Next up was Tara Hunt who is with Ma.gnolia and they announced that they are going completely open source which should take their product to the next level. They are going to be the wordpress of social bookmarking allowing people to download and start their own social bookmarking platform. It was a good presentation about why being open gives you more power with the community you are trying to work with.

After a little coffee break we were entertained by Ben Huh of icanhazceezburger.com which talked about the evolution of memes and the humor that can be funnier with the use of social media and the power of community. If you haven’t ever checked out that site or the original LOLCats.com with captions under funny pictures you are missing out on a core part of the funny side of the Internet. I love good presentations and his slides used the eras of grow for the site in one word formats like the site, for example “icantgetanysleep” or “programmatica” eras. He used lots of pictures and few words which made his talk funny and impactful. These are good lessons for any business person that has to present a topic that is left of center and needs to be recieved by everyone.

Last before lunch was Danny Sullivan on how using search can meet real life. He touched upon a couple of important points:

“It’s easy to underestimate the importance of search in our everyday lives. Only a few years after search engines arrived, they had replaced friends, books and libraries as the top resource people used to answer questions. Today, the frequencies of daily search use continues to rise — as does what you can find in search engines.

If you look at how the real world – rather than just the “web world” – is increasingly becoming searchable, and at the impact this has. Is Google StreetView cool until it’s your house that’s showing up? Should people be able to pull material even if it’s “public” in other ways? Do we need to better understand how revealing search can be about ourselves, in particular when so many are now Twittering and Flickring their private lives?

And what happens as search continues to jump off our web browser and into our televisions, iPhones and GPS units. These bring us a world of new search opportunities, such as location-specific restaurant search — but they also open new concerns about the search records and profiles left behind. After exploring some of the issues, plenty of time for audience discussion.”

Great session and now it’s time for a great lunch, networking and video interviews of some of the attendees.

Next is going to be coverage of the afternoon sessions. Stay Tuned.

After a little coffee break we were entertained by Ben Huh of icanhazcheezburger.com which talked about the evolution of memes and the humor that can be funnier with the use of social media and the power of community. If you haven’t ever checked out that site or the original LOLCats.com with captions under funny pictures you are missing out on a core part of the funny side of the Internet. I love good presentations and his slides used the eras of grow for the site in one word formats like the site, for example “icantgetanysleep” or “programmatica” eras. He used lots of pictures and few words which made his talk funny and impactful. These are good lessons for any business person that has to present a topic that is left of center and needs to be recieved by everyone.

Be Prepared for Scale

Within in two weeks (Feb 2007) of starting the site, they had 2TB of storage to deal with and then they had to move to an easier content system. In this case it was WordPress.com to host and handle this type of system. They did it the following month. Every business should have a provider growth plan in place in case your growth plans outpace your predictions.

Your Weekend “Project” might become a business

Ben thought this would be a fun thing do as a weekend project but as the traffic grew from 0 to 15 million page views a month within a six month period he quickly realized that this is going to be a real business and not side weekend project.

Good Solutions are Simple Solutions

Ben commented that even though they tried complex solutions for some things they always found that the good solutions are the simplest. Complex content management system? No. Use a Blog. Big Content Delivery Network for our site? No. Host it on Wordpress.com

Leverage Your Success and Branch Out if you Can

Since the success of the site was rising and everything was scaling well, so he thought it would be a good time to leverage the success of a scalable model like this and branch out. This is how iHasAHotDog, FailBlog, GraphJam, PunditKitchen, TotallyLooksLike and EngrishFunny were born and are seeing the same success.

If you can learn to scale your business, there is no limit to what it can do over the long term. You just need to prepare for it and tune it along the way.