ICWSM Invited Talks

I thought I'd try to give micro summaries of the excellent talks we had at ICWSM over the past two days.

• danah boyd talked about MySpace and how teenage culture and needs transition from the real world to the virtual world. An interesting observation she made was that the real danger of young people online is less from sexual predators and other media fodder, but actually from exploitative marketing machinery.
• Andrew Tomkins gave some great perspective on the data involved in the web. Essentially, the cost of storing all the textual data on the web (object and meta) is equivalent to the cost to an employer of 10 FTEs. Andrew argued for the importance of academic research in the search area and how the realities of scale now make this possible (almost). He also asserted that the size of the social (media) web is greater than the regular web.
• Evan Williams gave a Twitter demo with some great insights into how it came about (the idea was around several years ago), the similarities between Twitter updates and status messages on IM clients and some thoughts on moving forward.

I feel we were lucky to have a great set of speakers and found that many of the themes they presented and discussed resonated with the content of the research presented in the technical session.

Comments

[Jason Vallery]

Matt,

I actually also did a write-up of the same 3 talks on my blog. Take a look here: http://vallery.net/2007/03/27/what-is-web-30-a-review-of-the-icwsm/