GnomeDex Update - Day Two
Today was the second, and final, day of GnomeDex 2002. Five speakers today, all interesting.
Phil Kaplan opened the morning talking about why so many of the dot.com companies failed (basically throwing money around with reckless abandon and the lack of anything even resembling a legitimate business plan) and what he's managed to do differently to have web sites that make money. If you're familiar with Phil and his sites, you'll understand why I'm not linking to them. He did say one interesting thing that I'll quote, at least from a dot.com failure standpoint.
"Traffic does not equal money. That was 1999 thinking. Money equals money."
I don't have this web site with any intention of making money, so I'm not at all worked up about a business plan, but his statement makes sense. So many of the dot.com failures seemed to not have that in mind.
Mark Thompson, of AnalogX fame, talked about web development in this post dot.com economy. Mark has created several wonderful pieces of software, all of them free. He also has a band, which is where the AnalogX name came from, and is working on a new CD to be released later this fall. The best advice from his talk was to keep things simple, so that the online system will run itself as much as possible. Good advice, to be sure.
Doc Searls gave a talk that was centered around the Linux operating system, but he spoke about the Internet as a whole and the role that technology plays in it. Technology is the infrastructure of the Internet and supports all of the commercial activity that is able to be conducted over it. He raised some interesting points about how traditional media and Congress really oppose those who create that infrastructure from being involved in defining the rules, regulations, and laws that govern it.
Evan Williams, the creative force behind Blogger (another of the major weblogging software players), spoke next on the future of weblogging. He reported that Blogger has about 750,000 registered users and about 20-30 percent of them are actively posting. He also predicted there will be about 5 million webloggers within the next two years.
Leo Laporte, host of TechTV's The Screen Savers, closed the conference (I skipped the after-conference parties) with his keynote address. His talk really boiled down to this key point (I'm paraphrasing here):
The initial focus with technology is on the tools. The focus needs to shift to what can be done with the tools to help people.
Excellent point. It isn't about the technology, but what the technology can do for people.
Leo graduated college with a degree in Chinese history. I can't imagine why someone would choose to major in Chinese history or how you get from there to hosting a television show about computers and technology, but he did bring in several examples from history to make his points.
It takes a generation growing up with a new technology to really understand and implement the full change that the new technology makes.
Examples of this included the Gutenberg printing press (60 years before they printed anything but Bibles) and the steam engine (30 years before the first locomotive was in use). Before that time, the generation that created the technology uses it in relatively small ways. He spoke about this noting that we are 26 years into the availability of personal computers and less than that into the widespread availability of the Internet.
People will hang onto what they know and resist what is new.
This added to Doc Searls' points about traditional media and Congress trying to manage the Internet. Leo specifically asked for support of Internet Radio and pointed out this site for more information.
All in all, the conference was a good one, but I didn't get as much from this one as I did from the first one last year. At that conference, I learned about three "killer apps". These were
Radio Userland, the weblogging tool I use to write Country Keepers.
ActiveWords, an incredibly powerful scripting and automation tool.
Google Toolbar, which provides quick and easy access to search Google. I've since dropped this in favor of Dave's Quick Search Toolbar, but it is still a good utility.
I didn't learn about any similar utilities this time around. The information was more general, but still interesting.
Any way, GnomeDex is over, so its back to our regular programming 'round these parts! <g>
9:54:03 PM 
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