In My Experience... | Emergent Cali. (1333)

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Emergent Cali.
[ Posted by Dan on April 25, 2003 | 6 Comments ]

The presentation from the BBC crew was pretty shocking because it shows me how much I am missing in my day to day work when it comes to real users and the emerging applications that (will) serve them (in one way or another).

What I really can't believe is that some people have enough time to actually do research, consider it, plan on working systems around that considered research and execute those plans in an open fashion to deal with inevitable change. Relative to the world I've been living in, it's revolutionary. Being on that end of the relative scale is sad and disappointing. Perhaps I am in the wrong career, or simply on the backside of the curve.

Essentially, their presentation was a powerpoint'd requirements and use cases document built in such a way as to be spoken to in a presentation. Besides the totally simple (but not simplistic) Google presentation, the BBC presentation is the best (visually) of the conference, and the most tangible.

Interestingly, when they mentioned part of their new product/app/social-software would include a Creative commons mechanism, there was applause, and it downed on me... the O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference, and more fundamentally, the O'Reilly social network is a libertarian movement that I haven't been exposed to in my normal life back on the East Coast. when I mentioned in a recent post that their are two groups at this conference, the 'party geeks' and 'everyone else,' I am part of the 'everyone else' group.

It wasn't until lunch today when I met 'the spring Guy' did I hear about Emergent Man (a party last night) which is a seedling idea and event related to Burning Man, but centered around this conference and those who aren't staying at the hotel and are sleeping in someone's back yard. Very California.

I always knew it, but it's more obvious to me now that I'm very east coast.

East coast rules!

Also, I find it funny that the Spring site doesn't consider IE6 on Windows a standards-compliant browser and links you to the webstandards page that lists that exact browser as an acceptable one. Yet another example of someone jumping on a bandwagon when they don't really know why...

-Posted by Eric on April 25, 2003 06:18 PM

Sounds cool, I wish I went there. Screw east and West.. cuz the NORTHWEST rules!

-Posted by Jake of 8bitjoystick.com on April 26, 2003 10:37 PM

Thank god for the east coast. All of this fuzzy headed thinking of self maintaining dynamic systems magically merging together to allow all of us data centered humans to effortlessly interact with the infosphere is the same kool aid everyone was drinking back at the height of the Java fueled dot com era.

CTO's, with a perfectly straight face, would explain how via (always non specific) magical powers of XML, OO, etc and so on, that "e-business" was going to be transformed into automatically created and self maintaining relationships between business systems which would auto negotiate with each other to settle on protocols to speak, share business rules with each other and negotiate supply chains.

All of those businesses are now, fortunately, out of business.

This just sounds like the same drivel, reincarnated in a different arena.

As for Burning Man.. does anyone think "Burning Man" is symbolic of some emergent social trend anymore? Its a bunch of wealthy people paying to take a hedonistic vacation together in a desert for a few days before they go back to their jobs as lawyers and software engineers.

If you want to see a true emerging social trend look at the millions of Shiite Muslims gathering together in Iraq.

-Posted by on April 27, 2003 12:53 PM

To Anonymous Coward: Although I won't argue that there was alot of hype, there is a grain of truth to the B2B/XML stuff. The dark side that the Valley shills wouldn't mention is how hard it will be to get there. All you have to do is look at Amazon's web service (which is more specifically B2b, big B to little B) and flex your mind a bit to see where this stuff is headed.

-Posted by Eric on April 28, 2003 10:18 AM

"All you have to do is look at Amazon's web service (which is more specifically B2b, big B to little B) and flex your mind a bit to see where this stuff is headed."
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A bunch of patents and lawsuits? ;)

-Posted by on April 28, 2003 10:47 AM

Hey - thanks for the nice comments on the presentation. Interesting you see the Creative Commons stuff as libertarian, as from this side of the atlantic I think it appeals to our BBC public-service viewpoint...

I've put the slides available at
http://www.blackbeltjones.com/etcon2003

i've had to take out some of the slides which featured pictures of the people we talked to in our research, but it's all pretty much there otherwise.

Thanks again, glad you enjoyed it.

-Posted by Matt on April 30, 2003 02:28 PM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).