Friday, December 10, 2004

EthanZ summarizes Hoder's talk about blogging in Iran. 

Hot news from Mary Hodder, no relation to Hoder, including a picture of Joi Ito taken by Esther Dyson. 

I talked briefly with Dan Gillmor today about his new citizen journalism "seed" project. I wondered who he was working with. He didn't say. I suppose he could be doing it on his own, but somehow... I don't think so. Then I noticed he was sitting to the right of venture capitalist Joi Ito during the sessions this afternoon and thought Hmmm, I wonder. Sitting to Ito's left was Google VP Andrew McLoughlin. Maybe his money is coming from a big Silicon Valley company? We'll find out pretty soon, says Dan. 

This afternoon's first session was another ad! This time for Meetup.Com. I don't even want to know if they're a sponsor. I kept thinking if a reasonable moderator were here we'd ask if Meetup was the only example of this kind of stuff. Robert Putnam had some interesting things to say after the Meetup pitch. He talks about the 20th Century in different terms than I do, but observes the same phenomenon. Before the 20th Century we made our own entertainment, we entertained each other. Creativity was distributed. Along comes TV, radio, phonographs, CDs, mass produced print, and all of a sudden only the very best and most commercial of us are allowed to create. Now we're flipping back, because we can do mass distribution of micro-produced content. To the surprise and perhaps chagrin of the people on the last panel of the morning, this will flip around the equation in both business and politics. Demand will now tell supply what to make, instead of supply convincing demand to buy what they've created. Big big diff. 

Ole Eichhorn via email: "You guys already know this, but it’s a point worth emphasizing; one of the really cool things about the whole RSS mechanism is how efficient it is. Yesterday my DSL went down and my whole network is on dial back-up for the moment. (Using an Apple Airport Extreme hub as the dial-up gateway, which is slow but way better than nothing, very cool, which is a different story.) Anyway while on dial back-up I’m really appreciating the asynchronous nature of RSS retrieval. And it doubly reinforces how much better it is to get 'entire content' in RSS feeds as opposed to simply teaser text." 

Wow, it's been a whole year since I've used the term "wiener boys." Now there's a piece of data your life wouldn't have been complete without. 

This whole panel-audience thing is so tired. There are say 200 people in the audience, and five people on the panel. This format focuses all the attention on the five. But the ideas in the room are among all 205 people who are here. Day 2 flips that all around, we hope.  

We're an hour into the current panel. The moderator says he's "awed." Sorry to disagree. I'm "bored." Zzzzzz. Now something interesting. Esther asked why there are two cops in the room. Britt shouts out "Bad actors." Then Rebecca tells me there have been death threats against one of the speakers. Who? Hoder. 

I'm at the conference now, at 11:08AM. I have wifi access. Right now we're listening to an ad from one of the sponsors. He's telling us over and over in so many ways how successful eBay is. Boring. And kind of humiliating. Now Esther Dyson is speaking. She's on the board of meetup.com and was chairman of ICANN. "One learns more from mistakes." Craig Newmark is the last to speak. Can't wait till he goes. Micah Sifry, Britt Blaser and David Weinberger are in the row in front of me. Rebecca MacKinnon to the left. Keyboards clacking everywhere. Which is funny because the sign on the staircase says there's no wireless Inkernet access. Debora Spar from HBS is speaking. She says the Internet hasn't turned things upside-down in business, so it probably didn't do it in politics either.  

Today's conference is being webcast. 

I'm not there yet (slept in, I'm a sick boy). Tim Jarrett who is at the conf, reports there is no wifi. Bzzzzt. How did that happen? It seems that Tim's MAC address is okay because he was at the first BloggerCon. I'm hoping mine will be okay because I'm a former officer of the university. First I have to stop off at CVS and get some throat lozenges and oscillococcinum. 

Christian Science Monitor: Podcast your world. 

Geek News says iPodders aren't smart about using disk space.