OPEN

Guess I picked the wrong week not to have any time for blogging… heh heh.

Last week was almost too exciting at times. Seriously. At one point I had to get out of the office to get away from the frenetic jumping up and down of colleagues with new ideas…

I think that anyone interested in the web was probably a little over-stimulated last week, though…  the market was spinning on multiple axes with all sorts of things going down: the launch of the iPhone in the UK, the picking over the detail of the new OpenSocial platform and Facebook array of new marketing advertising tactics.

More cause for excitement for me when I got a last-minute request to talk at the IAB’s annual Engage conference, themed around one of my current big preoccupations, re-thinking marketing in the age of networks.

There was a good panel discussion afterwards, with Josh Spear (who gave a great run through of his view of being Born Digital (a state of mind, rather than an age thing, he said). Josh runs a really interesting UK / US company, Undercurrent, which calls itself  a “social interactive thinktank”.

I didn’t have any decent camera with me, just a rather deficient cameraphone, but here’s an apt pic of Josh running through his slides…

And a lectern’s eye view of the Mermaid Theatre‘s auditorium…

At almost 700 people in the audience it was the largest crowd I’ve spoken to yet. Funny, looks smaller in the picture than I recall quaking on the stage…

Actually, this one from the Mermaid’s own site is better:

Hopefully the IAB will make the presentations and discussions available to view or download – there were some pretty interesting talks from the likes of AOL chief Randy Falco and Owen van Natta, Facebook‘s COO. If you’re an thinking about joining by the way, the IAB is one industry body that is definitely worth getting involved in. Slick, stylish and unremittingly committed to just getting things happening, there’s a real energy and enthusiasm about the whole team.

Here’s to this week, then… be nice if people could stop announcing things for five minutes, but I hear Bebo’s lining up for its riposte to / support for OpenSocial…