Some, like the new BubbleBar let you put a bar on your relatives computers and your photos automatically appear. This is very cool, turns any PC into a photo display device. No longer do you have to email your photos to mom. Your photos will appear as soon as you drop them into BubbleShare.

But what is really funny is this annotated photo album he posted from his week last week at Mix06. Oh, man, that was hillarious! You gotta check out what he made people like Mike Arrington, Bill Gates, Marc Canter, and Jeremy Zawodny say (there’s nine funny photos, click next to see the whole thing).

Alec Saunders has more about the BubbleBar on his blog.

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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Congrats to Michael Lehman, who did that interview and did a TON of others at Mix06.

When Dave Winer says that RSS is going to embrace Microsoft, he’s right. So far we’re listening to what the community actually uses and haven’t gotten ahead of the community (which includes publishers like the BBC and the New York Times) and tried to tell the community which way to go. I think that’s a good thing.

That said, our RSS platform is reading in Atom too and we’ll support whatever the community adopts. Hey, has that Jeff Sandquist guy (aka my boss) been fired yet for supporting Quicktime and PSP? No!

I love this company!

Update: Richard wrote even more on this topic over on his blog.

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I just finished the panel discussion (“Web 2.0: Show Me The Money”) in which I got to hang out on stage with Tim O’Reilly, Michael Arrington, Adam Trachtenberg, and Royal Farros and talk about all sorts of things around what Web 2.0 is, where money is made, and so on.

The panel seemed to go well. It took a bit of time before the audience started to ask questions, but once they did it never stopped.

The weirdest thing about this conference is that nobody is quite sure who is in the audience. It’s not your typical Microsoft conference aimed squarely at developers. It’s not quite an O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference. It’s just… different. The audience is a real mixed bag and that’s okay. It just makes things a bit harder to predict.

I’m anxiously awaiting lots of other postings from attendees so that I get a better sense of what people think and what I’m missing in the next few days.

I tried to find a photo of our panel (I know many people were snapping pics) but don’t yet see one on Flickr. At least there isn’t one tagged with mix06 yet.

Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

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Living virtually is getting a lot of attention. A lot of people at Mix have told me they don’t want to try Second Life or World of Warcraft because of the time these things take. I totally agree. But here Laura and Tina give you a taste of Second Life and get you an interview with Linden Labs’ founder Philip Rosedale (the Ten Team also paid Eric Rice to build an entire island).

So when TDavid says that conference value is going away (he noted that he could get a lot of the value from Mix06 just by hanging out online) he’s absolutely correct. We could meet virtually and have a pretty compelling conference experience online.

But there is still that part face-to-face communication that these things miss. There’s nothing like looking in someone’s eyes, shaking their hand, and sharing an experience in real life. That said, I’ll be online this weekend with my son, who has built me an entire office in my evil software company in Second Life.

My son says that Second Life is the most addicting thing he’s done so far. Here’s a 2006 parent/kid conversation we had recently: “Hey, Dad, I’m in Home Depot in Second Life, want me to buy you anything?”

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Very astute. Of course I don’t think Bill Gates will be able to ignore that MySpace announced (at Mix06) that they had just passed MSN and are now in the #2 spot on most popular Web sites.

It’s real fun watching the reactions coming through about Mix06 over on Technorati. Marc Canter, of course, asked the first audience question about open standards. You can see what everyone says about Marc Canter on blogs too.

It’s funny, we create our own content here too. On10.net today Duncan MacKenzie shows how to use an iPod and a PSP to watch its content. Huh? What’s going on here? Someone is gonna get fired. Or not.

Lots of photos from Mix are up on Flickr too.

Someday we’ll all realize that the cool stuff on the Web is two-way.

Oh, and wait until I start doing demos of Second Life to Microsofties. One inch at a time. One inch at a time.

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I keep forgetting about that tool that lets you watch a variety of search services all from one search. Here’s Gada.be’s result for Mix06.

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.Now, I used to be a conference schmuck. Er, planner. And I’m involved with Mix06′s implementation and promotion.

First, about costs of conferences. Jeff has his economics way wrong. Turns out that if you wanna do a 40 person conference you can do it for free. I was at one yesterday (the Entrepreneurs 27 event was free for everyone – someone even donated a few snacks. Both presenters and attendance was free. Awesome, right?)

If you wanna do a 400 attendee conference you can do it pretty inexpensively. Gnomedex was done for about $100 a person for years. Many other 200 to 400 attendee conferences are low-cost.

But, wanna do a 1,000 attendee conference? Costs per attendee start going up exponentially.

Why?

Because there aren’t many places in the world that you can hold a 1,000 attendee conference. Even in San Francisco there are only a handful of places that can do that (I know, our VBITS conference started at the Marriott by the airport, moved to the Hyatt, then to the Marriott downtown, and now it’s being held at the Moscone Convention Center.

Now, do you have any clue how much we paid for a hotdog lunch? How about around $30 per attendee. How much for a Coke? $5. How much for an urn of coffee? $1,000.

These were not negotiable.

Oh, and you had to guarantee you’d sell a certain number of hotel rooms. Don’t sell those rooms out? You might be in the hole for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Everyone keys in on the successful 2,000 conference events. But you don’t remember the baths we took on conferences that we had to cancel.

Oh, and you can just rent a normal projector for a 200 person event. But remember at the PDC where we had thousands of attendees? We had 32 projectors, each of which cost more than $120,000 (Dylan has photo and info here on those). You don’t just rent these at your local Best Buy.

Not to mention about promotion. Even at Mix we’ve already spent quite a bit of money on that. Ads in Wired Magazine aren’t free. Getting an audience is tough work and doesn’t happen by accident.

If you make money at conferences it’s really rare. At Fawcette the conference business did make a bit of money over the years and when that happened it subsidized other things like magazine editorial (without a magazine Fawcette would probably have never sold out a conference in the first place).

Now, onto editorial.

Even at Mix we’re trying to put into play a lot of the things Dave Winer pioneered with the BloggerCons. But, holding a conversation with 200 people in a University setting is a whole lot different than holding a conversation with 2,000 people in a Las Vegas conference venue. It’s not going to be easy to get audience participation and that’s even if everyone brings a laptop and joins in the various chat rooms and blog networks that we put into play.

Regarding content, I don’t like panel discussions either. They always sound better when you’re planning a conference than they actually turn out. Why? Because it’s hard to pitch a real idea out to the audience and really chew on it for a while. I watched Gary Flake give a talk to search champs. He setup the idea, pitched the idea, then explained it in the course of an hour. It was wonderful.

But, if we had a panel on “live labs” it would have sucked. Why? Cause getting five people to work on an idea just wouldn’t have worked.

Panels can be entertaining, though, if you have something where people disagree about. Then you might be entertained and you might learn something. Might.

Anyway, back to the point. What we need to do is figure out how to keep event size at about 400 people. If we do that, then we’ll be able to keep the economics at a great level per person.

++++++++++++

Back to VC’ing. Rick Segal wrote a followup to all the VC talk out there. I love Rick’s thinking and am glad he’s getting some focus on the funding part of the industry.

It’s interesting, some of the anti VC points (and anti blogging points) I’ve heard lately are “you guys have created another bubble.”

Listen, the event yesterday was with young entrepreneurs. They didn’t pay anything to be there. I didn’t pay anything to be there. There was no lockout, no exclusivity. That sure doesn’t seem like a bubble to me. The thing that’s changed is the word-of-mouth network is far more efficient. In the old days you’d never have heard about a meeting like this. Today everyone around the world was dragged into that room. I love this new world. I don’t have to attend conferences anymore to hear the best ideas or see the newest products. I do notice that eBay, Yahoo, Amazon, and Microsoft were there to build relationships with new businesses and see if there’s some talent there that’s hireable.

Where did the Rolling Stones come from? They didn’t just walk on stage and become popular. They started in small rooms. Er, bars. High school auditoriums. And such.

Another criticism I saw of my post yesterday? That ideas aren’t what’s needed. I hear this all the time “ideas are cheap, implementation is expensive.”

Oh, really? How many of you thought up RSS? How many of you thought up Flickr? If ideas are so cheap, where’s the new ideas? I don’t see that many being put out there. And, inside big companies I get to see idea generation at work. They simply aren’t there.

What IS cheap? People who tear down ideas. I see that all over the place. “That idea won’t work because”

But I don’t meet many people who have consistently awesome ideas. They ARE valuable. Companies like Microsoft pay those guys big bucks for a reason. There aren’t enough of them.

Quick, tell me again how you’ll make a search engine better than Google’s. You got an idea? Write it down. If it really is a better idea it’s valuable. Yes, its value will only be exposed if that idea gets turned into an algorithm and put into a search engine. So, you do need implementation, I’m not arguing that, but Google started with an idea for a better algorithm. Let’s not forget that. People often do. To me, the idea is just as brilliant as the implementation.

Yeah, selling the idea is difficult. But, it’s not impossible. Just start a blog and explain why your idea is better than Microsoft’s or Google’s. If you can do that then let me know and we’ll figure out how to proceed.

Anyway, I’m off to travel back to Seattle today. Have a good one and keep the conversation going.

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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They are on walls near my office.

They are on cars on campus.

So, what’s the big deal? Tim O’Reilly is gonna beat up Bill Gates. That’s what I hear. Seriously, what is an open source advocate (Tim) doing on stage with Mr. Proprietary (Bill)? Hmmm. Maybe they’ll come up with a definition for Web 2.0? We’ll have to see. Hopefully no Web designers or developers will be hurt in the process.

Not interesting enough? We know. But we put up a ton of new info (yes, this is for Web designers and developers) and see that RSS icon? You know what that means, right? More stuff to come! (Tim O’Reilly on stage with Bill Gates isn’t the big news, but we gotta hold the really big stuff until later, which is why we’re doing the RSS feed).

Anyway, looks like the marketing team is going a little bit nuts in trying to get the word out about Mix06. Alright, who told THEM to work until 4 a.m.?

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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The marketers are still trying to figure out why RSS took off and how they should react. They see that even major news sites like the BBC are getting into RSS (nice new site, by the way) and that Microsoft this year will release a browser with RSS built in and they know something is up, but don’t know why, or how.

The geeks who invented this stuff probably will find these conferences not worthy, but that’s OK. RSS is crossing the chasm and now different kinds of conferences are needed.

I am gonna yell at their marketing team, though. That site is particularly lame. No RSS. No blog.

If you’re doing a conference you NEED an RSS feed and a blog. At minimum. Check out the Mix06 site, for instance.

Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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