OpenTech 2005

Here at OpenTech 2005, feeling very much in my natural habitat: surrounded by fellow geeks. Although a bout of delayed jetlag knocked me out a little this morning and I spent the second session sitting in the hallway talking to Alan Connor, who was suffering dreadfully from a hangover and thus was pretty much in the same state of mind as I.

The session I chaired, Practical Open Content (with Rufus Pollack, Paula le Dieu, Steve Coast and Tom Chance – thanks guys!), went pretty well I think. We discussed various open content projects, including Science Commons, Remix Reading, Free Culture UK and Open Street Maps, and the various issues faced by them. It was all videoed, and as usual I feel a bit of a loss about what was said because I was so busy concentrating on it that I can’t remember it. I’m sure someone somewhere took notes, but it was a good discussion with interesting questions from the audience.

Because I’m feeling a bit tired, I haven’t taken notes of everything. In fact, there’s just the BBC Backstage launch and the discussion about launching a British/European version of the EFF. I’m sure that others have taken notes, so maybe try the Opentech tag on Technorati. Oh, and don’t forget the Essential OpenTech 2005 Primer, which is just ace.

BBC Backstage

Ben Metcalfe announced the official launch of BBC Backstage, wherein the BBC make various bits of their content available for non-commercial use – as they put it ‘use our stuff to build your stuff’. He went through a bunch of slides explaining what sort of stuff they are releasing and how, and what sort of stuff you might like to think about building with their stuff.

Really cool examples:

Dynamite, which is a site remixing BBC Travel news, local news, Flickr, weather and Google maps. Ubercool.

BBC News Front Page Archive, which shows every change made to the front page of the BBC News site, e.g. the archive of July 7th. (Related fact: BBCi was fielding 50,000 hits a second yesterday.)

Rebotcast Reads BBC News, which is a podcast of a bot reading the news

He also announced a competition for BBC Backstage developers, to encourage people to come up with prototypes that demonstrate new uses for the BBC’s programme schedule data and win actual real prizes such as a server. Geek bling!

Should there be a British EFF?

Ian Brown, Rufus Pollock, Danny O’Brien, Cory Doctorow

Missed Ian’s short talk, sorry.

Rufus, has worked with FFII, UKCDR, Friends of the Creative Domain. But rather go through the organisations, why we are having these discussions because these issues that relate to the knowledge economy are suddenly becoming very important. Similar to the environmental issues from the 60s onwards when it became important. So there is a whole spectrum of groups who are working in that area – there is no single solution to how we organise activism and policy etc. Those of us here believe in an open approach but there’s not a lot of representation, e.g. at a political level, and in the media they are not taking both sides of the debate. At the basic level, we need to have a group that people, e.g. journalists, know they can call. FFII does get calls, but that’s only just started happening. But we need a spectrum of people – extremists and the guys who cut the deal are required, we need people to say XYZ is unacceptable, to stir things up, and the people who then actually do the deal.

Cory, from the American EFF. EFF is not a legal defence organisation, but they take very narrow cases which can change the law. They have no funding or resources to be a defence organisation, although they have contacts. EFF didn’t start out to be an impact litigator. It was founded and funded by some people who wanted to defend people in need, so they hired attorneys and it developed from there. Do grassroots organisation, work on policy/standards/treaties and lobbying, but what we don’t do very well is grassroots stuff that goes beyond letter writing and sending us a cheque. There’s a real concern that if there were chapters of the EFF that they would stray from the EFF’s position and could end up in court arguing against themselves. Are now leading some free software project, but need other things, say for designers, and any UK organisation needs to consider that. Cory is the entire EFF staff in all of Europe. Often bad laws are created by a sort of too-fro process by edging things forward on two fronts. Cory is here to work on the issues where American laws might have an impact on European laws. In the States, had a big victory for the Broadcast Flag, but in Europe there is a similar initiative that goes further than the Broadcast Flag did, and that’s the sort of thing that a European/UK activist group should be addressing. You don’t need to be a geek to understand some of these issues.

Questions from Danny: What works and what’s missing?

Ian – what doesn’t work is membership organisations, and things such as FIPR or No To ID which is a single issue thing and costs only £10-£15 to join, haven’t been successful. It’s not that people don’t like joining (look at Greenpeace or the RSPB), but for some reason these things haven’t worked as well as in the US. Activism in terms getting people to write to MPs for e.g., doesn’t seem to work either, and when people write it doesn’t really work in getting MPs to change their mind if it goes contrary to party line. Lobbying is better, e.g. House of Lords are far more interested in digital ID than the House of Commons, especially Labour MPs.

Rufus – potential approaches, we are lucky that we care about something and that’s what motivates people. Abstract issues are difficult, but concrete things involve people. Pitch actual examples to the grassroots, not the concepts, e.g. all software developers would be affected by software patents, but open source people were the most involved in the campaign to resist them. So getting people engaged is to look for people who are affected. Often membership organisations bootstrap from donations, although often membership orgs don’t pay their own way. Will be difficult to run a policy organisation on volunteers – activists yes, but not policy. If you’re doing to talk to the government and press you need funding, which is hard to get in the UK. Can provide a community and try to grow it, but without funding it’s difficult.

Cory – EFF doesn’t take government money. Here think tanks can get money, but activists can’t. EFF has built coalitions with other activists groups and that works very well. Appeals to the constitution also works, e.g. with strong crypto they used a free speech argument which worked rather than the arguments about technical issues. Human rights issues are very strong and powerful. There is the European Court of Human Rights, and it overrides local law and it’s important to look at that, because young lawyers will do it for free. Letter writing campaign, even duplicative letters, work in the US. If you get someone to write a letter, even a duplicative letter, introduces them to actually doing something. Appealing to industry does not work in the US.

Danny – Money’s what’s missing. Historically, every few years the idea of organising a big thing comes up. Danny’s done this and money is lacking.

Stef Magdalinski – We can do a lot without money, theyworkforyou cost £2k, and has gone round the dot.com millionaires and asked for money and they just vanish. Having given up on the UK guys, the US guys have made their money globally and shouldn’t we ask them to fund a global project.

Danny – there’s more than just dot.com billionaires, there are organisations that are in this area. But because we are used to doing this on a shoelace, and there’s no access to these people.

Richard Alan – Ex-MP. Was in the house of commons. Letter writing does work. Any MP that got 100 letters on an issue would act. Making it concrete is important, you have to make things relevant to people, say ‘this is what will happen to your constituents’, then that is concrete. Money is important and has been lacking. Another thing is about liberty, because although we have a Liberty, they muddy the waters by focusing on human rights.

The Rest

Back in the hallway, mainly cos their’s wifi here. Probably not going to take anymore notes, but has been a damn good day.

,

OpenTech 2005 line-up announced

The good people behind OpenTech 2005 (23 July 05, Imperial College, Hammersmith) have announced a provisional schedule, and it looks great. I’m chairing the first session in the seminar stream:

Practical Open Content 11.30am – 12.20pm

Chair: Suw Charman

Paula Le Dieu – Science Commons

Tom Chance – Remix Reading

Steve Coast – OpenStreetMap

Rufus Pollock – announcement of Free Culture UK

My only disappointment is that this means I’ll be missing one of my all-time favourite speakers, Danny O’Brien:

Living Life in Public 11.30am – 12.20pm

On the Net, you can go from obscurity to slashdotting to global fame to obscurity without making a penny. You can have privacy or influence, but not both. You can be famous for fifteen people, but not keep a forwarded email a secret. Danny O’Brien talks about the decoupling of fame and fortune, and the new security of obscurity.

Danny and I have chatted briefly about this subject before, and I was really looking forward to seeing how his idea for the talk had evolved. Guess I’ll have to beg someone to record it for me instead.

Another tough choice will be:

The Future is Open (or should be) 3pm – 3.50pm

Chair: Ben Hammersley

Jeremy Zawodny, Yahoo Troublemaker

The last few years have seen interest surge in “open” technology, standards, formats, and APIs. Why is this important for those who use and write software, those who create and enjoy digital media, and those building new businesses? Jeremy will make some informed speculation where is all this headed and talk about what Yahoo doing in these areas.

vs.

Where’s the British EFF? 3pm – 3.50pm

Chair: Danny O’Brien

Does the UK need a membership digital rights organisation? And if so, what cool-sounding acronyms haven’t already been taken?

Panel discussion with:

Cory Doctorow, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Ian Brown, European Digital Rights

Rufus Pollock, Open Knowledge Foundation Network

Woe is me. Alas, alac and woe. And alas again.

So, if you’ve nothing better to do on 23 July – and trust me, you don’t have anything better to do on 23 July – you should come along. Will be a great day, with suitable amounts of disorganisation and chaos to keep us all amused in the breaks.

New Media Knowledge Seminar: Blogging – A Real Conversation

Went to the New Media Knowledge seminar Blogging: A Real Conversation yesterday and did a 14 minute (it was closely timed!) talk on objectivity. Although I decided not to show my mindmap to the world during the talk, I’ve uploaded it to Flickr. It doesn’t encompass everything that I said – for the last five minutes I was extemporising on the blogosphere and how subjectivity is an essential art for marketers to learn if they are going to be capable of understanding and fitting into it. (Must learn to judge the timings of my talks better.)

Still, it was very interesting to see what else was said. I enjoyed Johnnie Moore‘s discussion on authority – who gives it to whom and why – and why we blog. Less of a talk and more of a chat, it was a nice change of pace.

I disagree, however, with Johnnie’s dislike of having speakers. Yes, having speakers stand up in front of an audience does create an us-them dichotomy which is especially false when you are in a room full of your peers, but in an ideal world that’s because the speaker knows something the audience doesn’t, and the audience wants to find out what. As a speaker, I don’t feel that I seize the authority to stand up in front of people talk about the stuff I talk about, I feel that I am granted grace to do so by the audience and that I had better damn well say something interesting. I do like more open-space/discussion type formats too, but I do see the value in a good keynote.

The corollary to that, of course, is that a crap keynote makes you feel like you’ve just wasted precious minutes of your life that you are never going to get back. But then, so does a crap discussion or a crap open space session. Can’t win ’em all.

Adriana Cronin-Lukas outlined a stark choice for marketers: either learn how to engage with your customers in a way which they find acceptable, or find yourself being forced into more and more outrageous attempts to capture attention. Her point that interruption-based advertising is outmoded and doomed to failure as we find better and better ways to route round it was well made. We are in an arms race now, as the marketers find new ways to grab our attention and as we create new filters (both mental and technological) to get rid of adverts. I wonder what the future of advertising holds – people are generally pretty media savvy these days, but when the kids of today grow up, having been used to dealing with the media their whole lives, will they be so savvy that advertising no longer works? Or will they be just like us, perpetually annoyed each new crappy gimmick?

I also liked Adriana’s equation:

bias + transparency = credibility

Works for me.

Was lovely to finally meet Rafael Behr, journalist and Observer blogger, and I say that not just (although possibly partly) because I’m on their blog roll. He had some interesting stuff to say about blogging and the media. I really like what he’s doing with the Observer blog – I particularly like the fact that it really is a bloggish blog, which just rambles along from day to day covering whatever subjects Rafael feels like writing about. Just like a normal blog, and not at all the journalistic behemoth that some people seemed to assume it would be. Good to hear Rafael’s perspective on how all that works and what the pitfalls are, though.

Sabrina Dent, the beginning of whose talk I unfortunately missed because I was a bit delayed getting to the venue, talked about whether or not blogging is a new communicationsn paradigm, and decided that no, it wasn’t. I missed the quote about the bees, so have had to lift if from Paul Goodison (who took notes – I’m going off memory):

Of most interest was her quote from a book called Out of Control by Kevin Kelly, which described the behaviour of bees when they find new food sources and how they communicate this back to the hive. The more vigourous and exciting the dance, the more bees visit that location.

Nice analogy.

Mike Beeston talked about how people have been doing bloggish things for centuries, but that the shift now has been the immediacy with which we can make links and transfer information. Couple of hundred years ago, one had to send off horsemen into the unknown with messages in order to organise insurrection. Now we can do it instantly via a whole bunch of technologies.

I think he missed a point out though – it’s not just instantaneous communications that are changing the way that we act and interact, but also persistency. Arrangements can be made for a temporally constrained event synchronously (e.g. proxy meetings which are organised on the fly via mobile phones) or asynchronously (e.g. via email).

We’ve always had asynchronous communications, and the problem with them is if you miss the boat – if the communication goes astray and it is ephemeral (a letter lost in the post, for example), then you never know that you didn’t get it. The difference now is that both synchronous and asynchronous communications have persistence – they exist online allowing that data to be more easily and more widely disseminated. If you miss the IRC chat in which your insurrection is being organised, the logs can be made available. If you’re using a blog, then it doesn’t matter when the details were posted, people can continue to read it up to and beyond the event you are organising.

Lloyd Davis has made a wiki for notes, and is posting the audio up too although that doesn’t appear to be available yet. UPDATE: Audio is now up.

I’ll be interested to listen to it, if only to find out what I said. (Oh, and on that note, if you were there, please do give me feedback on my talk – I really want to know whether it was any good or not, and what I could do to improve my speaking style.)

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Supernova: The Backchannel

Ross Mayfield, Mary Hodder, Suw Charman

As I was on this panel, it was pretty difficult to take notes. I think because it was a bit of an ad hoc, slightly chaotic panel – reflecting nicely the backchannel, I think – no one seemed to start taking notes until I put SubEthaEdit, which we were using for the collaborative note taking, up on the screen.

Funny that.

We talked a bit about what the backchannel is, and I described how IRC can be sniping, or it can be a force for good. Mary put together a film which sadly didn’t render properly so had no sound. Then we answered questions and I demo’d SubEtha Edit.

Here are the notes from SEE, thanks to Tom, Nat and Kevin for these:

Find SubEthaEdit here: http://www.codingmonkeys.de/subethaedit/

SubEthaEdit was designed for pair programming.

The last panel on the Backchannel…

Comment from the audience – we talk about the immersive gaming and the like, but why is the conference a one-way / one-speaker channel? one of the best things about the whole enterprise has been that while people are talking you can go and explore the blogs and read around it. It’s one of the best and most immersive explorations of the subjects that I’ve been involved with…

“This has been the best session so far”, says rohit.

Ross Mayfield: I founded this company based on wikis. Doc Searls said ‘look at the energy in the room’ “The thing for Supernova for me is always the people who are here”.

Suw: It [SubEthaEdit] runs over the local network Rendezvous (Bonjour) tells you who else is on the local network with you.

It allows a speed of note-taking that even I can’t get. It allows a collaborative document that is tidier than any one person could create. It’s a nice way of supporting a kind of community in the room. You feel like you’re in a little team, that’s supporting each other.

It’s extraordinarily productive as well. I was sitting around with Tantek and Kevin and Greg yesterday talking about the microformats stuff. It would take you a lot longer to do that stuff if you were passing around documents and the like…

One last comment or question? {no}

Suw: Yay! Where’s my vodka???

* *** ***** *** *

Ok, so my thoughts on all this.

I didn’t really know what I was going to talk about on this panel – last panel, on something which usually defies generalisation, doesn’t really encourage much in the way of preparation.

I’ve been in really constructive, useful backchannels before, where people are adding to the conversations and panels that are happening up on stage. People can dig up links, explain jargon or ideas, and add to what’s been said with further information. Equally, people can push back on speakers who have got it wrong – there was one speaker at Supernova (I wasn’t paying attention at the time) who said something about no one ever setting up a home-made lemonade stand in San Francisco, and within seconds Tantek had posted a picture of a lemonade stand in San Francisco that he had taken a couple of weeks earlier.

It’s true that sometimes the backchannel just descends into sniping, snarkiness and sexual innuendo, but usually this happens when people get bored with what they are seeing on stage. When speakers are engaging, the backchannel quietens right down because people are absorbed by what they are hearing.

So here’s a lesson for speakers – be interesting! If you lose your audience to the backchannel, don’t blame IRC, blame your crappy presentation.

I hate not being part of a backchannel. I loathe conferences without reliable wifi because the back channel gives me a better sense of who’s around and makes me feel a bit less like I am at a lecture and more like I am hanging out in a room with cool people and that someone just happens to (hopefully) be telling me cool stuff from the stage.

At Supernova, it did mainly seem to be the small coterie of mac-wielding Brit and non-American geeks who did the majority of the chit chat, although the odd USian did stick their nose in from time to time. We also had a few people kicking about who weren’t even at the conference, or even in the same country. That’s actually been a favourite trick of mine, to hang out on the backchannel of conferences I can’t get to, even if just to make connections with the people who are there so I don’t feel like I’m missing out too much.

Throughout the conference, I acted as official IRC mole, keeping an eye out for fun things to post up on the screens during the breaks. (I’ll post all those quotes in another post.) That was kind of fun, and added a bit of an interesting dynamic to the channel, as it was well known and announced that I would be doing this. Nothing like the threat of publication to make people paranoid.

One of the drawbacks of this was that I ended up with way too many data streams. At one point I was watching four IRC channels and about ten private messages, listening to the panel, taking notes in Ecto/SubEthaEdit, wrangling a half-dozen AIM/Bonjour conversations, two Skype IM conversations as well as having to check email and put together PowerPoint slides.

That, my friends, is too much data. I can keep that up for about an hour before my brain melts, which it duly did.

But the backchannel, for me, makes the conference a much richer experience. It’s the glue that holds the sessions all together:

TomCoates: This is like the backchannel OF the backchannel

KevinMarks: it brings hallway conversations back into the room

TomCoates: this is the social room for the work

TomCoates: I think it’s mischaracterising it

KragenSitaker: we’ll probably need a better-than-IRC medium for 500 brains. subethaediti s a good example.

TomCoates: This is where we play foosball

TomCoates: I don’t know that the backchannel for this particular conference deserves to be dragged out into the light

JeffClavier: We love you Ross, even after that

TomCoates: it’s more of a Gollum-style backchannel

jjgnet: tom++

TomCoates: the SSE docs is the bit that we should be proud of as ever

KevinMarks: and also flirting with 3 people at once

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Supernova: The Backchannel Mole

Whilst I was at Supernova, I acted as a sort of official backchannel mole, monitoring IRC for amusing or insightful quotes to project on the screens during breaks.

These were my slides. Warning: They may not make sense if you weren’t there. Although, frankly, they may not make sense even if you were there.

Jonathan Schwartz: Authenticity is absolutely paramount. Hiring people to write your blog is like hiring someone to write your email.

TomCoates:The panel is awesome

TomCoates:Ev versus Mena versus Cat versus Lili versus er…

Buzzmodo:When was the last panel with 4/5 women?

TomCoates:This is interesting – you probably don’t want people to get into a state of total comfort with their representation because things will clearly go worng. You want people to be a bit self-controlling. I mean – even at home, people don’t tend to sit around naked scratching themselves. People have an internalised sense of what’s appropriate for them.

hodder:the problem with teenagers is that they have no experience and they nothing to lose

direwolff:or you’re gonna hate that you have your past stuck to you for life

debs_:i don’t agree there is more out there and there will be more so more is forgotten and forgiven

TomCoates:can I ask people in this channel, do you use your mobile phone for phonecalls

direwolff:yes

TomCoates:do you like it? I mean – basically – I’m interested in this because I have no problem with the idea of talking about stuff on my weblog, but I find people ringing me up incredibly invasive and intrusive. I never used to.

Suw:tom: that’s what skype is for, I hardly ever phone people anymore because i don’t like to interrupt them

TomCoates:so what I’m interested in is why people don’t look at things like phonecalls and ask about the horrors and invasions of that and don’t look at how these new technologies are LESS invasive, MORE easy to control, LESS privacy releasing

anildash:if a person searches for the band “chicago”, yahoo should say “before phil collins made it suck?”

Suw:TomCoates, what was interesting about the Yahoo thing? what caught your eye?

TomCoates:Well basically it was that when you added something to your search repository, it wasn’t that you searched your metadata about it, you seemed to be still searching the page. that’s interesting to me, anyway – that you can bracket off things that you find interesting and search them as a subset rather than as a layer about it.

avantgaming:”we’re not really sure what the revenue model is yet”– but we’re playing with it. That’s cool.


jjgnet:it’s actually a good fit: baseball fans have always been multi-channel and participatory. people have been going to games with radios to hear play-by-play for generations, and keeping their own boxscores for generations before that.


njt_:”so mark, has SBC considered supporting people who bring their unregulated ducks to the ballpark?”

TomCoates:loose-coupling versus long term relationships

TomCoates:a typically san franciscan dilemma

Dick Hardt: Digital Itentity is just authentication to prove you are a directory entry.

TomCoate1:The balance between what technology is good for and what people are good for is important. Often people think that improving the technology means firing people. Which I guess it could do, but the core of the enterprise is letting the computers do what they’re good at, and the people what they’re good at that may result in fewer employees (if you’re late in making the change and can’t repurpose your staff), but the ones you have left will be happier and more creative.

TomCoates:that fucking rocked. Interesting questions about the kind of organisational structures in working environments that make that kind of sensation good. that make us feel supported, and safe and comfortable and able to focus and be creative.

Dave Sifry: People would rather be strangled than be forced to put something into a taxonomy or explain why they did something.

wseltzer: we’ve gone without data privacy so long we barely notice.

KevinMarks:Odlyzko’s point is that communications services between individuals and organisations are way mroe important than media, but much harder to count as they are so small

TomCoates:so I went to an event a while back and in the event the guy queried the distinction between marketing and content saying that he put ‘content’ in scare quotes because really – all content was was good marketing, which completely freaked me out

KevinMarks:If you’re calling it ‘content’ you are halfway there

rossm:whenever i hear the word ‘content’ I reach for my gun

njt_:hey dinosaurs, go back to your tar pit and die already!

TomCoates:yeah – fuck you dinosaurs!

KragenSitaker:there’s a knitter ethic?

hodder:don’t stab your seat mate with your needle

njt_:children treat parents as damage and route around them

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Supernova: Reinventing Media

Dan Gillmor (Grassroots Media, Inc.)

Jeremy Allaire (BrightCove)

Suranga Chandratillake (Blinkx)

Lawrence Gelburd (Wharton)

Dan Gillmor

The protection of markets is always one of the great disincentives to innovators.

How is the net becoming a platform not just for text and pictures but for everything. It’s bigger than journalism.

Jeremy Allaire, BrightCove

Founded BrightCove, online service for distribution of TV on the internet. Open model in terms of who can publish. Core premise isn’t anchored in open source media, but more general accross programming. Monetisation of media, and free media.

Traditional distribution platforms for video on a mass scale are scarcity constrained and closed access. Economic/contractual system in place, rights issues, but internet confronting that head on. Opportunities for two audiences:

– existing commercial p rogrammers, line up of tv/sat providers, not necessarily movie studios, but producers of massive amounts of content. but little control over distribution

– secondly, net new growth in who can credibly create video products. Tens of thousands of video producing organisations and have a new distribution path. The net growth of people who have cameras and lightweight production tools will grow exponentially so a publishing model for them is important.

In beta trials, launch later this year. This is a plaform evolution so TV as an internet platfor ms new, it’s not IPTV or TelcoTV, but it embraces the internet models of discovery and communication. Best practices from the net merging with TV.

Surange Chandratillake, blinx.tv

Blinx.tv is an audio/video search engine, using speech recog. tech to make the audio and video itself searchable. Jeremy’s points aply. Blinx is content agnostic, and have done deals to get trad content into the system, but also open to opensource content.

In many ways this is not a reinvention, just a new chapter in an old story, which has themese like the Gutenberg printing press. It’s about tech being used as an amplifier for the ideas of an individual. Then it’s all about power and influence. The net can be used to broadcast beyond what you could normally do. that becomes interesting.

When first launched product was a download tool, had a traditional marketing plan with ads etc. that people do. Briefed Om Malik, and told him that it could be blogged, that the embargo only applied to ‘real’ media, but three days later had a massive problem with download demand – Om’s blog totally wiped out their servers with demand. That’s the power of amplification.

Blinx allows any submissions, and automatically indexes any content. One issue was a submission form from the BNP, fascit nationalist political party in UK. Irony that they were benefiting from the work of a second generation immigrant.

Lawrence Gelburd

Love biz, tech, entrepreneurship. Building services. Interested in loosely coupled servers etc. Realised that big companies didn’t like it.

Started open systems, open protocols so that anyone with a computer could get all the information needed to control a building. Good for users, not so good for competition. Created national standard -> international standards. Well worth it.

Dan Gillmor

Harder to do good audio than good text, but good video is even harder. Everything is crap, or a lot of it is crap. so how are we going to find the good stuff?

Jeremy: Production values, costs, etc. This is largely tech driven at one level, but as scarcity has been addresed, so moving from terrestial to digital, to satellite to digital TV, as it’s easier for smaller markets to be served with focused content, it’s easier for people to find stuff.

Advent of workstations and hardware/software, the timing of internet TV distribution is not totally coincidental. Micromarkets can be supported, and understanding production values becomes easier.

The methods of discovery for this are no different to what the web already presents. I don’t believe in a programme guide, but in self-programming. People who create content will programme.

The base of discovery which is search, they won’t be searching for video, but they may happen to come across video.

Surange: easier for an endu users to become a producer, and in six months wherein blinx has been live, the content was traditional media, but now it’s swinging widely the other way, 50% self-generated content and that will grow faster than the traditional media. So how do you organise it? How do you find the bit you care about. Predictably it’s following what happened with the internet. So there are directories, that works for a while but breaks down becuase it’s a lot of effort, there are attempts at using folksonomy, which has more chance of succeeding. Because you have more people doing it and they are passionate about their particular areas. One of the most powerful source of discovery is search, the fact that you can go to one place and describe what you want then jump to that info is phenomenal.

Only a few short years ago you had to use a library. Now you can just use Google. Just need to understand the raw data in order to be able to search, but that’s just the first platform. Once you get to that stage then you have to build everything else on top which is where it is interesting.

Lawrence

Save people time and energy from doing search, some businesses woujdl rather pay to have someone else to do it. There will be hybrids of human and machine filtering. Some of this stuff is going to have to be done by machine, too much data. And you don’t want to spend so much time watching to find what you want.

Dan Gillmor

Broadcast flag – the bill to insert the broadcast flag has failed. Yay!

Questions from the floor

Greg Allen: Starting to imagine what technology might look like in the next 5 to 10 years. We’ve reached escape velocity. So waht do you dream about at night?

Surange: Distribution used to be a big problem, and that doesn’t exist for broadband-enabled people. The problem becomes then how you get to waht yhou want – finding stuff is difficult. I believe that it is partly abouthte individual, but also about implicit tech.

Tom: what about machine-readable licenses?

?: XRRL describes this

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Supernova: Mike Homer, Open Media Network and Marc Canter, Ourmedia.org

Mike Homer, Open Media Network

Reinvent public broadcasting

Landscape for rich media delivery:

– Consumer broadband take-up

– mass market video creation stools

– bitTorrent adoption

– Weblogs

– RSS feeds

– RSS feeds move to porcasting and video blogs

The Open Media Network

– a free public service for the mass publishing and viewing of legal content on the internet – a true public broadcasting system for the internet – basied on kontiki’s grid delivery technology

– components of the strategy – grow as fast as possible -s tart with free content – provide only legal content – authorise dby copyright owner – accelrate content collection – mass publishing innovations – accelerate audience growth – mass viewing innovations – harmess the community for organising, ratings and rankings.

Benefits of open media network:

For consumers – broad selection of content, easy to find, tv style program guide, secure virus free background, kontiki grid, better than bittorrent and secure, personalisation, season tickets, tags, synch ipod, windows media, tivo

For producers – free directory listing, automated publishing with RSS feedreader, free delivery, unlimited volume, broad audience – PC, TV – ipod, prominent branding, links back, secure nanopublisher with payments

Tivo implementation of the open media network.

KQED has an affiliate programme

http://www.omn.org

Firefox and Mac version in beta in a couple of months.

A handful of key features that are important for professional publishers and display on a tivo in the course of the next three months.

Marc Canter, Ourmedia.org

partners:

internet archives

creative comments

broadband mechanics

bryght

wikipedia

commitments to join registry:

– open media network

– odeo

– buzznet

– brightcove

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Supernova: John Clippinger, Social Physics

Classic notion of authority is to have the big leader, top down, etc.

Next generation web – small groups can organise and be as effective as large groups. Notion of authority is residue of middle ages. Seven levels of authority. Serf to King.

Adam Smith – two sides. Unless you have sense of empathy or sympathy and moral responsibility you can’t have the self-interest side either.

“These good acts give pleasure, but how it happens that they give us pleasure? Because nature hath implanted in our breasts a love of others, a sense of duty to them, a moral instinct. In short, which prompts us irresistibly to feel and succor their distresses.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1814

Humans are wired for trust:

Human brain evolved in part to read an dmanage complex social relationships. Behaviorual and neuro-economiosts found that people are not rational, maximising economic actors but risk trust to protect reputation and social norms. Economic “chioices” are not conscious – but a mid-brain function.

What is trust?

– evolutionary stable strategy tested through a variety of social species over millions of years of evolution.

– a pattern of neural pathways and dopamine circuits – embodied in the social emotions – mirror neurons.

– socially constructed and enforced ‘protocols’ that depend upon ‘honest signallying’, credible and equitable reputation accounting and outcomes, cheater-detection and enforcement.

Trust is more emotional than rational – you can’t make a distinction between rational thinking and emotional thinking.

Reputation and trust:

– Control through ‘reputation’ rather than ‘force’

– How someone is seen and rate by their social peers determines their standing and access

– Reputation scales faster and is less costly than force

– Emergent network roles and dynamic specialistaion

– Social identity an ‘social exchange value’ social currency is tired to context and reputation.

Network leadership roles – eight different people work in a network – exemplar, gatekeeper, visionary, truth-teller, fixed, connector, enforcer, facilitator.

Effective networks work well if these people are placed and operate effective.

{diagram of ‘netwoork role-based sense-making inter-networks}

SocialPhysics Platform – multiple identities and contexts – ‘you have many selves / different ways in which you perform in different networks’.

“Higgins Open Source Trust framework”

1. Create a framework / API – an abstraction layer for identity and social networking services

2. Create a set of exemplary context ‘provider’ implementations (plug-ins)

3. Create an exemplary appl that demonstrates how to use the extensible network

4. Enable developers to leverage higgins in their applications…

[Higgins Project: http://www.eclipse.org/proposals/etf/main.html and http://www.eclipse.org/higgins/ ]

Policy conversations: identity metasystem initiative…

http://cis-berkman.editme.com

Provocative Takeaways:

– trust is biological encoded and supported by social emotions

– can have principled strategies for achieving high levels of trusted exchange

– identitiy is multiple, distributed, contextual, role-based and reputatioonal

– markets are a kind of social networks and depend upon the social emotions -trust – empathy – reciprocity – to function

– long tailed markets are aggregates of social contexts

– trust feeds on transparency

[from backchannel: http://www.identityblog.com/stories/2004/12/09/thelaws.html]

[http://www.google.com/search?q=trust+serotonin+oxytocin ]

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Supernova: Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com

[Collaborative notes taken by Tom, Nat, Kevin et al. EAOE.]

“The cake has to bake” – I don’t buy the whole-new-web story, this is a maturation process. We’re only in the beginning, yes, but it’s not Web2.0 either.

We do use open source extensively, been coding since March ’99. Our killer apps on this stack are out (salesforce, supportforce), but now we’re selling our toolset, customforce (v2 shipped yesterday) to develop apps, competing with Access and IDEs. And, of course, there’s customforce, “database on demand”. Multiforce will be our OS, lets ISVs manage entire apps hosted on our network.

Our sw is free for universities and nonprofits.

Q: I used to describe you as Seibel, but now you sound more like Oracle.

A: When I started out was the era of 3270 terminals, an 80’s stack that only recently got replaced by MSFT in the ’90s. [“Oh, and Seibel — they’re still around” 🙂 ]

Merrill Lynch signed 5K users this week.

We have to show entrepreneurs in this industry what’s possible. We have other ideas in our labs that highlight that this is a platform — so you can sell software to manage “conference events”: payments, rsvps, etc. There’s a ‘long tail of enterprise apps…’

[He’s using long-tail as the label-du-jour for what used to be called “mission-critical custom apps”]

Part of customization is localization: Japan and China shouldn’t remain stepchild markets that wait for patches, etc. Much less customized to local cultures…

Q: Where’s your blog? A: crmsuccess.com

[but http://crmsuccess.com/ doesn’t obviously link to anything of Marc’s — but it’s apparently only for customers. IRC backchannel found http://crmsuccess.blogs.com/ which is public]

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