ITEC 2007 at Detroit

Today I visited ITEC at Detroit's Cobo Hall. I managed to get there for most of the Keynote presentation "Technology is Broken: How to Fix IT For Your Business" given by James Gaskin. It was an interesting presentation and he brought up many good points and seemed to push open source and Mac a lot.

I also got to listen to "Social Media and Web 2.0: How blogging, podcasting, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, LinkedIn, MySpace and more are going to affect your business." given by Kelsey Ruger of Webxites, Inc. Where he talked about current trends and how Social Media and Web 2.0 is and will continue to change the ways in which businesses advertise.

One of the interesting things he mentioned is that if a business embraces some of these new technologies and the social networking tools available, that they have the possibility to reach a much larger advertising audience. If they ignore them that it will not stop the content and discussion from happening, all that will happen is that the business will lose all influence on the discussion about them or their product.

social networking, wikis and folksonomies are some of the new buzzwords.

Blogs are a place where industry and technology news, ideas thoughts and other topics of interest can be added to. Also allows for reputation management.

At the end he recommended that if you want to get more involved:

* embrace social media
* read and consume social media
* start a blog (blogger or wordpress)
* start a podcast of a video cast
* build a mashup (openkapow or Yahoo pipes)
* integrate these into your daily work life