At last week’s OSCON conference event, Evan Prodroumou won an award from Google and O’Reilly Media for his work on identi.ca and the laconi.ca platform.

OSCON is by far the conference with the biggest profile in the year; and it’s a statement well-deserved to Evan’s magnificent work on the laconi.ca platform, which has now reached 7.000.000+ “dents” and 60.000 users.

Google and O’Reilly Media, the co-organizers of the conference awarded Evan, as well as other open source/Free Software leaders, such as the people behind Drizzle, PostgreSQL, etc. The award is given to individuals who innovated in open source and lead by excellence

Evan can be proud of himself; he’s in many ways a model for entrepreneurs and hackers alike, proving that all you need is a laptop and a spot in a co-working space somewhere in the world (ok that was maybe stretching it a little bit, but not so far from the truth…)

First day of the Web 3.0 Conference here in New York City where the name of the game is to be the biggest possible fish in the smallest possible pond, fast.

What is Web 3.0 ? About 100 attendees are gathered here to try to hammer out a convenient definition. Web 3.0 draws inspiration from the loosely defined beginnings of Web 2.0: 2.0 is Ajax, UGC, community and syndication, with APIs, mashups, angel funding, and Hawaiian-sounding domain names. So Web 3.0 ups the ante and fully embraces a fully effervescent sense of creative confusion: it is a machine-linked web of meta-tagged content arising from specified or behavioural semantic discovery, aggregated along the lines of your interests and/or social graph structure, but with heavy iron serving middleware functions, RDF, SPARQL, and few, if any, customer-facing interfaces, which you will actively use daily, because it will replace, yet support, extend, embrace, and completely annihilate the ordered chaos that is Web 2.0. That, and it will save you money. Excited ? You should be. It will change the world. Any day now. Got it ? The gift shop of the New Yorker Hotel is, perhaps not coincidentally, running out of Tylenol.

Let’s put the random Lego blocks apart though and take a look at what we can build with them.

Problem: Humans, whether they be your consumers or employees, have a fairly limited attention span borne out of a mind that is still by and large better adapted at understanding the Serengeti than it is at dealing with rivers upon rivers of disjoint information. As consumers, people tend to do the day-long web gerbil run: Facebook, blogs, e-mail, Twitter, planners, and back to the start again for one more spin of the wheel. They try to synthesize it all but can’t, so they run around looking hard for an elusive synthesis. As employees, they also have a lot of difficulty making sense of the torrential flows of information cascading through their senses, and face tighter deadlines and concentration-busting pink slips.

Solution #1: let the machines augment what they can do and know. Invent a new query language (SPARQL), to query random databases of unstructured information (which can be RDF, records of user behaviours, interests, and relations with other users), discover the links, synthesize it all, and feed it back the human. In other words, let the machine find the dots, link the dots, and understand the dots, and give you back the general outlines and dynamic trends of the whole picture. Who buys this stuff ? Right now: traditional media, health care providers, and intelligence agencies. If your business is to build, analyze, or enrich links, go see them now.

Solution #2: let the people remain confused, but use machine synthesis to analyze the memetic dispersal of ideas along the influence lines of social graphs, so you can sell them more goodies (including migraine medication). Who buys this ? Right now, advertising networks. If your job is to discover how information flows in a way that augments returns on advertising investments, run, don’t walk, to their doors now.

Solution #3: build microsites and streams that let you distill a whole domain of knowledge for users, web readers, managers and employees. Who’s very interested ? As of a few days ago, Google. Take tomorrow’s plane to Silicon Valley.

Why the rush ?

If there is something that many attendees seem to agree on, is that Web 3.0 is a giant zero-sum game. To win it, you must capture sectorial knowledge in such a way that nobody else can draw better analysis from it than you, possibly obviating the visibility of the sites that are the very sources of your data. When you do, the barrier to entry becomes vertiginously high: with every day that passes, your data gets refined and augmented at an accelerating pace; with every day that passes, wannabes lose ground to your accelerating momentum. Soon enough, you’ll be the biggest fish in the smallest pond, leaving no space for anyone else to grow.

You may agree or disagree on this. Not that I’ll be around to persistently debate either side of the issue tonight. You see, I have this gigantic headache, and there are quite a few more days of deep confusion ahead for us all.

There are 6 “big” upcoming tech events in Montreal this upcoming week, one of the busiest weeks in recent times. Either you’re in marketing, in development, in social media, or into startups, there’s an event for you this week to meetup.

A group of programmers and developers from the SAT are doing Code Forum monday 4th. It’s an open event for all Montréalers, with the event format modeled after unconference principles.

Felipe Coimbra, the instigator behind TwtApps, is doing a NewTech meetup this upcoming Tuesday.

NewTech meetups are opportunities for startups and new projects to showcase a new piece of software or a product.

There’s a potential problem with the venue, and Felipe is looking for a space to replace Laika. If someone has a potential solution, do contact him.

Wednesday evening, Yulblog gathers Montreal bloggers in its first wednesdays meetup in may

StartupCampMontreal edition 4 is Thursday at the SAT. So far, StartupCamps are the events which gathers the most tech people in Montreal, with an attendance well beyond 300, for an evening of presentations and pitches by 5 startups. Selected startups to pitch the audience are Control Yourself, SiteZoogle, PraizedMedia, Klaxa, Twtapps.

Sylvain Carle is also doing an early session, with a more open format.

In the same day, php Québec is also holding a very interesting evening for php programmers: Rencontre php Québec at ETS. 1 presentation about the Facebook API, and 1 presentation about Atomik, an easy framework.

Also, of interest: Charles Sirois (TeleSystem, Enablis) and Robert Calderisi (World Bank) will present their views on entrepreneurship & africa at a Fraser Institute event, on May 7th.

San Francisco is a cold and windy place this year. Even though O’Reilly’s European conference got canceled, attendance here is visibly reduced. There are fewer booths, fewer attendees, the parties offer a little more room to breathe than a year ago. We were still technically in a recession last year, a year of record attendances, but that was before we figured it out ourselves and helped tell the world (and our customers) about it.

But what the event lost in numbers, it more than made up for in content. The Web 2.0 Expo this year is all about business. Gone are the underwear gnomes, the flower children, and the googly-eyed hopefuls holding in diffident shame (or convoluted PR) the idea of wanting to make money. People come here with a revenue strategy, not to find one. They want to shorten the prototyping cycles, discover the customer sets offering them the deeper revenue streams, achieve visibility, deliver faster, and lower costs. Even the old euphemisms are gone: “Monetization”, the ultimate after-thought, dissipated in thin air and is barely heard of any more. Money is not in the mind last, it is clearly there ahead, as a way to sustain one’s primary dreams and ambitions of offering the best value out there. People here say what they want to say with pride: “I want to do good” and “I want to make money.”

Quirky Twitter is a business tool, and it now wants to work on Scala rather than Rails. Agile is being reworked. Vendors are here offering SDKs, not promises: eBay and PayPal offering a share of their revenue stream; Palm Pre is courting mobile devs; Windows Mobile Marketplace offering a 70% revenue share in 28 countries from the start. Mozilla is offering new, better cost-efficient ways to build software. “If you want to rebuild this economy”, they say, “we want to be partners”. The VCs are still holding court. People come up with products and services that they can reliably offer their users in sustainable ways.

I like that.

I think this is the best year so far.

With conference season upon us the Montreal technology community is preparing to descend on a number of very large industry events.

Our community has a number of speakers, attendees & company presentations occurring at:

• SXSW Interactive in Austin (March 13-17)
• Game Developers Conference in San Francisco (March 23-27)
• Web 2.0 Expo (March 31-April 3)

Conferences give us a great chance to network with many of our industry counterparts from around the world.  They also provide us a chance to meet members of our local community that we may not have connected with while in Montreal.  Meeting your local counterparts at these events allow us to help support each other in many ways while we are stateside.  Whether you are looking for a job, trying to recruit for a position, inviting people to listen to your session talk or need help trying to meet that critical investor/partner/speaker or guru your local community might be able to help you get more out of your conference experience.

If you are planning on attending any of these conferences this year please send a tweet using the conference hash tag & #MTL to introduce yourselves including who you are, which company you are with (if any) and any information about meetups, promotions, presentations or help you need to get the most out of your trips.

• #SXSW #MTL Example: @georgefavvas CEO of @smarthippo is at #SXSW #MTL this week where SmartHippo is going to be doing a fun promotion.
• #GDC #MTL Example: @austinhill from @akoha #MTL is doing a keynote at #GDC Serious Game Summit
• #Web2Expo #MTL Example: @acroll @seanpower Authors of new O’Reilly book on Watching Websites are speaking at #Web2Expo #mtl

This will allow other Canadian & Montreal tech community members to reach out, introduce themselves and hopefully lend a helping hand to each other for any specific things you are trying to get done. It also allows those of us not attending events to keep an eye on your tweets from Montreal.

If this picks with with other cities such as #Tdot (Toronto), #Van (Vancouver), #Cal (Calgary), #Ott (Ottawa) or #CAN (Canada) you can use these links to track the Canadian tech community at these conferences. Expat Canadians are also welcome to grab the #CAN tag to join in on the fun.

• #SXSW - Full Canadian City round up
• #GDC - Full Canadian City round up
• #Web2Expo - Full Canadian City round up

At the very least we can co-ordinate meeting up for drinks to showcase our drinking prowess to our industry counterparts around the world :)

This is a cross post from Austin’s blog.