Sunday, November 11, 2007

The Benefit of Multiple Firehoses - Oracle OpenWorld 2007 Twitters, Flickrs, Videos, Feeds, and Other Data (Information?)

Just read Dennis Howlett's comments on all of the information flowing out of Oracle OpenWorld:

The folk at Oracle Technology Network are marshaling a bunch of web 2.0 style resources to bring everyone within touching distance of Oracle OpenWorld. While we have seen tools like YouTube, Flickr, ustream.tv and Twitter start to appear in ad hoc fashion at conferences, this is the first time I’ve noticed a slew of tools brought together for the purpose. It is the classic consumer-to-enterprise adoption that many have predicted....

It’s 6.55 pm Pacific Time but already the Tweets are coming in, providing color to CEO Larry Ellison’s conference introduction. These provide that human dimension that’s difficult to capture in single person reporting. I’ve often said that Ellison is one of the IT industry’s consummate performers and he seems to be working the crowd in classic fashion....

The question is, what are we to do with all this new information? Will it better inform us about the companies with whom we interact? I sense it will and we will be the richer for it. Sadly I can’t be there but a number of my Irregular colleagues will. Still, I can have the vicarious pleasure of watching what others think.


While all of this information may benefit those who cannot attend Oracle OpenWorld 2007, frankly it can also benefit those who ARE in attendance at Oracle OpenWorld, for the simple reason that a single person cannot be in multiple places at once.

Take this evening, for example. A couple of weeks ago, I was planning on attending the Sunday Night Live session that Dennis Howlett referenced in his post. However, that was not the only thing going on at that time. I subsequently received a dinner invitation and was talking business with two Oracle representatives over dinner. One of my co-workers was also invited to this dinner, but he declined because of the Oracle ACE dinner. My dinner companions rushed off to a separate awards ceremony after dinner.

And this is the easy day, before the madness REALLY begins on Monday morning. Even though I'm interested in just a very little piece of Oracle's product line (although Oracle would obviously love for it to be otherwise), I have more than enough to do for the next few days. All of the tweets and Flickrs and videos and feeds and everything else will kinda sorta help me find out about the things that I missed.

Of course, this raises the question of how to turn this data into true information. Just to give an example, I believe that this will be my 40th blog post on Oracle OpenWorld 2007, and I'm just one person. I don't know if anyone has calculated all of the data that has poured out onto the Web regarding this conference, but how does one organize it all to digest and comprehend it?

I'm sure Oracle would be more than happy to propose a solution to this problem... :)

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2 comments:

Dennis Howlett said...

40 posts already - WOW!

Thanks for the props. Much appreciated. I guess we'll all find our own ways of consuming the stuff that comes our way. A feed of feeds would be an excellent start. And no doubt a ton of stuff will fall down the cracks for some folk.

As an aside - this might interest you.

If you use the @eventtrack utility AND you also use Google reader then by adding the Share with Twitter addin to GR, then you can post related material direct into the @eventtrack timeline from OTHER posts, along with tags, notes and the post heading.

That seems pretty damned awesome to me 'cos it means aggregation of outliers where folk are NOT in @oow.

Leila London said...

Hey mrontemp. You have interesting content.

Perhaps you should check out www.OVNTV.com it is an organic company that will definitely be a great alternative to Cable Television... and that's just for starters.

I look forward to reading more of your blogs.

Leila London.x

Feeling cosy, about 2 turn my PC TV on & watch a Movie 4 FREE on: www.OVNTV.com