About thirty of us are squeezed into a room. Dana Boyd (“zephoria“) is the ad hoc discussion leader.

(Scoble is right behind me and says the he would read my blog if I said bad things about him. So here goes: Scoble is, um, wearing a hat. And his son is adorable. Damn! I have to get the hang of this blog nastiness thing.)

The group skitters uncomfortably around the actual definition of “social software.” We’re trying to avoid it. Instead, we’re giving examples of social software that we find interesting. Examples: software that tracks one social network. Scott Heiferman of meetup.org talks about the value of semi-organizing real world meetings; there’s of course room for completely self-organizing groups, he says, but Meetup is designed to provide some structure around setting times and finding venues.

Andy Baio explains his new site, upcoming.org, that lets people schedule their outings to events and then find friends who are going to those and other events.

Fred Stutman (sp? I can’t see his tag) points to how our ability to establish an identity has facilitated social software. (I am much more ambivalent about the coming of digital IDs.)

Bill Janeway of Warburg Pincus talks about what corporations are going to have to learn the lessons of social software, discovering the actual social interactions that are enabling the business processes.

Ross Mayfield of SocialText talks about his company’s approach. (I’m on their Board of Advisors.) It’s at the other end of the spectrum from the social workflow that Bill was discussing.

of Denounce mentions one of his recent parodies: Blossier, a dossier for bloggers.

Someone wonders whether the rise of social software will cause the system to break. Others dispute that. It’s self-correcting, suggests Scoble, among others.

Marc Smith of Microsoft Research talks about his research on threads. Things need to get roughed up at the edges and show wear so we know where to go. [I’m leaving after the first hour in order to go to the bittorrent talk.]

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The subtitle of this session is “Annotating the World”; someone is a good marketer.

Ross Stapleton-Gray is explaining how bar codes work, with an emphasis on the directory services they use. The RFID directories will be federated.

RFIDs have 96 bits, enough to tag particular cans of Coke, unlike bar codes that are the same for every can of Coke.

Marc Smith, a sociologist at Microsoft and the NetScan guy (data about newsgroups), shows a handheld reader that scans a bar code and pulls down info from the Amazon web server. Another button press and it does a google search. He contrasts this with the approach Ross outlined that relies on custom-built databases. “The swarm will build the database.”

AURA (Advanced User Resolution A-something), the Microsoft project, has a variety of “resolution services” that can be invoked to get more info. “We’ve just tightened the link between the virtual and the physical.” One example: if you want to know if there are any genetically altered foodstuffs in the can of peas you just bought, you can’t get that from the food label. But you probably can by looking it up in Google. Further, everything you scan AURA logs for you for your private perusal.

In the future, Marc says, a store might broadcast the availability of its resolution service. More interesting, he says, you might pick up an AFL-CIO resolution service that tells you that the pair of pants you’re looking at were manufactured in a sweat shop (“Would you like to see the QuickTime movie?”) and might offer you pants for a few dollars more that are “made by women who are allowed to urinate whenever they want to.”

Marc’s been demoing using a Pocket PC device but he says it’ll happen everywhere. Fr’instance, the code for visual deciphering barcodes is a mere 11K.

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Larry Lessig blogs this remarkable paper from Michael Copps, one of the FCC Commissioners. An excerpt:

This Internet may be dying. It may be dying because entrenched interests are positioning themselves to control the Internet?s choke-points and they are lobbying the FCC to aid and abet them. The founders? vision of the Internet is being exchanged for a constricted and distorted view of technology development, entrepreneurship and consumer preferences. For its part, the Commission has already made serious regulatory miscalculations that could endanger the freedom and lifeblood of the Internet sooner rather than later. We seem to be buying into a warped vision that open networks should be replaced by closed networks and that traditional user accessibility can be superceded by a new power to discriminate. Let this vision prevail and the winners will be entrenched interests with far greater power than they have today…

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Here are some of the topics from off the sign-up board:

• Calling all language lawyers
• Programming ebay and paypal
• kwiki/yaml
• Tivo hacking
• Blogdex vs.s Technorati deathmatch
• Social software
• Technology and politics
• The hacking state of the nation
• Rendezvous
• Meme construction lab
• Bittorrent
• Trust metrics
• The glass bead game
• Twingle

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in order to show my support for the dmca, i hereby renounce the use of the shift key.

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Britt Blaser notices that at Blogger, the older bloggers tended to be more optimistic about the effect of blogs than the younger ones.

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200 of us crowd into a large room in the O’Reilly offices. It’s beginning to dawn on me that this whole compound is O’Reilly’s. It’s a new set of buildings with a parking lot in front and lawn and orchards behind. A family of deer – possibly animatronic – wander by during dinner.

Each one of us stands up and says three words about her/himself. The limit is inconsistently enforced by means of a gong. No surprise: this is a geeky crowd. Among the 200 self-descriptions there are a handful of big laughs including a couple that make an audible whooshing sound as they go over my head.

Then we are free to write topics onto 7-foot high boards with times and rooms on them. No panels! Birds of many feathers!

It is 8:30pm and we start spreading over the grounds, talking. One room has a guy with musical instruments made out of spare parts.The person who does the BMW movies site is letting people ride his Segway; I’m sitting at the spot, twenty feet in, where each rider says some variation of “Wow! I want one of these!” A guy is playing banjo a few feet away. People are standing around a small fire in a barrel on the patio; they and the people clustered around laptops are the only ones not looking at one another as they talk. The voice of the person next to you is backgrounded by the rustle of nearby of talk and laughter. It is, in short, what earthlings apparently call a party.

Geeks, Porta-potties and no Powerpoints. Does it get any better?

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I ran into Tim O’Reilly as I entered the door to FOO (Friends of O’Reilly). “Is this the first one of these?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Tim. “In fact, it was just an idea we had six weeks ago.”

So, here I am with 200 geeks for two days of, well, whatever it is that we decide to do for two days. At last the conference I’ve been waiting for:
Hallway talk with occasional self-organized colloquia. At least that’s what I think is going to happen. Maybe we’re all going to get naked except for “Burning Man Sucks” baseball caps.

I’ve already ran into bunches of people I either know and love or know of and respect. I’m so excited to be here that I actually went out and bought a tent. Me in a tent is like a trout in a holster.

Everyone here is smarter than me. I’m really excited about being here.

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I don’t know what “Cowboy up” means, but it seems to be an atavistic, totemic cry intended to encourage a local sports team.

While I wish the team luck in their endeavors, I have to register my objection to the phrase. We are in Boston. We are not cowboys. We are not lumberjacks. We are not even jolly ranchers. A more appropriate cris de guerre might be “Study hard!,” “Out-think them, fellows!” or “A sporting chance to us all!”

Let us try to remember that this is Boston, after all.

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Anyone know how to actually turn off the XP FilterKeys setting?

I have a lazy habit of resting a finger onf the shift key when I’m pausing between words. If I do that for more than 8 seconds, XP asks if I want to turn on FilterKeys. It does this even if I un-check the “Use FilterKeys” box on the Accessibility settings. The box stays un-checked, but the feature doesn’t turn off.

Note: Saying “Get a Mac” does not constitute help. Thank you.

As one of the commeters notes: Hold down both shift keys.

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