canspice.org

Nat is starting the show by telling us that conference presentations will be up on the website, and video from the keynotes will be put on YouTube. I will have links for those later in the day.

The Thursday morning keynotes kick off with Philip Rosedale talking about open source code and whatnot in Second Life. He says that Second Life and the X-Prize represent two possible escapes for humanity, one is virtual and one is literally leaving the planet. He says that open source (and Second Life) allow for greater return on capabilities over time, because you’ve got a community to help you out. “We don’t set the rules of governance, we just let it do its own thing.” I think that that statement is quite incorrect; Linden Labs does have rules of governance, some of which have greatly upset the Second Life community. Using the tools available, someone’s built a Second Life client that runs within a web browser — you can’t do much with it, but you can login and check messages and whatnot.

Jimmy Wales is up now, talking about the future of search. Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the entire sum of all human knowledge. An encyclopedia was the start of this. This is continued at Wikia, which is becoming a library of human knowledge. A second major project focusses on the “free access” aspect. This should be driven by search, which currently is dominated by a number of large monolithic closed search engines. Why not do the same thing for search what Wikipedia did for the encyclopedia? This is being done at search.wikia.com. This project will be focussing on transparency - openness in how the systems and algorithms operate, collaboration - everyone who wants to contribute can contribute, quality - improve the relevancy and accuracy of search results, and privacy - “Pursuing the Holy Grail of Privacy Protection”. The unfortunately-named Grub (it’s a bootloader, dammit!) has been acquired by Wikia to help the search process.

Simon Wardley is talking about commoditization of IT. An excellent talk, he makes the point that open source is a force behind pushing the new whizzy stuff into an ubiquitous commodity, and things like patents or DRM are attempts by company to keep their products as the new whizzy stuff.

I’ll post links to the last two keynotes when they show up on the web. All I have to say is that Nat’s was excellent and James Larsson’s was informative in an insane way.