Supernova 2007: because technology is everyone's business

Friday, April 28, 2006

What We're Not Talking About at Supernova

I try to position Supernova just slightly ahead of the curve, focused on key trends poised to enter the mainstream conversation.  It’s about actionable learning.  You should come out of the conference not just hearing new concepts, but understanding things that are useful to you.  Some ideas are fascinating, but too speculative to impact large numbers of users and businesses in the next few years.  Others are “hot topics” at the time, but only because everyone already knows about them.  And often, catchy slogans are so vague that they don’t really tell you much about what’s at stake.

The Supernova 2006 agenda is pretty broad.  But there are still some topics you might be suprised not to find there, like Blogs vs. Old Media, Microsoft vs. Google, or Is Web 2.0 a Bubble? These topics generate a lot of noise in the blogosphere, and they all reflect significant underlying trends.  Yet the conversations around them have become stale and caricatured.  They all reflect a simplistic “us vs. them” mentality.  It’s easy to make sweeping generalizations or dismissive judgments; it’s much harder to dig down and explore where things are going.  That’s what we try to do at Supernova.

Of course, the frameworks I set up through the formal conference agenda are only one thread of conversations that emerge around Supernova every year.  People will talk about what they want to talk about, both on-stage and off.  I have no desire to stop that (as if I could).  It’s important, though, for a conference to push its participants from time to time.  When I did a session four years ago called “Are Weblogs the Next Platform?”, the speakers (all of them leading lights of the blogosphere) were perplexed about what that meant.  Now everyone talks about Web 2.0, and Microsoft CTO Ray calls RSS syndication the connective tissue of Net.  The topics we address at Supernova aren’t necessarily my ideas; they are concepts I perceive “in the ether,” by listening to what many smart people are saying and doing.  This year is no different.