Entries from June 2006 ↓

Lots of great blogging about Reboot, and a good selection of links on Doc Searl’s blog

This post from Rachel Clarke about Doc Searl’s talk on the intentional economy talk caught my eye:

THe obvious target is the review sites..where user reviews are collected (with the risk that you could be advertising next to a bunch of bad reviews of your product). An opportunity here is the development of better targetting which will help both advertisers and users…users only seeings adverts about what they want to see.

Wait a minute, I think, I run a review site… So, how can I make it more intentional?

Another talk I greatly enjoyed this year was Matt Webb’s talk on Making Senses. Matt recast browsing as a full-sense experience and went on to show how the properties of different senses – presence, attention, focus, etc. – apply to an internet experience. What stuck with me is that I usually start thinking at the other end of things, with interactivity – how is it going to work, what can the users do with it? – rather than how do I immerse the user in the world I’m creating and give the user the ability to sense their surroundings.

Fantastic project that uses heatmaps to compare transport times and connectedness of places in Britain.

Robert Paterson pinpoints the ‘markets are relationships’ meme:

“Participation is not a feature of this emerging paradigm but its centrality. Community will be the container into which things will happen directly between people. Social relationships and hence trust will be the critical factors. ”

Doc Searls remembers some inspired geek heckling:

Just now, the speaker on stage had trouble with his projector. “Fuck it.” he said. From the audience: “But how?”

Anne Vankesteren picks up the peripheral visions idea in Jyri’s talk:

Mobile 2.0 is not about “multimedia.” It’s about enabling social peripheral vision – across space and across time.

Aah. Who am I kidding, if you want to read more, just go and read the buzz tagged reboot8 on technorati like I did!

If last year’s Reboot conference in Copenhagen tacitly found inspiration in Skype, del.icio.us and Flickr this year’s was all about myspace. Two topics hit home: the internet will be finally social; and none of us at the conference may be young enough to belong there.

Ontology – a strong meme last year – is now old news since the question that the web lives to answer isn’t what, where, when or how but who. Who are you? Who am I? Who do you know? Who am I like? and, most importantly perhaps, who do I belong with?

The official theme this year was ‘renaissance?’, and a fair few of the speakers tried to contrive their talks around the subject.

But, as the conference went on, I got the sense that something or someone was missing. Where were the under-18s – the most prolific sharers on the web? The ones who do it simply because everyone else they share with is sharing too? Maybe they don’t come to conferences, maybe they only live in myspace.

In every way, though, it was an exhilarating couple of days and I’ll be writing up and posting the talk notes I made (and, no doubt, more random thoughts that came to me) shortly.