This’ll be my last post from Silicon Valley for a while. I’ve been here for two full weeks and I’ve had a fantastic time! I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Mike Arrington for letting me stay at his house and making me feel so welcome – thanks Mike! It’s been a hub of Web 2.0 activity in the house over the past two weeks. Fred Oliveira‘s been here working on edgeio, the product Mike and Keith Teare are building which will be in beta mode very soon. And Gabe Rivera of memeorandum fame has been staying here too. We’ve all had a great time and I consider them friends now. It’s also spawned an actual Web product, the Web 2.0 Workgroup. Mike, Fred and I came up with the idea while sitting on the TechCrunch sofa drinking diet cokes, eating over-sized American pizza and watching The Daily Show (or something like that). The idea went from concept to website to an expanding network of Web 2.0 blogs very quickly, attracting such luminaries as Dave Winer and John Furrier to join. The Web 2.0 Workgroup will continue to grow organically, which is the beauty of it.
The Web 2.0 conference was a real thrill for me. The words ‘energy’ and ‘enthusiasm’ are ones that I’ve been associating with my experience of the conference. I’ve seen a lot of cynicism and even criticism of the bubble-ish nature of the conference, but it’s difficult for me to identify with that because my experience was overwhelmingly positive. Perhaps that only proves I’m a conference newbie in Silicon Valley, but I’d like to hope I always maintain my enthusiasm for the Web and its growth. It’s exciting when people are building so many great products and services on the Web platform. I wanna be in the middle of that 🙂
I’ve met a lot of amazing people while I’ve been over here. Too many to list, but one highlight was the spicy noodles dinner with the father of RSS Dave Winer, the Workgroup founding fathers, and father of News Readers 2.0 Gabe. It was also great to meet the people I’ve been working for over the past months – Susan Mernit, Marc Canter, Dan Farber, and others I’ve done projects for. I also met my book co-author Josh Porter and briefly met Tim O’Reilly. Plus I met people I’ll be working with in future (or hoping to, in some cases). I met so many great people and I ran out of time to meet others. Apologies to those people who I didn’t get to meet.
I’ll be back in Silicon Valley soon, with my family this time. I hope I can get a US working visa, because this is the place where I belong. In the meantime, I’ll be back in New Zealand pumping out the Web 2.0 posts on Web 2.0 Explorer and Read/WriteWeb.
Originally published on ReadWriteWeb (archived copy)