June 06, 2004
Notcon Part 2
It's now lunch time and I'm in search of beer. The morning sessions I attended were Danny O'Briens life hacks talk (site available at http://www.lifehacks.com/) and the panel discussion on the politics of the internet. All good, nothing bad.
The conclusions I got from Danny's talk, which may or may not be the ones he was trying to get across, were;
- When faced with a task use the simplest possible tool to perform it.
- Big, bloated applications will bite you on the bum, over time people migrate away from them to simpler tools.
- The wise geek stores their data in text format. Mainly because of point 2 above, but also because it is easier to index and search.
- Incremental search is good.
The discussion on the politics of the internet was interesting. Each panellist had slightly different viewpoints, but they were all agreed that there is no politics of the internet. This is because politics is about everything and everything is about politics.
Interesting points though, were that technology makes law making more difficult and this has got the lawmakers slightly worried, and neither the technology of the internet or governments are going away and that sooner or later they will have to learn to love each other.
I'm now sitting in the ground floor listening to Brewster Kahle talk about the Internet Archive. His tag line is "Give us your content and we will give you unlimited storage and unlimited bandwidth, for ever." Best. Use. Of. Technology. Ever.
Posted by Andy Todd at June 06, 2004 02:43 PM