API Summit

Image via Wikipedia

I am still trying to decompress from a week of travel, ending in the API Summit today in Reston, VA.  I plan to offer thoughts, when rested, to put the Summit into context, but Mark Potts did not need recovery time, he just let us have it:

The liveblog of the meeting has attracted a spirited discussion among true believers about what the 50 execs should be talking about, and while that’s interesting, it’s a little pointless–the true believers in what it takes to get to the future are on the outside, and the people on the inside aren’t listening to them. The liveblogger did manage to get the discussion put on a screen at the meeting for a few minutes, but odds are few in the meeting had any idea what they were looking at–or dismissed it as the usual rantings of idealistic underlings they’ve ignored (at their peril) for years.

The concept of the liveblog did not hit me until early this morning, after I had read last night that Twitter had been integrated into Cover It Live.  Since the whole point of the conference was frank discussion, without attribution, I was not there to report on the proceedings, but to keep my notes for myself, and ask questions to those who care deeply about these issues.  I believe that many who attended will read this blog, and several will actually read the thread of the conversations in the liveblog, and the results of the polls.

As I have been saying here for some time, we have much work to do, and need a completely different mindset from the traditional packaged media to achieve our goal of a Complete Community Connection.