Tuesday, March 21, 2006

A great excuse for visiting Santa Barbara

I'm at a meeting here at CITS, at UCSB, going over the upcoming 2006 Santa Barbara Forum on Digital Transitions, on April 8-9. There are still a few openings. It'll be a fun event; first of its kind. Check it out.

Tags: citsforum, citsforum2006.

Because he's probably right

An Immodest Proposal quotes liberally from Chris Messina's Because of open source, finding it aggreeable.

Your tax data, for sale

This is creepy.

Taking delivery

Tom Markiewicz took some pretty good notes.

Were there eyeball hors d'oeuvres?

Mary Hodder got a little more than a day in at SXSW before she headed west to PC Forum. There she wrote,

There was a guy on stage yesterday that Esther Dyson kept trying to get to say that the users could create on his site, and he finally blurted out, ".. we just let them think they are creating...". (You know there was a publicist in the back of the room saying "Take him out. I repeat. Take him out" to a sharpshooter on an ear radio somewhere. In fact there are tons of publicts and PR folks here.. many more than last year.)

It's too bad because "Users in Charge" is a great topic and Esther and company have put in a lot of work to frame these issues thoughtfully. But most of the attendees can't help themselves... they can only think of consumers buying things, being fed something packaged and consumable and neatly branded from these companies and making boatloads of money, with seemingly little care for the users, the experience or anything else.

Brian Dear added,

The most absurd was during the Me Media roundtable session where someone was talking about "content-producing consumers"... I had to walk out about then.

Stilldeath?

Bruce Sterling: What exactly do you call a 'fatality' that strikes the cryonically suspended? Link.

Why there won't be a Web 3.0

Shel Israel doesn't like the term Web 2.0, and observes that I don't either. We both think that Web 2.0 sounds way too much like a product upgrade, when in fact what is happening is more fundamental and much larger than a feature-enhancement.

And he also wonders about changing it:

Is it already too late to rename "Web 2.0?" Are Doc and I are the only ones still resistant to the term, which had been argued with some passion several months back? Is resistance futile?

The short answer is yes.

The longer answer will come from the future. Here's betting that "Web 2.0" is what we'll call the next crash.