• Anne Zelenka: How to Make Your Blog Popular – “You need to love to write, to be passionate about the subject of your blog, and inspired by interactions with your commenters. It’s fun to write for a popular blog not because being popular is so fun in itself, but because it brings more of the same: more writing, more ideas, more people to interact with.“
• Read-Write Web: Software for Virtual Teams – “It’s 2007 and no longer do startup employees, or even those of medium-size and large companies, need to be located in the same place. Instead, more and more companies are going virtual. The answer to long commutes, inner city traffic, tapping into creative minds in other geographies and combating global warming is: a ‘work from home’ policy.“
• Chris Anderson: Who needs a CIO? – “The life of a university CIO is like the life of a telco CEO, fast forwarded by about five years. The users want a dumb pipe, preferably at gigabit speed. They neither need or want the university to administer their email, wikis, blogs, video storage or discussion groups. They want it to simply get out of their way.“

“We make stuff.”

Progression of design expression (PDE).

Myth #1: More features = more value. If everything is equal, nothing is important. Solve specific problems well. Design for the 80%. Myth #2: Chrome is cool. Design content not chrome. Myth #3: Missed it due to over-Twittering. Rumor has it that it was Animation is spurious. Myth #4: App is the sum of the parts. Think like chefs, design a whole meal. 2007 Tour of California done by his team in 6 weeks. Myth #5: One size fits all.

Rick of Virtual Ubiquity is showing off Buzzword, a web-based word processor written in Flex 2.0.

They started off by building a layout and pagination engine so that they could do great typography. Good kerning, dynamic layout, all WYSIWYG. Nice list management, including making it easy to have one list item include more than one paragraph of text. Easy graphics importing – “We’ve managed to make graphics a simple thing to do.”

Better direct manipulation, obviating the need to use the menus in many cases.

Documents stored up in the cloud, users with roles (commenters, read-only, etc.)

As Scoble points out, this would be great for blogging tools. True, but InetWord is a native HTML editor and perhaps an even better fit for that use case.

Faizan of Scrybe traveled to the conference from Pakistan!

Their organizer product works just as well offline as online, using a local storage object and a synchronization engine.

This looks very slick. Lots of good printing options, good timezone support – pop up a world map and see the time at a glance. I want this application and just put my email address in for the beta!

Now in final stage of beta testing, sharing and collaboration.

This speaker presented an internal eBay management application of some sort. eBay has over 40,000 servers. The app lets them manage the servers, start them, stop them, open up tickets on them, and so forth. Pretty cool stuff.

Continued demo of the rich eBay application we saw earlier. HTML rendered content inside of Flash. Good performance, showing live filtering of 30,000 categories in memory. Attractive graphical browsing history. Goal is to give users a more personal eBay experience. Persistent search options. Further info to be disclosed at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Computer problems, will show a video instead.

More very nice looking charts, their customers dig deep into data. Take static/boring charts and animate them.

BMC dashboards for BSM (Business Service Management) take system performance and throughput information and display them in dashboard format for an executive audience.

They offer a rich suite of extremely flashy real-time and historic charts of service health and performance. Drag and drop report generation with drill-down. 30,000 data points on the screen at once to “dramatically increase IT agility.”

Uh, sorry, the post-lunch energy slump set in and I kind of zoned out. I’m not the only one — Scoble is either asleep or reading feeds!

Joe is showing some videos and rich shopping on the Victoria’s Secret site. The initial goal was to build the ultimate shopping experience. At first it was “floating through a sea of products,” or The Matrix in 3D, then they got a reality check. After realizing that this didn’t really meet the needs of their target users, they decided to focus on the checkout process. Turns out that 50% of shoppers bail out of an online purchase after hitting the Checkout button. The net result was a pageless, in-situ shopping and checkout model.