Monty Flinsch

I’ve noticed an emerging culture at the web conferences I’ve attended over the past couple of years. There are the usual conference inhabitants: sales reps, booth babes/boyz, swag hounds and earnest newbies. These folks are ubiquitous at all conferences these days regardless of the industry. But the web world has it’s own special species, some of which I’ve been able to identify at Web2.0 Expo this week.

1) The Uber Geek - Dress is intentionally deconstructed, t-shirt from failed start-up required, MacBook Pro covered with stickers, knows more about just about anything related to the underlying technologies powering the web than you do. Extra points for skateboarding through the expo hall. These guys make the products but you can’t talk to them unless you are a real hacker. Doesn’t use Twitter, wrote the framework Twitter relies on.

2) The Blogocrat - Shaved head, goatee, MacBook Pro with custom cover. Black shirt, jeans, nerd glasses. Knows everyone, actually uses Twitter for more than journaling trips to the restroom. Works from home/airport and probably has a better handle on what’s going on than the editors of Information Week.

3) The Re-Tread - Enterprise software sales slime now with Web2.0 features added. You know the guys, they sold your company $30M worth of ERP/BPO software in the early 90s and now want to sell you an underlying network service architecture to make the box of parts they sold you last time come closer to working. Company logo polo shirt, $100 hair cut, golf slacks, loafers with tassels and no socks. These guys are your best friends as long as you control corporate money. Loves his Dell Laptop, wants you to join his LinkedIn network so he can have a TweetUp with you.

4) The VC - Or is he? - Blue blazer, open collar dress shirt, dockers, loafers with socks, really good hair.  Shiny new MacBook Air.  Has the secret to monetizng Twitter, just can’t share it with you, yet.  Wants to reach out to a larger market and will talk to you as long as you have knowledge or potential.  Says things like “As a VC you don’t want to know what I’m thinking”.  May be real, may be Memorex.  This guy just might fund your startup so you have to take him seriously.  Follow him on Twitter

Have you noticed any other outstanding types, want to help catalog these rare species? Leave a comment…

It’s 1996 all over again folks. The hype is flowing, bloggers blogging and thetwitterheads are twittering. There’s more excitement than I’ve seen since the Web1.0 bubble started to inflate. My focus this week is in the social meets enterprise space, especially focused on how wikis with extensible social frameworks can stretch to fill the collaboration space.

I was reading Wiki Patterns on the plane ride out and was struck by the contrast the author (Stewart Mader) drew between structured collaboration architectures and the flatness of a wiki. If we don’t completely understand the use patterns, or if in fact they are still evolving, should we really be deploying rigid hierarchical topologies and expect them to work?

Had a great discussion with Stewart about this and decided immediately he’s a person whose thoughts you should follow.

Other interesting threads are in the open ID data portability space. How many profiles should you have? Personal, professional, theme related? How many of each? It’s a common question within the enterprise as well. Employee ID, LAN ID, wiki login, single sign-on issues are more relevant in the enterprise then perhaps in the public space since use is mandated.

Sitting in the Blogtropolis blogger lounge right now, seeing faces that must belong to my Twitter stream, interesting how a global social network is still relevant in finding a person across the room.

More thoughts later…