Les Blogs day 2
Let’s see now what was up today…
(oh and about Sunday one more thing that I forgot… at the McDonald’s, or Mickey D’s, near my hotel, there were pigeons walking around inside and even on the second floor. That’s that about the “my cat” type of blogging for this post, back to real stuff…)
Started off with Mena Trott and her saying how people should be so much nicer to each other in the blogs and not be so evil and mean. And then dotBen commented that it’s kinda patronizing, first in the backchannel (more about backchannel later on), but then Mena asked him to stand up and they had a real heated discussion about whether dotBen is mean or Mena is patronizing or backchannel is good or whatnot. Good stuff, livened everybody up in the morning. Not only warm and fuzzy stuff.
RSS panel kinda didn’t go anywhere. I was hoping to hear more about where RSS is going and what specifically are some cool services enabling it and whatnot. Some comments were made about the web consists of structured vs unstructured data and how RSS is only a wrapper of text whereas most of web comes from databases as structured data.
Podcasting, photo&videoblogging… a Nokia lifeblog guy originally from China who everyone calls Janne in Finland. He said how people in South America and Asia post a lot of stuff, like photos and videos, from their mobiles to forums and billboards, which is not exactly like blogging… or then again maybe is because the intent is the same, to share your stuff, and the fact that it doesn’t have RSS doesn’t make it necessarily “less blogging”. And watch out for Asia. I must say I’m not a great fan and watcher of audio/videoblogs because they take ridiculously large amounts of time to listen to and want my unsplit attention to do me any good, as compared to regular blog feeds where I can just go click-click-click through stuff. If I had to go by tube 2*30 minutes every day, then maybe I’d get an iPod and check those out. Although voice is more personal than typed stuff. But if you know the people behind the writings anyway, which I try to for the stuff that I watch, you can appreciate their written stuff as well as you would their audio.
Then “how to socialize in the year 2055” and “Tracking/listening to the online world”. Don’t remember much except Marc’s and Hugh’s remarkable characters. I cheated and was reading some chats and emails during them.
“Eight ideas” by Ben Hammersley. By far the best preparation and presentation of the day. It rocked. I’m hoping to get the official video soon (they were said to come to vpod.tv some time next week) so I could re-watch and distribute it. Blogging isn’t one of the eight presented ideas because it’s all of them. An eariler version of the talk from another event. Reportedly, France is going to have a copyright law that outlaws Open Source.
And finally the closing/future session. Somehow drifted to China and democracy and human rights and whether we should push for them to open up or is it a bad thing. And how local bloggers in Tunis got beaten up during WSIS.
So all in all, good stuff. I met some fine people and some content was pretty good. Made sense to be over here. Off to a dinner with Skype’s own man in France now.
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