Liveblogging the TimesOpen Keynote
UPDATE: I decided to just do this for the keynote. Too much to do it all day! Apologies to twitter peeps coming here this afternoon looking for a liveblog. The keynote was very good though, so I encourage you to read on…
I’ll update this as much as possible throughout the talk. Enjoy!
11:18AM - Clay from Sunlight Foundation - “why are you headed in government 2.0 direction?”; O’Reilly wants to see creative innovators working on “problems that matter”; wants to “bring silicon valley to washington”
11:12AM - rep from yahoo news - how do we (the news orgs) work together to make something better, rather than competing? example: one interface for news search APIs, rather than a bunch of divergent ones. O’Reilly picks right up on it and totally agrees that this is the way; parallels to social networks; it’s all about interoperability; the faster we adopt open standards, the sooner we can create the really interesting solutions
11:09AM - great question: “how long do we have” as people working at news organizations?; O’Reilly: “48 hours” (haha); “it starts now” - if you’re not “doing it”, start; this will be a pruning - lots of orgs will go out of business, those that don’t will get stronger; again: news isn’t going anywhere - if you look at what news is being passed around in social circles, its largely from big publishers (techcrunch as example)
11:05AM - Q&A; Gottfrid appreciates the blunt criticism of NYT
11:04AM - News and the need for it isn’t going anywhere. Just need to harness that need into a business model. Alan Kay quote: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”
11:03AM - search for a business model as a road trip; you have to keep gas in the car, but this is not a tour of gas stations; focus should be on building an interesting future consistent with the value that we give to our users (not, “where is the money going to come from?”)
11:01AM - search for a business models starts with a question: “What Job Does a Newspaper Do?”
10:58AM - Theme #5 - “Asymmetric Competition”; Craiglsist 7th top site on internet in 2005, with only 18 employees! The rest on that list have thousands, often tens of thousands; the idea is to demolish old business models; compete.com: nytimes.com vs washingtonpost.com vs huffingtonpost.com; then add digg.com, whoa!
10:57AM - lessons from twitter: do one thing and do it well; let others build on what you do, even if it appears to compete (this is what makes it a platform); when users innovate, support their behaviors in your platform (twitter: @, #); “insert and extend”
10:55AM - twitter a great example of this - not only client apps but user generated stuff (hash tags for example) as well as fully feature third party apps - http://bit.ly is analytics for twitter
10:52AM - Google as a great platform because of integration with external data; geotagging on google maps via iphone was driven by hackers, then google supported it; if you are building a platform, customers/partners may innovate features before you do
10:48AM - “We are building the global electronic brain”; NYT platform is one piece of that; one of O’Reilly’s “beefs” with NYT: they don’t do a good job of linking; linking as critical to enriching the web; apture.com is a cool tool related to this
10:46AM - Web 2.0 theme #4: “The Internet as Platform”; there are two types of platform: “One Ring to Rule THem All” and “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” (O’Reilly asks: “how many of you have read Lord of the Rings?”, about half the people here raise their hand); showing a cool “internet routing graph” titled “The Whole Internet”
10:45AM - Google mobile app - speak “pizza” and it finds you restaurant - so many sensors! accelerometer turns on mic when you lift handset; mic captures voice; cell signal captures location
10:43AM - “Instrumenting the world” - using sensors beyond the keyboard/mouse to power collective intelligence - see http://code.flickr.com/blog/2008/10/30/the-shape-of-alpha
10:42AM - programmers can contribute to journalism by creating a context where people can connect and share
10:41AM - Search blog.wired.com for “Group Spots Giant Hacks by Combing Small Newspapers”
10:38AM - Web 2.0 theme #3 - “programming as journalism” - usaspending.gov, which was purchased/cloned from fedspending.org, which is basically programmer driven investigative journalism
10:37AM - markmail.org - searches tech newsgroups and shows you trends; also shows the most influential people in that community
10:33AM - personalities are critical - don’t just show me aggregate data, show me who is a part of it; gives users an incentive to participate (increase in status); example: NYT shows “most blogged”, but doesn’t show who’s blogging; cites techmeme as getting it right
10:31AM - TimesPeople as “one more social network” - O’Reilly’s TimesPeople page is a ghost town - wants to see outside content there (twitter)
10:30AM - “In social networks, you gain and bestow status through those you associate with”; “bestowal of status by what you pay attention to”; “if you only pay attention to yourself, you aren’t as valuable to your readers”
10:27AM - Twitter more compelling that Facebook (for Tim O’Reilly and anyone who has a large public persona - i.e. lots of followers - 30,000+ in his case)
10:26AM - Web 2.0 theme #2: Social networking; cool graph from mediaczar.com of politically oriented tweets
10:25AM - Question for newspapers is: “what assets do you have that increase value through participation?”
10:23AM - “The network as platform means that competitive advantage goes to systems that harness network effects to get better as more people use them”
10:22AM - Real Time is important - twitter as real time news; mybarackobama.com and project houdini (real time updates of get out the vote do-not-call lists as voters went to polls, the idea was “don’t call people who have already voted”)
10:16AM - Web 2.0 theme #1: “Harnessing collective intelligence”; best exemplified by Google and PageRank - implied social network - extracting hidden information that everyone else was throwing away; find meaning in user-generated data and create useful services from it; “harvesting meaning from user activities”
10:14AM - “You guys are out there inventing the future, and one day everyone is going to be living in it” (Twitter a good example)
10:12AM - Tim O’Reilly is on stage - how many people here have O’Reilly books? (Everyone raises hand)
