Has anyone seen Bill Gates at reboot8? Or maybe Steve Ballmer? Most people would wish they would never be there but somehow they know about this conference. See for yourself what they did

Now I am also one of those 1000 people on earth to soon have a number painted exclusively for me. It’s a fun idea and I hope Sala does share some more information about the project after he has sold all numbers.

Today at reboot Doc Searls talked about marketing as relationships. One of his slides showed marketing as being bullshit. In addition he thinks that

There’s no marketing in the attention economy, just sales

In my opinion he is wrong to some extend. Sure if you have a big crowd of people that talk about products you don’t need marketing to tell you about the product and the company still will sell the product. However, how does the first person to buy your product and spread the word know about your product?

If I want to buy a product I do look for it and might find blog talking about it. But how on earth do I find a product that does exist and nobody bought because nobody does no about it. So, you need marketing to tell you that this product exists. This is one of the major reasons why marketing exists is to tell you about products a company has to offer. Even the smallest amount of doing that, maybe just by putting the product in front of your company door, is marketing. And therfore we need to have marketing and this is not bullshit.

Marketing is about markets and if your product is not in the market nobody can buy it – you don’t have any sells. I would even say that the basic function of marketing can be seen as “bringing something to the market”. That said it should be clear that marketing is not bullshi.

Today’s first keynote was from Jesse James Garret about User Generated Information Architecture. He mentioned Amazon to be one of the first websites to use special links to track the way a user makes throughout the whole site.

I am a long time user of openBC now and one of the most interesting features is the search. It’s not the usual search you think of on most websites. In openBC you have the possibility to see which person has looked at your profile and especially how they came to your profile.

They may have searched for your name and surname and then clicked on the search results. Or they may have clicked your profile because you are a contact of a person he’s a contact of. Actually this is not really about tagging, but the concepts they use are the ones Jesse talked about in his presentation. I think this is not that curcial to openBC (I might miss a point here) but for the user it is a very important feature.

I was very curious about reboot this year. After my first attendance last year I knew what to expect somehow and what this will be all about. So this year I did have expectations – the biggest one to be motivated and inspired.

This really did happen. The talks from Bill Laio, Ben Hammersley and Jesper Rønn-Jensen were really good and did inspire me again. I will share some more thoughts about Marc Hurst’s presentation about “Bit Literacy” and what to do with your sent messages box.

So, looking forward to day 2.