March 17th, 2005
ETech summary, day 3
This morning’s opening keynote presenter was Larry Lessig, a natural at a conference about remixing. Larry gives an amazing presentation–very entertaining and informative.
Paula Le Dieu, Cluster Head for Content Management Culture with BBC’s central New Media department, gave a presentation on the BBC’s efforts to embrace massive media, a word she uses to refer to blogs, wikis, and other popular publishing trends. Her statement that the "BBC will not use DRM." drew appreciative applause from the crowd. Of course, they’d been primed by Lessig.
If you’ve read Chris Anderson’s article from Wired entitled The Long Tail you know about the way that infinite inventory and low-cost distrbution are leading to brand new markets. I especially enjoyed his conversation with Joe Kraus, CEO of JotSpot because I hadn’t considered JotSpot as a longtail play before. Joe says JotSpot is about servicing the long tail of Web applications. Cool idea. Joe also says its still hard to get funding for longtail businesses because VCs have a tough time understanding the "go small to get big" argument.
I attended a session on remixing networks by Nikolaj Nyholm. He described the OpenWRT project that replaces the firmware in a Linksys WRT54G with a Linux-based alternative. This is an interesting way to co-opt the manufacturing power of a large company to get lots of inexpensive networking gear that can be repurposed. I like that.
I also went to a session on Life Hacks, productivity tips from alpha-geeks. I went to this presentation last year by Danny O’Brein and was a little concerned that it would be a repeat, but it was very fresh. Lots of interesting ideas. Matt Merlin discussed things he’s had on his 43 Folders web site. I had already started to do somethings to keep micro-events from disrupting my work (like turning off the bell on your email), but it was nice to hear some more.
Phil Windley is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Brigham Young University. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
