Category: Conference Notes

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Conference Notes

Supernova '05: A round-up of Tuesday afternoon…

The talks that this post refers to occurred at Supernova 2005 on Tuesday 21st of June between midday and 4.30pm.

In the first post I wrote about my experiences at Supernova I expressed this opinion about the conference as a whole:

“I think by necessity this creates a kind of weirdly diverse conference that attracts radically different types of people whose relationship to each other isn’t always easy. So you’ve got the business people, the alpha geeks, the legislators, the military, the policy people and the academics talking about things from very different angles. Which means that any individual part of the audience is likely to be frustrated at some points, bored at other points and insanely fascinated for the rest of the time.”

I came to that conclusion during the first day of the conference proper and I think specifically because of the mixed experience I had of the event. The first interview had been pretty interesting, the panel that followed was good, but right in the middle of my area, so perhaps not ground-breaking. After that had come again the overly familiar: Chris Anderson on the Long Tail and then Jeff Weiner talking about Yahoo, which by that point in the conference had been by far the most interesting talk I’d heard. But around lunchtime, a very different group of people took to the stage for a few hours and for the most part I derived very little of value from their pieces. I want to repeat that I don’t think this is a consequence of poor public-speaking skills and I wouldn’t for one minute suggest that the subjects themselves were empircally uninteresting. But I will stand up and say that there were times when it felt to me like there were two concurrent conferences running at the same time – one which I enjoyed and occasionally loved and a completely different parallel one for a completely different class of human.

The talks, then, that I am going to skim through immensely quickly are pieces from Udi Manber representing A9, Hossein Eslambolchi representing AT&T, a panel on Voice over IP that featured Bill Schlough from the SF Giants, Peter Sisson from Teleo and Stuart Henshall from the Skype Journal. I’ll also touch on Kris Lichter’s piece on the Genographic Project – not because I didn’t derive value from it, but because I can’t think of anything particularly intelligent to say about it.

My notes from the A9 talk are extraordinarily brief. They read, “Search is hard. Why?”. I don’t know who I was addressing that question to specifically – perhaps myself, perhaps it was a transcription of a section of the presentation or perhaps I wanted to corner the guy concerned and ask him directly. But I think my major problem with the talk wasn’t with the talk at all, but with the product he was talking about. A9 is a profoundly puzzling venture that seems up front to be a patently ingenious way of helping people navigate for stuff, but which somehow falls down every time when I actually try and sit in front of it. I have the same problem with Yahoo – I just find it difficult and mind-threatening to deal with the busy pages. In Yahoo’s case that’s the homepage – a mire of complexity and horror that distracts me from whatever I’m trying to accomplish. In A9’s case, it’s the multi-columnar format. And when I see people proposing ways of adding to the numbers of columns you concurrently search – frankly, I tune out…

Hossein Eslambolchi, I’m afraid, probably wins my wooden spoon for worst presentation at a conference ever. And I’m prepared to stand up right now in front of the world and say that I know that I’m being unfair. Like several other papers delivered at ETech this year, it was absolutely clear that there was substantial value lurking somewhere under the surface, but the speed of communication, the language, the unspoken assumptions and the complexity of the slides made the whole thing entirely unfollowable. As a communications exercise it completely failed. And that means – unfortunately – that it became impossible to determine whether what he was saying made sense or was exciting or not.

The panel was substantially better in quality than either of its two preceeding talks. But from my perspective, conceptually at least, VoIP is a solved problem. What I’m waiting for is effective implementations – little more than that. Once that’s been done, then I guess the applications of incorporating speech into other areas (TV’s / software etc) make it worth reinvestigating, but I cannot articulate how uninteresting I find some of the core questions about regulation and hardware vs. software.

To be fair to the panel, however, two panellists did engage my attention. Bill Schlough talked about ubiquitous wireless internet access in the SF Giants ground – which I still don’t really understand the point of at this moment in time (but still fascinated me with possibilities). But it was Stewart Henshall who made the most substantial personal impression. He gestured at a couple of core issues which seemed to me to be about culture changes brought in by technology changes:

“I ask people two questions – ‘what’s your skype strategy?’ and ‘what’s your presence strategy?’ – Skype moves your use of voice from telephony to a kind of intercom where rather than closing a line down you just temporarily mute it. The social net reflects a revolution in the way that we use our tools. There’s always been a tension to use a communications technology to get things done, but now communications technologies are being used to connect, to create communities…”

The final talk I’m going to heavily abbreviate in this section was by Kris Lichter from IBM about the Genographic Project, a bold attempt to study migration patterns and movements of our distant ancestors, the first humans. There’s very little I can say about this, except that it was engaging and I would recommend that people explore it in more depth. The very brief notes from this part of the afternoon are captured here: supernova_tuesday.txt.

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Conference Notes

Supernova '05: Jeff Weiner from Yahoo!

The talk that this piece refers to took place at Supernova 2005 on Tuesday 21st of June around 11.30am.

Now I think I can say with relative certainty that the Chris Anderson talk did not go down terribly well with the assembled backchannellers, who were for the most part regular conference-goers desperately looking for intellectual novelty beyond the stuff that they can read up about in weblogs. The whole weblogging culture has – in my opinion – pretty dramatically changed the conference dynamic. Now it’s not good enough for someone to stand up and talk about the same thing that they’ve been thinking about or doing for the last six months. Many of the audience will be more than familiar with the subject already. They’re going to be looking for novelty. I think this affected the reaction to Google at this year’s ETech a fair amount as well. Everyone had already seen Google Maps. Everyone had cooed over it and celebrated it and got all excited about it weeks before the conference itself. And so when it was presented as the big novelty in the auditorium, accusations of shark-jumping or just being dull flew around the place.

As I said in the previous post, just because people have been over-exposed to things or crave novelty doesn’t really mean that the talk is any less good or pertinent. It doesn’t mean that no progress has been made either (only that people are too flighty and unfocused and impatient to wait until the end of a presentation to find out what’s new).

Nonetheless, there is something specially gratifying about being presented with a talk that you didn’t expect and which actually makes you think in different directions. For me, the first talk that really did that at Supernova was by Jeff Weiner from Yahoo!

He presented an exercise in sizing the amount of knowledge in the world. He didn’t take it too seriously – it was just an attempt to articulate some scale. But it goes a bit like this. If you imagine a typical person and all the things they know about, they probably know a little something about an enormous range of things. There’s a lot of information stuck in their heads, one way or another, whether that be about the best places to eat or the best ways to clean a sink or the best bands of the 1990s or particle physics. If you include all the stuff they know about their family and their neighbourhood and their job then you could probably get someone to write a few sides of A4 paper about a few thousand topics. He postulated maybe 10 pages per subject on average with about 5000 subjects per person.

Now, ignoring overlap for the sake of convenience (and probably because we don’t really seem to generally worry about duplication online anyway), if you multiplied those 50,000 pages by the seven billion people in the world, you’d end up with hundreds of trillians of potential documents full of information. And how many do current search engines think are on the internet? Only eight billion. As a proportion of the total knowledge that we might be able to capture out of people’s heads, that’s a trivial number. Significantly less than one percent. This, says Jeff, is no larger than a rounding error…

This is where it got interesting for me – if there’s all that information in the world, then it’s the responsibility of an organisation like Yahoo! to get that information to the people who might want or need it. And to do that, they need to get people to actively participate. And here’s where he puts up the ‘vision statement’ and it’s even nicer than Google’s. It goes like this:

Enable people to find, use, share and expand all human knowledge

That emphasis on the creative aspect of knowledge – the fact that people make it and that an organisation could be there to help them and to make it easier for them to share it and even to employ it – really appealed to me. The only thing that subsequently spoiled it was when he revealed that you could make the acronym F.U.S.E. out of all the core parts of the enterprise. That was a lurch too far for me…

In terms of demo’s – the bit that stuck in my head but seems to be pretty invisible to most of the people around me was the My Web search interface. Fundamentally, this is no more or less than a tagless version of del.icio.us with one major difference – you can search through your bookmarked pages in full rather than just your tags and descriptions of them – and there’s the full expertise of Yahoo’s search engine to make that searching accurate. I wonder if if it’s too small a conceptual difference from the other bookmarking services to really gain conceptual currency, but it’s certainly more useful than many of them. It may get lost under folksonomies…

A couple of other minor notes from the backchannel around this particular talk – there was general derision for the F.U.S.E. acronym of course, but also considerable irritation about the use of an older woman (normally mother) as the stereotypical naive or relatively naive user. Moreover, there was a bit of a query about the tone of the piece which seemed really aggressive and a certain nervousness expressed for our much-loved colleagues at Flickr when Weiner mentioned their acquisition. Some form of collective intake of breath and tensing happened in that moment. I’ll be interested to know what it means…

As ever, there are more comprehensive notes about this session available, should you be interested: supernova_weiner.txt.

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Conference Notes Radio & Music Television

Supernova '05: Chris Anderson on the Long Tail…

Quick apologies – my notes and write up of Supernova have been thrown out of whack by various unforeseeable pressures. I’m going to try and get through them very quickly now. This session was held last Tuesday at 11am.

It’s getting like it wouldn’t be a conference without a long tail somewhere in evidence and Supernova didn’t disappoint. The third main act of the first day of the conference proper finds us watching Chris Anderson working through his thesis in public again. He clearly knows his schtick pretty well by now, and that he knows how to present it. But this shouldn’t really be a shock – it’s been nine months since his first article on the subject appeared in Wired (The Long Tail) and he’s taken his core ideas and extended them across a number of conference appearances since then. I myself have had the pleasure to read the article and see him talk around it at least twice.

Of course, familiarity breeds contempt, and while it’s clear that he’s not standing still and that the thoughts are developing, the conference backchannel was not positive about the whole enterprise. The idea already seems dangerously close to over-exposure in the geek community – perhaps because of the weblog of the same name and the planned book on the subject that’s supposed to emerge from it. Apparently it’s now also become a fairly standard piece of rhetoric for people working their way around venture capitalists. No presentation, it seems, would be complete without it.

None of which is Anderson’s fault of course. For the few of you who aren’t familiar with the idea (and I suppose I have to believe that there are a few of you left) in a nutshell it is that – under certain new democratised and superfluid economic circumstances – there can be as much value (normally financial) in the enormous amount of unpopular, niche products as there is in the big ‘hits’. If you can:

  • Democratise the tools of production
  • Minimise the transaction costs of consumption
  • (and) Connect consumers to amplify word of mouth

… then you can turn a market where it’s only economically viable to sell things you know are going to be popular into one where costs are so low and consumers are so connected that the true revenue comes in the millions of people buying products that almost no one else is interested in. If you’re engaged but still confused at this stage, I suggest you read the article itself. The link again is: The Long Tail.

I’m not going to go into much more detail about the whole talk, but there was one particular area (or set of observations) that he made about TV and radio distribution that I should cover. He observed that television was the industry that was going to be most strongly affected by move to a long-tail philosophy because it was the industry with the highest ratio of produced content versus available content. That is to say – an enormous amount of television programming has been produced over the last sixty years or so, but at any given time an almost trivial percentage of that is available for people to consume. The desire of individuals to open up that back catalogue – he argued – was inevitably going to be completely industry transformative. This all seems perfectly reasonable to me.

In a previous session the day before (which unfortunately I’d missed) he talked in much more detail about the implications for radio along with Dave Goldberg (VP Music at Yahoo!), Jeremy Allaire (CEO of Brightcove) and David Hornik (August Capital). I got a by-the-blows account of the whole thing as it was happening from Nat Torkington which he subsequently wrote up for on the O’Reilly Radar weblog: Supernova 2005: Long Tail Panel. There was a particularly interesting summary of some of David Goldberg’s comments which I’ve quoted below:

Goldberg: They’re closing one rock radio station per week. Audiences for rock couldn’t get what they wanted from rock radio, now getting it from other places. Yahoo has a thesis: music will disappear from terrestrial radio within ten years. Don’t know implications for preferences, but will change way artists get invested in and marketed. Major record labels and movie studios have controlled distribution. When you take away that distribution, they have to be good at either marketing or investing. Right now they’re good at neither. All these things will change at the same time.

I can really recommend that anyone interested in the future of music and programming in general reads the rest of that summary. It’s extraordinarily interesting. But Beyond that, there’s very little for me to explore here in particular depth that my full rough notes won’t articulate more effectively. So I’ll move on…

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Conference Notes Personal Publishing

Supernova '05: "Apps. for a Mobile, Connected World"

Hm. So I spent a good forty-five minutes yesterday writing the next post in my series on Supernova ’05, only to lose it catastrophically when Safari collapsed under the weight of 150 open tabs. So this will probably be a slightly shorter version of that post. It may also benefit from having had more digestion time. Who knows.

The first panel of the day was “Applications for a Mobile, Connected World” and featured Lili Cheng of Microsoft, Caterina Fake of Flickr, Amy Jo Kim of SocialDesigner.net, Mena Trott of Six Apart and Evan Williams of Odeo. The area that these people stake out between them could probably be summarised as individual-focused social software, weblogs/personal publishing and amateurised media distribution. All these subjects are very close to my heart and many of the people on the panel are my peers and friends. So again, I should probably throw out a quick warning about perspective and potential bias from the start.

Looking back on the panel, it basically fell into discussions about three main areas: (1) The individual’s creation of media, what it means to them and how it can be supported; (2) The effects of taking that personal creation and embedding it in a wider social context – what new things become possible; (3) The role of human psychology, trust and trusted networks in the whole enterprise.

Discussion about individual creation really started with some comments from Ev – probably doubly appropriate because both his work with Noah Glass at Odeo and his previous life at Blogger confront these issues head on. He started off the session by saying, “at Odeo we’re here to enable lots of the ideas that we saw with blogging and to take them to a new medium”. His starting point was the individual’s participation in media in general and their ability to create and share media of their own. As an example of how that could be immediately harnessed, he cited the work that Amazon undertook in enabling participation and the enormously positive effect it had on their business.

Between them, Caterina, Amy Jo, Mena and Lili focused more on the individual’s desire to express their identity online and to capture memories. Caterina pointed towards Friendster as the moment when the idea of creating a digital presence for yourself suddenly stopped being strange, alien and geeky. She said, in a comment that I personally found very resonant, that “When I first started weblogging, people thought it was very strange”.

Amy Jo picked up on this idea of expressing identity, saying that user-generated content – specifically in her case focused on games – was an incredibly important form of expression and that it was appearing at a whole range of new and interesting registers from overtly publishing in weblogs to the more tacit expression through playlist sharing on services like iTunes.

Mena really brought memories to the fore. She stated that she wished she had a record of everything that had happened in the first twenty-seven yearas of her life like she has since she first started weblogging. She revealed that she takes a picture of herself every day as a hook to hang her memories around – saying that she could see immediately her mood and her background and her surroundings and very quickly get a sense of what she was feeling at that precise moment, even years after the fact… Although there was a bit of scepticism in the backchannel about this concept, Lili Cheng supported it very rapidly by talking about how important she felt it was to capture as much information about what you were doing as possible (presumably connected to her work on Wallop and/or to Microsoft’s stuff around MyLifeBits). Her position was really interesting – saying that it was very difficult to know which memories you were going to come to cherish in the future and that having these records gave you a structure to narrativise around.

Later, in the question and answer session, an audience member expressed their anxiety that their weblog wouldn’t be there in twenty years time – that it would get lost somehow – and said that they would find that ‘devastating’. Mena answered that with a really interesting characterisation of SixApart as a company that ‘held memories’ for their users. She said they took that responsibility very seriously.

In terms of the social dimension, the panel focused on two major areas – the increasing desire to communicate in small groups of real-life friends and the larger implications / possibilities of being embedded in space where your actions became part of something larger and more powerful. Caterina was particularly interesting. She talked about how one of Flickr’s major selling points was the sharing aspect and that this is what differentiated it from the other photo-publishing services online. She pointed out that 80% of all photos on Flickr were public. And she moved on to say that many technologies developed entirely new possibilities when connected to social networks. Her prime example here was the folksonomic tagging approach that Flickr and del.icio.us have pioneered – and she pointed out that this was generating an entirely new way of organising and categorising content online. This wouldn’t have been possible with the substrata of the social networking functionality.

Mena and Lili were the particular evangelists of the power of communication within small groups rather than to the world at large. One quote from Mena rang particularly true:

“One of the biggest things that I’ve been able to see – this whole idea of inward conversations – smaller audiences really matter. I believe that this internal-facing weblog is really important – the kind of conversaiton that you’re goign to have with smaller audiences is different to conversations you have in public. We really realised this when we bought LiveJournal this year. An audience of six people really matters to a lot of people.

Lili took this even further by talking about the qualities of the conversations themselves, pointing towards a concept of ‘energy’ and suggesting that this quality was something that she was now able to move into the rest of Microsoft’s work:

“Sometimes you want to find a critical mass in really small circles. What’s most important is whether I’m having a dialogue with people which feels like it has energy?

At this point, Ev Williams came up with a point to balance this discussion, talking a bit about his time at Blogger again:

“Of course there are a lot of people out there who only write for strangers. We used to put everyone’s name under their posts and people used to really protest. They didn’t want people in their every day life seeing stuff they’d written online.

But probably the biggest focus of the panel, and a recurring theme of the conference as a whole was the concept of ‘trust’ and what it meant. This was a more heavily contested area – related to the idea of social networks and small groups but understood differently by different people. Caterina made a particularly nice high-level and inspiring comment about trust that I enjoyed:

“It’s trust that enables us to go out in the world. It’s the thing that makes the internet possible.”

A slightly more formally expressed and nuanced position (but perhaps a less practical one to implement) came from Amy Jo:

“You don’t build trust by ‘throwing crap up on your website’, even though a lot of the work that people are doing is foundational in building trust – personal control in who sees what. Trust is contextual – I trust my husband to be a good man and a good guy, but I don’t trust him to get the right kind of bleach. it’s contextual, it’s not global.

Finally – moving on from the concept of trust – one other interesting comment came from Ev Williams when talking about the future of podcasting. I’m not completely sure that I agree with it. It was in response to a question from audience about the future of podcasting. His response:

“The future of podcasting is not on the pod but on the phone – and it takes these ideas not only to a new medium but to a whole new audience”.

I’ve heard this particular sentiment from a lot of people recently, but as yet it seems to me entirely unproven. As I understand it, radios on phones have – on the whole – not been an enormous success to date – whether that’s because of implementation or use cases is unclear to me at the moment. But podcasting to phones also feels like something whose time is further off, when the handset has been more substantially abstracted from the concept of voice / data connectivity. But that’s all speculation, and probably a good point to end this particular batch of notes.

[You can find my full notes from the session here]

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Conference Notes Personal Publishing

Supernova '05: "Perspective: Jonathan Schwartz"

Since yesterday morning I’ve been hanging around at Supernova and I’ve been taking some fairly intensive notes, but I’ve not yet had the opportunity to write any of it up. Over the next hour or so, I hope to put up some of my reactions from the last day and a half of the conference. I’m a little unclear as yet whether I’ll be posting the full notes that I’ve been making for each part of the conference. I guess we’ll see. They’re not always of the most enormous value.

For people who don’t know, the core idea behind Supernova and the concept of the conference i decentralisation and the effects of network. I guess the metaphor is of the aftermath of the exploded centre, where top-down governance and control gives up its power (by choice or by force) to the new many-to-many network where power and agency operates at the edges. The conference takes that fundamental concept and looks at its application across a whole range of different subject areas – from social software and personal publishing, search, telecoms, gaming, business, media as well as around meta-areas like how individuals deal with this radically different vision of the world. I think by necessity this creates a kind of weirdly diverse conference that attracts radically different types of people whose relationship to each other isn’t always easy. So you’ve got the business people, the alpha geeks, the legislators, the military, the policy people and the academics talking about things from very different angles. Which means that any individual part of the audience is likely to be frustrated at some points, bored at other points and insanely fascinated for the rest of the time.

I’m going to start with a brief bit of coverage of a discussion between Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems and Kevin Werbach of Supernova. The two major areas of this discussion were really about about whether or not Web 2.0 was a reality (the answers to which were relatively anodyne) and a much more interesting discussion about future business communication with weblogs.

I kind of take my life in my hands a bit every time I go off on a discussion about weblogs after six years of writing this site, but sometimes it really does seem that there genuinely still more that can still be said around the edges. Here are a few really telling quotes (probably mistranscribed) from Schwartz that I noted down during his piece:

I’ve learned a lot of things. If you think about what a leader does, you’re fundamentally a communicator. You have to be able to communicate to the marketplace to the people who report to you – there is no efficient way of doing that than using the network – using the internet. If you want to be a leader, I can’t see you surviving without a blog. It’s like being a leader without having e-mail or a mobile phone. You still find them very occasionally, but it’s moving away. It’s very rare.

Authenticity is absolutely paramount. Getting poeple to write your blogs is ridiculous. It’s like hiring people to read your e-mail. You might be able to get away with it, but it’s kind of like pushing a rock up a hill…

When I first heard Schwartz talking in these directions, I genuinely didn’t know what I thought about it. In my experience weblogs inside organisations don’t tend to be terribly interesting or useful and only a limited number of people participate with them. I was going ready to treat his comments with a similar scepticism (particularly given some of his earlier comments about authentication and the future of the web which were pretty banal), but he blew my suspions out of the water with some of his later comments. When challenged about whether he was only talking about communicating with the company internally or doing it in full view of the public, he said something really interesting.

For a start, he said that in the near future he wanted to start doing all his communications via his weblog. Then he moved on to addressing this internal / external dichotomy. He mentioned a particular case where particularly good employees had their names and photos put up on an intranet celebrating their achievements. Instead of this he suggested that it should be done completely in public. He said that some people had suggested that this might mean that the staff concerned would just be poached by other companies but he responded that good people would always be open for poaching. And here’s the interesting bit – he said he had no interest in an internal weblog, that he wants it to be completely transparent and that while he was aware that this approach and celebrating his employees achievements in public might to his competitors knowing what he was doing, it also meant that their employees could see it too – and they can then use that to decide if he’s a more attractive leader with better policies and a vetter vision of the future.

This is a view of the world that I really like – it doesn’t limit your ability to have particular specific projects operating under the radar, but it’s an acceptance that large-scale strategy and communications about your company as a whole is never secret. And rather than treating that as a weakness or as a problem, it turns and faces it directly. It let’s people see the way you run your company and encourages people to question and interrogate it – creating a virtuous circle of improvement and self-awareness inside organisations that raises the whole level of the debate. For everything else you might say about Sun, this is a noble idealistic and inspiring aspiration. Very cool.

[You can read my very rough notes on this interview as it happened here.]

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Conference Notes

On doing two papers at ETech 2005

Hm. The O’Reilly ETech button on the right there doesn’t really look very comfortable on the page, does it? All looks a bit showy and ostentatious. It’s just the wrong width, really. Ah well. Never mind.

I’ve actually been meaning to write about talking at ETech for a while but for a variety of complex logistical reasons, I’ve been kind of leaving it until I felt reasonably confident that it was actually going to happen. I think I can tell it’s going to happen now. After all, if it wasn’t happening, then I wouldn’t have had such an overwhelming freak-out terror fit when I found out that I’d got the date for getting the paper in wrong by a full week and a half. And that I’d told all the people who were co-writing the incorrect date as well. That’s all fixed now, of course, but at least I got scared, and anything real enough to get scared about is – in my humble opinion – probably real enough to write about on my site…

So I’m really excited about the conference for a couple of reasons. And those couple of reasons are the two papers I’m involved in. Firstly there’s a paper on some of the interesting and innovative stuff that Radio and Music Interactive does at the BBC (Reinventing Radio: One-to-Many meets Many-to-Many), which is half done by Hammond/Biddulph and half done by Webb and me. Obviously twenty minutes isn’t really long enough to give thorough coverage about the stuff we’ve been working on at various points over the last 18 months, but it should give us a little time to talk about a couple of projects in a little depth. Here’s a description to whet your appetite:

How could you enhance a one-to-many national radio station by building in the many-to-many-style interactions of Flickr or the weblog community? How might lessons from social software further blur the distinction between listeners and broadcasters by pushing interactivity beyond the phone-in or the online poll?

(1) The “Ten-Hour Takeover” used SMS technology, pattern matching, and statistical analysis to give the British public control of BBC Radio 1’s musical output. For ten hours, there was no planned playlist–every track was chosen by listeners via text messages. We turned these messages into a navigable information space of artists, tracks, and listeners that the DJs could interact with directly. Moreover, the loosely coupled component-based infrastructure has allowed us to deploy new mobile-based products (SMS and MMS) quickly and easily.

(2) A component-based architecture also allows us to hook together SMS, track now-playing, and show scheduling systems with each other and with third-party services. BBC R&Mi are using this as a basis for exploring social software models of interactivity: the potential of Flickr/del.icio.us-style tagging for radio; the possibilities of combining buddy lists with media players; new applications for SMS; and concepts like “100 Composers”–DABJava applications on PDAs that can have data trickled to them over broadcast radio.

The session presents work from BBC Radio & Music Interactive’s Technical Architecture and R&D teams, including demonstrations of existing software and working prototypes of new projects.

The other thing I’m involved in – again with Mr Biddulph, but this time also with Mr Bell – is our presentation on a project called Programme Information Pages (PIPs). Now this paper has the worst name of anything ever written in the world, so I’m just going to link to the description and hope you find your way around it. It’s basically about getting ready for what might happen alongside (and potentially after), broadcast television and radio, and should fit really well with the other papers from Tivo, about television and the discussions that are really likely to appear about the Creative Archive project and the BBC’s role in open data, which really all seem to be around the same kind of areas but from really different perspectives.

That’s the paper that I’m most nervous about – certainly I’ve invested more of myself and my time into the project itself than any other piece of work I’ve done since University. I really hope that comes across in the paper itself and that people get why it’s interesting.

Anyway, so there you go. Two years since my last ETech paper and now two have come along at once! And while I can’t see the fear going anywhere for a while, I’m also really looking forward to being able to talk about all this stuff in the open and the free and clear. See you there?

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Books & Literature Conference Notes

Live from ETech: Cory Doctorow and e-books…

Warning: What follows makes increasingly little sense. Day Three Proper of ETech has resulted in a certain lack of mental flexibility and a weird warm grinding feeling at the temples as my over-saturated lobes rub together…

So in a few weeks I’m presenting a piece on e-publishing and weblogs at the London Book Fair. To be honest, I’ve never understood the compound, “e-publishing”. It seems to mean different things to different people at different times. For most people it seems to bear little or no relationship to what I consider publishing online – ie. those content-rich sites like BBC News Online and TimeOut.com or weblog-style stuff or in fact anything browser-readable, but instead just that highly narrow field of e-book publishing (generally considered as some kind of proprietary text-based format glued into a PDA or piece of dedicated e-book-reading hardware / software). In a nutshell, then, I didn’t really consider it terribly interesting.

I was surprised, then, to see Cory Doctorow talking on the subject at Emerging Tech. I mean, obviously I knew that he’d released his books online under a Creative Commons license and obviously I’d known that had been quite a successful and publicity-garnering thing to have done, but – to be honest – I’d somehow never really made the connection between that and “e-books”. In my mind an e-book was little more than a species of niche electronic emphemera designed to sit within a tiny ecosystem of highly-tech-friendly but not particularly tech-savvy over-monied poseurs. So, why would that have any connection with Cory? I mean – he basically slapped the plain-text of the book onto the web. Which is – you know – useful. Where’s the connection?

Forty-five minutes later, of course, and my views are different. It’s not that Cory said that much which was alien to my sensibility or world-view – in a sense he’s preaching to the converted – but I’ve now got slightly more of an understanding of the publishing of books ‘electronically’ as a spectrum rather than as a set of rather problematic models in competition with each other. Which demonstrates, I guess, what a dumbass I was fifty minutes ago. Still… I guess it’s good that I can face up to that, right?

Anyway – I’ve stuck up my personal transcript and understanding of his piece and I recommend everyone read it.

More importantly, Cory did a really cool thing just before getting off-stage – he’s releasing even more of the rights to “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” under a Creative Commons license. Originally it was just free to distribute, but not to change or undertake any derivative works. But now – as long as it’s uncommercial – he’s freed up derivative works as well. This is more important than it might sound – it means that individuals can make t-shirts or badges on the one hand (as long as it’s non-commercial), but more significantly, they can now make and distribute reader translations of the book without trouble and they can even write fan-fiction and slash without any trouble – just as long as these translations and derivative works are distributed under the same terms. Very interesting and worthy of considerable celebration and approval. More later…

Categories
Conference Notes

Is there a ROBOT OVERLORD in your future?

ETCon gets weirder and weirder by the moment… [larger version]

Categories
Conference Notes

Live from ETech: Day Two Schedule…

In lieu of a detailed coverage of what’s been going on at ETCon, I just thought I’d post a schedule of the talks I’ve been to today. I’ll drill down into some of the more interesting ones later this evening or tomorrow.

Categories
Conference Notes

Live from Etech: Flickr and the end of Day One…

So ETCon Proper Day One ends and I’m basically high on some kind of highly emotionally charged intellectual hysteria-generating buzz. So far I’ve only managed to write about the things that have caused me frustration and irritation – probably because irritation can be easily quantified and described while the enjoyable papers cause an explosion of possibilities that are hard to collate and contain. The papers I’ve found most stimulating today have been threefold:

The first two in particular I can’t rave enough about and have pushed me into some kind of weird euphoric intellectual trance – but I think it’s best that I talk about them later when I’m feeling more centred and can produce a more rational response. The Castranova piece on cyberspace economies intrigued me and stimulated me because of the question-and-answer component rather more than the paper itself – which was more of a bringing-up-to-speed piece for people who haven’t been reading Terranova or read Richard Bartle’s Designing Virtual Worlds.

But it was the final talk of the day that was the most heady, but more because of the launched product and the play around it than the talk itself. I’m going to let Cory describe what was launched because – frankly – I’m a bit fried:

Flikr is a social image-sharing application: it’s a mechanism for creating ad-hoc chats, using a drag-and-drop GUI interface that lives inside your browser, and share images from peer-to-peer and within conversational groups.

I’ve beta-tested this at various points and at each time I’ve been struck by Ludicorp’s amazing combination of utilitarian, usable interface aesthetic and genuinely witty whimsy. As Ben Ceivgny, a developer on the project, said:

We collect images with cameraphones and so forth, but we have no good mechanism for advancing them out into the world. Here’s a mechanism for batching them into a locked-and-loaded tool for firing them into the world.

I’m not a Ludicorp adviser, but I have been beta-testing it. It’s bloody good fun and I highly recommend it. Much much better than Orkut – introducing Flickr!