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Scene: The Open Source Cafe.
Man: Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.
Waiter: Sir, it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
Conferences are great for dorky jokes that no one should ever utter and under no circumstances should post to their weblog.
My Trip to Liberty City. awesome narrated video of someone navigating the virtual world of Grand Theft Auto as a tourist
Brewster Kahle is currently speaking about the Internet Bookmobile. It’ll be downstairs after the session and you can get your own book printed. Donations for the continued operation of the Bookmobile are appreciated.
Update: My photos of the Bookmobile. (Journalists and others: feel free to use the photos with attribution. Thanks!)
During his talk on Biological Computing, Eric Bonabeau mentioned that to run experiments with ants, they need to starve them to get them to do anything. There’s a push to starve the ants, as it were, with the DMCA, the Broadcast Flag, Patriot II, plugging the analog hole and the like. At some point, this is going to result in some pretty hungry ants. What happens then?
Maceij’s semantic blog search engine. uses 1-year old data but it works
You can tell this conference is bottom up rather than top down when digerati Esther Dyson and Howard Rheingold are sitting on the floor in the packed O’Reilly presentation. Could you imagine Alan Greenspan sitting on the floor of some financial conference?
Realtime Amazon product feeds. Perl script
Tech Forum Talkes Big Ideas. Wired News
Hydra lets people work on documents together via Rendezvous. Right now, 5-7 people are taking collaborative notes in the same document on Eric Bonabeau’s talk on Biological Computing. With the permission of the other participants, I’ll either post or link to the resulting document here. (Ok, here are the notes we (there were 7-10 of us) took during the session. Oh, and here it is with Hydra’s color coding intact.)
Update: there’s now a chat as well…using Hydra as a ad hoc chat system. Hydra just connects with a place for people to plop in text. Very little imposed heirarchy which makes it very flexible (what Howard was talking about this morning in urging developers to “create tools that amplify collective action”).
Some screenshots of New Blogger. is it ok to be underwhelmed by this?
Some key points from Howard Rheingold’s keynote on Technology Innovation and Collective Action:
- Developers: create tools that amplify collective action
- Are we going to be consumers (passive) or users (active)?
- We need to fight to remain users.
- Reputation systems are crucial.
- In building software, learn from the past and buildin room for future innovators
- The design of defaults is important. (The idea that simple is very usable, but make it hackable for power users and developers.)
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