Thursday, June 22, 2006

BloggerCon party: 6:45PM tonight, Jillian's, 4th & Howard.  

Don't forget to sign up for a Friday night dinner.  

Doc Searls movie. It was a looooong hot day, setting up and getting ready for technography and webcasting at BloggerCon.  

This morning's webcast was great, and got a good WMA file.  

Music courtesy of the Carnival Cast.  

BloggerCon monitors. "There are two monitors for each session, each of them 'owns' a wireless mike, and moves around the room partially at the direction of the discussion leader, and partially in response to requests from others in the room." 

BART is free today. Almost all public transit in the Bay Area is free too. 

Ken Sands, the online publisher of the Spokane Spokesman Review, on citizen journalism. He'll be part of the citizen journalism discussion, tomorrow morning, at BloggerCon IV. 

Bill Gates: "This social-networking thing takes you to crazy places." 

All the whitewash that's fit to print 

David Pogue: "Some people remain cynical about the timing of Mr Gates's exit."

Pogue gushes "when you step back far enough, Mr Gates's entire life arc suddenly looks like a 35-year game of Robin Hood, a gigantic wealth-redistribution system on a global scale."

Look, I'm willing to give Gates his due. As long as I've been listening to him, he's always been clear that he would at some point give away his fortune.

But in creating his fortune, he wasted the creativity of a generation. This isn't something that should be washed out of the history books.

Also, it shouldn't be missed that Gates claimed to see what had eluded his predecessors, the founders of DEC and the other mini computer makers, and the management of IBM when he was dealing with them in the 80s. In fact, he fell into the same inevitable trap all big technology companies do. They get big, the leader's assumptions are rooted in the past, and they spend their capital trying to keep the world from changing, instead of embracing change, and staying out the way of the inevitable evolution of technology.

Gates did some really nasty shit that cost us all a lot. He could have, instead of saving his generosity for his fifties, practiced it in his late 30s and 40s, and then I wouldn't be so cynical about his motives. You can find my public pleading with him to ease up on the destruction in the archive of this blog and DaveNet.

Further, I think it's buying into a lot of PR hype to call Gates a scientist as Pogue does. We've already devalued "innovation" to please Gates, now will we do the same to science?

No panels at BloggerCon