These are events planned for the Silicon Valley area for the week beginning November 3; please let me know if you’d like to include an event.

If you’re interested in New York tech/Web events, check out CenterNetworks list.

Monday November 3

DreamForce
Host: Salesforce
Dates: November 2 - 5
Place: San Francisco, Moscone Center
Cost: $1,299

Widget Summit 2008
Host: Hat Trick Media
Dates: November 3 - 4
Place: San Francisco, Hotel Nikko
Cost: $895

Tuesday November 4

WCA’s 14th Annual International Symposium & Business Expo
Host: Wireless Communications Association International
Dates: November 4 - 6
Place: San Jose
Cost: $50 Exhibit only - $995 non members

South Bay Bloggers Meetup
Host: South Bay Bloggers
Time: 7 – 11 p.m.
Place: Cupertino
Cost: Free

GridGain 2.0 – Grid Computing Made Simple
Host: SDForum
Time: 6.45 – 9 p.m.
Place: Palo Alto
Cost: Free Members/$15 Non Members

Wednesday November 5

Web 2.0 Summit
Host: O’Reilly Conferences
Date: 5 – 7 November
Place: San Francisco, The Palace Hotel
Cost: By invitation only

Thursday November 6

Viacom vs. YouTube: The epic struggle for creative expression
Host: The Commonwealth Club
Time: 5.30 – 7.30 p.m.
Place: Palo Alto, Four Seasons Hotel, Silicon Valley
Cost: $15 Members/$20 Non Members

Social Marketing Tips presented by SF WoW
Host: McCann Worldwide
Time: 6 – 9 p.m.
Place: San Francisco
Cost: $10

WEBCAST: The State of the U.S. Online Retail Economy
Host: comScore
Date: November 6,
Time: 2 – 3 p.m. EST
Cost: Free

Silicon Valley Business Expo V
Host: Every Circle and InfoBayArea
Time: 6 – 9 p.m.
Cost: $15 before 11/6, or $20 at door
Place: Santa Clara, Avalaon

Saturday November 8

Circuitry Class Engages Kids and Parents
Host: The Intel Museum
Time: 10.30 a.m. – 2.45 p.m.
Cost: Free
Place: Santa Clara
More Info: Email: museum@intel.com or Tel: 408-765-0889

Information from:

Gary’s Guide
Tech Venue
Info Bay Area

Sphere: Related Content

Allen Stern puts together a roundup of Web/tech events for New York every week, and his list inspired me to do the same for Silicon Valley events, given I keep a list of potential events to cover for ReadWriteWeb.

So, here are events planned for the Silicon Valley area; let me know if there are any that I’ve missed, and I’ll do my best to include them.

Monday 27th October

Design Thinking Morning Forum
Host: SVAMA
Time: 8.30 - 10 a.m.
Place: Palo Alto
Cost: $5 Members/$15 Non Members

Annual Future of Virtual Worlds
Host: SD Forum
Time: 6.30 - 9.30 p.m.
Place: Palo Alto
Cost: Free Members/$15 Non Members

International Congress of Nano-Bio Clean Tech 2008
Host: International Association of Nanotechnology
Time: Monday 27 - Thursday 30
Place: Burlingame
Cost: $795

Gallery of Serial Entrepreneurs
Host: Right-Hand Partners LLP
Time: 5.30 - 8 p.m.
Place: Mountain View
Cost: $50

Tuesday 28th October

Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series : IP and Legal Issues
Host: Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Time: 6.30 - 8.30 p.m.
Place: UC Berkeley
Cost: $50

Web Services SIG: Financial Cloud Services
Host: SD Forum
Time: 6.30 - 9 p.m.
Place: Palo Alto
Cost: Members Free/Non Members $15

BlogWell: How big companies use social media
Host: GasPedal and the Blog Council
Time: 1 - 5 p.m.
Place: San Jose
Cost: $200

SNAP Summit3: All about the Social Web
Host: Room Full of People
Time: 8 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Place: San Francisco
Cost: Student $99/General Admission $249
* Live video stream once the event begins

Innovating and Adapting in the Emerging 3.0 World
Host: New Voice of Business
Time: 5.30 - 7.30 p.m.
Place: San Francisco
Cost: $10 Members/$20 Non Members

Wednesday 29th October

Social Media Strategies Conference [Day 1]
Host: Web Guild Silicon Valley
Time: Wed October 29, 7 a.m. - Thursday October 30, 5 p.m.
Place: San Francisco
Cost: $875 Members/$975 Non Members

The Chronicles of Web Standard: the HTML 5, the Comet and the WebSocket
Host: Silicon Valley Web Builder
Time: 6.30 - 9.30 p.m.
Place: Google Campus, Mountain View
Cost: Free if register online

Lawrence Lessig Remix Book Party
Host: Stanford Law School
Time: 6.30 - 9 p.m.
Place: San Francisco
Cost: Free

Best of San Francisco Show 2008
Host: International Advertising Association (IAA) - West
Time: 6 - 9 p.m.
Place: Adobe, San Francisco
Cost: $25 Members/$35 Non Members/$10 Students with ID

Thursday 30th October

Social Media Strategies Conference [Day 2]

Special Gala Dinner: Distinguished Service Award Celebration
Honoring: Susan Decker, President Yahoo! Inc
Host: Institute of International Education
Time: 6-9 pm
Place: St. Regis Hotel, San Francisco
Cost: $250+

Ubuntu 8.10 Release Party: San Francisco
Time: 7.30 p.m.
Place: The Thirsty Bear, San Francisco
Cost: Free

The Next Generation of Advanced Media
Host: National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences
Time: 7 - 9 p.m.
Place: San Francisco
Cost: $10 Members/$30 Non Members

Cross-Cultural User-Experience Design
Host: AIGA
Time: 6.30 - 8.30 p.m.
Place: San Francisco, CA
Cost: Free

Politics 2008: Sound Bites, Spin, and the Search for the Facts
Host: The Churchill Club
Time: 6 - 9 p.m.
Cost: $64 Members / $78 Non Members
Place: Menlo Park

Friday - Halloween

New York Tech Web Events - Week of October 26

Sphere: Related Content

The Simple Image Link has been updated to allow the image to be displayed based on the user’s role.

This replaces the ‘Display image’ checkbox in earlier versions.

This is useful for WordPress, including MU, installations which allows users to login.

This functionality was inspired by Praveen’s comment and initial code.

Thanks for all the feedbackon the plugin to date.

Sphere: Related Content

While the recent Digg bans have caused much online controversy, little attention has been given to the larger issue affecting users of social sites, namely user rights.

Last year, Mike Arrington, Robert Scoble, Joseph Smarr and Marc Canter wrote a Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web. The document asserts that all users of the social Web are entitled to certain fundamental rights when it comes to ownership of their information.

Our question is: what rights do the banned diggers have?

While their submissions and Diggs remain on the site, their profile information is simply wiped out; they vanish, as if they never existed.

Digg argues that by not disclosing the reasons for individual bans - but for breaking the TOU - they are abiding by their privacy policy, and thus protecting the user.  We argue that they’re hiding behind their privacy policy; the banning process should be transparent and open, particularly with users who want their voices heard.

Surely it’s a conflict of interest if the operating company, whose goal is to make money [now or in the future], can be the same body that determines which users can have access to the site and which can not?

Users should be offered a formal appeal process, be it public or private, and be given an opportunity for further recourse through a third party arbitrator if no resolution can be agreed on.

Additionally, while Digg certainly should remove any inappropriate content, any users that have had an account suspended or terminated should still be able to login, and their account should remain functional so that they can review or transfer their content.

Thoughts?

Update: Neal Rodriguez put together a five minute video with some excellent points; check out Dear Kevin and Jay

Sphere: Related Content

<rant>

Let me tell you a story…

Lid does a number of things around the Web, and sometimes I even find it hard to keep up. So I have a Google alert on her, so I can see what she is doing and what people are saying about her. That’s my excuse anyways.

Last Friday I got an alert from Google with 3 references:

The references are:

  1. Lid’s ReadWriteWeb post about Social Media and who is doing it well from the Social Media Marketing Summit in San Francisco.
  2. A post by Laurena about delicious and tagging which discusses and references Lid’s article -just what the Web is intended for.
  3. A post by ‘Oggi’ which looks remarkable like Lid’s - it starts with the same 20 words - and even references her by name.

So who or what is Oggi’s blog? Here is a screen shot.

Here is a breakdown of Oggi’s blog:

  1. 3 separate groups of Google advertising - two text based, and the third image based.
  2. The title of the post which is the same as Lid’s.
  3. The content of the post is the same initial 20 words of Lid’s post, then followed by “Original post by Lidija Davis” with Lid’s name linked to her post on ReadWriteWeb.

Now the link on Lid’s post is interesting in that it is not a direct link to the post on ReadWriteWeb, but rather an indirect link via Google’s FeedBurner service. Here is the link:

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/nS1e6RgCjbw/social_media_for_business_who_is_doing_it.php

So what about the other posts on this blog? Surprise, surprise, they all reference other people’s posts in exactly the same way. The same title is used, same first 20 words, and a link to the original post via FeedBurner.

Just to prove to myself that Google is still in fact indexing Oggi’s blog, I did a site search for Lidija, and found two previous ReadWriteWeb posts.

So what is the point of Oggi’s blog?

To hi-hack anyone who is searching for the title of noteworthy posts, so that if they click on the links, they will invoke 3 separate Google blocks of ads, with the user clicking through to the original article.

Now, who wins out of this?

  1. Oggi - for the princely sum of a few fractions of a cent.
  2. Google - for recording and charging the lucky advertisers for appearing on Oggi’s blog - this too would be minimal; however, it is still money on the bottom line.

The individual amount of money changing hands is minimal; however, multiply this by the number of hapless visitors and it could get into the hundreds for Oggi, and multiply this by the number of Oggi clones out there and now you are getting into the thousands for Google. I must state that I have absolutely no clue as to the actual numbers, but I think I have underestimated both sets of numbers here.

So who loses?

  1. The users of the Web for being distracted by useless profiteering …
  2. The advertiser.
  3. The Web in general for being littered with content which has absolutely zero value.

So to recap:

  1. I was sent an e-mail by Google alerting me to the existence of Oggi’s blog, of which I was blissfully ignorant until then.
  2. I visit Oggi’s blog and find that I am reading a post of zero value to me, has zero content, well actually 29 words copied from elsewhere, and which is surrounded by 3 block’s of Google advertisements.
  3. The link to the original post is via Google’s FeedBurner service.

The only thing which is not Google’s is the blogging software, which is WordPress in this case. Otherwise, we would have had a clean sweep. Digressing a bit, we had a bit of fun last April fool’s with this post on Google acquiring WordPress (remember this is not serious).

Now what Oggi is doing is cookie cutter stuff, so I can’t see how Google cannot detect that the intent is none other than injecting a post in between the user and what they actually want to view and benefiting courtesy of Google ads.

But then the conspiracy person within me has a theory, and we all have one, just the degree varies (checkout ReadWriteWeb’s very own post on Chrome)…

Why aren’t Google proactively purging such sites from their index, and thus alerts?

If they did then they loose money since ads are not being triggered.

I certainly hope this is not the case. I would expect that purging 100% of such sites from the index is actually impossible, but I think that low hanging fruit such as Oggi are simple enough for a group of 2-3 Googlers to solve - a few, ok, many, 20% days perhaps.

It maybe a long bow, but the theoretical dilemma is interesting, and no doubt finer minds than mine have discussed this to death.

I googled Google to see if you can report such blogs so this site is removed from the index, but the only thing I could find on the first page of the results, I am not a patient searcher, was a reference to reporting copyright infringements which requires me to mail in a letter (I kid you not).

I was expecting to find a ‘report abuse’ link one click away from the Google’s home page, in “About Google” specifically.

With search being an integral part of everyone’s online life now, and that given that ‘googled’ is now a verb, it plays a critical component of the Web, in that it potentially can control the pages which are viewed by users, thereby controlling the ads which are displayed, thereby controlling the potential revenue received by Google.

Google currently receives a lot of freedom in what they do, which they have rightly earned, but how can we be sure that this is not abused in the future?

How can we, the citizens of the Web, be assured that there is no conflict of interest between the search/index side of the business and the advertising side within Google?

Is there a common theme here? Checkout Michael Gray’s view on Google’s book search.

</rant>

Sphere: Related Content

« Previous PageNext Page »