paul kedrosky

Traditional doesn't mean bad though (and props to Mark Evans, Matthew Ingram, Michael McDerment, and Stuart MacDonald for taking the time to organize this; I know how hard this is to do in 12 months like we do for Northern Voice let alone 3 months like they are doing). I really enjoyed the "traditional" part of the Northern Voice blogging conference (why? just two of many reasons: Nancy White and Julie Leung) in Vancouver both in 2005 and in 2006. But I gotta admit, after helping organize unconferences like Northern Voice Moosecamp 2006 and BarCamp Amsterdam, as well as more traditional conferences like Northern Voice and the Open Source Content Management System and Blog Tool Summit, my sympathies are with the unconferences.

A plea for somebody in Toronto: organize a Bar Camp Toronto (should be easy given the success of TorCamp and DemoCamp4, maybe call it CanadaCamp and encourage people from Vancouver and the East Coast to converge in Toronto; I wish I had time to help organize this but other than throwing out crazy ideas I don't!) before or after the Toronto Web 2.0 conference at a place with lots of rooms, central location and good WiFi and convince some West Coast people like the following to lead sessions (the following short list off the top of my head shows omits many cool folks apologies in advance):

• Boris Mann - one my Bryght partners - could lead sessions on starting and running an open source company, open source product development and evangelism since he is Drupal evangelist #1 in my book. Boris could also be a session leader on Jabber, VoIP and web application platforms.
• Avi Bryant and Andrew Catton of Dabble DB could lead a session on Smalltalk and why it's relevant to Web 2.0 as well as why doing things differently makes sense
• Dave Sifry (not a Vancouverite person yay!) could do a leadership "hack" session - the one at Moosecamp was fantastic from what I could tell
• Paul Kedrosky (a sometime Vancouverite) could talk about On why you may not need Venture Capital for your startup, just do it with your own money!
• Alexandra Samuel on what tech companies can learn from non profits and activist organizations.
• Dick Hardt or one of his sxip folks could lead a session on Identity 2.0 what it is, why we need it. Dick also knows a tonne about running an open source startup!

From Stuart MacDonald | eBusiness and Marketing Geek.:

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Our Web 2.0 Toronto Conference date and location are set. Mark May 8 and 9, 2006 at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in your calendar. The keynotes and panels are shaping up nicely, and we will have a site up by mid-March with all the details.

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Yup, real broadband to the home (and mobile too) is what's really needed to really make the net take off. And by real I mean 10 Mb/s bidirectional and up. Unfortunately I doubt we'll get it from the cableco and telco oligopoly here in Canada. More likely ths kind of bandwidth will come from something out of left field like Spanish upstart Fon.

From Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: The Broadband Bandwidth Boondoggle.:

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Paul's Rule of New Technology: Unless you offer a ten-fold improvement in performance along some meaningful dimension, most users of your technology won't notice the performance increase. Rolling up from 1.5Mbps to 6Mbps fails that test, even if it does offer broadband providers an opportunity to charge you more.

Real world-changing differences in broadband will require (mostly) two things:

1. A 10x increase in bandwidth. In other words, jump me to 15 Mbps or 30Mbps from 1.5Mbps; don't take me to 6Mbps.
2. A symmetric pipe. Most of what's interesting, at least to me, requires far more than the current throttled-to-death outbound pipe. The idea that in some near broadband future I'm getting, say, 15Mbps in, but still dawdling along with 640kbps out, does diddly for me.

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Yes, the current structured blogging effort is not optimal and neither are microformats. But yes the blogging world needs more structure that doesn't compromise its easy to create content nature! Two examples from something I love: recipes and digital camera reviews. Wouldn't it be great to have recipe aggregators and review aggregators so when you are cooking and buying stuff you could get consolidated, rich view from blogs rather than random results from Google searches (that are currently compromised by spammers and commercial information free "reviews"). I know that most of the good recipes and reviews are on blogs NOT on CNET or Yahoo or epicurious or the big sites or even opinions but try finding them with a search engine. Good luck!

And as Marc Canter says more normal people (or "humans" :-) as Marc likes to call them!) will write reviews and recipes than work with the blank "digital paper" slate of blogs as they stand today.

So I think the structured bloging advocates and Kedrosky are both right: we need more easy to use structure AND existing bloggers won't change (at least not overnight).

In either case, Drupal already has the ability to generate any format from its database and the ability to easily create content types for any more structured approach. Today, for instance, Drupal already has content types other than blog posts like "stories", "books" and "audio" and "video". Bottom line, I am not worried about what happens. With Drupal and its excellent community of developers who have written and will continue to write many amazing modules to generate a wide variety of content, I am covered!

From Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: Structured Blogging Will Flop.:

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Darn it all, techno utopians are so cute. Nevertheless, structured blogging - the over-ballyhooed idea that people will post to their blogs using different forms depending on what they're posting - is going to be a flop.

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