BTW, I added a news feed from O'Reilly via a very simple Javascipt snippet - you can see the results underneath my blogroll:

<script
language="JavaScript"
src="http://meerkat.oreillynet.com/?&p=7619&_fl=js">
</script>

 

6:07:38 PM    

The O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2003:

From Blogging to Internet Bookmobiles

 

I recently attended the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, or Etech as the cognoscenti know it, and found myself surrounded by a sea of bloggers tapping away on the keyboards of their laptops recording the event in real time.  It was so pervasive that it made me wonder why I should even bother to write up the event at all, but simply point you to the event’s home page which also aggregates a number of blogs which, each in its turn, documents the event.  Check it out for yourself at this Etech 2003 link.

 

Content Syndication via RSS

What I did glean from the event is that blogging is moving beyond the electronic diary phase, which bears more than a passing resemblance to the early days of desktop publishing when everyone who owned a Mac and a LaserWriter became instant publishers.  Just as desktop publishing grew up to become, well, Publishing, blogging and its close cousin, syndication, are being transformed into the next generation publishing  system which emphasizes the distribution of information rather than its publication  It promises to be just as revolutionary as desktop publishing was in its day.

 

Daniel Steinberg said it best in his blog about the event when he commented on the promise of news aggregation in an essay titled “Controlling the Media”:

 

 “Blogging and news aggregators allow me to assemble my own daily newspaper with my favorite reporters and commentators. I have them divided up into categories that look much like the sections in a newspaper: World News, Technology, and I have a category called "The Guys" that would be on my own blogroll if I had one.”

 

What makes this possible is RSS which is a Web content syndication format. The history of how RSS came to be is long, gothic, and mind-numbing, so let’s leave it to the (W3C) to define it: “RDF Site Summary (RSS) is a lightweight multipurpose extensible metadata description and syndication format. RSS is an XML application, conforms to the W3C's RDF Specification and is extensible via XML-namespace and/or RDF based modularization." Dave Winer, who helped co-invent it, calls it  “Really Simple Syndication.”

 

What’s become apparent is that content syndication is becoming really easy, and is being driven largely by the exploding blogging movement since each blog comes with its own built-in RSS module for syndicating its content.  Content aggregators, such as NetNewsWire on the Mac and Newsgator or Feedreader (among many others) on the PC, allow you to subscribe to dozens of content streams from news-oriented web sites and blogs.  The big boys, such as The New York Times and the BBC , are getting into this game.  But the really exciting aspect of this movement is the ability of individual reporters, writers, and individuals to use syndication as a means of circumventing the increasingly conservative voice of corporate owned media.

 

This has led to some notable successes.  Dan Gillmor pointed to the Trent Lott affair, which only exploded into the open when a popular blogger, via syndication of his post, brought it to the attention to a few dozen of his friends.  They in turn posted it to hundreds more of their friends, many of them reporters and editors at newspapers and TV networks, who then turned it into a page one story.  Gillmor is working on a book about this phenomenon, the working title of which is “Making the News: What happens to Journalism and Society When Every Reader Can be a Writer, Editor, Producer, etc...”

 

It’s also generating a backlash by some bloggers' bosses at work. Gillmor and dozens of other bloggers (as well as speakers at Etech) posted items about a Hartford Courant reporter who was told by the paper’s management to cease and desist from producing his own blog.  Gillmor’s comment showed up in my RSS feed in Microsoft Outlook via Newsgator’s cool plug-in.  

 

Internet Bookmobile

I want to point out one other project that caught my eye at Etech – the Internet Bookmobile. The latest do-good project by the Internet Archive’s  Brewster Kahle and  Creative Commons' Lisa Reins, the Internet Bookmobile is an on-demand printing and bookbinding operation on wheels. It brings with it the ability to access, download, and print one of the almost 20,000 public domain books currently available online.  The bookmobile uses an assortment of off-the-shelf components that enables volunteers to produce books on demand for kids, who can watch it being printed and perfect bound in the back of the van.  You can see the manifest for an internet bookmobile Here.

 

Kahle estimates that the total cost for producing one bookmobile is approximately $14000 and one month’s labor, although in practice you can probably get some of the equipment donated by technology vendors. According to Kahle, kids love participating in the book publishing process.  When we tried it out ourselves, we enjoyed it too.  It was so Back to the Future as to be cool.

 

This is one of my favorite conference - and professionally, I'm in the conference business and so going to a conference for me is somewhat like hauling coal to Newcastle.  But I won't miss next year's event, and I recommend that you don't miss it either

 

 

6:04:32 PM    

I receive a daily email from Electronic Flux Corporation / www.e-flux.com highlighting upcoming art exhibitions. I thought this image was funny, but according to the curator it's "used as an ironic critique on societal values, with artificial images of an inflated car, criticizing the system of social commercial values imposed by the media, demanding thin bodies and simultaneously pushing the individual to be an uncontrolled consumer." It's by Austrian artist Erwin Wurm.

I still think it is funny.

2:46:07 PM