Guess there are New Toys coming

Here comes Supernova

As you all are probably well aware of - yet another industry event (at least OUR industry) schmooze fest is coming up this week.

Kevin Werbach has assembled quite an array of pundits, practioners and CEOs. The overall theme is decentralization, but some highlights of this year's agenda include:

- Syndication Nation - with Dave Sifry, Tim Bray, Scott Rosenberg and Paul Boutin sounds like a winner. I'd love to hear what Bray thinks about Technorati's model.

- my old college buddy Robert Poor will be there. Always a treat to see him. He's the CTO and co-founder of Ember. Robert and I went to school together - over 28 years ago.

- it'll be great to meet Niklas Zennstrom - I heard he couldn't enter the country!

- I wonder what Doc's panel on Fighting the Distrbuted Wars will be like?

- The concluding session on back channel loops with Dan Gillmor, Loic and Liz Lawley sounds hot - but I gotta also check out Mr. Shawn Hardin (of AOL Broadband) and see what he thinks he's doing. He's the guy who decided NOT to hire us - after spending over two years trying to help out AOL. I guess his success at NBCi gave him reason to ignore us.

- I like the idea of concluding the conference with a backchannel rap - as that's how the conference continues 24/7/365. That and an on-going Wiki and mail list.

- and last but not least the Digital Identity panel which I'm on should be fun - even though I'd LOVE to be finding out how they're building 'the Matrix'. I get to find out about sxip (which I still can't pronounce) and what people think about FOAF and our FOAFnet efforts.

The whole scene kicks off with a pre-dinner tomorrow night - which has over 110 people signed up. And Joi gets all the credit and he's not even showing up. Now THAT's what I call marketing.

David Weinberger is also not coming.

Supernova Three

SuperNova '04

Supernova 2004, June 24-25 in Silicon Valley. I usually dodge conferences, but for Kevin Werbach and Supernova 2004, I'll make an exception. In fact, I'll be moderating Kevin's Syndication Nation panel discussion on Thursday morning. The central question for panelists: Is there more to syndication than reading 300 blogs at once? [Paul Boutin]

I really hope I can make it to SuperNova.

SuperNova

I'll be speaking later this month at Kevin Werbach's Supernova conference in Silicon Valley. Looks like the usual intriguing event.

[Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Me too!  Should be KEY - I'd recommend everyone to come!

Techdirt At Supernova

Supernova Notes

Supernova 2005

Supernova 2005 starts today in San Francisco. I can't wait.

To the extent I blog during the next few days, it will be on the Supernova 2005 Weblog. And we'll have lots of other great user-generated content on our Community Connection. If you're not attending Supernova in person, that's a great way to follow some of the action happening here at the conference.

Blogging Supernova

Supernova 2004

supernova.typepad.com
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Critiquing SuperNova

The peer-to-peer connections enabled by backchannel communications is the way for conference attendees to get to know each other.

The virtualization of conferences means that we can engage 24/7/365.

Perhaps better speakers, better interaction and less lying would create better experiences.

[Supernova05] At Supernova

Supernova live

Another Super Supernova

Sergey at Supernova

Supernova 2004 video

Jonathan Marks, who attended Supernova 2004 from the Netherlands (and will be joining us again this year), put together a fantastic short video with highlights from last year's conference.

The video gives you a bit of the flavor of the event. And the fact that Jonathan put this together on his own gives you the flavor of the kind of people who attend. I like to say, "There is no audience at Supernova; only participants." This is a perfect example.

Check the video out here: (Quicktime | Window s Media)

Supernova: Social Spreadsheets

Phil Windler has a report from an interesting panel at Supernova....

These are some comments and thoughts from a panel called "The Network is People." Esther Dyson, Ray Ozzie, Mena Trott, and Christopher Allen were the panelists.

Spreadsheets were amazing because they sit in the middle, between calculators and the corporate accounting system. They let people not just change the numbers, but to change the models and to build new models. The power of the spreadsheet is the power to persuade people (some might say "beat them into submission"). Spreadsheets are as much about group interaction as presentation software is.

Social networks have a problem in that they let you record relationships, but they don't give you power to control interactions. They provide too many opportunities for "friend inflation." They don't accurately reflect people's real social networks. What we need is a "wiki for transactions." We need a way for users to manage their workflow in a flexible way--a spreadsheet for social interactions.

Would you rather have ten networks with 700,000 people in them or 700,000 networks with ten people in them? This is an interesting question. Linked-In is the first. Blogs are the second.

[Phil Windley]

Esther's idea for a social software spreadsheet are right on. She wants someone to be able to author their own sequence of events to 'script' their own social software actions. Sort of like roll your own LinkedIn.

She said this right after folks were attacking the entire premise of explicit social networking - saying that it was too artificial for expressing real-life relationships.

But I say that without explcit social networking - we'll never be abel to deliver Esther's social software spreadsheet.

Supernova 2005 bl0gcast

The unofficial Supernova.org closure FAQ

Lot's of people are now on the search for torrent sites after several of the most popular and well publicized sites were shutdown. It is understandable why as the heat had been turned up by the MPAA. I find it sad that they did not stand up and fight though.

It's tough to stare down the end of a gun barrel that has a 100 lawyers behind it ready to litigate you into financial ruin. I am sure at some point we will get a site willing to fight and find out the legal standing of torrent sites.

The FAQ contains a list of alternative sites and information on the closure. [www.silentdragz.net]

FC Now: Schwartz Kicks off Supernova

Supernova 2005 Website

We've just launched the new Website for Supernova 2005. Go check it out! Registration, speaking info, and more details are coming soon.

I'm really excited about bringing together deep technology insights and amazing people with Wharton's high-level business visibility. I hope you can join us in San Francisco, June 20-22.

Supernova 2005 bl0g

I'm pleased to announce that the Supernova 2005 weblog is now up and running. You can subscribe to the RSS feed here.

The blog is an integral part of Supernova, which is coming up June 20-22 in San Francisco. Over the next three months, I'll split my time posting here and on the conference blog. As Supernova approaches, we'll be adding additional features and participants to this blog, which is powered by our friends at SilkRoad. We'll also unveil additional online community tools that enhance and extend the physical event.

Frankly, I can't imagine doing a conference these days without a blog. Yet I still see lots of events, even those focused on emerging technologies, that want everything to be a hermetically sealed box around the conference venue. The success of Supernova, along with other "extended" events like ETech, SXSWi, and PC Forum, should be pretty convincing.

supernova 2004 webl0g

Supernova pre-conference bl0gs

ProNet: Supernova workshops

Supernova '05: "Perspective: Jonathan
Schwartz"

Since yesterday morning I've been hanging around at Supernova and I've been taking some fairly intensive notes, but I've not yet had the opportunity to write any of it up. Over the next hour or so, I hope to put up some of my reactions from the last day and a half of the conference. I'm a little unclear as yet whether I'll be posting the full notes that I've been making for each part of the conference. I guess we'll see. They're not always of the most enormous value.

For people who don't know, the core idea behind Supernova and the concept of the conference i decentralisation and the effects of network. I guess the metaphor is of the aftermath of the exploded centre, where top-down governance and control gives up its power (by choice or by force) to the new many-to-many network where power and agency operates at the edges. The conference takes that fundamental concept and looks at its application across a whole range of different subject areas - from social software and personal publishing, search, telecoms, gaming, business, media as well as around meta-areas like how individuals deal with this radically different vision of the world. I think by necessity this creates a kind of weirdly diverse conference that attracts radically different types of people whose relationship to each other isn't always easy. So you've got the business people, the alpha geeks, the legislators, the military, the policy people and the academics talking about things from very different angles. Which means that any individual part of the audience is likely to be frustrated at some points, bored at other points and insanely fascinated for the rest of the time.

I'm going to start with a brief bit of coverage of a discussion between Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Microsystems and Kevin Werbach of Supernova. The two major areas of this discussion were really about about whether or not Web 2.0 was a reality (the answers to which were relatively anodyne) and a much more interesting discussion about future business communication with weblogs.

I kind of take my life in my hands a bit every time I go off on a discussion about weblogs after six years of writing this site, but sometimes it really does seem that there genuinely still more that can still be said around the edges. Here are a few really telling quotes (probably mistranscribed) from Schwartz that I noted down during his piece:

I've learned a lot of things. If you think about what a leader does, you're fundamentally a communicator. You have to be able to communicate to the marketplace to the people who report to you - there is no efficient way of doing that than using the network - using the internet. If you want to be a leader, I can't see you surviving without a blog. It's like being a leader without having e-mail or a mobile phone. You still find them very occasionally, but it's moving away. It's very rare.

Authenticity is absolutely paramount. Getting poeple to write your blogs is ridiculous. It's like hiring people to read your e-mail. You might be able to get away with it, but it's kind of like pushing a rock up a hill...

When I first heard Schwartz talking in these directions, I genuinely didn't know what I thought about it. In my experience weblogs inside organisations don't tend to be terribly interesting or useful and only a limited number of people participate with them. I was going ready to treat his comments with a similar scepticism (particularly given some of his earlier comments about authentication and the future of the web which were pretty banal), but he blew my suspions out of the water with some of his later comments. When challenged about whether he was only talking about communicating with the company internally or doing it in full view of the public, he said something really interesting.

For a start, he said that in the near future he wanted to start doing all his communications via his weblog. Then he moved on to addressing this internal / external dichotomy. He mentioned a particular case where particularly good employees had their names and photos put up on an intranet celebrating their achievements. Instead of this he suggested that it should be done completely in public. He said that some people had suggested that this might mean that the staff concerned would just be poached by other companies but he responded that good people would always be open for poaching. And here's the interesting bit - he said he had no interest in an internal weblog, that he wants it to be completely transparent and that while he was aware that this approach and celebrating his employees achievements in public might to his competitors knowing what he was doing, it also meant that their employees could see it too - and they can then use that to decide if he's a more attractive leader with better policies and a vetter vision of the future.

This is a view of the world that I really like - it doesn't limit your ability to have particular specific projects operating under the radar, but it's an acceptance that large-scale strategy and communications about your company as a whole is never secret. And rather than treating that as a weakness or as a problem, it turns and faces it directly. It let's people see the way you run your company and encourages people to question and interrogate it - creating a virtuous circle of improvement and self-awareness inside organisations that raises the whole level of the debate. For everything else you might say about Sun, this is a noble idealistic and inspiring aspiration. Very cool.

[You can read my very rough notes on this interview as it happened her e.]

Supernova early registration deadline

• Industry gurus such as Ray Ozzie, Esther Dyson and Clay Shirky.
• The new president (and heir-apparent) at Sun.
• The Bush administration's top telecom policy official.
• The elusive head of disruptive VOIP startup Skype.
• Creators of amazing blogging, syndication, and collaboration tools.
• Leading visionaries in fields like grid computing, software-defined radio, and social network analysis.
  

Supernova Imaged by Hubble Telescope

Stealth Disco attack at Supernova

Lois Le Meur (zat crazeee Frenchman) has just gone up to the stage to photograph James Seng (zat creazee guy from Singapore) stealth discoing...

The backchannel is happening now that bandwidth is working. Come on in at IRC Freenode #supernova.

Move coverage of this disruptive event.

Save the date -- Supernova 2004

Headed back to Supernova again next week

The end of oil? Guess again

"Guess Who"

See, if you can guess what this is?

Well, not quite. In fact, it's a Hello Kitty tissue holder. You put a box of Kleenex inside it and pull them through the small opening that looks like, well, err.

This message has been brought to you by WTF Finland.

Okay, I Guess I'm Sorry Too...

0tv.com - Guess My Name

zerotv.com/namegame/index.cfm?game=now
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So, I guess we have a war on.

I guess Meg's not coming to Supernova