I went to Online 2007 today (tues) to have the usual wander around and to catch a few talks that sounded like they could be interesting.

I sat in on “Benefits and Applications of RSS in Organisations” and “Strategies for using RSS and Web 2.0 as communications tools in the enterprise“. Sound good right?

They may have been if the titles better reflected what was said by the speakers - from Newsgator and EasyByte respectively, but they didn’t really do much more than plug the respective product of the vendors. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing at all wrong with this - but if you’re going to do this, let me know. Of course I expect you to plug your own product, but I don’t expect that to be the main thrust of the talk. Worse still, the guy from Easybyte - who was their CEO, Gustav Colliander - was unbelievably dull (sorry Gustav, sure you’re a lovely bloke) and was totally lacking in passion. If he doesn’t have passion for his product, why should I or anyone else??

Now, I have a lot of time for Newsgator, and indeed whilst not my rss reader of choice have used it to set several colleagues up with an rss reader over the past two years. Still Andre Bonvanie’s talk should have been entitled: “How Newsgator and Sharepoint can harness RSS in Organisations”.

Both talkers would also have done better to find out who in their audience used rss, sharepoint etc either before or early in their talks.

I have to confess I left these talks annoyed that we were not getting better, and yes it does lead to the ‘well, if you think you can better ….” line of thinking. Can I? who knows, but hopefully I could deliver a talk that at least matched my title. So, maybe I will see you at Online 2008 … and then maybe you’ll have the last laugh.

NB: The Panel Debate: The challenges of sourcing business information from BRIC countries and emerging markets, whilst not exactly saving the day, did at least go some way to doing what it said on the tin.