Author: administrator

Meg Hourihan (megnut.com) is talking now. ABout weblogs and later about the Lafayette project, which is looking for a new name.

The anatomy of a weblog, with timestamps, links, etc., is what uniquely defines a weblog. But blogging is also about distributed discussions, where weblog posts float around the web, people connect to each other, share ideas, and so on. Basically, weblogs are what the web should have been from the beginning. It just took us longer to get there than we expected.

What are we doing with blogs? Two sides of the weblog equation: Reading blogs and writing blogs. A lot of development is going on on the publishing side (Meg is a co-founder of Blogger.com). Plug for Typepad (I’m waiting for that too!)

The reading side is the new challenge. Social software. RSS readers. Good enough for smaller scale social networks, but what happens when things grow? Trackback (Reboot bloggers, see here)

The Lafayette project is about helping people reading weblogs. A social networking tool. RSS reading, blog recommendations, several languages. Opens this summer. Cool.

No weblog backlash ahead, Meg thinks. On thhe contrary, actually. Lot’s of interesting stuff to come. A whole new way for people to read and write content.

Scott Heiferman is talking now. He created Meetup, a tool for organizing local interest groups.

Powerful? You bet. Meetup has more than 350.000 users. Never did any advertising, only word of mouth. Example: Creating a presidential candidate: Howard Dean as president. Meetup on CNN. 270 cities held meetups. 36.000 people registred.

Scott’s message: The big trend. 1950: people meet in groups. 1960s: People watch TV in groups. 1980s: People watch TV alone, bowling alone. 1990: People usd non-internet-PCs. 2000s: Internet, and Meetup.com.

The Internet is a network of people. Space and time is connected in new ways. Using the global network to make local connections.

Ben Hammersley is talking about his dog, Pico. As an introduction to the semantic web. Triples all around; Pico is a boy. Subject, verb, and object. And the URI, the unique identifier. And namespaces, that makes up a defined language for defining what we talk about. DC.creator and such.

Ooh, getting techie now, having shown real code on the screen. On to RDF and RDQL. Semantic queries, much more advanced than Google. Find me everyone in this room who likes Abba. Google can’t do that. Semantic web can. And Ben’s grandmom can (huh?).

Cory Doctorow is talking about making a living out of wat you love to do. Cory as had a life-long dream of being a scifi writer, and recently realised this dream whern publishing Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

Can creative people make money on the net? Cory talks about how difficult history has shown it is for creative people to make money off new technologies, because they’ve been screwed by the tech industry and big media.

We’re loosing our freedoms in the copyright war. Intellectual property rigts vs. academic freedom. The freedom to copy a CD. And so on.

The solution is compulsary licences that ensures that money your pay goes to the artists.

Tim O’Reilly is the last speaker today. Tim talks about the paradigm shift towards open source.

A change in world view that calls everythng you knwo into question. The last paradigm shift in computing was the PC paradigm shift. There, a key development was the coming of commodity hardware based on an open architecture (“IBM-compatible PCs”). Another important feature of the PC paradigm shift was that software was decoupled from hardware, creating not one, but two (overlapping) industries.

The open source paradigm shift is happening now as part of the wider internet paradigm shift. We’re seeing commodity software with an open architecture, and information applications decoupled from both hardware and software.

The main characteristics, the three C’s:
– Commodisation
– Customisation
– Collaboration

What are the business models? All over. Linux as the BIOS of the internet OS. Many possible new “Intel Inside” possible, such as J2EE. But mainly, the new business models are about services. Both various professional services, but also services to the end users. UUnet, BIND, etc are relevant models. Offer a core service, but also offer “add-on” service, like BIND who could have done domain registrations, or Apache web hosts offering web hotels.

“Jeff, you’re pissing in the well” (Tim to Jeff Bezos of Amazon when they filed for a patent on one-click shopping)

One ring to rule them all OR small pices loosely joined?

We’ve just heard Marc’s Voice live, singing H�ndel. Logical introduction to broadband mechanics and Longhorn and open source.

Tools ain’t what they used to be, Marc says. Productivity software. Unified digital lifestyle. Chanting about communities. It all great. But: It’s really hard to get shit to work together.
Introducing WebOutliner, the ultimate tools for bringing communities and people together.

It’s all done using OPML with a social software wrapper around it. Hey, it’s all very cool, BUT, is OPML an open standard? As far as I know, it’s a Dave Winer standard. OPML is not real qualified XML, that’s the real problem.

First after lunch is Jason Fried of 37signals. Jason is a usability designer. He’s talking about theh importance of putting things in context and perspective. How big is small?

Setting expectations. “Now what? What happens next?” Some nice examples of how good designers are thinking about the user situation. Like Amazon’s buttons with short explanations.

Contingency design. Things go wrong. Oh, they do. Design your error messages, especially the crisis points. Preventative and First Aid. Hall of shame, OMG, what shamefull examples, like Network Solutions’ AskJeeves natural language thing, that’s soooo stuupid.

Dan Gillmor is last before lunch. A journalist, one of the best out there, Dan talks about how the web is chang�ng the way we consume news.

The aftermathh after September 11, 2001, showed how media in the digital age really works. Then came warblogging. More recently, Trent Lott, a politician brought down by bloggers. Columbia’s explosion, where bloggers brought the real story.

Journalism becomes a conversation, or maybe a seminar. My readers know more than I do, is what journalists have to accept (it’s always been a fact, but a denied such).

Tools and toys are coming up constantly. We don’t have to wait until Gulfwar 8, there’s a lot out there now.

Hollywood and governments want the internet to be like a TV with pay-per-view access. Three scenarios: Total control. Total anarchy. New melding of the forms, big journalism and little journalism living together side by side. Thhird choice preferred. Agree.