On Friday, June 11, I attended ReadWriteWeb‘s Real-Time Web Summit. I was able to attend by virtue of responding to a call for commenters to share their insights on the real-time web, with a handful picked to get free passes to the summit. (So, thanks again, ReadWriteWeb!) I was doubly pleased that my higher ed colleage, J.D. Ross of Hamilton College, was also in attendance. I had only known him via Twitter prior to the Summit, so it was fun to meet him and to have a friend in the room.

Real-Time Kickoff

The keynote, ” Myths, Realities & the Future of the Real-Time Web,” was delivered by ReadWriteWeb co-editor Marshall Kirkpatrick. It was a good overview of the landscape to kick off the day. (You can read an overview on ReadWriteWeb.) Among the key points, in my view:

• The real-time web is not coming; it’s here, and it has been for a while. Doctors are increasingly using it to make decisions. The Red Cross is using it to save lives. It is already making a difference, and it’s here to stay.
• Amazing innovations are around the corner. Imagine a real-time geoimagery API that developers could manipulate to create, for instance, a real-time campus tour.
• The real-time web is invaluable when it comes to monitoring news in real-time. If you’ve identified the tastemakers in advance, you can watch them to see what news they share or break.
• Twitter and Facebook are only one part of the real-time web. With innovations like PubSubHubBub, for instance, blogs are part of it, too.
• The real-time web is best complemented by context: “slow news,” experience, value, strategy

Here you can watch an excerpt of the keynote, video-recorded by yours truly:

Suzanne Livingston of IBM, one of the event sponsors, then spoke briefly about how the real-time web is not a trinket but rather should be integrated into the core culture of your business, to help maintain relevance, share knowledge, enhance business practices and potentially open up parts of the decision-making and idea-generating process. Read her recap of her remarks and see her slides.

Unreal

The Summit was set up as an unconference, so we spent about an hour conceiving and organizing the four sessions that would comprise the bulk of the day. Some of the sessions were “The Internet of Things and Real-Time Apps,” “What is a Place? Location in Civic Contexts,” and “Twitter Annotations for Real-Time E-Commerce.” You could attend a more techie sessions on HTML5 or XMPP, or a more squishy one like the applications of real-time web for nonprofit fundraising. There was something for everyone. And if it didn’t work out — like the very first session I sat in on — the unconference “Law of Two Feet” allows you to get up and go somewhere where you can both contribute and learn more effectively.

You Better Give a Damn About Your Bad Reputation

My first session ended up being on “Truth Detection and Healing the Bad in Real Time Data,” where we chewed on issues like the difficulty in tracking reputation on the real-time web (and pined for a way to track reputation much like you can track a reliable seller on eBay). We talked about the power of community (and a network of “spotters”) who can help out with damage control during a reputational crisis on the real-time web. We noted that while there is much you cannot control in the real-time web, you can always control what you publish on your website and as comments on other media (pending moderation, in some cases). We discussed the idea of a reputation economy, and how the real-time web demands accountability (the other side of the “we can publish fast!” coin is “we have to correct faster”).

Interestingly, the conversation eventually turned to teens and the need to cultivate a heightened digital literacy. There is often a vicious cycle of people disbelieving what they read on the web and turning to traditional media sources that are actually just mining the same real-time web and potentially perpetuating the same misinformation. Some half-jokingly referred to it as refining one’s “crap detector,” but others cautioned not to start breeding cynics, but rather just critical thinkers (related: read this excerpt from the new Nieman Report on the challenges of constant connectivity).

Curation Nation

I was beyond excited that there was a session on content curation. Content curation, after all, goes hand in hand with the real-time web. Going back to the idea of tastemakers, the real-time web requires people to make sense of it, to filter it by topic and relevance. Of course, even the notion of curation, as essential as it is to the real-time web, is not without potential pitfalls

Curation provides context and agenda to the real-time web, as well as design and framing. It quiets the noise, as one participant put it. We discussed the need for users to be able to imbibe curated content by topic, not by personality. We talked about the hazards of self-selecting our trusted sources for information, and whether that limits us from discovery. Another concern was content time management in a real-time web world and the idea of continuous partial attention.

There was an ongoing discussion about how best to take advantage of the ability of content curation to facilitate relationships via the real-time web. Like so much on the web, it comes back to the concept of trust. Curation is built around trust. Trust is a filter for the real-time web. If possible, creating offline complements to online curation — e.g. meetups — can help build trust and solidify relationships.

Once again, the conversation cycled back to education. “We live in an amazing, info-rich time with tools that make the world smaller & more accessible,” I tweeted from the session. “Build curation into learning.”

Video from the content curation session:
(It doesn’t start on this clip until about 1:07:00)

The Flip-Side

After lunch, ReadWriteWeb paid its bills, but in a fun way. We had an hour of “speedgeeking,” which was basically speed dating with vendors peddling apps that tie into the real-time web. It was a great way to get a quick glimpse at a wide range of cool apps and services. Some of the cooler ones were Curated.by, Postrank, Collecta and Scenios (recently reviewed by J.D. Ross).

I was a bit let down in the afternoon because the two sessions I wanted to go to, “Interacting with Users in Real-Time on Your Website” and “Real-Time Web and Social Calendaring,” ended up drawing only one person other than myself — and not even the session convener, at that! (If I had one complaint about the day, it would be this lack of accountability — a-ha! — by those who proposed sessions in the morning. I’m not sure who experienced it besides me, but still. The hazards of an unconference.) While I could have observed the Law of Two Feet, I ended up having two really interesting one-on-one conversations, so ultimately it was two hours well spent.

Takeaways

Some of the most important bits of insight (or questions) I came away with after a day of sessions:

• Context is invaluable when it comes to making sense of the real-time web.
• If the real-time web is breaking news, the standard/traditional web (what are we calling it now, anyway?) is enterprise reporting.
• You need education, information and reflection to really help the real-time web shine.
• In a real-time web world, content curators are the augurs of the big “what’s next.”
• Cast your content net wide in the real-time ocean, then figure out exactly how to fillet your fish
• The real-time web is an unbelievable platform for innovation. As Brett Slatkin, creator of PubSubHubBub, said, “Build for the unforseeable use case.”
• The real-time web should not be a standalone, distinct thing. It should be integrated into the fabric of all that we do.
• Accountability is paramount in the real-time web, since information is more slippery.
• The advent of the real-time web raises the need to cultivate heightened digital literacy in younger generations. We ascribe expert knowledge of all things web to anyone under 21, but that’s just not always true.
• The real-time web poses a potential dilemma of time management
• How do we find people lost in the real-time web and give them a path to curated information?
• Once we find those paths, how do we ensure that they don’t limit us from discovery outside of our self-selected course?
• How do we build relationships in the real-time web?
• The real-time web makes trust even more critical.

Stop, Collaborate and Listen

To cap everything off, at the end of the day, I went home with a prize of a 3G 32GB iPad! At lunchtime, they gave away four wifi-only iPads at random, but said they had two 3G iPads to give away at the end of the day — to the attendee with the best rap, poem or dance routine. Of course, I couldn’t resist throwing my hat in the ring. Over the course of the afternoon, I scribbled verses on a sheet of paper and muttered lyrics under my breath. When the closing session came and I did my thing, I was one of two rappers left standing — and walking away with an iPad! Depending on how my iPad adventures go, keep your eyes peeled for a review. In the meantime, here is some video of my performance (you have to fast-forward to 10:10 and play until 11:05):

Related Reading

• Watch more video from the Real-Time Web Summit, courtesy of Justin.tv.
• Check out this liveblog from a SXSW 2010 panel, “Can the Real Time Web be Realized?” Good stuff.