"The Year of Disruption"

Welcome to the first Realtime blog…The Conversation.

Let me introduce myself: I'm Val Landi. In the early days of the Web, I was what was called a Chief Marketing Officer. You remember me, I was the guy who spent all the VC money to acquire "eyeballs." Today, I'd describe my function for both Realtime and our industry colleagues as that of a Web 2.0 media architect.

I'll be blogging twice a week about the effective use of emerging Web 2.0 tools and platforms to engage in conversations with your customers and markets: How are RSS, podcasting, the explosive growth of web-based communities and social networks, vertical search via Alexa, and weblogs changing the nature and dynamics of marketplace communications and creative dialogue? We'll discuss books, interview thought leaders, and try to find out who's doing some really great stuff out there.

This fall will mark the third year of the Web 2.0 conference hosted by media gurus Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle.

The theme of the first year was “The Web Is a Platform”; the second year the theme was “Reviving the Web; both were about the services and businesses and opportunities that arose from the Web. The tentative theme for this year’s conference, according to Battelle in a recent Searchblog will be “The Year of Disruption” – “the year the Web - in all its forms,” Battelle writes, “really flexes its muscle and begins to seriously turn the soil of the global economy in deep and permanent ways.”

With a snap of the fingers we can think of several major and deep disruptions already underway that will be worth examining in upcoming posts: just look at the advertising-lite issues of the once mighty print bibles of the IT media industry to see the damage wrought by the Cnets and wiki-based news sources of the world; of the importance of brand in an RSS-world of 500,000 channels; of the iPod and social networks such as MySpace on the music industry and the explosion of Indie labels; the impact of Google offering free WiFi on the Baby Bells; of Amazon and its affiliate company, BookSurge, as ways for authors to leapfrog a myopic and  dysfunctional book industry; of Craigslist on newspaper classified ad revenues; of Microsoft Live on the software industry, or any two or three or four or five days’ worth of Web 2.0 companies showcased on Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch or dissected on Tim O’Reilly’s Radar blog.

As Seth Godin says, “marketing is not a conversation; great marketing starts a conversation.”

We welcome your comments: our goal is to showcase the insights and stories of the magic it takes for our companies to succeed in a rapidly changing world.