Thursday, May 16, 2002

Conference Weblog coverage and articles:  This is how to leverage communications! O'Reilly gets it.  Well, of course they do.  This a terrific example of how a conference organizer can leverage articles about the speakers and coverage by Webloggers via WiFi as the conference is going on.  On one page O'Reilly has a couple of sentences and links to such Weblogs as boingboing, raelity bytes, megnut.com and many others.  It also has links to articles about the speakers and photos of the conference. Conference organizers need to see and know about this.  It's not rocket science, but not many conferences are doing this.  I'm going to make sure the attendees at my WiFi conference for conference organizers know about this.  I'm also going to use it as an example in my other conference presentations and as part of my wireless consulting (and I speak around the world about this stuff). Unfortunately, most conference organizers are clueless about the value of this sort of information. 6:43:28 PM

Holy mackerel!  Capturing other people's browser images via WiFi This ought to make WiFi users feel really secure!  Bob Flickenger, O'Reilly Network's systems adminstrator, was attending his company's Emerging Technology conference when he began viewing, capturing -- and posting -- the browser images from WiFi users in the audience.  Flickenger used a Mac program called EtherPEG which, he says, "combines all of the modern conveniences of a packet sniffer with the good old-fashioned friendliness of a graphics rendering library, to show you whatever GIFs and JPEGs are flying around on your network.  It's sort of a real-time meta browser that dynamically builds a view of other people's browsers, built up as other people look around online." With EtherPEG, Flickenger was able to see what WiFi users were viewing and he posted collages of those images in an article on the O'Reilly Network Weblogs section.  The collages contain images that range from run-of-the-mill to those you wouldn't want young children to see.  He could easily determine what people were viewing and the traffic volume as each speaker was presenting. He concludes, "I have stared at the sun, and for the sake of my sanity, will never again look directly at the consciousness of the online ueber-geek collective.  Unless I really want to..." The conference, by-the-way, is still going on.  I wonder if people are taking a closer look at what Flickenger is doing with his laptop. I first learned of this article from a posting to Prof. Dave Farber's "Interesting People" newsgroup. 10:21:49 AM