Cohere

Tara "Miss Rogue" Hunt pointed me to one of the most interesting and potentially useful capabilities I have yet seen, Plazes. Plazes locates you from your router connection to where you are in the world and allows people you've assign as friends to see you are there.

This may not seem very interesting. But I see two things currently necessary to make the internet and web powerful:

• Incorporate into the daily work activity regardless of where one -- unshackle from a desk location.
• Computers seamlessly understand people -- rather than people needing to understand computers to fully utilize their capabilities.

These are two of the essential new capabilities I see in what has been tagged "Web 2.0". "Web 2.0" is an unspecified label to which Tim O'Reilly, Richard MacManus, et. al. have been assigning meanings to the coming internet capacities. The genius of a non-specific designation as "Web 2.0" is that it means everything and nothing. So that when new web applications develop that stick with a gestalt formed, looking back "Web 2.0" will have a definite meaning.

What is necessary for the internet to be powerful, is for it to become invisible in our life. To do that it has to adjust to us. For the large part, we still have to adjust to computers to fully leverage them. To use blogging, podcasting, videoblogging, mobile internet capable phones, etc. we need to understand RSS, iTunes, mobile networks, etc. This needs to disappear and the work toward open internet API's, web application that are immediately understood like flickr, mobile devices that are self evident as the iPod are beginning to realize this.

Where I see a location service as Plazes being powerful is in coordinating people's location to where and what others are doing. So that if I'm working on a project at a cafe and need to grab a cable at a computer store. If I locate a friend at Fry's (California computer store) who's heading past me, I can message and ask if he'd pick up that device. Perhaps authorize him to use my paypal up to a certain amount. What this means is that our work and intentions are exponentially leveraged through coordinating with other people's locations.

In Robert Scoble's post of the Scobleizer blog he pointed to the It’s JerryTime! vlog. This is a wonderful, animated vlog that I subscribed to.

What got me thinking in Scoble's post, is his statement,

Now, usually I don’t inflict video blogs on you unless they are either mine, heh, or they are good.

To which I replied,

It’s interesting that currentlhy linear video is intrusive in relation to text.

I think that will change when a standard of tagging specific video segments become addressable in text links. Then one can reference video segment examples into text similar to quoting and illustrating with images.

To experiment with this concept, in future posts I'll put video segments illustrating blog entry descriptions, topics, points, and such.

I was sitting last Saturday, Nov. 19th at the San Francisco Indie Club meeting waiting to speak on videoblogging. As I watched speakers talk and talk, making explanation after example to prove points leaving a few audience questions at the end, I thought of how to implement communication through discourse.

3. an extended communication (often interactive) dealing with some particular topic; "the book contains an excellent discussion of modal logic"; "his treatment of the race question is badly biased"

It's the interactive capability of discourse I want to do. So I thought of this reiterative approach:

1. Show (or demonstrate) an example of the topic.
2. Ask what was shown.
3. Answer (if needed) and/or discuss -- then back to 1. for the next element of dicussion.

1. So the first I showed one minute from two clips on my iPod:

• The preview of the Peter Jackson "King Kong" film.
• "Widow Maker" made last year by members of the SF Indie Club.

2. Then I asked everyone what they saw? People saw that I was holding and manipulating my iPod as I played the clips. They responded that I was showing clips through my iPod. I asked what's unique about that?

3. Since my time was short -- ten minutes -- and since an audience reponse wasn't immediate, I said I'd answer that: That both the preview of the Universal release of "King Kong" and the local film "Widow Maker" were distributed throgh the same method to the iPod. That there was no intermediary barrier to marketing and distribution to iPods, rss enclosed films on the web, and such.

This led to a lively discussion which went on for a couple more minutes. I wanted to show more films, websites on how this is done and such, but I didn't have enought time. Glorinda, who organizes on the meetings, said there would be more time for me to present at the next meeting.

The short experiment in interactive presentation was entirefly successful to my goal. I'm going to continue this in presentations reaching points through discoursing with the audience. I'll have to see how this works for longer presentations containing more points.

This brings the audience into creating the ideas presented, not just a speaker pontificating. It takes away the static one way interaction of (speaker->audience) to (speaker< ->audience). At any point anyone can be the speaker to the rest being the audience and the presenter directing the discussion path.

This is my main blog area. Here are my philosophical and day-to-day expressions.