VMWORLD 2008: DAY 2 REVIEW – VIRTUALLY ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE

VMworld is not just a trade show about virtualization, it uses virtual technologies and Web 2.0 technologies in a way I’ve never seen before. Here’s an example:

Blogging:

Not only is blogging encouraged, but it is honored. There is a special set of tables in the keynote auditorium for bloggers to set up their laptops for blogging. Or in my case, I was Twittering about the keynote with my iPhone. Indeed, during yesterday’s keynote with with VMware CEO Paul Maritz, the announcer invited attendees to use Twitter to send in their questions. The person next to me was from Denmark and didn’t understand what I was doing. He had never heard of Twitter, so I sent him to Twitter.com. By the way, my real-time “Tweets” (noun form of Twitter) on this show can be found at this link. Note, they’ll appear in reverse chronological order, most recent at the top.

Podcasting:

John Troyer of VMware, blogger and podcaster extraordinaire, was doing several podcasts live from the Communities Lounge at the Solutions Exchange on the show floor. John is very involved in VMware’s blogger community and end user communities. He has lots of community management experience. Here you see John interviewing user moderators from VMware’s communities. You’ll find John at the VMTN Blog and his podcasts here.

Virtual Pavilion:

While this is a show about virtualization, there is also a virtual show going on at the same time. Eric Nielsen, VMware’s Director of Web Communities showed me around the virtual, online pavilion.

You can access it directly from the VMworld.com website, or from here. It is a two dimensional virtual world that an attendee can navigate through and visit various rooms.

As an attendee navigates around the Virtual Pavilion he or she can see other attendees, participate in contests and games, gain points for answering questions on multiple choice questions, etc. This virtual navigation system is a 3rd party module for Clearspace, the social networking technology that VMworld.com uses. There are even “Expert Sessions” non-synchronous “events” — talks that you need not be present to hear — where a speaker will provide audio, video, content or a whitepaper which is then attached to a forum. The expert will visit daily for the next two weeks to answer any questions.

The Virtual Pavilion also features 15 “hidden rooms” where you can find special clues, quiz answers, and secret codes for a free t-shirt at the Communities Lounge. One of these hidden rooms is the Restroom, which itself has a portal to a hidden room.

Eric manages VMworld.com year round. It is active not just during the semi-annual shows, but throughout the year. Various Partners have “booths” here. Can you find the “hidden room” in the Dell booth?

Blogs:

And as I mentioned before, the VMworld.com website features attendee blogs as well, found here.

Thanks for coming along.

BillPetro.com

LAS VEGAS AND EMC WORLD

I’m in Lost Wages, Nevada for the EMC World event being held at Mandalay Bay. The first night’s entertainment, the Goo Goo Dolls. 9300 attendees so far. While I’ll be writing daily about this huge show on this blog, for the first time, another technology will be used to update information more quickly: Twitter.

To follow my “tweets” or my more frequent posts, you get them at http://twitter.com/billpetro

I have written about it before, but the use of the technology continues to evolve. It is at least 3 things:

1. Micro-blogging technology that allows one to write just 140 characters
2. Broadcast Instant Messaging that is not just one-to-one, but one-to-many, as many chose to “follow” you
3. Presence-management or status-management as it is often used to tell others where one is or what one is doing

More recently companies and professional bloggers are using Twitter to make product announcements, press releases, and references to news stories. There are technologies, for example, that sent out “tweets” (Twitter posts) to all followers after a blog article has been posted. This is true on my group of blogs. Other tools allow presentation of blog posts to social networks like Facebook.

For EMC World, there is a group of bloggers and twitterers (is that even a word yet?) who will be writing posts about the event, and their adventures in Las Vegas during the event. These can be tracked by the “tag” that is used in tweets of “#emcworld”. So, you can use a Twitter aggregator to filter all tweets with the tag “#emcworld” and see what the twittersphere is discussing. For example, a visit to http://twemes.com/emcworld will show who is talking about emcworld, including me.

Thansk for coming along,

BillPetro.com