So we're sitting waiting for Matt and James to start their talk on BBCness - we're missing a talk on Smart Dust and Robot flies to do some cheerleading. The tech isn't working at the moment so no slides! Horror!
James is quite quiet - ah, they've sorted all that out now. Poor bastards! This is painful!
So JPC's talking about why people could be turned off by politics. A guy in the audience has suggested distributing the slides now and letting people see them on their own computers. Good idea in theory, however the slides are absolutely massive apparently.
Matt, bless him, is holding great swathes of microphone lead in one hand to help him focus and not go off in to a spiral of bleh.
Ahhh.... now it works. Matt should really shut up for a minute because there are 4 people trying to work out the gizmo stuff at the desk at the front.
"it's quite big and it's hard". That is not something to say on the stage given that it sounds like a punchline.
"We make ourselves stupid in order to make the computer software seem smart". Shouldn't the software seem easy, not smart?
Ok. Notes on the next one regarding Groups are in the extended section. "What groups will be"
Games and Social interaction afterwards.
David Weinberger is a very "playing to the crowd" speaker.
He's going to be using "friendster" as an example - but that is only vaguely group oriented - well... I think I'm wrong there but anyway.
Premis is:
1) Groups are great
2) Groups are crap on the internet
....what?? Which groups? What is he talking about? He's saying that all his groups are independent and different URL's.
So the net's not very good at handling groups... "which is exactly as it should be" - eh? I think this man is talking gibberish.
He's also talking off his script which is only bullet points. He may be a well known guy, but he's stumbling through this, talking about "end to end" but not really focusing it at all.
This is an almost entirely pointless talk! He's werritting about the fact that people have to state their favourite books. "we, literally, don't know what we're interested in". Er... you may not do, mate.
He does make a good point about self censorship however - what do you state publicly that you like.
"it assumes there is only one me, whereas in fact, there should be multiple me's".
Funny - Doc Searle leaves. David w; "Doc's walking, ok it's all over." Doc: "Come on Dave, let's leave these people!"
In losing ambiguity you lose the richness of social interaction.
"You can't disentangle the technical from the social". Ian Pringle is chewing the most disgusting chewing gum next to me. Horrible nausea inducing smell. I'll be nice and not say anything though.
Constitution needs the ambiguity so it can change as needed
This talk is about almost literally nothing at all.
By the way, talking about something completely different - the Social Software Alliance have a section on the front page of their wiki with "Sightings in blogs". Whohoo, well that's really important then isn't it! A bunch of people at the BoF wrote it up afterwards! I'm griping for no reason, really. But it is very amusing to me.
Difference between implicit and explicit knowledge. That's actually an interesting point that moves toward something we were talking about on Monday at FT to do with giving groups the opportunity to be "expert" groups in some way. I like the idea of that.
I wonder whether the same people end up giving talks year after year because it's a geek convention ie: there are a certain type of people here who actually can't get up and speak because they're too shy.
So this comes down to the fact that he's worried about digital ID and how you can have various different digital selves or that you should be.
"We're absolutely in the beginning of this" - social software. Well - er, kinda, but kind of not. Mail lists? "why is there a big buzz about this now" - because things are cyclical? "maybe we're coming out of our infatuation with bytes". "maybe we're ready to embrace ambiguity".
Hmmmmmmmmm I think not, my friend.
Ok, a very nice, friendly talk but absolutely nothing to do with emerging tech in any way shape or form!!! Not a hell of a lot to do with anything much, in fact.
