I met Seth in Aspen. He's a "keeper". It turns out that he's a good friend of Halley's. I could have guessed.

During the marketing discussion in Aspen, Seth was one of the few people who I thought really "got it".

He has a thread on his blog about the purple polar bear that "increased visitor numbers to the zoo by 50%."

Some people argued that it was a hoax, then Seth dug in and is now convinced that it is true. He says he doesn't want anymore email about it. ;-)

Where's Halley's blog?!?

A very obvious thing that I keep forgetting. Blogging standards are not nearly as important as AIDS, global warming, peace in the Middle East and poverty. Having said that understanding blogging does have a lot to do with my perspective on the commons, democracy and the future of media. Debates on the web about details and going to conferences with lots of bloggers can lead to a narrowing of perspective. Conferences like Brainstorm where 9 out of 10 people ask me, "what's blogging?" is essential for me to keep my perspective. ;-)

I just uploaded more photos to the TypePad photo album. The great thing about digital cameras and blogs being one of the things I love to talk about is that I can take pictures as part of my conversation. ;-)

Today we went around the room and everyone got up and said their name, title and affiliation. I was Joi Ito, CEO, Neoteny, Japan. The coolest was, "I am Noor Al Hussein, Queen." ;-)

Unfortunately, Bill Clinton's discussion was "off the record" so I can't blog it, but it was the most intelligent, moving and inspirational presentation I've ever heard. I almost cried afterwards. He's absolutely amazing.

PS : I took notes so if anyone is interested, iChat me. ;-)

Just posted some photos from Aspen. Will post more later.

David Kirkpatrick : "Everything is on the record."

This means I can blog! ;-)

Panelists: Madeleine Albright - the 64th Secretary of State of the US, General Wesley Clark - Former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Paula Dobriansky - Under Secretary for Global Affairs of the US Department of State and Kishore Mahbubani - Singapore's Ambassador to the UN.

Question: "Are we safer now since the war in Iraq?"

Madeleine Albright, "was Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat? No. So we are less safe now than before the attack. Understood the 'why' but not 'why now'. I'm now concerned about where (WMD) they are now. Many people in the US hate the UN, because it is full of foreigners, which can not be helped. (laughs) Support Bush's notion of more democracy in the middle east."

Paula Dobriansky: We are safer. The issue of what brought us in. 9/11. I don't think anyone would have thought that what took place on 9/11 was possible before that. The topic is new world order. We are not safe from a variety of threats. From rogue nations, or terrorists. There was a false sense of security. Then we look at Iraq specifically. 12 years of negotiation. Over several US administrations. Some security resolution. Hundreds of investigators. Inspectors who were on the ground in and out. The uncertainty of our security. The kind of volatility that exists out there. The environment has a great deal of vulnerability. The question is, are we better with Saddam's removal. The answer is "yes".

Kishore Mahbubani, "If you come from outside the US, for the rest of the world, the key question, is 'what now'. what is the impact of the Iraq war on the rest of the world. In the rest of the world, there are more questions being asked than has ever been asked before. Part is due to the Iraq war. "Friends of America" want America to succeed and would like some introspection in America to figure out how to get it right and how to reach out to the rest of the world. "What percentage of the world in their hearts of hearts want American to succeed vs. fail in Iraq." Many allies want American to fail and many others want America to succeed because we need a world order. "Tipping point". What can America do to make sure it doesn't reach the tipping point.

Wesley Clark, A few days after 9/11 Clark went through the Pentagon to check on his commentary. A joke was going around. "If Saddam didn't do 9/11, too bad, he should have, we're going to get him anyway." Those seized on that event to take out Saddam. Going after Sadaam cost us a year on the war terror. 40,000 troops who should have gone into Afghanistan were being held by Rumsfeld for Iraq. "It doesn't matter why, or how it comes out, but we went in there and kicked some ass, and boy they'll respect us now." The UN is not a world government, but it is an important part of creating legitimacy. I am concerned about WMD, but where are they? Not enough intelligence. The impact of instability of the action. There were some erroneous assumptions made. "I" for Iraq. Incomplete and indeterminate. Policy problems, bad planning, slow and cumbersome. We have a threefold problem. Al Qaeda, Iraqis trying to live, the Shia are organizing and deciding what to do. While we are worrying about terrorism and WMD, North Korea has crossed the redline. I'm happy Saddam is gone, but we have a plateful of stuff to do, but I think it's arguable whether we're more safe or not.

Paula : AIDS... After 9/11 worried that heath issues would get marginalized or sidetracked.

Albright : I sympathize for Paula who has to defend uni-dimensional administration policy. Defending the Bush administration is difficult, defending the UN is more difficult. Need for UN has never been greater.

Some quotes...

In America, we have the constitution. If something is socially unjust, Americans say 'It's unconstitutional'. In Islam, the equivalent is, 'this is un-Islamic'.

I regard Osama Bin Laden as the Robin Hood character. If we had a democracy in Saudi Arabia, Bin Laden would run for office.

There was a study that came out in June. The question was how the rest of the world views the US. Bin Laden was one of the top 4 on the list of who could help change US behavior. The approval rating, even in Europe has gone down over the last year.

The American Muslim community can help interface with the Muslims in the rest of the world. The American Muslim leaders and the American Jewish to work on issues such as the Palestinian issue.

Q: What about the role of women in Islam

A: Ideals and realities often have a gap. Even the framers did not really give people equal rights at the beginning. The ideal equality, but it didn't end up that way. The prophet was very much a feminist. The problem was when the Koran was implemented, local culture became law. Over 95% of law in the middle east is not from the Koran. The industrial revolution and the spreading of wealth increased the role of women. You can see this in the Middle East as the countries become wealthier, there are more lobbies to allow more equality for women.

If the Islamic world were more democratic and were more economically healthy, you wouldn't have many of the problems you have now. The rage in the Muslim world is focused on local issues. The war on terror should be focused on creating a light at the end of the tunnel and helping people raise themselves up.

I DID NOT know that. That's amazing. ;-p Picture taken in Denver airport

I had to say a few things navigating the airports and other people talking was distracting, but sitting in the plane not watching movies, reading or doing anything except thinking and staring out the window was interesting. What was the most interesting was that after the initial discomfort, I wasn't bored and started exploring a very nostalgic space in my head. The scenery outside the window and the clouds were actually really interesting.

I spent the first hour or so thinking about how I was going to blog this or that thought, then I decided not to think about blogging or really think about anything particular. I tried to just "hang out with myself." Anyway, it was a lot of fun and I should do it more often. A few things to remember next time. Don't drink and eat a lot before the "day of silence". I spent the first half of the day getting my head clear. Although the plane was a good place to be quiet, I would have liked to walk around in the woods or something. Even if you are silent, noisy people around you are distracting.

Anyway, I arrived quietly in Aspen and saw a fox run across the airport parking lot. That was cool. Then I felt dizzy and realized that Aspen is at 8000 feet and that I felt dizzy last year too. Anyway, the conference will start this evening. I hope that have wifi at the Aspen Institute so you can all be there with me. ;-)

Halley suggested that we all need a day of silence to hear our own voice. I'm going to be on a plane for most of it, but I'm going silent in a few hours for 24 hours. No email, no blogging, nothing. Just a gray marble stone to keep me company. Halley has begun her silence already. When I come out silence hopefully I'll have something interesting to share. ;-)

Having some mail problems. If you sent email in the last few hours, please send again. I am now forwarding to a variety of mailboxes so even if you get a bounce, it's likely I'll be getting it in one of my other mailboxes. I'll let you know when it's all working again.

I can't believe it's been a year since I went to Brainstorm 2002. Brainstorm 2002 was one of the best conferences I went to last year. Brainstorms is a conference where the editors of Fortune Magazine invite 100+ people to discuss a variety of issues. I think that the 100-150 number is a very special number for conferences. It's just the right size to get a great deal of diversity, but also be small enough to allow people to get to know each other. This year, Fortune is holding the conference jointly with the Aspen Institute.

My favorite speaker last year was Shimon Peres. I blogged the event last year. I think it was the first conference I blogged live. A few quotes from my own blog.

The King of Jordan just said, "We find ourselves between Iraq and a hard place." ;-)

Shimon Peres

First, he told us that he had just received a call from the Prime Minister and that another bomb had gone off in a University...

"I have no hatred in my heart for the Palistinians."

He thinks that maybe the Palestinians may be able to build the first real Arab democracy since they are building from scratch and have watched other Arab nations and their problems.

"We are just two tragedies meeting in the same place. I hope that this doesn't turn into a third tragedy."

"I believe that the greatest liberation in the 20th century was the liberation of women."

"Since we can't build a world government, let's build a world NGO. Have the companies come together and pay insurance. Have a board of directors with members such as Bill Clinton, Nelson Mandela. Totally based on volunteering. No one forcing. This may be able to handle the problems that globalization is creating."

"Television made dictatorship impossible, but it made democracy intolerable."

"What can you learn from History? Very little... History was written with red ink, wth bloodshed. We should educate our children how to imagine, not how to remember."

Some students and a Rabbi were discussing how you can tell when night is over and day has come. One student said that when you can tell the difference between a lamb and a goat, day has come. Another student said that when you can tell the difference between a fig tree and and an olive tree, the day has started. The Rabbi says, when you see and white man or a black man and you call him your brother, the day has come. When you see a rich man or a poor man and you call him your brother, the day has come.

If this year's conference is as interesting as last year's, I'll have a lot to blog about. I also got an OK to bring Hecklebot with me, although I haven't confirmed that there will be Internet access for us at the Aspen Institute. I'm leaving for the aiport in 5 hours. Hope to see you there or along the way.

Scoble blogs about secrets. I'm really bad at keeping secrets. That's part of the reason why I love to blog so much. I love sharing information and ideas because the feedback increases my information. I remember attending a conference on intelligence and one of the US intelligence officers said that Bill Clinton complained that he would get "top secret" reports from the CIA only to see them on CNN the next day. The value of many "top secret" documents that he couldn't talk about with anyone was quite low in a world of exceedingly fast information.

I do see the need for secrecy and as someone who is concerned about privacy and security, I think about secrecy a lot. This also ties in with the issue of who should be allowed to have secrecy and that we should limit, if possible, the secrecy of those in power in order to limit their ability to abuse power.

Liz Lawley's recently moved her blog from: www.it.rit.edu/~ell/mamamusings/ to mamamusings.net. Much nicer. She's still going through many of the problems with moving a blog. You have to make sure your permlinks don't break. Static files and images need to move over. People's blogrolls need to be updated. It's lots of work. That reminds me again why I picked the URL joi.ito.com. It is a bit egocentric, but I've gone through this URL changing process enough times now that I decided I'd pick one that I'd most likely stick with. Also, more generic names such as my "Netsurf Japan" mailing list turned into public spaces where I was no longer the owner, but more like a custodian. I decided to make the assertion this time that this blog was clearly closer to my living room than a public park. Ito.com has its problems. A lot of spam is sent with ito.com as the return address for some reason. It's also a 3 letter URL so I constantly get queries whether I'm using it. Doh.

Anyway, for all of you who are thinking of starting a blog. Think carefully about your URL. It's easy to think, "hey, I'll just give it a whirl first and see if I like it." But if you do end up liking it, you're going to be stuck with that URL. Also, be careful about where you upload images and other things. Try to keep your directory structure tidy so you can move these files easily.

Boris aka Bopuc has been working on fixing the look and making the page more valid based on lots of feedback I've received. It's still a first pass and we are going to work on the navigation and other things, but let us know what you think.

Please post feeback on wiki page if possible.

Rebecca MacKinnon, CNN Tokyo Bureau Chief

The show should be aired on CNN International next week or so depending on whether there is other "breaking news". I will be a talking head in my own little box. I've been on CNN before, but this is my first "Max Headroom" appearance.

Rebecca, the Tokyo Bureau Chief is a fellow GLT and a friend. I set her up with an IRC client and got her logged into #joiito. She has an exciting and sometimes dangerous job. It definitely looks like a lot of fun. She had a gas mask and a helmut in her office...

On July 4, I mentioned here that I thought it would be cool if we made a hecklebot and I started a wiki page about it. Many people from #joiito contributed. Then on July 12, David Beckemeyer aka twostop actually built one. I received it yesterday and got it running. The same day, the hecklebot project was mentioned in the New York Times.

New York Times

In the Lecture Hall, a Geek Chorus
By LISA GUERNSEY
July 24, 2003
[...]
Meanwhile, Mr. Ito is already creating a new riff on the concept. He said he was working with a group on designing a "hecklebot," a light-emitting diode screen that displays heckling messages that are typed during online chats at conferences. "I want to make something that I can put in a suitcase and take to conferences," he said. He describes it as a subversive device that will get people thinking about the significance of the back channel. From the chat room, he said, "you could send something like, 'Stop pontificating.'

Ross blogged about the article first and Liz has some thoughtful comments about the article and the idea of the back channel.

Dan also blogs about the article.

My investors, my readers and a variety of other people keep trying to get me to explain what I'm interested and why I'm interested in it. Here's a first shot at this. Thanks to Steph, Kevin Marks and others on #joiito for a first pass edit. I've put it on the wiki as well so we can continue to work on this.

Ever since Reverend A. K. M. Adam aka AKMA started hanging out on IRC, I've started to think that #joiito is a lot like M*A*S*H, the American TV show about the people in a medical camp during the Korean War. As a Japanese who never went to Western churches, my first exposure to a chaplain was on M*A*S*H. AKMA plays a great chaplain on #joiito. ;-) Like the TV show, there is funny chatter like the doctors chatting during surgery. There are visits by guests who pop by to say hi. There are even battles waging on blogs and the wounded show up at #joiito to hang out and recharge.

Anyway, I'll stop pushing the metaphor now.

Technorati reads the FOAF file from your blog and creates a profile. Your picture from your FOAF file and a link to your profile shows up when you appear in people's cosmos listings. A good reason to get a FOAF file. TypePad has FOAF built in. If you want to build a FOAF file, you can go to this foaf-a-matic site (thanks for the link Sifry) and make a FOAF file. Put the FOAF file on a server and point to in from your blog with a link tag like this:

<link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="http://joi.ito.com/foaf.rdf" />

FOAF stands for "Friend of a Friend" and it is a project to create a machine readable format for putting information about yourself and your friends on web pages.

Here's Marc Canter's profile

Update: As Dave Sifry says in the comments section, you must get an account on Technorati and "claim your blog" before it will make a profile from your FOAF. You can do that here.

David Weinberger blogs about some of the negative comments from "The Net" to Howard Dean's blogging. He says:

David Weinberger

Before this, what would you have had to do to get the ear of a potential president of the United States? You could have a column in a national newspaper or you could get a hernia toting sacks of cash to the campaign headquarters.

Can we at least pause for a moment of delight before we become blasé?

Ray Ozzie

I'm curious; perhaps someone out there knows...

Has anyone yet attempted to create "RSS email", where the "feeds" served to a feedreader might be automatically synthesized from the emails themselves as things such as Person (from or to), Thread, Folder, etc?  (One could probably easily implement this as a straight layer on top of IMAP.)  Rather than just inserting RSS into an email client paradigm as in Newsgator, it might be amusing to invert the solution and explore the usability issues of rethinking email as being just another form of feed served up to a reader, with plug-ins for creating & replying, etc.  Hmm.

Has anyone yet attempted to create what I guess I'd refer to as a "Hyki" - that is, a character-by-character real-time collaborative (Hydra-like, Groove Text Tool-like) editor with automatic creation of real-time linked sub-documents when CamelCase words are typed, etc.  ??

Ray, if you find something or someone else knows. Let me know too!

I met Kris and Maciej of netomat at Supernova and just got around to downloading and playing with the beta. It looks interesting. It's like an email/wiki/link sharing tool. It's written in Java and runs on Mac and Windows. It's pretty easy to use and is more "rich" than a wiki because it has things like drawing tools that let you annotate pages in a way similar to a white board. You create pages with your netomat client. You can publish it with editing enabled so anyone can modify it. It keeps a history of changes. You can email pages to people. You can include lots of things in pages including audio, images, links, etc.

If anyone else is running the beta, send me netomat mail so that we can mess around. I am jito on netomat. My first netomat page is here.

Software and music piracy linked to terrorism!

The RIAA was trying to assert this last year and I thought it was pretty silly. Now the head of Interpol is saying it.

News24

Piracy linked to terrorism
16/07/2003 14:27  - (SA)  

Paris - The head of Interpol called on Wednesday for a global crackdown on software and music piracy, saying the illicit proceeds help finance al-Qaida, Hezbollah and other terrorist networks.

Via IP

"Mac Canter is a very silly man" -- Lisa Rein

Update: Lisa has posted the movie of this. ;-)

I've set up a wiki page to try to heckle conferences more strategically. We should post information about conferences we are going to remote-heckle, list of speakers, past presentations from the speakers, what they are likely to speak about, hard questions we should ask, etc.

I just scanned and uploaded to TypePad, my photos from the First International Moblogging Conference.

Photos taken with a Hasselblad 503CW with a CFE 80/2.8 lense and a Hasselblad D-flash 40 on Fujicolor New Pro400 negative film. Images were scanned with a Nikon Super Coolscan 8000.

Dave Winer moved the RSS 2.0 spec from Userland to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. It is now licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license. There is now an advisory board.

The initial members of the board are Dave Winer, Berkman fellow and author of the RSS 2.0 spec; Jon Udell, lead analyst for InfoWorld and columnist for the O'Reilly Network; and Brent Simmons of Ranchero Software, author of NetNewsWire, a leading RSS-based application. When the board makes a decision it will be by majority vote.

I think this is a great step toward a peace process in the "great RSS debate". Dan Gillmor writes about this in more detail on his blog.

I think we should call a cease-fire at this point...

Today they were webcasting the AO2003 conference. They had a chat that they put on the screen every once and awhile. Many of the regulars from the #joiito IRC channel dropped in to the chat to do our usual heckling. During the journalists panel that Tony was moderating, the hecklers got quite active. It was "the usual". Some people were a bit rough on Tony, but he was a good sport about it. He did say, "we should charge you guys" to the hecklers, but I was thinking that they should pay US. During a discussion about telecommuniting and the Internet enabling distributed workflow, I mentioned on the chat that I was in my underwear in Tokyo. Then someone, I think Ross, put JoiTV on the big screen. Then Tony started teasing me. Heckleback! So I thought I was hecklejacking the conferencing and then I got hecklebacked. We need start a lobby for hecklers rights. ;-P

Anyway, it was good fun. Thanks Tony.

Happy Birthday Cory!

Yesterday, I gave a talk to approximately 150 IT vendors who will be installing the national ID systems at the local government offices and will the the "privacy advisors" to the local governments.

Almost a year ago, I was handing out leaflets and protesting with a megaphone in Ginza to try to stop the national ID. Then the bill passed and I joined the oversight committee for the national ID to try to increase their awareness of security and privacy issues. Then I started working with the local governments who "opted out" of the national ID. Now that the system is in place full swing, I am working hard to increase the awareness of the people who will be installing and training the people who are in charge of one of the weakest links in the system, the point of entry into the database. At the same time, I am working on educating the ministry and the awareness in the public so that we can prevent "function drift", or the use of the national ID # beyond the scope of its original intent, which is to use it only for government services.

I am supportive of my colleagues who are still working on protesting the system and local governments resisting it, but I am focusing my attention on future systems that the government is planning to implement and to try to do what I can to improve the security and privacy of those systems that have already been deployed or will imminently be deployed.

There is a lot of talk about identity these days. You MUST remember that identities are like names. You are NOT your identity. Your identity points to you. Everyone has multiple identities. Roger Clark describes this as the difference between entities and identities. You are an entity. Your name, your role in the company, your relationship with your child, they are different identities. Multiples identities isn't just about having more than one email address or chat room nym. A multitude of identities is an essential component in protecting privacy and interacting in an exceedingly digital world.

Pete made a iJoiTV pop-up window for me!

Thank you Pete!

Lots of Cheese and other goodies at the French Embassy Bastille Day Party this evening. I have no idea who invited me, and I was worried that I wouldn't know anyone. Luckily I knew a few people and got to chat with Idei-san. We talked about blogs. I asked him to be my guest blogger.

Happy Bastille Day!

Luna and Eamon play with Pete over iChatAV with my new iSight.

I got my iSight today and downloaded QuickTime Broadcaster. I've set up streaming from my streaming server. I guess this is sort of a JoiItoTV. ;-P

Pretty boring, but if you want to see a full motion video stream of me sitting on the phone, sitting in meetings or working on my computer, check it out.

Now I've got to figure out something useful to do with this. The cool thing is that I should be able to carry this contraption around wirelessly. "Now, for our on-the-spot broadcast..."

Click more to see the stream. (If I'm broadcasting.)

David Beckemeyer built a hecklebot! It's called UcHeckle.

I've been thinking about how I am going to use TypePad. Boris mentioned the permalink issue of switching, but I think we could probably solve that. However, I am leaning toward keeping my main blog on Movable Type so I can hack it directly and run bots and stuff. I think this site just needs a serious overhaul. There are a lot of cool features on TypePad that deal with non-text content and metadata so I'm thinking of moving my audblog, moblog, photos and my "reviews" over to my TypePad site. Anyway, I'll be messing around for awhile.

I am going to stop cross posting between this blog and TypePad because it is confusing. I was with Mena last week and she helped me answer "gee, I wonder what my site would look like on TypePad?" I couldn't resist the opportunity to have template-master-Mena design my site. ;-)

Anyway, feedback is appreciated as I try to figure out how to make all this work together. Also, please remember that TypePad is still in beta. Lots of features and documentation still to come so please be patient.

Howard Dean is going to guest blog for Lawrence Lessig while he is away on vacation. It is VERY cool that a presidential candidate is blogging. It's also cool that Six Apart can now say that a presidential candidate uses Movable Type. And how cool is it to be able to say, "Howard Dean's taking care of my blog while I'm away." Nice one Larry!

Let's all welcome Howard Dean to the blog world!

Japan Times

Behead parents of boy suspect, minister says

Yoshitada Konoike, state minister in charge of deregulation zones and disaster management, said Friday the parents of the 12-year-old youth suspected of slaying a 4-year-old boy in Nagasaki should be dragged through the streets and beheaded.

"It is better to have the parents decapitated for punishment after dragging them around town," said Konoike...

Konoike's remarks drew a barrage of criticism, but he refused to apologize.

I got Cory to say "Boing Boing" into my Olympus voice recorder. Here's the mp3. Maybe I should start a collection of people saying their blog or product names... Maybe not...

Also got Cory saying, venti mocha latte americana frap espresso-chino

Lots of photos from Supernova by Jason DeFillippo

While I'm being bashed on my blog for misrepresenting the banning of the use of camera phones to copy publications in book stores as banning moblogging, my sister gets quoted in the CNN article about camera phones. ;-P

Thanks for the link Jefu!

Kensington

Work Anywhere!

Your life on the road just got a lot easier. With the first and only WiFi detector on the market today, you no longer need to cross your fingers as you wait for your notebook to boot up. Just press a button and the Kensington WiFi Finder lets you know if your location is "hot"...instantly. No software or computer needed. What could be easier

via Bopuc on IRC

I just got back from Supernova in Washington DC. It was great. It was great hanging out with old friends, making new ones and meeting online friends for the first time. It really reminds me of the "good old days" of The Source. At the party, people had to tell each other their IRC nicknames to recognize each other.

"?"

"rojisan"

"oh! I'm mamamusings"

"oh! hi!"

"Halley. As in Halley's Comment"

"oh!"

Many of us were on IRC during the conference. I didn't get the hecklebot done, but there was a great deal of heckling going on on IRC. There is definitely a kind of attention drain in the room when everyone is on IRC. There is even more attention drain when the panelists are on IRC. ;-)

I thought about this a bit and my conclusion is that in most cases, it is better to let people be on IRC (or some other chat room) during a conference. Several reasons. If people are bored, they will do something else anyway, like sleep, do email, pick their nose, whatever. At least IRC keeps everyone semi-focused on the time/place of the conference. As Kevin Marks says, the problem with conferences is that only one person (usually) can speak at one time. On IRC everyone can talk at the same time. This is inclusive and useful. People can post useful links, give feedback to the speaker without interrupting them and everyone can contribute. One of the most important reasons for going to a conference is networking and meeting new people. The best way that I've found for meeting new people is saying something smart. It's easy if you're a speaker, but usually you have to ask some intelligent questions so people want to talk to you. IRC is great because it give everyone an opportunity to say something smart during the conference. It also lets people get to know each other during the conference without having to escape into the lobby and miss the conference entirely.

Kevin Werbach, the organizer was a good sport about all of this. He hung out on the IRC channel himself and let Liz put the IRC channel on the screen during the wrap up. It will be interesting to see how these social software tools get integrated into conferences by conference organizers themselves. There is something "naughty" about unauthorized back channels that make them fun, but better integration and more reliable connectivity would probably make them more useful. It's also easier to include everyone if it's run by the organizers. I can't remember who said this, but "in the future, the room will be the back channel for the IRC chat."

I guess my next goal should be to get a hecklebot into Davos.

My TypePad weblog is live and thanks to design help from Mena, it "feels" like this blog, but is light and clean. Let me know what you think. I'm considering making TypePad my main blog.

I'll cross post for awhile, but lets keep the comments on this blog so I can keep them in one place until I do the final export.

Hally and Liz dancing with the belly dancer Photo by Jason DeFillippo

There are some great photos on Jason DeFillippo's blog.

People are using digital cameras and camera phones in Japan to photograph pages of magazines and books instead of buying them.

IOL

Starting on Tuesday, bookstores across the nation will put up posters urging magazine readers to "refrain from recording information with camera-mounted cellphones and other devices".

I know several people who use digital cameras as document storage devices. Just yesterday, I saw a very cool camera mount for taking pictures of documents with your digital camera. In the context of copyright, there are some very interesting issues here that tie into the whole area of photography copyright.

via imajes via #joiito bot blog

My plane took off, flew for an hour and did a U-turn. Electrical problems. We're switching planes now, but I'm stuck in Japan again. Anyway, I've created a tentive outline of stuff I want to talk about on the panel. Please take a look and feel free to comment. It's here.

I got this idea of using a wiki from Cory

All packed up an ready to go. I'm off to Supernova 2003. Please join me in the #joiito channel on irc.freenode.net at 10am July 8 in DC (UTC -0400) if you want to heckle me during our panel. I'll be on IRC. Hopefully, we'll be able to get it up on a projector. ;-)

See you in DC!

The Logo All dressed up an nowhere to go

Update: etoy.ROCK gave me the sweatshirt. Thanks ROCK!

Hirata just demo'ed an experiment we did with Sony. It's a moblog gateway. It receives email from a cell phone with a photo attached. The Sony team made an XML RPC metaWeblog API interface to Sony Image Station. We take the picture, talk to Sony Image Station using metaWeblog API and post the picture in a photo album. Then the gateway talks to Movable Type using the metaWeblog API to create an entry with the thumbnail from Image Station that clicks thru to the full picture on the Image Station site. The text and the title get entered into Movable Type and the category is pre-set. We are using the metaWeblog.newMediaObject (which Movable Type current supports) to send the images. Please support this standard so photo sites can use the API.

We'll continue doing tests with the research group and hope to do some syndication stuff soon. ;-) This is not a product and is really just an experiment. I'm hoping more and more groups in Sony start looking at the open standards and that the open standards people start thinking photos, video and audio as micro-content. Totsuka-san from Sony CSL Content and Applications Lab (sorry about the mistake Totsuka-san!) had an interesting comment today. He said that pictures are attached to email as second class citizens and the text is still the core of the data. I think the idea is to try to get multi-media micro-content to be more important. ;-)

PS I don't have a URL for this since we have only received an OK to demo it at the conference. Stay tuned.

A live moblog from the conference.

Hot off IRC. Jeff Jarvis on AOL's blog tools. You will be able to blog from IM. Hey, but we can blog from IRC. ;-)

Thanks for the link Sifry

Today is the First International Moblog Conference in Japan. It's nice having an interesting conference in Japan for a change. It's also nice cuz it's an excuse for a lot of blogger types to make it over to Tokyo. IRC has made my relationship to many bloggers more personal so it's fun seeing people I've been chatting with the last month or so. So anyway, "welcome to Tokyo mobloggers". I'm moderating a session at 11am with my brother-in-law Scott Fisher from University of Southern California, Yuichi Kawasaki of JNutella, Takashi Tostuka of Sony. I think they're going to have a blog/wiki going up which I'll blog once I know. Until then, please feel free to splatter stuff on my unofficial 1IMC wiki page that I've put on my wiki. I'll try to put stuff up from the conference. Also, I'll try to be on #joiito on irc.freenode.net as well. For more information on getting on #joiito check out the IRC channel wiki page.

Too bad we don't have a hecklebot yet.

Most people have probably already seen this, but Pete turned me on to a very funny edit of GW's State of the Union address. A must-see if you haven't seen it already. Streaming QT file.

Many conferences have wifi for the audience these days. People blog the conferences or chat during the conferences. There is definitely a back channel and a lot of people who track conferences online. At a recent conference in Helsinki, Kevin Marks, who was in California, wrote a limerick heckling Tom Coates on IRC. The difficulty is feeding some of the good stuff back to the speakers. This is where HeckleBot comes in. HeckleBot is an IRC bot that sits in the IRC channel for a conference. You give it commands like "?heckle Stop pointificating!" on IRC. The bot talks to a linux box connected to an LED display facing the speakers. The LED displays the message to the speakers. This way, the speakers can get immediate feedback from the audience as well people watching a video stream or reading people blogging the event.

I promise to try to get the HeckleBot set up at as many conferences I attend if people will help me build it. There are some links to the various pieces on the wiki page about HeckleBot. Please sign up or contribute on the Wiki.

JesseE suggested that we should have rules on #joiito. He's started a list of ideas on the wiki. I'll give everyone a day or so to add to the list and call a real-time summit on the channel to discuss the rules.

rvr just modified jibot, the resident bot on the #joiito irc channel to allow you to post to #joiito bot blog from IRC. (It's using the Blogger API). #joiito bot blog is running on Bloxus, a blog package developed by rvr.

rvr - alchemist 1st class

After reading the last post to Halley, acrobat asked if I was an alpha male. I don't think so. But I'll ask Halley. He asked me if I had take the Myers-Briggs test. I hadn't heard of it. It's very cool. I'm an ENFP. Hmm...

Halley of Halley's Comment, author of "How to Become an Alpha Male" is going to be in DC for Supernova and we're finally going to get to meet. We have some mutual friends like Dave and Gnome-Girl. I read Halley's blog, but I rarely link to it because she writes about all of the things I tend to avoid writing about these days. She writes about emotions. She writes about men. She writes about dating. Yesterday she wrote about me, and now I'm going to try to write back. ;-)

First of all, anyone who hasn't read "How to Become an Alpha Male", must. When I read it, I started reading it with "academic curiosity" but ended up learning a lot and reflecting on my past, present and future.

According to the Swedes on #joiito, a Japanese space probe just crashed in Sweden. I can't find anything about on English or Japanese language sites. Anyone know anything about this?

Erista has blogged about it in Swedish with a link to the to the original article. Manne first discovered the link.

Should I move my sidebar to the right so that the content of the blog loads first?

I apologize for the light blogging the last several weeks. All of my spare time has been consumed by IRC. acrobat on #joiito compared it to a well placed water cooler. I drop in in the morning with my coffee, between meetings, from cab rides and after dinner before I go to bed. Some people who work in front of computers for a living "park" themselves in the channel. There are about 40 people on the channel now, only a half dozen or so are actually focused on the conversation. We've got a pretty interesting distribution of people. Most major time zones are represented and there are quite a variety of personality types and professions. It's also interesting to note that there is probably an equal distribution of people who are using IRC for the first time, rediscovering IRC and are IRC regulars. The conversation is much more random than my blog, ranging from total silliness to heated debates about RSS. I do think most of us agree that IRC today (or at least my #joiito channel) is much different from the IRC we used to use. I think the blogs help people identify each other and the wiki creates a bit more context and memory for the channel. IRC has definitely reduced my blog output, but in exchange, it has helped me make a much stronger emotional link to many of the people I blog/email with. I think it is the sense of spending time with people that creates this new sense of connection. It's almost like Sims Online. You see people drop off to take care of kids, cook, shower, go to work, come home, etc. Some of the more persistent personalities update people on what's happened during the "day" when you check back in after a being away. It's like being flat-mates with 50 people from around the world. "Hey, if you see so-and-so, tell them I'm looking for them and if so-and-so drops by while I'm out, be nice to them and introduce them to everyone..."

A useful thing about the IRC channel is that it is a 24 hour support system for a variety of issues. Just this week, Dave Sifry "held court" about Technorati, Mark Pilgrim explained python unit testing to me, Doc talked about the 17" PowerBook he was testing out, I got rojisan to book the venue for the DC party, I got Kevin Burton promise to finish the OSX version of NewsMonster and sniffles wrote a bot to remind me not to drink too much. ;-)

A controversial, but interesting thing in IRC are the bots. They are programmed to do a variety of tasks. There are bots that log, take notes, post stuff to wikis, answer questions or annoy people. The bots are probably how IRC will be integrated better into blogs and wikis. There are a few bots on #joiito. Jibot has become a collaborative effort with regulars pitching in via CVS on Sourceforge to add features to the bot.

As I continue to be immersed in IRC, the question that I am struggling with is how better to integrate IM, IRC, wikis and blogs. There are so many ways to do this yet no one seems to have done it well. There is also the issue of the metadata and meta-services like reputation tracking, search, identify management, etc. I'm sure different communities will find different combinations of tools useful.

Even though I call my blog "a conversation" I now realize after using IM and chat a lot that it still looks more like publishing or giving a speech although the comment threads are like conversations. IM chats can be like transactions. IRC is conversation or even "hanging out" with friends. The wiki is where we collaborate. The core strengths of each of these tools is very important and I think we all do a little bit of each of these activities. The alchemy of these tools is really interesting and I urge people to get over the hump and try these tools in combination and join us in thinking about what this all means. ;-)

GaiaX, a company that sells community Net services to ISP's and portals filed for a trademark for "Blog" on March 6 of this year. They issued a press release on June 28 saying that they would reserve the right use the word blog in products and services, but would allow people to use it freely in writing. I think some people have doubts as to whether they will be granted the trademark, but stranger things have happened in Japan. In the past, I think someone trademarked "groupware". I think GaiaX also has a trademarks in some categories on "Avatar."

Anyway, I'm glad SixApart and MovableType don't include the word "blog" in the tradename. ;-P