ReadWriteWeb Summit Wrapup – Part 1
June 17th, 2010
Last Friday, I had the opportunity to attend the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit in New York City. Although I was one of only a handful of people in attendance from the higher-education world, I found the summit to be extremely valuable, and it was a great place to learn, share and connect with others across a wide variety of industries.
In addition to these wrapup posts, over the next several days I will also be writing a series of posts reviewing new applications and services that I had a chance to demo at the summit.
It’s not a conference, it’s an unconference
The Real-Time Web Summit was held in an “unconference” format – that is, the agenda and the direction was not set ahead of time by ReadWriteWeb, but rather by the conference participants themselves.
After the keynote address, Myths, Realities and the Future of the Real-Time Web by Marshall Kirkpatrick, and a talk by Suzanne Livingston from IBM, pieces of paper and markers were set out on the floor in front of the group (we were all seated in a large oval). People who were interested in convening a session would take a piece of paper, write their idea and name on it, and announce their session to the room. Below is an example of a session description posted on the grid.
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Similar sessions were merged, and the pieces of paper were then affixed to a large schedule grid in the adjoining room. Breakout rooms had been created with pipe and drape, which allowed for a dozen or so sessions to run at the same time. The sessions were to take place under the Principles of Open Space (see below).
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Session 1 - Truth detection and healing bad realtime data on the web
This session was pitched and moderated by Mike Rose from TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
The focus was on the fact that stories that go viral aren’t always true, and how can/should the real-time web react and correct these false tales? For example, stories and tweets that go around claiming a the death or arrest of a celebrity, etc.
We talked about the need for some kind of reputation-checking system, a meter of trustworthyness for posts and/or people. Detecting false stories becomes even more difficult when popular hyper-influencers chime in – at that point, refuting a story becomes like swimming upstream unless another strong influencer comes in.
Someone likened this hyper-influencer issue to the old New Yorker cartoon about no one on the Internet knowing you’re a dog – if 6 million people THINK you’re a dog, then essentially, you ARE a dog.
Another important point that came up, and one that I found repeated at two other sessions later in the day, was about teaching digital literacy to kids. How can we educate them and condition them NOT to instantly believe everything they see tweeted and Facebooked online? Is this something that should be tied together with a more broad educational program about reputation management on social media sites?
Some other points and questions raised from this session:
- Can a self healing solution be crafted – like the comments in BitTorrent?
- The realtime spread of the problem is faster than the system can deal with it.
- There is no online meritocracy for general information.
- Is there a way to add reputation levels to the Twitter metadata?
- Should we be tracking where things originate using metadata?
- People love to re-tweet something that makes them look smarter than the media – but it’s often bogus info.
- Could we flag people with a positive grade (not necessarily a negative one) for sharing truthful information?
- Do brands need to find advocates across timezones to force-influence topics and act as spotters if something incorrect comes up?
- How do you measure the overall cost of the damage of false information?
More to come in Part 2 of my wrapup, including Content Curation in the Real-Time Web, Social Media Monitoring, and Real-Time Location Sharing.
Also: Read “Dispatches From the Real-Time Web” – wrapup notes from Georgy Cohen, my counterpart at Tufts University.
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