Sitting in the French Senate for Les Blogs. Given the fact that there are 300 bloggers here, I probably will not do my conference blogging schtick. The past couple of days have been a wonderful getaway and chance to see friends. Loic has been a wonderful host.
The Senate representative welcomed us to the first international blog day. John Chambers spoke here last week, Steve Balmer joins them for breakfast tomorrow. Blogs are the next revolution. Half of their schoolchildren blog, French is the second most popular language in the blogopshere, they like to express themselves and debate their views. 20 different countries are represented here, half of attendees from outside the country. As Peter Parker’s uncle said, “a big power implies big responsibilities.” Like Spiderman, we have big responsibilities.
Joi Ito’s presentation
An extension of a series of events. Internet is the first open bottom up network. Ethernet connected some computers, TCP/IP connected the network (IFTF rough concensus working code), HTML (had a tagging protocol of SGML but you couldn’t view the source, was too complex), with blogs we are connecting people. Now we are fighting against people that do not want us to share our content and talk freely.
Richard Florida, The Creative Class: anti-establishment, critical thinkers, autonomous action, self-fulfillment, self-expression, sharing collective action, community, learning and openness to innovation. These technologies become adopted through word of mouth. Some cultures adopting faster. Gap between creative and non-creative class is bigger than between countries. Shows the superbowl commercial of kids busted for sharing music. Some people understand this gap and are selling to this creative class. Watch user behavior and create products for it, don’t change behavior. Traditional media is trying to force people back into the old model. iPod Shuffle isn’t the best specified product, but word of mouth and brand let them make it a success. Even through they have DRM everywhere and are suing bloggers, we believe they are on our side.
Long Tail (gulp): Delivery vs. Discovery of content, file sharing(a sophisticated way of playing DJ), recommendation engines/reviews, blogs and word of mouth. Problem is not how to protect my copyright, it is how to get people to listen to your stuff. Worse than being copied is not being copied.
Blogs and marketing: Kryptonite and a Bic Pen lost $10M in 10 days, Rathergate, Fastlane is honest marketing by conversation to develop trust, BBC and Infoworld Technorati sidebars.
The Sharing Economy: The myth of intellectual property, “creative property” is a new idea, “the commons” is and always has been essential part of creativity, amateur vs. professionals. This is an amateur revolution. Professional sex is not always better than amateur sex. Creative commons has 10M licensed web pages. Red Blood Cells project where the White Stripes remix is an example of skipping the intermediaries whereas works become automatically copyrighted the moment they are made. (cc)
Remix culture is not just about creative content, it is about free speech. Read my lips and other remix videos. NBC is saying you can’t use Bush speech because of copyright, lots of things are trying to stifle our ability to share.
Ross Mayfield is CEO and co-founder of Socialtext, an emerging provider of Enterprise Social Software that dramatically increases group productivity and develops a group memory.
He also writes Ross Mayfield’s Weblog which focuses on markets, technology and musings.
