A weekend after Reboot

OK,
So Reboot was friday, and between then and now I've been stoned once, seriously drunk once, and had a great day yesterday with Signe (it was her birthday), and our families.

It's monday now, and i'm not sure exactly how much my memory of Reboot has been influenced by the events of the weekend, but I am sure I found it an invigorating, interesting event in general, with some pretty good speeches.

As mentioned, I didn't blog live, partially because the blog-tools on my Palm Tungsten C were giving me no end of trouble, and partially because, frankly I don't type very well :-)

But here are a few opinions about some of the speakers, and some general notes on the days events.

Cory Doctorow | blog
The day started off with Cory warning us about the nightmare that is IP law, copyright and Digital Rights Management. Just like last year, it was an inspired speech, and Cory's rendition is wonderful. Guan has a nice write-up of what he heard.

The key message that came across was that we need to act now before the US and Europe shred the net to pieces with ridiculous, pointless, police-state-style copyright protection. Oh, and that the solution currently advocated by the EFF is a compulsive license on music heard online. In other words, a similar solution as the one used for music on the radio. Somewhere there is a collection point, and each user either directly or through some fee, pays a monthly for free rights to music on-line. I'm no expert and really don't know how much sense this makes, but in Cory's words there's a compelling argument.

Ben Hammersley | blog
Well, I finally get to meet Ben the English Gentleman. And he's talking about the Semantic Web. About a future of RDF, semantic information in triplets, and the ultimate on-line search tool through which you can make compound queries. And it's not that I don't believe him, or even that I don't find it fascinating, but there just seem to be so many things we need to achieve first, efore we get to the ultimate semantic web-thingy. Sorry Ben. It was a good and funny talk, but ultimately I', just no ready for that subject yet. I've spent too many futile years in the web-industry discussing meta-data with too many futile people. I'll get there eventually. I promise.

Scott Heiferman | blog
Scott Heiferman was basically talking about meetup.com and how he created the site with friends because he wanted to do something against the destruction of local communities, partially caused by global communications networks. And even though I don't really think meetup.com is the next big revolution, I can uniquely identify with Scott's need to do something he believes in. To give something back to the world that gave us all these opportunities. Thanks for that Scoot. It's good to hear someone get up and say, in effect, I did this because I was inspired to do it. To combat a negative I saw in society. So I built this thing, because I could, and now look what a success it's become.

Meg Hourihan | blog
I actually missed part of Meg's talk because I was outside talking to my friend Louise Strøyberg, whom I see much too rarely, about my all-time favourite non-profit. Also because I have developed an allergy against bloggers blogging about blogging, and that allergy has seemingly extended to listening to bloggers who get all their travel costs paid, talking about blogging.
OK, this really, really isn't fair to Meg, because I do think her Lafayette project is really improtant. I just needed some time off to chat....
So for those who want to know more, here is a link the Cory's extensive notes from Meg's talk.

Jason Fried  | blog
I won't say much about Jason Fried, because he talked about usability and interface design. and since I take great pleasure in not knowing (or really caring) much about these issues, i'll just leave you with another link, to a picture (that Jason presented duuring his speech) of the worst Terms of Service agreement ever [via BoingBoing].

Dan Gillmor | blog
Dan Gillmor talked about journalism in a blogged age. He did a great job, but my energy is failing me, si I won't say much more about it now.

Marc Canter | blog
Wow! what a madman. Essentially waht he was doing, at a rate of about 180 km/h was to present his newest product. a Web Outliner. And it's somewhat obscure connection to a next generation communikty group building tool. It's a nifty dhtml-based web outliner, and it actually works, but i can't say i'm that impressed with the concept. But I did get a chance to hang out with Marc and my good friend Julian (Informal & consume.net) over a large number of beers and some specials Marc boyght out in Christiania. And we had some interesting dicussions about the future of broadband, and possible buisness models for putting all the fiber to use that is currently in the ground unlit. According to MArc, 97% of all the worlds fiber is unlit, becausse either there is no proven business-model, or the telecom sector is milking us for all we're worth. Thanks Marc. You're a funny and interesting guy, but a Web outliner?
Oh, and I still don't believe you can actually sing gregorian chants in yiddisch...

Tim O'Reilly | blog
Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's the man. My new hero. what a clued in guy Tim is. Thanks Tim. Here are Cory's notes.
Tim spoke about a paradigm shift in  the internet world and especially in business models. A paradigm-shift fueled by open source and open standards, and lead by companies such as ebay, amazon and google. Companies who have understood how to make their users add value to their tolols. For free!.

Tim's talk alone was worth going to Reboot for, and I recommend to everyone to watcht the video, as soon as they get it on-line. here.

Actually Tim's speech gave me an idea. i think it's a good one. i just need to iron out some kinks, and i'll post more here soon.