plasticbag.org

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]

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.]