A recording for a conference in Pisa, Italy
Podcast of my presentation at Pisa, Italy, “User communities and their tools.”
Dave discusses the concept of the “unconference” that he developed for blogger conferences, where the focus was on discussion and tapping into the collective intelligence of the audience rather than traditional panels and speakers. He explains how the internet has enabled a shift away from centralized control of information and communication, allowing users to bypass traditional gatekeepers and create and share content directly. Dave argues this has led to an explosion of information and creativity, as the costs of production and distribution have plummeted. He believes this shift represents a return to a more decentralized, user-empowered model that was lost with the rise of mass media, and that this change is a significant evolution that can help solve global problems through increased creativity and participation from all.
Listen
Transcript
This transcript was automatically generated.
Good morning. This is Dave We
iner and this is a special
recording for the conference in
Pisa.
And for everybody that’s listening, this will also be listened to by people on script ing. com.
What happened was Murphy’s Law, which says anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Well, Murphy’s Law ruled the day today and we were unable to actually make the video conference work.
So what I’ve agreed to do in place of giving a live talk is to use some reliable technology , mp3, and to record the presentation and then upload it to a server and then provide the link to the people running the conference and then they will play it for the people in the room with my apologies. I really wish that I could have been there today and of course it would have been a lot more interesting. Hopefully we would have actually been able to have a discussion, which is what I prefer to actually just giving a talk.
So I have several things that I want to talk about today and if you want to follow along, the URL for my talk is http colon slash slash DaveTravel D-A-V-E-T-R-A-V-E-L dot scripting S-C-R-I-P-T-I-N-G dot com slash P-S-A notes P-I-S-A-N-O-T-E-S So who am I? My name is Dave We iner and I’m a resident of Florida. I’m a software developer. I’m a blogger. I invent things. I’m a college graduate and I have a master’s degree in computer science. I ’ve developed outlining tools, presentation tools, scripting systems, blogging tools, aggregators or feed readers and I’ve designed formats and protocols including XML, RPC, SOAP, RSS and OPML. I’ve won some awards and I used to be a research fellow at Berkman Center at Harvard Law School and I’m a former contributing editor for WIRED.
So one of the things I want to talk about since the topic is user communities and their tools is the idea of an unconference and this is something that we developed in a format that we called Blog gerCon which was a conference for bloggers.
We’ve done three of them. We did two at Harvard Law School and one at Stanford Law School and the first one was sort of the evolutionary one where we did the conference sort of the usual way with panels and speakers and but with a heavy emphasis on discussion because it was a blogging conference.
We felt that you know, if you’re gonna put a room full of bloggers together that we would want to hear what they all said, what they all think and it was sort of based on the premise that I’m just gonna let, this is my cell phone and my ringtone and I’m just gonna let it ring.
Anyway, our premise was that when you have a conference that if you were to add up all the intelligence in the room you would find that most of it is not up on stage while you try to get very smart people to speak it’s still there are so many more people in what we call the audience that we ought to try to tap in to the the intelligence and their enthusiasm and their ideas.
Not just because there’s more of it, but also because we were curious about this phenomenon that that happens when you put a conference together, it seems all the interesting conversations take place in the hallways and so the thought was that if we could involve the people that were in the audience more that we might get a better conference.
So it was a two-day conference then that was the way the first day was and the second day we went even more extreme. We said no panels, no speakers and we had this idea that you would have a discussion leader and that their job would be much like a reporter putting together a story and that the people in the room were the sources and that the discussion leader would try to assemble a story out of the the expertise of the people in the room and this changed some of the basic rules of conference going and I we felt a very good way because one of the things that happens at a conference is that you have a speaker like what I ’m doing right now and people sort of formulate their questions while I’m speaking and then at the end they line up in front of a microphone and wait their turn to ask a question and even if they didn’t have a question either they just wanted to make a point and all the time they’re sitting there waiting they’re composing a speech and they’re getting nervous and what they’re gonna say gets longer and longer and longer and people go out into the hallway to have the real conversations and a funny thing happened in the second day of BligerCon where we had this sort of unconference format the interesting conversations took place in the room and and so at the second BligerCon we completely did away with the format of speakers and panels and Q&A and just went with the discussion format and perfected that in the third BligerCon that we did at Stanford, which was late in 2004 and since then the format has been emulated by other conference promoters with great success to the point where some people don’t even want to go to the old kind of conference anymore because this way of doing it is so much more makes better use of their time and is so much more interesting and if you think about it, it’s a lot like the blogosphere in that the blogosphere sort of centralised the whole idea of information flow, an idea flow, that you didn’t need to get a job with a big publication in order to have your ideas heard all you had to do was get a web log and so this goes back to why I started blogging and you know depending on how what you think a blog is you know I either started blog ging in 1994 or in 1996 or 1997 but it was pretty early and while there are some question about who was the first blogger, I was certainly among the first bloggers and and my blog served as the model for many of the what we consider the early weblogs and my reason was because I wanted well, you know go back to the beginning of why did I get involved in the internet in the first place is that it seemed to me that this was from a software developer standpoint, which is one of the hats that I wear one of the things that I do It seemed to me like the platform without the platform vendor which meant that nobody controlled what you could do and which meant that it could be a place of great creativity and it turns out that while there are many people and companies that would like to be the platform vendor of the internet that it pretty much has maintained that over the over the years and in fact wherever the internet has been successful It’s been precisely because of that because there was never anybody that could control What people use the internet for it meant that basically it became a place of great creativity and and you know and lots of interesting new economic models and social models I Started which I’ll get to a little bit more in a bit when I talk about monoculture But I started blogging for the simple reason or I started using the internet to communicate For the simple reason that I had a story to tell and I couldn’t get the reporters to tell the story and it goes to back to the Macintosh platform when it was competing with Windows and the conventional wisdom amongst reporters was that there was no Macintosh software and of course, I was a creator of Macintosh software and Actually more specifically it was that there was no new Mac intosh software And I knew many of the reporters and I would call them up and say come on You know that there’s a lot of new software for the Macintosh because you use it. They say oh , yeah Yeah, I use all that stuff. It ’s cool and then you say well Why do you report that there’s no new Macintosh software and they they would say well But everybody knows that there ’s no new Macintosh software and I don’t think that they were dishonest I just think that they didn’t understand that Conventional wisdom that you shouldn’t report conventional wisdom was my belief you should report the truth And that if there is Mac new Macintosh software then your reports should say there is new Macintosh software but There was nothing that we could do about it the reporters were Constantly saying that there was nothing new which made it really difficult to you know market new software for the Mac intosh so I started communicating directly and and lo and behold more new Mac intosh software started getting created and And a very very important principle developed from this which is that the use of the web To route around centralized authority, and you see it happening everywhere for example If you were to book a trip You know you might have ten years ago. You might have used a travel agent to book the trip But today you probably would use Expedia and hot wire Maybe in travel velocity where you might go directly to the airlines some airlines in the US Like Southwest offered very deep discounts In Europe, but you have Ryan air that’s doing the same thing And we sort of put together our own vacations now and It’s a it’s a it takes more time than it used to take on our part But we can save money and we can get better trips and we get to go where we really wanted to go in the first place I used to find when I use a travel agent that I would go end up being booked at resorts that have great golf courses and which was useless to me because I don’t play golf but my travel agent did play golf and that’s why she liked the Reporter who reports that there ’s no new Macintosh software the travel agent can’t necessarily see there even see their own Filters and understand why they ’re making the choices that they make But yet they make those choices and they may not be the choices that we want made on our behalf So the internet creates this opportunity for us to make our own choices for us to do our own reporting to get our own story out there and to hear directly from the people who have the knowledge without the intermediary or To book our trip on the airline without going through a travel agent and that’s just one of many such you know Things are going on eBay for example is a is a whole Economy that’s based on this idea that we don’t need the middlemen anymore that we can do our own Shopping and we can do our own marketing and our own distribution and this is creating a phenomenon that that makes us ever more hungry for information and And if you think about it in the last ten years or so our expectations for information have just gone through the roof Think about the trip that you might have booked in 19 let’s say 1992 Let’s say you were going to go to To London or you’re in the United States you would go to Chicago and You wanted to know what clothes you should bring with you or you wanted to book some theater tickets You wanted to know what was playing or if the your favorite sports team was in town and maybe buy some tickets for that in 1992 Your expectation you might have you might have been able to find out what the temperature was yesterday in Chicago or in London But the other information You would have had to have gone to the library and the information would have been old and you wouldn’t be getting information about the future You’d only be getting it about the past in other words We have moved from an age of information Poverty into an age of information excess in an incredibly short period of time in 10 or 15 years not only has the amount of information gone up, but our expectation of information has gone up dramatically at the same time the economics of providing information have changed such that There isn’t you know if you look at the reporters in the news networks the newspapers and the magazines They’re cutting back They have less reporters than they used to have before because the economy economics are forcing them to do that So you have this weird situation where as our expectations for information are Exploding okay at the same time the cost or the the amount of reporters available to provide that information is Shrinking and so that gap is being filled Somewhere by commercial vendors by we’re doing it for ourselves And there are other businesses that are being started that are incentivized to provide us with that information and at the same time we’ve invented some techniques for Making for automating the gathering of that kind of information so that we can consume even more information As if that were the problem that we have well, it actually turns out that it is and the technology that has been created for that is called RSS and RSS stands for really simple syndication and It’s become enormously popular in every year since its inception Has been sort of the watershed year for RSS and and this year of course is no exception All the major major news organizations support it all of the blogging tools support it You’re finding the government agencies are providing feeds Across the board the the network that’s being created right now is the RSS network and the tools That are being created to to consume to use that information are just exploding and you know the the BBC Actually, I did the interview with the BBC that created the characterizes we characterized it as a Sushi restaurant conveyor belt if you can imagine, you know if you’ve ever eaten at a sushi restaurant where you sit down and They just put these beautiful little plates of sushi in front of you and and you pick the ones that you want and They charge you for them. That ’s sort of like how RSS works You subscribe to all these different feeds and and all these news items just flow right by you And you see one that you find interesting say I think I’ll go look deeper into that you click on it And you get the whole story and and you can when you do that you don’t have to go looking for the news it comes to you and You can think of RSS as Automated web surfing In other words, you you create this sort of Relationship between yourself and the news source and say I want to be informed whenever there’s something new on this topic so for example, I subscribe to the New York Times Technology feed or the BBC World News feed or And gadget which is a gadget website a technology website or boing boing, which is a style and technology sort of, you know Curiosity you might think of it curiosity web feed my own site scripting news Scripting comm has a has a feed you’ll find pretty much that any blog or any news source These days has a feed and that more and more people are subscribing the BBC For example has a goal that at the end of this year by the end of this year 10% of their clicks They expect will come from RSS feeds There have been estimates that in three years the New York Times 25% of their clicks will come from RSS feeds So the growth amongst people that are avid users of news were avid users of information Which are people who use the web very effectively? It’s it’s an absolute explosion right now So where does this lead and what are the changes that come about from? this new all these different new ways of communicating You know the the unconference the blog RSS Where does all this go and and and and how is this changing things and and the answer I think is That well first of all we all grew up in the 20th century if you’re alive today in an adult That won’t be true for very much longer I just turned 50 and as you grow older well time acceler ates and Strange things happen like people who were born in the 80s are adults now And I of course was an adult in the 80s That seems kind of weird and there will come a day when I won’t be able to say that that if you’re listening to me now that you Were born in the 20th century, but for now it’s true and in the 20th century The innovation was central ization and the reason why was in order to communicate on a large scale to lots of people You needed there was a certain sense of exclusivity because the means of communication were so expensive If you wanted to broadcast If you wanted to be on the radio you had to take a job working for a radio station Because it cost millions of dollars to set up a radio station and we didn’t have that kind of money as people as per Personal we didn’t have that kind of money If you wanted to write for publication for print You needed to work for a magazine or a newspaper all the way up until the late 80s When the desktop publishing revolution happened at which point the cost of a laser printer went down to under $10,000 and all of a sudden you started seeing rapid change in the Publishing industry because it became more and more accessible to the point where today the cost of a website Which is the equivalent of a magazine or a newspaper the cost is virtually zero You basically need a personal computer, which most people have anyway In order to do the writing and the serving for a web log Basically a zero unless you have a huge flow web log in which case it’s a few dollars a month The cost is not the prohibitive factor anymore A cost is virtually free the same thing’s true with radio If you wanted to produce what we call a podcast Which has just become very popular in the last year this art form of called podcasting Yeah, you need basically a personal computer many of them come with built-in microphones You need recording software, which costs about $30 on the Macintosh It comes bundled with the with the operating system and the server cost is a little bit more than it is for For for a web log, but the cost is is coming down at a very rapid base to the point We’re probably in a couple of years Maybe even sooner the cost will virtually be free again this cost of being a part of the radio Network now is is basically as is almost as cheap as it is to be a writer on the internet and so what that means is that ideas can come from users and you know in the old days a product was designed by a Company and the company had all these layers of insulation They kept the users away from the people who did the product design So the products were were crude approximations of what users wanted but now The users are on the verge of becoming product designers themselves and in some areas they are the product designers if you look at Photography if you look at if you look at writing for the web The users are having enormous influence over the design of the products with eBay The marketing and the the distribution in the sales manship and all those aspects are now in the hands of the users It’s only a matter of time before the Manufacturers become fulfillment houses where they know exactly what the users want and can create it in very very rapid fashion the Emergence of things like in gadget or gizmodo are clues as well because there are so many people that are qualified to write for these Publications now the cost of producing the publication is virtually zero and these people are indistinguishable from product designers and one day they’re going to wake up and realize that they’ve got more good ideas about where The product should go to the people who are designing the products That day is not very far away so I think what we’re seeing now is the driving of our economy our social life all Aspects of what we do are being driven away from centralization and Towards this distributed decentralized Everybody’s equally empowered to be creative world which you know some people say well human nature can’t change that you just can’t Change the way people work and this actually came up at the first blogger con Esther Dyson famous Analyst and venture capitalists she said well, you know can’t change human nature and I said well Maybe we’re not changing human nature Maybe we’re going back to the way things were before they were centralized back before you had radio stations and before you had Record companies and before you had television and movie theaters We all had to provide our own entertainment I mean if you wanted to hear music on a Saturday night You either had to do the music yourself or you had to have a friend or a family member nearby Who would play for you or sing for you and Didn’t we lose something when we all stopped being creative and we all started thinking that you had to be somebody special somebody extremely talented or extremely beautiful in order to have the joy of being creative and Yeah, I think we did lose something and I think that we desperately need to get back to being creative because Our world has problems that can only be solved by creativity and they need to be solved by all of us And so this may well be the next step in the evolution of our species. It may be that big a deal what we’re doing right now, so Exciting time to be alive. I wish we were I wish I were there with you in Pisa, so I could say let’s have a great discussion about this now But if you want send me an email Dave Wainer W-i-n-e-r at gmail. com and or I’ll tell you what I’ll put up a place for for comments on this on this speech This is also going to be the morning coffee nodes podcast for May 11th, 2000 or I’m sorry May 12th 2005 and if you’re a regular listener to my podcast You may be disappointed to find out that there’s no singing on this podcast But I promise to do some singing on it upcoming one real soon And if you want to read my site my blog is www. scripting. com and if you want to subscribe to my RSS feed It’s www. scripting. com RSS. xml So everybody in Pisa and everybody around the world I hope you have a great day. It ’s been great talking with you, and I’ll see you again real soon. Take care. Bye
And for everybody that’s listening, this will also be listened to by people on script ing. com.
What happened was Murphy’s Law, which says anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Well, Murphy’s Law ruled the day today and we were unable to actually make the video conference work.
So what I’ve agreed to do in place of giving a live talk is to use some reliable technology , mp3, and to record the presentation and then upload it to a server and then provide the link to the people running the conference and then they will play it for the people in the room with my apologies. I really wish that I could have been there today and of course it would have been a lot more interesting. Hopefully we would have actually been able to have a discussion, which is what I prefer to actually just giving a talk.
So I have several things that I want to talk about today and if you want to follow along, the URL for my talk is http colon slash slash DaveTravel D-A-V-E-T-R-A-V-E-L dot scripting S-C-R-I-P-T-I-N-G dot com slash P-S-A notes P-I-S-A-N-O-T-E-S So who am I? My name is Dave We iner and I’m a resident of Florida. I’m a software developer. I’m a blogger. I invent things. I’m a college graduate and I have a master’s degree in computer science. I ’ve developed outlining tools, presentation tools, scripting systems, blogging tools, aggregators or feed readers and I’ve designed formats and protocols including XML, RPC, SOAP, RSS and OPML. I’ve won some awards and I used to be a research fellow at Berkman Center at Harvard Law School and I’m a former contributing editor for WIRED.
So one of the things I want to talk about since the topic is user communities and their tools is the idea of an unconference and this is something that we developed in a format that we called Blog gerCon which was a conference for bloggers.
We’ve done three of them. We did two at Harvard Law School and one at Stanford Law School and the first one was sort of the evolutionary one where we did the conference sort of the usual way with panels and speakers and but with a heavy emphasis on discussion because it was a blogging conference.
We felt that you know, if you’re gonna put a room full of bloggers together that we would want to hear what they all said, what they all think and it was sort of based on the premise that I’m just gonna let, this is my cell phone and my ringtone and I’m just gonna let it ring.
Anyway, our premise was that when you have a conference that if you were to add up all the intelligence in the room you would find that most of it is not up on stage while you try to get very smart people to speak it’s still there are so many more people in what we call the audience that we ought to try to tap in to the the intelligence and their enthusiasm and their ideas.
Not just because there’s more of it, but also because we were curious about this phenomenon that that happens when you put a conference together, it seems all the interesting conversations take place in the hallways and so the thought was that if we could involve the people that were in the audience more that we might get a better conference.
So it was a two-day conference then that was the way the first day was and the second day we went even more extreme. We said no panels, no speakers and we had this idea that you would have a discussion leader and that their job would be much like a reporter putting together a story and that the people in the room were the sources and that the discussion leader would try to assemble a story out of the the expertise of the people in the room and this changed some of the basic rules of conference going and I we felt a very good way because one of the things that happens at a conference is that you have a speaker like what I ’m doing right now and people sort of formulate their questions while I’m speaking and then at the end they line up in front of a microphone and wait their turn to ask a question and even if they didn’t have a question either they just wanted to make a point and all the time they’re sitting there waiting they’re composing a speech and they’re getting nervous and what they’re gonna say gets longer and longer and longer and people go out into the hallway to have the real conversations and a funny thing happened in the second day of BligerCon where we had this sort of unconference format the interesting conversations took place in the room and and so at the second BligerCon we completely did away with the format of speakers and panels and Q&A and just went with the discussion format and perfected that in the third BligerCon that we did at Stanford, which was late in 2004 and since then the format has been emulated by other conference promoters with great success to the point where some people don’t even want to go to the old kind of conference anymore because this way of doing it is so much more makes better use of their time and is so much more interesting and if you think about it, it’s a lot like the blogosphere in that the blogosphere sort of centralised the whole idea of information flow, an idea flow, that you didn’t need to get a job with a big publication in order to have your ideas heard all you had to do was get a web log and so this goes back to why I started blogging and you know depending on how what you think a blog is you know I either started blog ging in 1994 or in 1996 or 1997 but it was pretty early and while there are some question about who was the first blogger, I was certainly among the first bloggers and and my blog served as the model for many of the what we consider the early weblogs and my reason was because I wanted well, you know go back to the beginning of why did I get involved in the internet in the first place is that it seemed to me that this was from a software developer standpoint, which is one of the hats that I wear one of the things that I do It seemed to me like the platform without the platform vendor which meant that nobody controlled what you could do and which meant that it could be a place of great creativity and it turns out that while there are many people and companies that would like to be the platform vendor of the internet that it pretty much has maintained that over the over the years and in fact wherever the internet has been successful It’s been precisely because of that because there was never anybody that could control What people use the internet for it meant that basically it became a place of great creativity and and you know and lots of interesting new economic models and social models I Started which I’ll get to a little bit more in a bit when I talk about monoculture But I started blogging for the simple reason or I started using the internet to communicate For the simple reason that I had a story to tell and I couldn’t get the reporters to tell the story and it goes to back to the Macintosh platform when it was competing with Windows and the conventional wisdom amongst reporters was that there was no Macintosh software and of course, I was a creator of Macintosh software and Actually more specifically it was that there was no new Mac intosh software And I knew many of the reporters and I would call them up and say come on You know that there’s a lot of new software for the Macintosh because you use it. They say oh , yeah Yeah, I use all that stuff. It ’s cool and then you say well Why do you report that there’s no new Macintosh software and they they would say well But everybody knows that there ’s no new Macintosh software and I don’t think that they were dishonest I just think that they didn’t understand that Conventional wisdom that you shouldn’t report conventional wisdom was my belief you should report the truth And that if there is Mac new Macintosh software then your reports should say there is new Macintosh software but There was nothing that we could do about it the reporters were Constantly saying that there was nothing new which made it really difficult to you know market new software for the Mac intosh so I started communicating directly and and lo and behold more new Mac intosh software started getting created and And a very very important principle developed from this which is that the use of the web To route around centralized authority, and you see it happening everywhere for example If you were to book a trip You know you might have ten years ago. You might have used a travel agent to book the trip But today you probably would use Expedia and hot wire Maybe in travel velocity where you might go directly to the airlines some airlines in the US Like Southwest offered very deep discounts In Europe, but you have Ryan air that’s doing the same thing And we sort of put together our own vacations now and It’s a it’s a it takes more time than it used to take on our part But we can save money and we can get better trips and we get to go where we really wanted to go in the first place I used to find when I use a travel agent that I would go end up being booked at resorts that have great golf courses and which was useless to me because I don’t play golf but my travel agent did play golf and that’s why she liked the Reporter who reports that there ’s no new Macintosh software the travel agent can’t necessarily see there even see their own Filters and understand why they ’re making the choices that they make But yet they make those choices and they may not be the choices that we want made on our behalf So the internet creates this opportunity for us to make our own choices for us to do our own reporting to get our own story out there and to hear directly from the people who have the knowledge without the intermediary or To book our trip on the airline without going through a travel agent and that’s just one of many such you know Things are going on eBay for example is a is a whole Economy that’s based on this idea that we don’t need the middlemen anymore that we can do our own Shopping and we can do our own marketing and our own distribution and this is creating a phenomenon that that makes us ever more hungry for information and And if you think about it in the last ten years or so our expectations for information have just gone through the roof Think about the trip that you might have booked in 19 let’s say 1992 Let’s say you were going to go to To London or you’re in the United States you would go to Chicago and You wanted to know what clothes you should bring with you or you wanted to book some theater tickets You wanted to know what was playing or if the your favorite sports team was in town and maybe buy some tickets for that in 1992 Your expectation you might have you might have been able to find out what the temperature was yesterday in Chicago or in London But the other information You would have had to have gone to the library and the information would have been old and you wouldn’t be getting information about the future You’d only be getting it about the past in other words We have moved from an age of information Poverty into an age of information excess in an incredibly short period of time in 10 or 15 years not only has the amount of information gone up, but our expectation of information has gone up dramatically at the same time the economics of providing information have changed such that There isn’t you know if you look at the reporters in the news networks the newspapers and the magazines They’re cutting back They have less reporters than they used to have before because the economy economics are forcing them to do that So you have this weird situation where as our expectations for information are Exploding okay at the same time the cost or the the amount of reporters available to provide that information is Shrinking and so that gap is being filled Somewhere by commercial vendors by we’re doing it for ourselves And there are other businesses that are being started that are incentivized to provide us with that information and at the same time we’ve invented some techniques for Making for automating the gathering of that kind of information so that we can consume even more information As if that were the problem that we have well, it actually turns out that it is and the technology that has been created for that is called RSS and RSS stands for really simple syndication and It’s become enormously popular in every year since its inception Has been sort of the watershed year for RSS and and this year of course is no exception All the major major news organizations support it all of the blogging tools support it You’re finding the government agencies are providing feeds Across the board the the network that’s being created right now is the RSS network and the tools That are being created to to consume to use that information are just exploding and you know the the BBC Actually, I did the interview with the BBC that created the characterizes we characterized it as a Sushi restaurant conveyor belt if you can imagine, you know if you’ve ever eaten at a sushi restaurant where you sit down and They just put these beautiful little plates of sushi in front of you and and you pick the ones that you want and They charge you for them. That ’s sort of like how RSS works You subscribe to all these different feeds and and all these news items just flow right by you And you see one that you find interesting say I think I’ll go look deeper into that you click on it And you get the whole story and and you can when you do that you don’t have to go looking for the news it comes to you and You can think of RSS as Automated web surfing In other words, you you create this sort of Relationship between yourself and the news source and say I want to be informed whenever there’s something new on this topic so for example, I subscribe to the New York Times Technology feed or the BBC World News feed or And gadget which is a gadget website a technology website or boing boing, which is a style and technology sort of, you know Curiosity you might think of it curiosity web feed my own site scripting news Scripting comm has a has a feed you’ll find pretty much that any blog or any news source These days has a feed and that more and more people are subscribing the BBC For example has a goal that at the end of this year by the end of this year 10% of their clicks They expect will come from RSS feeds There have been estimates that in three years the New York Times 25% of their clicks will come from RSS feeds So the growth amongst people that are avid users of news were avid users of information Which are people who use the web very effectively? It’s it’s an absolute explosion right now So where does this lead and what are the changes that come about from? this new all these different new ways of communicating You know the the unconference the blog RSS Where does all this go and and and and how is this changing things and and the answer I think is That well first of all we all grew up in the 20th century if you’re alive today in an adult That won’t be true for very much longer I just turned 50 and as you grow older well time acceler ates and Strange things happen like people who were born in the 80s are adults now And I of course was an adult in the 80s That seems kind of weird and there will come a day when I won’t be able to say that that if you’re listening to me now that you Were born in the 20th century, but for now it’s true and in the 20th century The innovation was central ization and the reason why was in order to communicate on a large scale to lots of people You needed there was a certain sense of exclusivity because the means of communication were so expensive If you wanted to broadcast If you wanted to be on the radio you had to take a job working for a radio station Because it cost millions of dollars to set up a radio station and we didn’t have that kind of money as people as per Personal we didn’t have that kind of money If you wanted to write for publication for print You needed to work for a magazine or a newspaper all the way up until the late 80s When the desktop publishing revolution happened at which point the cost of a laser printer went down to under $10,000 and all of a sudden you started seeing rapid change in the Publishing industry because it became more and more accessible to the point where today the cost of a website Which is the equivalent of a magazine or a newspaper the cost is virtually zero You basically need a personal computer, which most people have anyway In order to do the writing and the serving for a web log Basically a zero unless you have a huge flow web log in which case it’s a few dollars a month The cost is not the prohibitive factor anymore A cost is virtually free the same thing’s true with radio If you wanted to produce what we call a podcast Which has just become very popular in the last year this art form of called podcasting Yeah, you need basically a personal computer many of them come with built-in microphones You need recording software, which costs about $30 on the Macintosh It comes bundled with the with the operating system and the server cost is a little bit more than it is for For for a web log, but the cost is is coming down at a very rapid base to the point We’re probably in a couple of years Maybe even sooner the cost will virtually be free again this cost of being a part of the radio Network now is is basically as is almost as cheap as it is to be a writer on the internet and so what that means is that ideas can come from users and you know in the old days a product was designed by a Company and the company had all these layers of insulation They kept the users away from the people who did the product design So the products were were crude approximations of what users wanted but now The users are on the verge of becoming product designers themselves and in some areas they are the product designers if you look at Photography if you look at if you look at writing for the web The users are having enormous influence over the design of the products with eBay The marketing and the the distribution in the sales manship and all those aspects are now in the hands of the users It’s only a matter of time before the Manufacturers become fulfillment houses where they know exactly what the users want and can create it in very very rapid fashion the Emergence of things like in gadget or gizmodo are clues as well because there are so many people that are qualified to write for these Publications now the cost of producing the publication is virtually zero and these people are indistinguishable from product designers and one day they’re going to wake up and realize that they’ve got more good ideas about where The product should go to the people who are designing the products That day is not very far away so I think what we’re seeing now is the driving of our economy our social life all Aspects of what we do are being driven away from centralization and Towards this distributed decentralized Everybody’s equally empowered to be creative world which you know some people say well human nature can’t change that you just can’t Change the way people work and this actually came up at the first blogger con Esther Dyson famous Analyst and venture capitalists she said well, you know can’t change human nature and I said well Maybe we’re not changing human nature Maybe we’re going back to the way things were before they were centralized back before you had radio stations and before you had Record companies and before you had television and movie theaters We all had to provide our own entertainment I mean if you wanted to hear music on a Saturday night You either had to do the music yourself or you had to have a friend or a family member nearby Who would play for you or sing for you and Didn’t we lose something when we all stopped being creative and we all started thinking that you had to be somebody special somebody extremely talented or extremely beautiful in order to have the joy of being creative and Yeah, I think we did lose something and I think that we desperately need to get back to being creative because Our world has problems that can only be solved by creativity and they need to be solved by all of us And so this may well be the next step in the evolution of our species. It may be that big a deal what we’re doing right now, so Exciting time to be alive. I wish we were I wish I were there with you in Pisa, so I could say let’s have a great discussion about this now But if you want send me an email Dave Wainer W-i-n-e-r at gmail. com and or I’ll tell you what I’ll put up a place for for comments on this on this speech This is also going to be the morning coffee nodes podcast for May 11th, 2000 or I’m sorry May 12th 2005 and if you’re a regular listener to my podcast You may be disappointed to find out that there’s no singing on this podcast But I promise to do some singing on it upcoming one real soon And if you want to read my site my blog is www. scripting. com and if you want to subscribe to my RSS feed It’s www. scripting. com RSS. xml So everybody in Pisa and everybody around the world I hope you have a great day. It ’s been great talking with you, and I’ll see you again real soon. Take care. Bye