The Web 2.0 Expo, co-produced by TechWeb and O’Reilly Media, is a global annual gathering of technical, design, marketing, and business professionals who are building the next generation web. It just wrapped up it’s East Coast run today. The conference featured a number of phenomenal keynote and general session speakers.

Among the keynotes was one of my favorite authors and presenters: Clay Shirky. Shirky is an adjunct professor at NYU who studies social media, and author of the book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. During his keynote Thursday at Web 2.0 Expo in New York, Shirky examined the problem of information overload. His premise was the fact that the problem is not that we have too much information to process. The problem is that our filters are inadequate. And privacy breakdowns are a similar problem — privacy is threatened because the filters we relied on to keep our private data confidential are broken, and we haven’t evolved good mechanisms to replace those filters yet. I thought that it was one of his best presentations and I’ve shared it below.

For a thoughtful summary and evaluation of Shirky’s presentation, take a look at Mitch Wagner’s post on Information Week’s Digital Life Blog titled: Clay Shirky Busts The Myth Of Information Overload At Web 2.0 Expo.

To take a look at other great presentations from the Web 2.0 Expo, take a look at the videos here and the speakers presentation files here. Definitely looks like it’s a well run and worthwhile event to attend.

It seems like you can’t read a business or technology blog or any other type of magazine or trade publication without running across a myriad of references to Cloud Computing. In its most simple form, cloud computing means nothing more than browser access to an application hosted on the Web. Cloud computing is most definitely that, but it’s also much more. Today, the cloud makes leading-edge technology available to everyone, including consumers, often at a far lower cost than businesses pay for similar or inferior services. So what is cloud computing? Why would or should you use it? How can your association leverage it? What are the benefits and challenges? Obviously there are as many questions as answers; and as always, the devil is always in the details.

Photo by Cote

I’ve been keeping a very close eye on this trend for quite some time and found a really good reference from Information Week that cuts to the chase and will give anybody interested a good foundation to understand the concept. It’s not so much a how-to guide as it is a look at cloud computing from the perspective of the eight leading players in the arena including: Amazon, Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, IBM, Oracle, and EMC. The goal of the article isn’t to provide a look at all of the players, but rather to sacrifice breadth for depth. I think it accomplishes that end quite well.

And for anyone out there doubting how relevant cloud computing is to smaller organizations, I’d recommend taking a look at two articles on how SMB’s Will Rise to Cloud Computing and Cloud Computing’s Strengths Play to Smaller Companies’ Needs because I think each does a good job of building the business case for why and how smaller organizations, especially those “making do with a small, underresourced IT staff trying to emulate the productivity of IT outfits with multimillion-dollar budgets” can now access enterprise-class technology with low up-front costs and easy scalability. However, in order to stay balanced and because cloud computing is not without its challenges, I’d recommend taking a look at their article “Down to Business: Customers Fire a Few Shots at Cloud Computing” which looks at the arguments against cloud computing most notably: cost, scalability and reliability.

As the writers and editors from each of these pieces note, this is just the beginning of the conversation. There is obviously much more to examine, understand and consider in order to determine if cloud computing is right for your organization. However, the one thing that we can be relatively certain about is the fact that it is here to stay. Hopefully these resources will help you make some informed decisions that could ultimately provide your organization with a competitive advantage and translate into greater efficiency and member value creation.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on if your organizations are using (or contemplating) using cloud computing and if you are how it is working out for you. If you aren’t what’s holding you back? What questions are left to be answered? What are your concerns?

How many times do you encounter a problem or challenging situation but get stymied in your search for a workable solution? If you are like most of us, it happens all of the time. I am one of those who are truly amazed by the true innovators among us and and during the Great Ideas Conference back in December, I posted a tweet where I pondered: “Where do great ideas really come from?” Needless to say it’s an area that I am extremely interested in because it is as much art as it is science and requires the ability to be in the moment and keeping an eye on the future.

In a recent Economist article: The accidental innovator, Evan Williams, founder of Obvious and creator of Blogger and more recently Twitter, was profiled and he shared some of his thoughts about innovation.

What I found most interesting and useful about the article was Evan’s pragmatic approach to innovation. He cites three primary insights gained during his time creating Blogger, working at Google and as he has further developed Twitter and ramped-up his work at Obvious:

1. Genuinely new ideas are stumbled upon rather than sought out.
2. New ideas are by definition hard to explain to others, because words can express only what is already known.
3. Good ideas seem obvious in retrospect.

Great thoughts and something to really consider in our everyday lives. I really appreciate his commitment to making stumbling on accidents a core competency. My key take away from the article and from Evan, himself, is his willingness to embrace mistakes and use them to his advantage. Blogger was created out of frustration with collaboration software and Twitter was created by asking the simple question: “What can we take away to make something new.”

What frustrates you or your members? What can you take away from one (or more) of your processes, programs, services, etc. to make something new and potentially more valuable? It may not be the only or best approach to innovation or problem solving but it does give you a great starting point.