Notes from the world of ETCon
My column about the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference -- a musing on the future of Web services, as the wave of idealistic technological innovation hits the breakers of proprietaty business thinking and legal constraint -- is now up on Salon, here. (It's a Salon Premium-only piece, but anyone can read it if you watch an ad and get a "daypass.")
For those interested in more session-by-session reports from this conference, there's a list of those bloggers who provided notes here.
This was beyond a doubt the most heavily blogged, WiFi-hotspotted, wiki-fied, IM-ed, chat-enabled event I've ever attended. There was even some cool, Rendezvous-enabled group-note-taking employing some software called Hydra.
At one point at the start of a talk I saw Cory Doctorow and Glenn Fleishman wandering the hall, laptops held open at waist level, moving intently, deliberately, up aisles and down rows. I understood on an intellectual level that their orbit somehow involved a hunt for good 802.11b reception; but what my eyes took in seemed more seance-like, a wireless ritual. It was as though they were scouting for the geek music of the spheres. I hope they found it.
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