I’m at the Supernova conference from which I’ll be doing video blogging for C-NET and Knowledge@Wharton. C-NET’s coverage is here. The video bloggery is here. [Technorati tag: supernova05]

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C-Net has put up its page where the Supernova videoblogcasts (and more) will occur. I fly out there tonight and start vblogging tomorrow morning… [Technorati tag: supernova2005]

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It’s Sunday morning. Reboot is over. It was a damn good conference.

For a geekfest, a surprising number of sessions were on cultural topics. And the presence of academics was stronger than I’m used to in US tech conferences. Yet it all felt quite integrated. For example, Jyri Engestrom’s session on object-centered social networks used insights from sociology to help software designers create apps that work. I hope US tech conferences take a look at Reboot’s program to get ideas about how to broaden both their appeal and their significance.

The conference was well-run, informal, over-packed with sessions, in English, presumptively in favor of open source, and in Copenhagen. What’s not to like?

Ok, one thing not to like was the meagre presence of female presenters, including zero keynoters. Yet, fwiw, the atmosphere felt less testosteronic than at the typical US geekorama. I heard less techno one-upmanship, saw less swagger. On the other hand, maybe I’m just not as good at decoding European testicular displays. [Technorati tag: reboot7]

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Régine Debatty (we-make-money-not-art.com) shows examples of art projects, from her blog: The Medulla Intima is a “jewel” you wear that betrays your feelings by showing what your face would look like with the appropriate emotion. The Key Table shows your emotions based on how you throw your change and keys on a tabnle. Iyashikei-net lets you pump water in your house to cause “tears” to fall from a sculpture of tears. Needies are a cross between pillows, plush toys, and Furbies; they compete for your attention. Spatial Sounds is a robot arm that tries to establish a relationship with the person near it. The Hug Shirt hugs a remote wearer if you hug your own Hug Shirt… (She gives many other examples.) [Technorati tags: reboot7 RegineDebatty]

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The effervescent Ben Hammersley argues that Richard Steele was the first blogger, publishing his first post was on April 12, 1709. He postsed three times a week, ran comments, had 800 readers, and drank lots of coffee. “This guy is a blogger.”

Amateur publishing + coffee = Revolution, Ben says. When fashion no longer flagged status, and people were drinking coffee in coffee shops, getting more and more animated, you get conversations among equals. The Tatler then broadcast this cafe society to the hinterlands.

Ben’s equation: Normal person + Anonymity + Audience = Total fuckwad. “The new technology…is resisted because people don’t know how to use it within their social environment. They are afraid of humiliation.” Most people live in “the Hinterweb” (Danny O’Brien’s term) of “X10 popups, porn adware, and endless, endless Hotmail and Yahoo spam.” “New technology needs a new etiquette. This needs time.” Our mission, says Ben, is a new Tatler that will teach the people in the Hinternet “how to deal with each other in this new technological world that we’ve already created.” If we don’t teach them that, they will destroy the new world because “there are more of them than there are of us.” He adds that he doesn’t mean “teach” so much as show.

[The talk was too entertaining to blog well. So I’ve over-simplifyied badly. Sorry.]

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Lee Bryant of Headshift talks about five case studies.

1. In an experiment, users get to tag stories on the BBC news page and see other people’s tags. (Stowe blogged about this here.)

2. Local aggregation, pulling in news, blogs, links, photos and government information. Text analysis derives common themes. Show the keywords by frequency so people can navigate. Make everything comment-able.

3. Building shared meaning with tags — cluster and search on themes.

4. Negotiating language — learning from unstructured data. They asked for user-driven feedback on health services based on unstructured stories. They use text analysis to identify matches with formal taxonomies. If the user says that’s wrong, the system learns. So, they create “user-generated tag clouds.”

5. Where do we go from here? His company is trying to escape from the “taxonomy deadzone” by providing a lightweight social software interface.

Q: (Dina Mehta): How do you talk a company into taking this bottom up approach.

A: Point out what isn’t working. Show them how they can build on top of what they have.

[Excellent talk.]

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Jyri Engestrom (who blogs at zengestrom.com) is applying sociological theory to the online world to explain why some social networks work and others don’t.

Design is always motivated by theory, he says. The most popular theories behind social networks are ones discussed in the books Links and Nexus: “A social network is a map of the relationships between individuals.” (He takes this definition from Wikipedia.) This doesn’t explain what connects particular people and not others. But another tradition of theorizing, people connect to each other through a shared object.

By object, he means things such as dates and jobs in addition to tangible objects. “Tangible objects invite play.” Objects “knot” networks. “When a service fails to offer the users a good way to create new objects of sociality, they turn the connecting itself into an object.” “The services that we love to play with hvae made those objects tangible: They afford tagging, crafting, tuning, hacking…ways of playing and fabricating.” Objectives are goal; objects generate new goals.

[Great talk, but he’s stretched “object” so far that I’m not sure it can be use as the differentiator. I.e., LinkedIn has an object — contacts — but it’s still failed because it’s not very useful. LATER NOTE: I raised on the conference IRC and people straightened me out: You have to have objects that people can play with.]

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I’ve posted a 2-minute video plugging my upcoming video blogging of SuperNova. The conference, about business in the decentralized world, runs June 20-22, and I’ll be there June 21-22, interiewing speakers and attendees. It’s an experiment that I’m looking forward to. [Technorati tag: supernova]

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Ulla-Maaria Mutanen applies the long tail to fashion. She’s going to connect craftblogging, fashion and the long tail.

Craftblogging is, obviously, blogging about one’s crafts. She takes us through some sites. But, she asks, does all this craftbloging constitute a new market? Is it part of the long tail market? She summarizes the long tail as: 1.Most of us want more ethan jst hits. 2. The market of non-hits is bigger than the market of hits. 3. Most successful businesses on the Net are about aggregating the Long Tail in one way or another.

Yes, she concludes, these craftblogs are part of the long tail of fashion…if they have easy, accessible tools. Craftspeople could use better tools for creating, sharing, managing reputations, purchasing…She proposes a unique naming scheme for fashion products with human-readable and machine-readable codes. She’s written a Craft Manifesto.

[Very interesting, especially since the marketers I’ve talked with think the point of the long tail is that they can sell into it, not that the long tail is going to be selling to itself. ulla-Maaria says in response to my saying this that, yes, the long tail will be selling to itself, and it’ll be selling not crafts but tools.] [Technorati tags: reboot7 longtail craftblogs]

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Paual Le Dieu who describes herself as an “(i)commonist” talks about the science commons. She works on the BBC’s “creative archives” — the generous licensing of BBC content — and is the director of Creative Commons International. (I’m writing an article for Wired on the BBC’s progressive content policies, so I will be tracking her down…) There are 12-14 million web page swith a Creative Commons license.

Science Commons aims at enabling “the creation of an open, accessible commons for scientific knowledge.” There’s obviously lots of scientific information online, but access is spotty at best. To get SC off the ground, it’d be good to show the impact of one’s work, she says. Paula points to CC Mixter, a music mixing site, as an example of a site that shows the sources one’s work draws on and the sources that cite one’s work.

This year they will be publishing a semantic web browser + cc publisher.

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