Photos from Mesh08 conference up

I've put my photos from Mesh08 up on Flickr. Check them out! Thanks to the organizers for a great Mesh conference. You guys did an amazing job.

Mesh08 - Day 2 - Second installment of 15 minutes of fame

Now is the second installment of 15 minutes of fame.



The first presenter is Ali Asaria of Well.ca which is an online drug and pharmacy store. Ali is saying that the key to their success is not the technology, but everything is focussed on the customer. Why are people buying online? People are saving time and it is the convenience of buying products.



The second presenter is Enomaly by Reuven Cohen which deal with enterprise cloud computing and scalable infrastructure. They are building scalable open source systems for companies. Mark Evans is asking Reuven where is cloud computing going? Reuven says that cloud computing is the next evolution of software. He is envisioning cloud computing as the base platform for building the next Google or like the Apache of cloud computing.



The last presenter is OverlayTV by Robert Lane. The business was focussed around user generated content. There are not a lot of tools for the average amateur user. Users can create overlays on video and post to Facebook, blog and any other social networking site. This is what video is heading towards, to annotate and to overlay on the video. The vision is to give 3 minutes to users to overlay on a video. Mark Evans is asking what is going to make Overlay.tv the YouTube of video. Robert is mentioning that there are 3 components, relevance, control (the users should be in control in creating the overlay).

On Technorati: Mesh08, Mesh 2008

Mesh08 - Day 1 - Private vs. Public

I'm now in the last session of the first day of Mesh08 which is on Private vs. Public. There is the question of regulation in a public space. There is an issue now where people who are not who they are, post fake pages, there was this case with a Toronto local councillor who was bad mouthing others, according to Ken Anderson, assistant privacy commissioner for Ontario. You have to understand the ramifications of posting content online, according to philosophy professor and author Mark Kingwell. Rachel Sklar, the moderator, is addressing about how people use handles to be anonymous and not reveal their identity. An audience members is addressing how whether we can use a Creative Commons notion for acknowledging privacy and asking if it would be viable, because it is the case now that we have to be aware of what is being said in surroundings and how content about yourself can easily be posted online. Ken addressed how surveillance is something you can't control and he is talking about sousveillance where people monitor their surroundings like Professor Steven Mann's work on wearable computers.

Another question being addressed by an audience participant is how to guarantee that the information being captured using cameras is used for just for the purposes intended for, but what guarantees that it is not being used elsewhere. Another question is that whether we should get rid of privacy because everything is being made public and it is difficult to regulate and control privacy. According to Ken Anderson, not all websites are the same.

On Technorati: Mesh08, Mesh 2008

Mesh08 - Day 1 - Panel: The New Front Page

I left the online video workshop to come to the panel on the new front page. Daniel Burka from Digg and Pownce is talking about how the web is not replacing traditional media, and how traditional media like CNN is not linking or using Web 2.0 tools like Digg. I'm beginning to see how CTV and CBC.ca is now using Facebook and other social media technologies and bookmarking services for sharing content with others. Daniel is mentioning that Digg is having some content partnerships with media companies.

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Mesh08 - Day 1 - Online video workshop

I've finally decided to go to the online video workshop. The workshop is talking about the creation of content, the presentation of content and monetization. The video content needs to be viewer centric and tailored to your audience. You also need to engage your audience with blog comments, etc. You need to distribute your video on a regular, predictable schedule and decide your distribution (iTunes, YouTube, blip.tv, Vimeo, Ustream.tv). For networking, you need to be part of the community through face-to-face meetups as well as social networking like MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other online tools. As a matter of fact, I'm getting more people following me on Twitter from the mesh conference than ever before!

On Technorati: Mesh08, Mesh 2008, online video, Amber MacArthur

Mesh08 - Day 1 - 15 minutes of fame

Right now is the 15 minutes of Fame where start up companies talk about their product in 15 minutes. Today, there are three companies which is being moderated by Mark Evans.



The first company is aideRSS which is a service which provides an extra metalayer to target to users to read what matters to them, since there is a pool of information that is hard to digest. The web is now an RSS pool. This seems very relevant in Web 2.0, so I may check this out.

The second company is GigPark by Noah Godfrey and Pema Hegan, which is using friends to make recommendations to others for services. I'm a member of GigPark and seems really cool, something simple, but useful.



The third company is carbonetworks by Daniel Crawford. They create a software platform for helping companies create carbon emissions strategy.

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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