It's hard to believe mesh kicks off tomorrow - a reality that became very real yesterday when the Group of Five, our wonderful conference organizers, MCC Planners, and our volunteers (thanks, Rhonda!) hung out at MaRS getting a handle on how the two days will unfold. As the MaRS crew started to set things up, I couldn't help butthink that we are a long way from a cold winter night a few months ago at the Paddock Tavern when someone raised the idea of putting on a conference. Little did we know what we were getting ourselves into! I'm looking forward to mesh-ing as much as possible so if you see me wondering around, please introduce yourself.
Update: Om Malik, who will kick off mesh tomorrow with a keynote on the "Future of Media" has a great - and timely - post called "The Myth, Reality & Future of Web 2.0", which a must-read for anyone at all interested the Web 2.0 phenomena. A couple sentences jumped off the page:
1. "The Myth of Web 2.0 is the investment opportunities. The reality of Web 2.0 is too little original thinking." That's a fairly provocative and intriguing statement given the dozens of new services coming out every day (which provides TechCrunch and Emily Chang with raison d'etre).
2. "The way I see it, there is a lot of commonality in Indian food and Web 2.0. Even as early as [the] 1990s, Indian food was not familar to the American palette. It look a long time before people got used to the earth aromas and spces. But once they did, the Indian restaurants blossomed in America." I think what Om means is that right now the Web 2.0 community of developers and users is arguably pretty small, although we like to believe everybody's into all these cool, new things. Over time, however, Om is suggesting the rest of the world will eventally get jiggy with Web 2.0...or something like that.
P.S. I write most of my blog posts using Qumana, a Canadian-made editor. Tris Hussey, Qumana's chief blogging officer, will be giving a workshop tomorrow called "Blogging 101 - How and Why".