Scripting News: A smarter net?

Scripting News, the weblog started in 1997 that bootstrapped the blogging revolution.

A smarter net?

On Twitter, earlier today I saw that Jason Calacanis was in Barcelona. Hmmm, I thought, I wonder what he's doing there.

A few hours later, I see that Jeff Barr is in JFK waiting for a flight to Barcelona.

Okay, now I know something is up. So I ask Jeff, and he sends a pointer to a conference he's going to. I'm sure Jason is going there too.

Now I wonder, who else in my network will be there?

And of course I'd like to have been alerted of this coincidence two weeks ago, so I could have planned a trip myself. While the conference doesn't look that awesome (do they ever?) I've never been to Barcelona, and here's an excuse to party with people in my network in a new city. And a trip to Europe would be interesting right about now.

Someday, probably not too far down the road, our nets will be smart enough to make these connections for us. All we need is a few hooks and a data interchange standard or two, or enough motivation to enter our data into a new app. Maybe there would be enough of a payoff.

Disclaimer: I invested in Confabb thinking they might solve this problem.

Last update: Thursday, June 3, 2010; 4:00:41 PM

~About the Author~

Dave Winer, 55, is a visiting scholar at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"The protoblogger." - NY Times.

"The father of modern-day content distribution." - PC World.

One of BusinessWeek's 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

"Helped popularize blogging, podcasting and RSS." - Time.

"The father of blogging and RSS." - BBC.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

Mail: scriptingnews1mail at gmail dot com.

Mar May