Interop 2009 Las Vegas: Web 2.0 At Its Best

I would like to apologize that for the next few days, my posts will be more geared towards Interop (if I do get a chance to post that is). I am taking part as an attendee at Interop 2009 in the place that never sleeps, Las Vegas.

Coming to Interop, I realized that Web 2.0 has taken a brand new toll on companies and individuals today. Almost everybody has been twittering and facebooking about their experience with what they are doing at Interop. Some exhibitors even have a Web 2.0 section in their booth, such as Xirrus. Xirrus has one section in their amazing boxing ring booth that is just for Web 2.0. They encourage you to blog, facebook, twitter, flickr, and feed what is going on at Interop.

There are laptops everywhere and blackberries with twitter enabled. Can’t wait to fill you guys in on what’s happening next at Interop. I got here kind of late so I missed out on one of the boxing matches, but Xirrus employees have captured it on video. They said it would be on their youtube channel very soon, so keep a lookout for that!

The Pros and Cons of Forums

This day and age, forums is a social means of conversating with one another. There’s forums for almost everything now a days.

I’m a frequent visitor to about 4 different forums daily. In the beginning, I used these forums just to gather information. I never saw the point of contributing to the forum, so I would just lurk around and read almost everything. Later on I signed up for the forums so I can contribute, solely because I wanted to put my two cents in on certain subjects. Forums can be used to gain information, to have questions answered, and to network. Also forums are a promotional and marketing tool for companies, which thus help with sales and informing consumers about their latest and greatest product.

The bad thing on forums is that people all have the right to speak their piece on anything. So if they don’t like you or a certain company/topic, they will bash you like there is no tomorrow. Being on the forum, you have to watch what you say because you really don’t know who you are talking to behind the computer screen. There’s also a big sense of e-hate that grows very easily on forums.

I encourage people to take part in a forum of their liking. This is possibly one of the best ways to network amongst individuals that share the same interests and passion for a topic as you do.