Jon Lebkowsky has been blogging highly detailed notes from O’Reilly’s Emerging Tech conference all week. Not so much futurist stuff but very smart people pulling the big picture of the new social computing into focus – RSS, Wikis, FOAF, hive mind, open spectrum, mesh…
Clay Shirky on social structure in social software:
Why do we have weblogs now? Why did we have geocities instead? We didn’t know what we were doing – it took a while to realize that conversation was better than pictures of cats. We’ve internalized, now people are building, and what they’re building is web native. A weblog and a wiki is web all the way in… lightweight, loosely coupled, easy to break down and extend.
Andrew Orlowski slams the conference, then Tim O’Reilly rebuts the slam. Boys, boys.
Its interesting how even though blogs emulate conversation they don’t do it very well. What I mean by that is blogs set off a flurry of intense conversation, but do not go into the kind of detail that one might go into in person — with a blog you’re already off to a new topic/subject.
I think the closer the Internet moves towards the paper/print annology the more user friendly and informative it will be. Blogs, css, and other recent technologies have helped us find our way out of the multi-media wilderness towards sanity, but what will be the next step?
We’d love to attend, only the long awaited documentary on the MC5 and the Detroit scene will, alas, take up a valuable portion between 3:30pm and 5pm on Wednesday afternoon. There isn’t any Social Software that can match the potency of the MC5, or this crucial period in American social history, which saw promised a vital revolutionary link between the Black Panters and the White Panters, which MC5 manager John Sinclair founded. Suspicion lingers that this was a proto-Malcolm McLaren stunt. We shall see.
You’ve gotta give ’em that….
WHAT MC5 DETROIT DOCUMENTARY!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
strange they didn’t catch the typoes “Panters” for “Panthers”
oh, and it’s Lebkowski…
Thanks xian – fixed.
baald, I did hear of this recently. *scanning* … this looks like it:
http://www.futurenowfilms.com/
I’ll probably have to wait for video, but we’ll see.
mrgrape, one thing I’ve noticed is that conversations attached to blogs tend to go much deeper when conversations are actually threaded, as they are on LJ, and when responses are mailed to recipients, as they are on LJ. It’s hard to imagine why these two simple lessons have not trickled over to other blogging systems.