17 May 2002

Are Bloggers Building an Online Ghetto? The Shifted Librarian noticed two emerging technologies (intentional adjective) at ETCON 2002 during O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference. The first is from Alan A. Reiter: "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." This is an interesting use of the technology during conferences of geeks. If implemented, you would get immediate dissemination of panels and presentations out to the 99% of the profession that can't make it to any given conference. The second is from Rob Flickenger: "So there I was at ETech, sitting in the back of the Emergence discussion, listening to Rael Dornfest, Cory Doctorow, Clay Shirky, and other extraordinary blogging minds thought about the blogging world. I was thoroughly enjoying the discussion, but I had to wonder, how were the other 200 people in the room reacting to the proceedings? Response seemed very favorable, but I did see quite a few faces staring down, with accompanying tell-tale key clicks buzzing about the room. If only there were some way of getting into the collective stream-of-consciousness of the crowd, to gauge their actual reactions to what was really going on up on stage.... If you've never heard of EtherPEG, its a Mac hack that's been around for a while that 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. The effect was staggering. As I expected, traffic was very light at the beginning (a couple of big news and blog sites were obvious, and strangely enough, the Microsoft Developer's Network.) But as the talk continued, some people were obviously letting their minds (and their fingers) wander... I was impressed that when Tim O'Reilly stood up to ask about whether bloggers were building a city or living in their own ghetto, virtually all traffic stopped. Evidently, this was something that almost everybody in the room was interested in listening to. And once Tim sat down again, the pixels began to flow once more.... It became obvious that the crowd could be viewed as a living organism, with its own cycles of activity and rest. The chaotic effect of random images plastering themselves on my screen gave me a unique point of view-- it was a sort of mental feedback (much like audio feedback, even with the accompanying headache, only this headache was in some bizarre fourth dimension.)" ++++++++++ Sent from The Ground Floor, Kilkenny, Ireland using Nokia 6310 IR for O2 GPRS from IBM TransNote. ref: 1014