Mesh 08 - Day 1 - Michael Geist keynote

I'm right now in the keynote with Michael Geist who is University of Ottawa law professor. He is talking about technology law and copyright with digital media. There is lots of mashups of video that take different streams and making their own video. We talk about Facebook advocacy, YouTube advocacy, and Google advocacy (example using Ushahidi.com which uses Google Maps and identify places where violence has occurred).

There are examples where people have used Twitter where protesters in Germany updated other protesters, Facebook was used to bring to attention an issue by the public from which a law was made in the Senate in Canada. Offline protests have been organized from Facebook meetings. There is also a protest about net neutrality which has been publicized on a website online where people are gathering on Parliament Hill in Ottawa and Canada to not regulate the internet. According to Michael, there are people from the blogging community that are speaking against (cyberdissidents) issues and are jailed, and they use mainstream media to bring to the attention of those people that are jailed (like Reporters Without Borders). Michael gave an example of a video mashup which uses short clips from Disney movies to illustrate copyright law.



Michael has also launched a site called iOptOut to exempt yourself from a do-not-call registry. There is now the instance of Government 2.0. For example, in Britain, people can upload videos of what to ask the prime minister and invite the public into a kind of virtual townhall meeting.

On Technorati: Mesh08, Mesh 2008, digital advocacy

MeshU tomorrow!

I can't wait for MeshU which happens tomorrow, it's a one day workshop on technical stuff for Web 2.0. I'm trying to recover back and get back into work mode after the Victoria Day long weekend here in Canada. Then the Mesh conference happens on Wednesday and Thursday. This should be great, there are lots of great talks and speakers, and I got both tickets for $30 each as a student!

On Technorati: MeshU08,Mesh Conference 08

Mesh conference 2008 schedule is up

I just got an e-mail saying that the Mesh conference 2008 schedule is up as well as the MeshU schedule. I'm pretty excited as I'm attending both events and I got both for only $30 each through student ticket pricing! For the past 2 years, I've wanted to go to Mesh but I was always late in getting the student tickets and they are limited and go by so fast! So, I wasn't going to be disappointed this time. Looks like there will be a great roundup of speakers, I'm impressed as to how the organizers were able to get these speakers, but kudos go out to them, as it's not easy to get the right set of speakers. I know since I've organized many workshops and getting speakers is not easy.

With that being said, Mesh is about less than a month from now! And speaking about Mesh, do you know that Microsoft has Live Mesh? It's their answer to Web 2.0, many people were saying how Microsoft is not onto the Web 2.0 bandwagon. Again, Microsoft may be late to the game, but they have a pretty neat platform called Live Mesh that is designed to synchronize not just people you know, but devices and content. It was the brainchild of Chief Software Architect and CTO, Ray Ozzie and has been 2 years in the making. It just got released last week. More info on Live Mesh on here. To me it sounds like service-oriented architecture like Jini or web services but has a Web 2.0ish flavour to it, plus a open extended programmable framework that allows programmers to write and get data from the mesh using any programming language. What do people think about Live Mesh?

On Technorati: Mesh2008, LiveMesh