entry fee companies give one six minute demo of their product and a space in the crowded gallery. Critics contend that many of the most exciting startups today wouldn't have been able to pay such a high price to launch in their earliest days. The ability to pay to play does not correspond to the innovation a company offers.
• DEMO is antiquated.

There was a time when the press corps was small and there were limited opportunities for investors to find the most interesting startups coming to market. Neither is true today. Just like creating a company has been democratized beyond the ranks of those who can afford to launch here, so too has media expanded to include far more writers and reviewers than are walking the halls here in Palm Desert.
• It's not just startups.

Though DEMO presents itself as the place for brand new companies to launch, there are always a significant number of big companies presenting. This year well known companies like Symantec, Citrix, Leapfrog and Education.com are coming on stage. Many people are looking to discover the freshest of the fresh, the newest of the new, and cynics contend that big co's are just buying their way on stage.
• A lot of undifferentiated mobile stuff.

GrandCentral launched at DEMO 2007 and was promptly scooped up by Google. Other than that, if you're not interested in the finer points mobile and telephony, a lot of DEMO presenters won't interest you.

DEMO's continued relevance

I've considered the arguments above but am particularly moved today by the following reasons why DEMO is still relevant.

• Large number of diverse companies.
Executive producer Chris Shipley focused in her morning address on the intersection of many different market sectors. New, media rich consumer websites create new demands on hardware. Both software and hardware companies are here at DEMO. The business and consumer software markets are tied together by providing each other with innovation and motivation. Throw in some mobile vendors and you've got a unique and really useful mix of companies here.

Shipley says that the hundreds of companies she talks to each year in order to make her selections are all data points she uses to create her best forecast of where tech and markets are headed. I think she's in a unique position to do that.

• Good international presence.

There are quite a few companies here from Canada, a handful from Europe, some from Asia and a panel of startup entrepreneurs from Africa. There is heavy Silicon Valley representation here as well, but the international participation is important.
• Mix of startups and established companies.

While this is something that some are critical of, the participation of big companies at DEMO means that we get to see some really neat new products built by companies with substantial R&D and marketing budgets. Though the innovation offered by small stealthy startups has proven a game changer in recent years, the big guys are still coming up with some things that are fun to see and could make a big impact on the market.
• High production value.

There's a lot of mediocre conferences in this world, but DEMO isn't one of them. It's worth your time here to sit in the presentation room - not just lurk in the halls. The production values here are high. It's a classy operation. Things are in transition here and some kinks need to be worked out of a new approach for a new era - the new website, for example, is hipper than before but it's not nearly as pretty.
• This is a particular sector of the market.

DEMO is expensive, but so is hardware production. There's no shortage of software companies either for whom nearly $20k in total cost of attendance stings but is doable. Companies that have raised any money at all, including just angel funds, pay multiples of that sum each month in wages. Chris Shipley interviews hundreds of companies each year that are fully prepared to pay the DEMO entry fee.

The rise of the fringe startup as web hero is a really important part of the internet story. It's also just a part of the story of a whole technology industry that's thriving in many different ways. DEMO helps tell another important part of the technology story.

• There is some awesome stuff here

All thinking aside - I am in awe of some of the products being launched here. There's no arguing with that.

Thanks for checking out our coverage of DEMO. I'm going to sit down with some startup founders and talk tech over the next few days, but I hope you find this and our previous DEMO toolkit post interesting and useful.

Starting yesterday and running through the 18th of January, the BlogOnExpo includes interviews and short tutorials from names many readers here will recognize.

Context

The idea of offering a "conference" on blogging for free, online, with such high profile contributors is a good one. Most real-life conferences strive to have big names but end up with mediocre content and the best value comes from conversations in the halls with other attendees. In this case, the content in the BlogOnExpo is pretty darned good. I was skeptical about how many of the listed participants would actually participate but a few days into the event - I am impressed!

If I had any criticisms they would be that the interview transcripts are a little awkward and the participants are limited primarily to tech bloggers. There are a lot of bloggers online who are wildly successful who don't write about blogging or tech at all. My favorite examples are the blogs Simply Recipes and Confessions of a Pioneer Woman. It would be nice to hear from some more top bloggers outside of technology about what's worked well for them.

That said, Aditya Mahesh has done a remarkable job in this first iteration and I look forward to seeing what he does next.

Note that Charles Knight live blogged most of the Defrag conference at AltSearchEngines. So if you want the play-by-play, I'd encourage you to check out his posts.

Alex Iskold has been covering the attention economy for some time here on Read/WriteWeb. At Defrag, he gave a presentation on structured attention. This is the subset of attention that is about physical things. Popular examples on the web include books, music, and movies. Alex explained that this is easier for a computer to process and therefore to derive recommendations from, because it has specific metadata. For example, a book has attributes like an author, title, and number of pages. Alex encouraged the audience to start focusing on structured attention.

Doc Searls also talked about leveraging attention. For those not familiar with his research at Harvard's Berkman Center, Doc is currently focused on Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) - which is focused on turning attention into intentions (see also our own Bernard Lunn's recent post on VRM). Following Doc's presentation, Esther Dyson presented some of her thoughts on attention as well during her keynote. Specifically, she focused on how to educate and engage individuals about the attention economy.

My Take: I've been thinking about digital attention for some time. There are a lot of issues to work out, as the presenters discussed, such as ownership of data and ways to articulate that to users. However, the benefits some websites have already seen (Amazon and Tacoda jump to mind) are going to continue to encourage sites to leverage users attention streams.

I'm also really glad to have leaders like Esther and Doc focused on the user's perspective and rights. Empowering and educating users is clearly very important. Unfortunately, I don't think the 'average' website visitor is that concerned about this today, but with the do-not-track proposal starting to get some coverage, and thought leaders exploring the issues, that could change soon.

Theme 2: Next-Level Discovery

Bradley Horowitz from Yahoo moderated a panel on "Next-Level Discovery." The panelist included both academics (Marti Hearst at UC Berkley) and practitioners (Lou Paglia from Factiva/Dow Jones, Jeremie Miller from Search Wikia and Steve Larsen at Krugle). In Bradley's opening remarks, he noted that each panelist had a unique vision for the next-level of discovery. The one thing there was consensus on was the importance of marrying implicit and explicit user behavior. However, there are very different opinions in the appropriate blend of implicit and explicit.

My Take: I believe that the appropriate blend of implict and explicit is not the same for every individual. Some visitors will want to be completely dependent on implicit gestures, while others will want to provide a lot of explicit feedback as well. The key then is creating a system that is flexible enough to create a great experience both exclusively from implicit gestures, while still giving users as much control as they desire if and when they choose to be explicit.

For full disclosure: I co-founded a company called mSpoke, which has technology that allows individuals to do exactly what I'm describing. In my view it is a superior approach to helping individual's discover and filter content.

Theme 3: Social Graph

Between Kevin Marks giving an overview of Open Social, Brad Feld and Alex Iskold launching Closed Private, and Facebook announcing their advertising system, the conversations around leveraging an individual's social graph were inevitable. While there seemed to be optimism about the long-term impact of an individual's social graph data, the conversation consistently noted how poorly our online social networks are at reflecting our actual real life social networks. Specifically, there were two components to this:

• The amount of data in other systems such as our cell phone and email that may reflect parts of our social network better;
• The desire for multiple levels, or some type of hierarchy, of different contacts which better reflect the relationships.

My Take:

One specific concern I have is that it will be important for Facebook to continue evolving to support more than a network of my college friends. For example, I attend a number of conferences - and after each conference people I've met add me to their Facebook network. Interestingly, a few conferences ago one 40+ year old man tried to get me to confirm the detail request that "we hooked up." I know what he meant, but I'm happily married to a beautiful wife and assure you that we didn't hook up! If Facebook is becoming another professional network, then the options you can choose just don't mirror reality right now. Just look at the screen shot below:

Theme 4: User Centric Identity

During the the first day, conference organizer Eric Norlan said something quite profound: "the individual is always the point of integration." Many of the conversations at the conference seemed to assume that user centric identity was solved online or would be solved.

Dick Hardt gave a presentation at the conference etitled "Defragging Identity." If you don't know Dick, he is probably most famous for his keynote at OSCON. The presentation here was delivered in the same style. His key point was that 'trust defrags identity', because in an online world you can't use the intuition you do offline to determine if someone is who they say they are.

My Take: User centric identity is an important topic for us as an industry to be talking about. I expected Eric to include it as a theme on the agenda and I'm glad he did. It's critical infrastructure for the three themes already discussed. I actually have another expert in user centric identity as my next interview on Read/WriteTalk, so if you want to learn more subscribe in iTunes now.

Theme 5: Enterprise Customers Arrive

Eric had tipped his hat to this in a post on the Defrag blog, where he said:

"I see a lot of the companies in the “defrag space” (including a lot of our sponsors) starting on the consumer-side of things. I also see nearly all of them making the shift toward the enterprise."

My Take: I spent two years selling enterprise software as an entrepreneur. I was actually quite good at it signing up a number of blue chip customers. However, I can't imagine going back and focusing on it again. That said, I think my reaction is more towards enterprise sales, versus seeing enterprises adopt these tools. It's great that a lot of web tools can be purchased now with a credit card, or even better are ad supported. In those cases, individuals can get started with the tool almost immediately and with limited overhead. Those types of opportunities are exciting.

Conclusion

So those are the big themes I left Defrag thinking about. I'm still processing each of then. Therefore, I'd love to hear your thoughts and reactions. I also know many of you were in attendance, so were there any big themes I left out?

Kevin's speech wasn't on the Defrag agenda, but it was squeezed in due to the timeliness of the topic. Plus, tongue in cheek, it was suggested that Brad Feld and our own Alex Iskold's launch of ClosedPrivate the day before may have compelled Kevin to get OpenSocial on the agenda!

While a lot of the material was repurposed from Campfire, Kevin also sat down with Jerry Michalski and the conversation turned very interesting. There were a few nuggets I wanted to share with the Read/WriteWeb audience.

Jerry asked Kevin: "what stage is Open Social App at?". Kevin was very clear that this is a true alpha - and he contrasted this with Google's typical perpetual beta. He explained that the leaders at Google felt it was important to get this out early, because of the need for developers outside of Google to participate.

User Authentication Model

One of the things I've been very interested in when looking at OpenSocial is how they plan to handle user authentication. According to Kevin: "At the moment, it is delegated to the containers. Clearly this needs to work better. We are looking at oAuth."

This was actually very encouraging to hear. I was afraid that Google would require users to authenticate using Google. I believe it will be important for OpenSocial to ultimately leverage an open authentication method, not depend on a single proprietary Google standard. In the meantime, given the alpha stage, using the container's authentication makes sense.

Kevin Marks at Defrag; Photo: Graeme Thickins

Sharing Data Between Services

One of the concerns that Marshall raised on Friday here on Read/WriteWeb was:

"While most APIs tend to be read-only, the OpenSocial APIs might be capable only of allowing widgets to be published from one network to another. Will one network be able to pull in bio, friend and interest data from another? That's not being discussed at all."

Kevin said that indeed this functionality is on its way. However, the authentication is important, because you don't want widgets to start pulling in data from friends of friends.

Jerry also asked about the ability to add users from one system to another. For example, can I add my LinkedIn contacts to another network? Kevin said that "at the moment it is just a query mechanism, but it is in development."

Conclusion

One of Marshall's questions in the post I mentioned earlier was: Is Google Exercising Leadership or Control? Obviously, only time will tell. However, I did find Kevin's transparency at Defrag encouraging. He answered questions directly and he was clear that OpenSocial is in alpha mode and so there is much more to come.

• Disruptive Technologies & Innovation
• Google and OpenSocial
• Next-Level Discovery Panel
• Enterprise 2.0 (Andrew McAfee)
• Web 2.0 ‚ÄúMade of People‚Äù (Ross Mayfield)
• Customer Reach vs. Vendor Grasp (Doc Searls)
• Discussing Attention (Esther Dyson)
• Defragging Identity (Dick Hardt)

There are more posts over on AltSearchEngines.

We had some follow up messages about other events, so here is an update...

The GigaOm Network is presenting a one day event called NewTeeVee Live, to be held in San Francisco on 14th of November. The event will showcase the online video industry. NewTeeVee is a similar blog to last100 (a Read/WriteWeb Network blog), so we will be closely following the action. R/WW readers can get a discount on NewTeeVee live tickets by clicking here.

Note: if anyone would like to provide some live coverage of NewTeeVee Live for last100, please contact us. We may be able to get you a free press pass to the event.

This is where the Weblog Awards 2007 will be announced -- VOTE FOR READ/WRITEWEB! pleeease. Also our friend Allen Stern from CenterNetworks will be present, apparently with a mini video camera attached to his head!

Widgety Goodness

British startup Snipperoo is holding a conference about widgets on December 6, 2007, at Brighton. We have 2 free tickets to give away! To enter, simply leave a comment on this post, telling us what your all-time favorite widget is. Note the event is in the UK, so make sure you can attend if you enter. I'll pick the 2 winners by end of this week.

Intelligence at the Interface, Nov 7, Palo Alto

I really want someone to write up this event for us - so please yell out if you're going and you're up for doing a guest post on R/WW. Here's a description from an email I received:

"SRI is demoing CALO (cognitive agent that learns and organizes), a rare glimpse. It’s use is military-only, and will never see the public (Radar did work on this project in its early days). XEROC PARC is demoing a social context-aware, mobile app. (going live only in Japan to start), that works like a tour guide, and Yahoo Berkeley Labs is demoing an application that uses social, spatial, and temporal context to support and enhance key user tasks (runs only on a special Nokia phone). Really, really cool stuff, all Web3.0, and the location-aware stuff is especially cool -- a lot like the “holy grail” of mobile networking that people keep talking about."

I'm sure there are many more web conferences happening, but I will be here all night... so if you have an event on that you want R/WW readers to know about, let us know in the comments. Or you can enter it in our Events Board, hosted by EventBee. You can list your event there for as little as $75.

Defrag - 1 free ticket available to R/WW reader; discounts too

Defrag has been sponsoring our Weekly Wrapups for the last few weeks; and we are a Media Sponsor for the event. The focus of Defrag is 'The Implicit Web', a topic we've explored a lot on R/WW - see for example The Attention Economy: An Overview.

Defrag is a two-day event being held in Denver, Colorado, from November 5 - 6, 2007. To register with a $100 discount, click here.

Also Read/WriteWeb has one free ticket to give away. To enter, simply leave a comment on this post giving us a 1-sentence definition of The Implicit Web. The best definition, as chosen by myself, will receive a free ticket to the event - valued at $1,495. (Note: if you purchase a ticket using the discount link above, that will be refunded if you win the free ticket)

On Thursday, November 1, 2007, ExecutiveBiz will be presenting the The New New Internet: Web 2.0 for Business conference in Reston, Virginia.

NewTeeVee Live

Our friends from the GigaOm Network are presenting a one day event called NewTeeVee Live, to be held in San Francisco on 14th of November. The event will showcase the online video industry. NewTeeVee is a similar blog to last100 (a Read/WriteWeb Network blog), so we will be closely following the action.

Note: if anyone would like to provide some live coverage of NewTeeVee Live for last100, please contact us. We may be able to get you a free press pass to the event.

TechCrunch Boston Meetup

Our friends at TechCrunch have another meetup happening, this time in Boston on November 16, 2007. Our own Josh Catone will be there, schmoozing on Read/WriteWeb's behalf. Look for a tall skinny guy with a beard!

Widgety Goodness

British startup Snipperoo is holding a conference about widgets on December 6, 2007, at Brighton.

R/WW Events Board

Last but not least, don't forget R/WW has an Events Board, hosted by EventBee. You can list your event there for as little as $75.