RageBoy compares and contrasts New Age narcissism and blogging.

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Cory Doctorow, who thanks to Atkins now weighs less than what I ate for lunch, is the moderator. The topic is innovation. Panelists: Merrill Brown of RealNetworks, John Ko of Cincro Comms, Kevin Lynch of Macromedia, RJ Pittman of Groxis and Mena Trott of Six Apart.

Mena: Interoperability is key. We have what we call the Philosophy of Yes. We say yes to just about everything our users ask for, and much of what our competitors ask for. We’ve had export in our tool from the day that it shipped.

RJ: Grokker organizes search results contextually, semanticallly, and does entity extraction. And can show you 5,000 results in a usable UI.

Kevin: We should have apps that rely on the local processing power of computers, not just servers.

Cory: What’s your blue sky conquer-the-world scenario? What does the world look like then?

RJ: We’re seeing the notion of the web browser starting to dissolve. HTML can be in lots of devices, but we’re even moving off of HTML. They’re building self-adjusting user interfaces.

Mena: In the future there has to be more transparent use of tools. Multiple devices, not just browsers.

Kevin: I hope everyone who uses the Web will feel like they have an awesome experience, which isn’t true now. And that we’ll see the Flash player in every device on the planet.

Q (Donald Weightman): MovableType is cool because it’s so modular.

[Sorry for the disconnected threads, but it’s a hard panel to generalize about.]

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This is in honor of the very lively chat going on during the Supernova conference. The unflattering reference is not to this conference, however.

There once was a conference that worked
even though the panels circled and jerked
The panelists spoke
unaware of the joke
that would have made them thoroughly IRC-ed

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The ubiquitous Joi Ito has initiated an IRC chat that has lots of people on it. Start up your IRC client, got to freenode and join #joiito. See you there.

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John Blair of Kenamea:

The reality of distributed computing today is that the network is intermittent, latency is indeterminate, the network is open, the topology is ad hoc, there is no administrator, transport cost is unpredictable…. Occasionally Connected Computing (OCC) apps work regardless of network connection status. Server-centric web architectures can’t handle these realities. We want to have distributed, composite applications that are off-line capable and on-line aware and that work across heterogeneous networks, platforms and devices.

He’s now doing what seems to be a product demo. And now it’s an architectural drawing of how the product demo worked. [Kenamea is one of the sponsors of Supernova, for which I thank it.]

David Isenberg responds, at the behest of Kevin W: All innovation has occurred on stupid networks, which yours is not. The stupid network isn’t dying because it can’t do some things well. It’s succeeding wildly because it can do everything badly.

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Halley just came into the Supernova conference. In a wheelchair. I’m sure she’ll explain in her blog, but she just gave me a note that says something about vaulting over a fence in the dark and landing on a nail.

Get hale soon, Halley!

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Marko Ahtisaari of Nokia (the Insight & Foresight Unit) points to the social implications of wirelessness.

John Chapin of Vanu builds generic devices that can receive and transmit wireless signals based on how they’re programmed. Among other things, that means that a single device can be your radio and your garage-door opener. Or your phone can download the European GSM software so it will work when you travel. You also get much better usage of spectrum through dynamic allocation. But flexible RD hardware is expensive.

Tren Griffin of Microisoft: “Wireless mesh is a major area of research at Microsoft Research.” Why? Because they believe in empowering the edge.

[I conked out. Sorry. Up too early to get here on time. There is a list of live blogs here.]

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Freelists.org is in bad shape. A lightning bolt on July 4 melted its server. They need hardware and money. Freelists has provided sophisticated mailing list services for free to tech newsletters (including mine). If you use Freelists or just want to support some Good Guys of the Net, check their home page to see what you can do.

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According to an article by Laura Blumenfeld in the Washington Post, a graduate student’s dissertation maps the critical points in the physical network. Does he publish it?

Very interesting. [Thanks to Greg for the link.]

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Craig Silverstein, director of technology at Google, looks like he may be giving the same talk he gave at O’Reilly Emerging Technology, in which case I have already blogged it here.

Preemptive blogging!

Q: What about image search?
A: Most image search engines just look at the text on the page. The ability to recognize objects in images isn’t ready for prime time.

Q: What about Blogger?
A: (Sergei Brinn) We’ve been focused on getting the new release of Blogger out. You’ll see more innovation.

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