Sorry about the blogging outage, been travelling and then busy here in Munich at JabberConf. Lots of good Jabbering going on, which I'll attempt to report on as time allows. My favorite so far was the keynote address by Doc Searls, entitled "Anarchy and Infrastructure". Here's my short summary:
Doc rocks.
He says there's a battle going on to define the Net. The Net is world unto itself, and we've only begun to terraform it. Think about this world as an empty globe. One virtue of this world is the emptiness in the middle. This means that the people and resources on the surface of the sphere can communicate with each other directly without an intermediary. So (1) no one owns its (2) everybody can use it (3) anybody can improve it. The founding fathers of the internet built it to support civilization. (Among them were Douglas Engelbart, I need to follow up on his work on hypertext.) The internet is infrastructure, like geology. No one owns or could own the core of the earth. Same with Internet protocols. Building things on top of that platform is like construction. We're architects and designers and builders. And we're building things that are open. Open meands ubiquitous. Ubiquity creates infrastructure. It's a virtuous circle.
So what do we need to do? Cause anarchy, then take advantage of it. :) Doc saith:
Markets = conversations
Conversation = fire
Marketing = arson
So which conversations are combustible? Figure that out, then start the conversations and watch them spread like wildfire. (Yes, that's a painful metaphor for people in Denver right now....)
Some combustible stuff right now, other than the forests of Colorado:
- Weblogs. If you don't have one, get one!
- Conferences. Present papers, get the word out!
Here are some others Doc and I talked about after his presentation:
- Wifi. Wireless authentication using Jabber, even if you're hitting a remote server. Build community at the same time.
- Identity. Gotta get talking to the PingID folks.
That's it's, must sleep, been up since 4:45 here and it's 1:15 the next day!
P.S. And yes, Doc is linking to me today (well, that's yesterday now). Thanks, Doc!