Wednesday, December 07, 2005

USA Today: It's online, but is it true? 

CBS News: Tricky Wiki. 

I stumbled across these pictures of Palo Alto riot police, deployed on University Ave, on 25 June this year. What was going on there? Weird. Any clues? 

I went for a visit at Yahoo in Berkeley today and had a brief talk with Jeremy Zawodny, who was visiting too. We had never met, and had an interesting discussion about something I'll write up later when I have a bit more time.  

Jon Udell: "A blog can be used to narrate the key events and accomplishments in your professional life, to establish your reputation as an authority on subjects in your areas of expertise, and to educate the world about your company's products and services." 

Lee Gomes: "Reporters for the big mainstream newspapers and magazines, long accustomed to fawning treatment at corporate events, now show up and find that the best seats often go to the A-list bloggers." There's more going on here than the reporters being replaced by bloggers. It's disintermediation, the thing that the Internet does to every business, art and profession that aggregates and repackages. Carl Sagan said that human beings are the cosmos gaining consciousness and studying itself. The tech bloggers are the tech community, the programmers, lawyers, investors, business managers, users, taking responsibility for their own cosmos. The reporters were necessary when you needed a million dollars to start a news "paper," then a billion dollars to start a media empire. Now you need a laptop computer and an account on Blogger or MSN Spaces.  

I've noticed what Don Park observes. The desktop is a minor nuisance to modern computer users. They pay almost no attention to it.  

David Berlind: "Park's observations exactly mirror what's going on not just in my household." 

It was interesting to watch the interaction betwen Ben Metcalfe and Mena Trott at Les Blogs. Not sure what to make of it. Technorati captures the action pretty well (although it won't work in the archive). I don't think he's so fabulous. When Mena asked him to explain what he said on the back channel he got all offended. Well geez, if you said it, why not stand by it? Seems a little cowardly to me.  

On thing's for sure, the format of the typical conference needs to be turned upside down and inside out. All the problems with the back-channel go away if you get rid of the audience altogether, and fill the room with bloggers, and turn the sessions into press events, and put them in the corners of a big room with the conversation open and in the middle (and not all-electronic). That's the idea behind Hypercamp. Maybe we'll do it in January (it didn't come together for December, after all). 

Looking at the conference website for Syndicate coming up next week in SF, I'm already bored, and the show hasn't even started!