These days the nextweb conference is really happening and great startups are presenting themselves! Evenso the great thinkers and early adapters of the web technology are sharing their thaughts with the audience. In a small side event of the nextweb 20 students of the HvA Interactive media and communication were able to site for 1,5 hour with three of these web evangelist and chat with them about the future, the latest developments, their fears, World War II and ofcourse “the shark”.
The first part of the session was about entrepreneurship and blogging. All the evangelist agreed on the fact that students need to be taught about jounrnalism and have to start blogging. Robert Scoble told the students about his early experience with startups and the hype that everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. One of his comments was that failure is overrated. Where I confront my students with the quote “going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm”, he told the students to research for themselve if they really want to become entrepreneurs themselves.
The second part was conducted bij Dave Winer and he started to talk about reputation management and one of the last sites about this topic empire avenue. It was great to hear him talk about facebook and how hard it is for spys at the moment to work for the CIA and other intelligence services, because if they don’t have an online appeareance it seems to be very suspicious. We debated about the downside of the fact that everybody knows to whom you are connected and philosophied about what would have happend in WWII if facebook had excisted and how governments at the moment are able to manipulate the way people are allowed to work with webservices like facebook.
We ended our conversation with talking about Dave’s new toy, a camera that can’t be demolished in the jaw of a shark and is able to make 3D images. It was a really exciting gathering moderated by Andrew Keen. A privilege for the students to be there.
