What a title! Are we already getting past Web services? Our panelists are: Christian Gheorghe, Graham Glass, Dick Hardt.

The audience is surprisingly unreceptive to the panel. Many apparently feel that Web services are either over-hyped and/or the existing success of Web services is being ignored. I.e., the wrong aspects are being hyped. Web services aren’t a panacea but are already a part of the development landscape, used in un-hypey, step-by-step ways.

Says Alex Sherstinsky of FaceTime Communications: “It is happening within the enterprise but not on the Internet-wide scale.”

Dave Winer makes a plea for doing the simple thing: Create Web services that open up your app, and publish the info them. Ignore the complications of UDDI and WSDL. (Here’s an interview of Dave by Dan.)

The final question raise: Will Web services enable a Hypercard economy where power users write the equivalent of macros to pull information together?

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Clay Shirky‘s plane was cancelled so Dan Gillmor is filling in. Dan is talking about “We Media,” the idea that journalism is becoming a conversation, or, he suggests, perhaps more like a seminar in which the journalist is the “sherpa guide.” Says Dan: “My readers know more than I do.” Maybe you have to be a journalist to appreciate how radical that statement is.

He points to the fact that increasingly the full transcripts of interviews are now being posted by the interviewees — e.g., Donald Rumsfeld — as a way of providing context for comments that the journalist might have misrepresented.

Of all the tools Dan sees emerging, “Blogging is the coolest.” He cites Doc, Ernie the Attorney and Glenn Fleishman‘s 802.11 blog as examples of “passionate semi-amateur” journalist blogs. “The next time there’s a major event in Tokyo…before the professional press is able to scramble their photographers to the scene, there will be 500 photos on the web.” Then, Dan says, “journalists will sit up and say ‘Holy shit!'”.

He ends with a plea for activism against the Congressional/Hollywood attack on the Net.

In sum, he says that in ten years “I may know as much from what other people [bloggers] are finding than as what the editors of the NY Times tell me.”

The great thing about Dan is that he so joyfully embraces technologies that most other journalists view as a threat.

I asked a badly-put question about what will happen when electronic book hardware is commonplace. How will this affect the line between journalism and blogging? Dan answered that he doesn’t think that that will have much effect. But I think it will, for it will deprive traditional journalism of the advantage that gives it so much value: the capital to put ink to paper millions of times a day. Without that, the New York Times is just a brand, and brands can be relatively easily eroded in a reputation-based economy. I think.

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Blogging own’s Dave Winer arranged for an open-invitation party last night at Jing-Jing’s spicy Chinese restaurant last night. As more and more people arrived, the staff built out the table configuration, resulting in a maze of squares each with happy geeks ingesting excellent food and talking up a storm. A couple of hours later, we rolled out onto the sidewalks of Palo Alto. Ah, the pleasures of F2F.

This morning I had breakfast with The Doc. Not only was it fun to catch up with him, I got to eat all the carbs he refused.

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Cory Doctorow is reminding us that “content creators” have always sued new technologies, starting with those music pirates, the piano roll manufacturers. Now it’s the Broadcast Flag initiative that will put a bit into digital TV signals and require all devices touching them to honor that bit. He gives a terrific talk — seated and calm — that asks why Internet hardware is on the verge of being told that it must be made secure against misuse. Crowbar manufacturers are not given the same demand, he says. And, he asks, why has the technical community not stood up and said that we do not want less regulation, we want no regulation.

Sean Ryan of Listen whose website says the site “gives you unlimited access to the largest legal collection of digital music in the world.” $10/month. He describes the service: they do burns and streams but not downloads because the industry doesn’t like downloads. (I can’t find figure out how to see the actual CDs they have available.)

Morgan Guenther, CEO of Tivo, is speaking. (Have I ever mentioned how much I love our TiVo?) They’re focused on execution (they’ll make a profit this quarter for the first time), transition (licensing and OEMing their technology), and innovation (moving programs from your downstairs set to your upstairs set, file-served television). “We’ve taken an industry-inclusive approach from Day One.”

Sean: “We play the middle game” with regard to compromising with The Industry.

Dan Gillmor: Is there any evidence that the recording industry will compromise on anything?

Sean: Sure. A couple of years ago they wouldn’t let us do any online music distribution. As Cory has said, there’s always compromises…

Cory: Actually, there weren’t compromises, there were victories.

Audience member: I teach film and I’m not allowed to rip a scene from a DVD to use in a class to talk about it. Fair use says I should be able to.

Morgan: We could let you create your own “channel,” e.g. an animal channel or sports channel. But you can’t do it because it’s illegal.

From this I draw the following conclusions: 1. You don’t compromise your rights. 2. I would follow Cory Doctorow anywhere.

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I chaired this panel with John Hagel (noted author), John Parkinson (Cap Gemini) and Narry Singh (CommerceOne). It can’t blog about it now, however, because the next panel is starting up…

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Mitch is talking about his current project: an open source Outlook/Exchange Server replacement (to put it crudely). He’s interested in this because it plays into his anti-authoritarian, decentralized instincts, one of which resulted (with John Perry Barlow) in the EFF.org.

Is “Chandler” really about more than email and calendars? Yes, (Mitch says) if you get lots of users, you get lots of leverage. “That’s why we’re going to lead with the application piece.” The clients they’re building will help determine the requirements for the platform. “People could build the equivalent of a finder or a file manager fairly readily.”

Cool feature: You’ll be able to manage your attachments independent of the messages. Hallelujah!

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Jeremy Allaire is streaming himself in from Newton, MA where his wife just had a baby. It’s a jerky talking head, a bit Max Headroom-y. Why do these streams still suck? It’s a problem with the economy, not the technology.

Anyway, he says he’s an optimist. He points to rich clients that bring more of the action to the end-user edge. By “rich client” he apparently means Flash 6 which is produced by Macromedia, the company for which he works. Of course, that was the moment at which static – which Bob Frankston recognized as “analog static” – made his presentation un-hearable.

Next Jeremy was going to talk about Web services. Instead, the panel has ascended the dais: Karl Jacob, CEO of Cloudmark, a distributed anti-spam product.; Mike Helfrich of Groove; Doc Searls.

Karl (Cloudmark): For the past ten years, we’ve had to interact with the Net the way the site or browser wanted. Now the power is moving to the edge where we users actually live.

Mike (Groove): He really likes the words “decentralization” and “rich client” because that’s what Groove’s about. He says we need more “flocking” and “swarming” behavior. And decentralized architectures enable apps to build themselves to adapt to the ways individuals want to work. Now Mike gets to the Security Spin: We need decentralized decisions because we wouldn’t want our “war fighters” to be unable to communicate. (Barely perceptible Freudian slip: “We’re very happy about where we are in the Mi…market.”

Doc: The supernova metaphor is a good one because we’re blowing up things to make a new world. The new world is all ends. The middle makers make nothing. What’s critical about the Net is that no one owns it, everyone can use it, and everyone can improve it. Finally, Doc says that we’re short some important services (identity, directory, IM) on the Interent and it’s up to the geeks among us to build them.

Doc says that you give away the underlying protocols and services and charge for proprietary stuff built on top of it. Jeremy says that Macromedia gives away their client and document all the APIs and file formats.

Marc Cantor says we need to move away from HTML. Why? Because it doesn’t have absolute positioning and it ignores time. We need rich media platforms. (I’m assuming that “move away” means “still support.” The importance of the simplicity of HTML can’t be over-emphasized.)

Mitch Ratcliffe says that technology won’t change us unless and until it recognizes the existing social fabric and behaviors. (Save it for my panel in 2 hours, Mitch! :)

Karl got asked what was surprising to him working with spam. First, he says, 99% of people agree about what is spam. Second, “these communities are remarkably good at self-regulating.”

Karl adds a ratings system(like eBay’s) to the needed services that Doc has mentioned.

Mike says that Ray Ozzie’s first inspiration for Groove was watching his children play a massively multiplayer online game.

Doc offers some closing thoughts about infrastructure. One type is the infrastructure of the Net itself; Vincent Cerf said “The history of the Internet is the history of its protocols.” Flash isn’t a Net protocol and doesn’t make the Net bigger and richer.

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Rod Smith from IBM is making a very different case than Lewin did. He’s arguing for open standards. (How refreshing!) Of course, he’s arguing for the open standards that IBM favors.

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Howard Rheingold, author of the excellent Smart Mobs, says his theme will be: Every time power decentralizes, there’s an opportunity for innovation. How might the new decentralization give rise to new forms of collective action?

He points to Seti@home, the growth of cell phone messaging in Scandinavia and Japan, and the Web itself as examples of what happens when centralized control is loosened.

Markets, says Howard, are a form of collective action. eBay, he says, is a market that really shouldn’t exist because of the “prisoner’s dilemma.” But eBay’s reputation system has enabled it to work.

Cory Doctorow: We’ve been good at initiating decentralized actions but not at sustaining them. We have yet to slashdot Congress. How do we organize ourselves in a sustainable way? Howard says he doesn’t know. (Fair enough.) Kevin responds that when there was a move at the FCC to allow the phone companies to levy a modem tax. Kevin sent out a notice with an email address to respond to, and got 350,000 messages.

Cory: Yes, but there were 50M Napster users and 50M voted for Bush, and no one stepped forward to say “What are you doing to my Napster?” That is, we haven’t been able to organize.

Killer quote on requiring people to fill out forms to learn about them: “Only geeks change their preferences.”

Adina Levina offers the following in the discussion of this blog entry:

on the prisoner’s dilemma

social science researchers, axelrod and onward have shown that the prisoner’s dilemma works differently when people play the game over and over again.

when people can earn a reputation, they tend to behave more cooperatively themselves, and are more likely to act, even against their immediate-self-interest, to punish non-cooperators

see Axelrod’s Evolution of Cooperation
also a good article last spring I think on SciAm — will maybe hunt down a link

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I’m at the Supernova Conference, a get-together put together by Kevin Werbach, ex-FCC guy, ex-Release 1.0 editor, new father. I’m sitting next to Peter Kaminski who’s next to Glenn Fleishman who’s next to Bob Frankston. In the next row ahead of me is David Isenberg and Doc Searls. So, it’s already a worthwhile conference.

Kevin has made sure this place is wified out the wazoo, including putting power strips under every table. Woohoo! And the conference has its own blog. And a group blog.

Kevin is giving his welcome. The question is what more we can do with the decentralized coming together that is the Internet. How can we “take it up a notch”?

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