devlog

Linked from the new Open Knowledge Foundation blog, slides from the talk i gave at ETech with Rufus Pollock, Hack Your Own Conference: the World Summit on Free Information Infrastructures. There’s also a sound recording of the talk that we gave on a slightly sporadic server with a link to a torrent file.

I went to ETech really to spend time with a few old friends and a few newer ones, and i was far from disappointed in that; i didn’t participate in the speaker sessions much. The only talk that i turned up for early and listened to all of carefully without laptop distractions, was Sam Ruby’s talk on Neurotransmitters, (talk slides). Reflecting on actions and patterns in the development of very simple organic structures; learning from experiences in the past that look a bit like the experiences we are having now, looking at what works about what works.

My favourite sequence of the slides for Sam’s talk are the ones that read, Spam. Phishing. “Attention Economy”. Rich taught me a good trick for parsing the rhetoric of the “attention” cult; every time you hear the word “attention”, mentally substitute it with the word “hype”. At the time, this really helped make everything make sense to me, and i cheered up a lot. It also really cheered me up to get a shout-out during Sam’s talk, for some of the ideas contained in the talk on gonzo collaborative mapping on the semantic web that i gave at ETech and a few other places in 2003.