This workshop will examine the business, political and societal implications of social media, and the impact of this burgeoning communication medium on the future media and business landscape.

The world of e-commerce today is dominated by centralized business models, blown up to immense proportions by the reduced friction and increased velocity of the Internet. The next intriguing phase supports decentralized commerce, allowing myriad small players across entire industries to connect directly.

This workshop track, presented by CommerceNet, will discuss the challenges and opportunities facing innovative models for decentralized commerce.

Decentralized Commerce A:
Prediction Markets

Participants:
Robin Hanson (GMU)
Bernardo Huberman (HP)
David Pennock (Yahoo!)
Emile Servan-Schreiber (Newsfutures)
Walter Yuan (Caltech)

Prediction markets provide more reliable forecasts of election results than polls. They can also be used to get improved forecasts on sales levels, project completion dates, or to get more detailed data on consumer preferences than focus groups provide.

We'll discuss how they are being applied in business contexts to incorporate divergent views into business plans.We'll introduce the idea and its history in the first session, then proceed to current examples, tools, and discuss the future of this new approach.

As organizations become more distributed, they need new tools to perform business functions. This session will highlight innovative software for managing structured and unstructured information, documents, and processes in connected organizations.

Smart companies are realizing they can take advantage of Weblogs for both internal and external communications. In this workshop, leading business blog practitioners, vendors, and analysts will provide practical advice for business professionals looking to leverage the power of blogging in their organizations.

Moderator:
Chris Anderson (Wired)

Participants:
Dave Goldberg (Yahoo!)
Jeremy Allaire (Brightcove)

Technology makes it possible to exploit the "niche" portion of the distribution curve for products, services, and content, which turns out to be even bigger than the "hits" that sellers have traditionally emphasized. Featuring top executives of leading e-commerce and online media companies, this workshop will explain how to capitalize on the growing power of the Long Tail in your business.

A Whole New Internet?

Presenter:
Janice Fraser (Adaptive Path)

The Web has always been limited by its page-oriented metaphor and request-response architecture. New approaches are overcoming those limitations. Rich, interactive, social applications are rapidly moving from experiments to de facto standards. Meanwhile, bottom-up approaches such as tagging and RSS syndication are bringing structure to the vast, unruly mass of online information.

The workshop will include a presentation followed by an open roundtable covering topics such as: social software, Ajax, tagging, folksonomies, RSS aggregation, online user experience, and the business implications of all these developments.