Susan objects to the title of the conference because it acknowledges that someone can take the rightto connect away from you. We don’t need permission, she aays. “We are here to assert our freedom to connect.” We should be optimistic about the state of connection. “Things are flourishing.” The content guys, law enforcement and the telcos would like to control the future. We need to uncontrol it.

At what level of the protocol stack should the government intervene? To allow design mandates to be put in place by a sovereign is like thought control. To assert we have the right to connect without asking permission requires us overcoming our “inner demons,” e.g., our willingness to accept filters.

She suggests that we need to “route around” the regulation rather than redoing it. By “route around” she means push out devices that are impossible to regulate. [Technorati tags: f2c scrawford]

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Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet group reports on his group’s recent studies. But first he fools us by pointing to the effects of this new technology, except it turns out to be from Elizabeth Eisenstein’s study of the effect of the printing press.

136M American adults now use the Internet. That’s 67% of Americans. 87% of teen-agers. 50% of home owners have broadband. In a typical day, 82M Americans will be on line. 71M of those use email…9x the number of people who use the postal system. 41M used a search engine. Broadband teenagers are more likely to get their news online. 14M did online banking, 5x the number who visited a bank. 4M googled someone they were about to meet; 1M googled themselves.

79M have participated in online support groups for a medical or personal problem. 7M have made political donations. 5-88M swapped files even as the Supreme Court was hearing the case.

There were 9 gaps. Only the gender gap has vanished.

Most important: Age.
Employment status: Students rule.
Education: More important than income as an indicator of Internet use
Disability: Only 38% of those with a significant disability use the Internet
Language: English is an indicator
Community type: Ruralites are less likely to be online than urbanites
Parental: Parented households are more likely
Income
Race and ethnicity: Less significant than other indicators.

How does connectivity change us?

People who use the Internet “grow their social capital.” People (especially women) use email to enhance their social networks. 84% of Internet users belong to online groups — that’s 115M people. “ePatients are creating a new healthcare model where the all-knowing, omnipotent, gate-keeping doctor is being replaced by a new model — online advice and support. (Half of the people doing medical research online are looking for info for someone.) And there is an increase in civic engagement.

He does point to a down side: Evidence shows heavy use of the Net can cause stress. Not to mention bad people doing bad things via the Net.

[Great talk.]

[Technorati tags: f2c pew]

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[f2c] Freedom to Connect

I’m at a Freedom to Connect, David Isenberg’s conference on why network connections are important and how we can get more of them. It’s a fantastic list of attendees.

David opens by arguing that freedom to connect is a political issue. The Democrats don’t like it because they’re in the pockets of Hollywood. The Republicans don’t like it because they’re in the pockets of the incumbent telcos. We need to get political, he says.

IRC here.

Audio stream here.

(By the way, Isenberg broke the “fuck” barrier eleven minutes into the conference.) [Technorati tag: f2c]

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I got up from chez Sifry at 3:30AM, packed, and drove 2.5 hours from Scottsdale to Tuscon to give talk on blogging to Reed Business Information at 8 AM. It was about 30 journalists and editors. I once again over-stated the case, but I think in the discussion we came to a more reasonable outlook on the fate of journalism. If forced to predict (and they did more or less force me to predict), I think we will continue to look to professional journalists for certain types of information — although the line between blogger and journalist will blur even more — but journalism is going to become more strongly voiced,; the voiceless voice of journalism will sound archaic. That which is purely factual will be listed in table form, and will be commoditized. And once truly usable, cheap e-reader hardware is here, publishing will be faced with the same challenges the music publishing industry faces now.

By the way, you haven’t had the Arizona Driving Experience until you’ve driven at day break as the sun snaps to full wattage at eye level over the hill you’re climbing. I don’t know why the entire east-bound population of the state hasn’t already been killed in fiery sun-based accidents.

Then I drove back to Scottsdale — out of eye-shot of the damned sun — and re-joined PC Forum. But not before I faced a dilemma: What do you do when your luggage breaks in the middle of the trip? My suitcase’s zipper blew beyond redemption. So, now I’m sending its contents on what will almost certainly be a hugely expensive UPS journey. Plus, tomorrow I have to try to get the airline to accept an empty suitcase with a flapping lid as a legitimate piece of luggage. I anticipate many happy Kafka-esque hours as they work on finding ways to construe it as a terrorist threat.

Then, at 2:30, Esther Dyson and I moderated an open session on tagging. About 100 people showed up and I think it was interesting, but what the hell do I know?

Then I had a chance to catch up with Doc for a bit. He’s fine and sends you his best.

Now I will resemble the walking dead as I go to the final cocktail party and dinner.

Soooooo tired…… [Technorati tags: pcforum docsearls]

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Brian BrianStorms Dear introduces his new company, EVDB (Events & Venues database). Calendars are a poor metaphor for publishing events on the Web, he says. They scroll off the page, they’re inconsistent. And there’s no structured data. And there’s no way of getting notified about an event you would have gone to “had you known.”

EVDB is event focused and aims at being a web service, not a portal, he says. The business model: Targeted advertising, commercial use of API, and used by “powered by” apps (web and mobile).

Brian shows a demo. We see a conference schedule. Every session counts as a separate event, under the parent of the overall conference. RSS feeds for events. You can subscribe to events that don’t exist. He shows a calendar based on crawling through Meetup.com data.

What does he hope people will do with the API? Desktop projects and mobile projects. Or services like Flickr where people are covering events in some way.

How do you solve the chicken and egg problem? The blogosphere is big enough to be a good market to start with. [Technorati tags: pcforum05 evdb]

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Trumba is an online calendar strong at aggregating group calendars. It looks full featured. Subscription based. Integrates with existing calendering tools. In beta.

Jason Calacanis asks why this is different than Yahoo calendar. They say: No ads. It will cost under $50/year. The Seattle Times is using Trumba, e.g., when you use their movie schedule, but the focus is on end-user sales.

In their presentation, they make too many big claims about revolutionizing and democratizing parenting, communities, large organizations, etc. In my view: It’d be enough if it were a really great calendar. [Technorati tags: pcforum05 trumbo]

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Join the IRC: irc.freenote.net #pcforum [Technorati tag: pcforum]

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Companies who get their own positions have 2 mins each to give us an overview. Here are my one sentence summaries of their 2 min summaries:

Trumba: We help people build calendar networks.

EVDB: (Brian Dear, yay!) Did you ever find out about an event after the fact?

Endeca: Guides users through complex sets of choices. (= faceted classification)

Siderean: Guides uesrs through complex sets of choices. (= faceted classification, but also manages ontologies)

Impinj: Chips the size of a grain of sand for RFIDS.

Grouper: Share music and videos to “socialize your media.”

Epocrates: Deliver info to doctors’ handhelds.

Brightcove (Jeremy Allaire): The Internet for television

Rearden: Agent technology.

Opera: We have the fastest, most secure browser and now it’s on a browser.

JotSpot: Integrated application platform (i.e., not just a wiki) [Technorati tag: pcforum]

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What will computing be like in 5 years?

Jayshree Ullal (Cisco): There are no secure perimeters. We need to be much more real-world. It’s going to be based on defining trust domains — the school you’re from, the location you’re from — which will be different than now when everything is separtae, e.g., you anti-virus, your firewall, etc.

Esther: Will we be able to go to an Internet cafe and anonymously log on?

Ullal: You shouldn’t be allowed to now. We need authentication and feedback mechanisms, etc. [Ack!]

John Thompson (Symantec): We should keep the Net environment diverse and learn where the bad parts of town are.

Scott Charney (Microsoft): We need both accountability and anonymity, so it should be done on the application layer. I want accountability when on-line banking but anonymity when engaging in political speech.

Thompson: We’ll be in trusted communities but not only in trusted communities.

Bob Frankston: How do we make computers secure without limiting outlandish and outrageous innovation?

Steven Levy: How do we do this without losing our civil liberties?

[No time for answers.] Thompson: Phishing has gone up exponentially. The question is whether the info that’s gathered is going to be used in the near future.

Ullal: We need better enforcement and more centralization.

Thompson: We can’t turn back democracy. [I’m liking him!]
[Technorati tag: pcforum05]

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Steve Ward of IBM talks about its Chinese business. He says it’s an international team with more women than men. [He also says he keeps a list of attendees at meetings and checks people off as they talk, which, although it’s undoubtedly a good management technique, I find slightly creepy.]

Anne Mulcahy (Xerox) talks about the partnership with Fuji.

Jonathan Schwartz (Sun) talks about doing business in China.

[I found little unexpected in their responses, so I zoned out. Sorry.]

Esther asks what you do about corruption? Ward says that you make clear that your company has certain beliefs, and if you’re a mega-corp, they’ll be honored.

Schwartz says that Sun left a country because it was too corrupt. He also reminds us that Enron et al. have destroyed far more value in this country than any other country’s corrupt practices have.

Mulcahy says that they no longer have a business in South Africa — they are mere distributors there — because of “reputational risk.”

Q: What’s going to happen to our Thinkpads?

Esther: How many of you have Thinkpads? [About a third of us…very different from a tech conference/]

Ward: We’re going to innovate even more! “Thinkpads will be forever.” We’re trying to decide if the branding will be “Thinkpad” or “Lenovo Thinkpad”

Doc: Will Lenovo market a linux desktop?

Ward: Lenovo ships several million linux clients today, mainly cell phones and pdas. But there’s a lot to do to get linux accepted by the mass market.

Schwartz: And we’re committed to working with Lenovo to provide a mass market, desktop linux….

Q: When will you have a woman as CEO of Fuji-Xerox in Japan?

Mulcahy: Fuji-Xerox does a good job hiring women managers, but it will be a long time before there’s a woman CEO. But Japanese companies that hire women have a competitive advantage over companies that don’t take advantage of half of the work force.

[First use of the word “synergy”: 8:15am] [Technorati tag: pcforum]

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