Jason Fried of Basecamp/37 Signals reminds us to stay lightweight, and don’t believe the hype. I very much hope the conference, which certainly was upbeat, was not considered hype. It’s true, I focused on that which I found interesting, astounding, important, and new…which really does create a bit of novelty exhaustion, as Kottke puts it, over the course of a three-day event.
In any case, I certainly agree with Jason Fried’s advice:
My advice to these new companies with their new products and fresh-faced enthusiasm… Keep it small. Start small and stay small. Borrow from yourself before you borrow from someone else. You can have an impact with just a few people. You can build great products with a small team. You can do it on your own. You can.
I must confess that, to my non-attending eyes, Web 2.0 looked a lot like 1.0, at least people-wise. My strategy is to wait for 2.1, the bugfix release.
In town I did make one interesting event on the future of the internet: The World Cyber Games. Huge international web base, lots of genuinely “next generation” talent, and nobody there had his own reality TV show :-).
I wasn’t able to attend, but coverage was decent, though fragmented –probably better that way, as a composite view rather than a fixed beam. Yes, there was the faint odor of hype wafting around the posts and articles. For some (most?) of those on the dais hype is a normal way of life; don’t worry about it. Good show!