Last Thursday, I pulled myself away from my desk for a field-trip to Yahoo!'s "Rise of Citizen 2.0" event. It was pretty freakin' cool. Ok, #1 - it's Yahoo! Granted, our shrine for Yahoo! is significantly dwarfed by Google's, but come on. Besides, they did have best party at SxSW so expectations were high!
The main part of the afternoon event was, of course, listening to Karl Rove talk about the internet and politics. For an invite-only event, the crowd was much smaller and more intimate than I thought it would be. Ingeniously, Yahoo! never actually published the agenda anywhere (that I could find) prior to the event so there was no sneaking in at the last minute for the big show!
The first hour of the event was spent talking about some research recently done by Yahoo! that built upon the framework they established when producing the Poli-influentials report with IPDI. Interesting? Yes. Groundbreaking? No. Check out the slideshow:
Personally, I'm not a Karl Rove fan and believe me I won't be moving over to the dark side any time soon, but there's no denying that he was well-informed about the web and politics. It was pretty scripted and they only accepted one audience question, but interesting nonetheless. I was also slightly underwhelmed by the presence of secret service. Well, until it was time for him to leave the cocktail party and then they were everywhere. Speaking of cocktail party, Karl Rove actually hung out and socialized following the event. With a little prompting, he even sent a text message to Tom Matzzie of MoveOn.org letting Tom know that he'd "taken his name in vain" during the presentation. Priceless!
