onfocus

It would also be great if conferences would make a list of every book mentioned in every talk. There were so many mentioned over the past few days, and I didn't get them written down. I remember Building Secure Software by Viega and McGraw, but that's it. At Lawrence Lessig's panel discussion yesterday, someone (David Henkel-Wallace, I think) mentioned a certain book as "the one thing you should read tomorrow to help fight outrageous copyright laws." (or something like that.) But I can't remember the book he mentioned. Anyone?

(This is another good reason to have a centralized note-swapping space.)

Some ideas from the conference that I'd like to jot down for safe keeping:

• As software companies are held more and more accountable for problems in their code, insurance companies may take over parts of the design process or set standards. (think underwriter's laboratories, which was set up to provide safer electrical equipment.) [related presentation slides.]
• As the technology industry matures, the problems become less technical problems and more human problems.
• Dan Gillmore's phrase The Former Audience kept recurring. Cory mentioned it on his site. It's a great way to explain the effect that weblogs and other collaborative communication technologies are having.
• The idea of copyright has been ingrained in everyone, and it's easy to understand. The idea of a thriving public domain has not been ingrained in everyone. There is a need for great metaphors and stories here so that it's easy to explain why a public domain is necessary for creativity. People should be debating it. Paul's Boutique couldn't be made today (without a thousand lawyers working around the clock). I want another CD like that...or I should be able to make a CD like that. I should be able to sample my culture.
• Unfortunately, I'm beginning to wonder if in the near future, the only place innovation can happen is inside large corporations. They will be able to absorb the costs related to patents, copyright, and insurance standards while smaller companies will simply be litigated out of business. And, of course, disruptive technologies like the personal computer or Napster would never have been released from a big company because it interferes with the existing system of doing business.
• Wireless technology will become ubiquitous, and hack the spaces that big companies won't provide high speed access to. And it's not because any company is pushing it or spearheading it. (It's not happening in the way companies have previously envisioned, anyway.)
• Tim O'Reilly's question: Are webloggers building a city, or living in their own ghetto? [mentioned in Rob Flickenger's EtherPeg article.]

There are many more that I can't quite write down yet. This was the best conference I've ever been to for ideas.

I'm home from the conference. It was a great experience, and I can tell it's going to take a while to digest all of the ideas I heard over the past two days.

I'm just sick that I'm missing the Emerging Technology Conference because I'm sick. I'm feeling better though, and I think I'm finally past the contagious stage. I'll be there tomorrow. Meanwhile I've been living vicariously through Wes and Cory's live updates. Is anyone else blogging from the conference?

This makes me think conferences should set up a simple Web Service that bloggers could ping to let the conference know they've written something related. In fact, a method for sending/receiving weblog posts would make this simple; and publishing tools could build it into their interface. You'd just enter the URLs of the services you want to notify, and choose from a list as you post—if what you're saying relates to the subject of the service. Then attendees (or absentees like me) could get a list of the distributed conversations happening about a conference at the conference site itself. This would be handy for aggregating topic-specific discussions as well. You'd just set up a server and say, "ping this URL whenever you talk about [your favorite subject]." Let's call this a Distributed Conversation Server. I'll get right to work on that.

Update: They have pointers to some weblog coverage.

being sick on a beautiful weekend like this is frustrating. And just to drive the frustration home, one of my favorite bands, Ozomatli, is giving a free concert at Sonoma State University today.

Other corporations could learn a lot from Macromedia. When their actions were (kindly) criticized by a few weblogs, they had an immediate platform to respond. Because they have weblogs themselves, they are involved in the community, and Mike Chambers responded to my comments with clarifying information right here. Most corporations who want to respond to criticism would still be discussing what kind of press release they're going to write, if they were even tuned in at all.

Stephen Johnson mentioned the Weblog Bookwatch in an article at Salon: Use the blog, Luke: He calls it "An interesting corrective to ordinary bestseller lists, in that it measures which books get talked about, rather than which ones get bought." I couldn't agree more. You may remember him as the author of such books as Emergence (currently on the Weblog Bookwatch Top 10) and Interface Culture. He'll be speaking at eTech next Wednesday.

Macromedia Vice President to employees: blog or you're fired. It'll be interesting to see how "the blog strategy" works out for them. Can someone sustain an interesting weblog if they're compelled to do it as part of their company's developer relations strategy?

And it seems the strategy has a few problems. Meg points out: "Passing off a 'work' site as a truly personal site when it's obviously not...can be misleading to its readers." Transparency and honesty are key pieces of personal opinion weblogs like these. Also, Matt notes that they're on the right track, but the content restrictions show they "...don't trust their employees to be human in a corporate setting."

You learn some interesting things in spam. Evite.com is wholly owned by Ticketmaster. TMCS also owns Citysearch.com and Match.com. (It cost me an extra $12 just to mention them in this post.)

"There is no such thing as writer's block. There is only failure to make a decision." - Michael Bremer quoting one of his writing professors in UnTechnical Writing. I can't decide if I agree. Maybe that's the first decision I need to make.

If you administer Windows 2000 servers, you might want to check out their new Baseline Security Analyzer. It will scan for missing hotfixes and known vulnerabilities and return XML reports about the machine. (Conveniently translated to HTML for easy reading.) It also checks out the security status of SQL Server 7.0+.

I'm guilty of using javascript: in my hrefs. Scott's rant has changed my ways.