I can't recall if this came from the journalism session or the warblogging panel, but this POV struck me:

"Audioblogging... I don't get it. Posting multimedia is fine, I love it, but... Exposition in audio is hard, most people don't do it well, it takes longer... I'm going to audio post the worst press release I get - real aloud with emotion..."

5:50:16 PM    

This is cool....

Via Jeff Jarvis
1:48:06 PM    

A few tidbits that resonated with personal experience or are relevant to topics I've been hashing over here (you may infer that I agree with them):

• General purpose reputation systems are useless. They are not portable between contexts. People who would cheat on their spouses might not cheat at cards (and vice versa). Ebay did us a disfavor by creating a 'reputation' system that actually referred to atomic economic transactions - it doesn't really translate. Real reputation is emotional. The penalty for identity surfing is and should be leaving your reputation (friends) behind.
• In the group software environment, some things must be hard/limited, else the core group cannot defend itself.
• The downside of Metcalfe's Law: Since the potential connections grow as the square of the group size, the density of conversation falls - and eventually sputters out. There must be a way for the group to defend itself against scale. Note relevance to the discussion about ecology of networks.
• The impact of immersive environments was overestimated, not as universal a pattern as first thought. Many early studies focused on what was different - novelty effects in MUDs and other realtime contexts - LambdaMOO and Habitat, for example. Non-immersive software has more long term impact. The patterns is small pieces loosely connected.

1:19:41 PM    

The first half was a reprise of early history - Licklider, Sutherland, up through the Alto and 'Dynabook'. Seen this before, many times. Have a videodisc with a lot of the material burned on it somewhere. Worth doing, since every new generation needs exposure to this stuff in the original form; it always loses something in the retranslation of each computing generation. And if people won't do their homework, this is a way to stick the prior art right in front of their noses.

Now onto the latest Smalltalk incarnation. Cool of course, great that we can finally get that much horsepower into a laptop. Shades of things I worked on at Kaleida Labs and hoped (vainly) for at Electric Communities, nice to see it come to life.

Now the skeptical take. It won't make any difference in the current generation. The insistence of a pure system from the bottom up allows clarity and cleanliness. It also means that Squeak, like the original Smalltalk and most incarnations in between, "doesn't play well with others". The real world of computing is a complex ecology of platforms and vested business and architectural interests. Doing a top-to-bottom standalone - and making a market success of it - is one of the hardest acts out there, particularly when it appeals to an interest (programming) that is a relatively minor taste of most users outside of this conference. Here's a fearless prediction - maybe I'll survive long enough to be held accountable - it will take two more major generations of computing equipment before this vision happens, and when it does, it will appear in childrens' toys, which can be standalones.
10:06:24 AM