Rick Segal has a great write-up on how TEDGlobal compares against other previous events like Reboot 7 and Gnomedex 5.0 - mainly because of how Chris Anderson decided to cut an interesting conversation between speaker and atendee due to time constraints.

It is this inability to understand the needs of the audience that surprises me. I believe people who attend TEDGlobal are there for the idea sharing and debate, not about the tight schedule and the up-to-the-minute agenda.

You see, the reason’s pretty simple: when presenting an idea, you are imposing your view of a given subject to your audience - still, you can never be 100% sure that you’re on the same wavelength everybody else is in, even if you are a great speaker. What makes the gap between presented idea and the captured idea tighten (or close) is discussion. It is discussion and debate that makes an idea evolve, and become something else - something valuable. That’s where the value of a conference comes from, no more, no less.

TEDGlobal is important. It gets the A-list folks together (even though I strongly believe that’s not where the new ideas come from, most of the times). But the conversation, the debate, the idea exchange - that is essential.

Just a quick note to let those who haven’t heard yet, that the Flash Player 8 (codename eightball) is now finally up for public beta. If like me you thought Macromedia was keeping us in the dark with new updates to their products after the deal with Adobe, this may come as a good surprise.

If you have no idea of what’s new on Flash Player 8, have a look at the presentation in tokyo about the new features, back in October 2004, at mookblog.

Anyway, on to what’s really important, I gave this a test run and it looks like performance does increase a lot, particularly on the Mac platform - if you’re on a Mac and you use flash frequently you know just exactly how much of a pain in the ass (and in the CPU) running intensive Flash applications can be. I saw a serious decrease on CPU activity and rendering some things seems to be a bit faster. If there’s any important stuff to note about this update, I’ll make sure to post about it. For now, this looks pretty good.

Evan (you know, one of the people at the oh-neato Odeo) has an interesting blog post about how people have been using a combination of Del.icio.us and their service in order to create an ad-hoc podcast. That’s interesting indeed, and one of the best uses of the “remix” paradigm that the web 2.0 empowers.

The part of the blog post that I find even more interesting, though, is when evan mentions the inumerous possibilities to put the content out there for users to consume. I quote:

For odeo we’ve been debating how to display feeds for the user which allows flexibility, yet also makes sense. It’s easy to generate atom, rss 2, rss 1, opml, oml, pcast, m3u, smil, xspf, asx, etc… but how to present it to the user. So far we’ve been burying these in the sidebar.

Here’s a thought, Evan. All those formats fall basically into two distinct categories: subscriptions (atom, rss, opml, the new pcast) and playlists (mru, pls, asx, etc.). Instead of using all three, why not give the user these two choices (subscribe / listen now) based on his preferences at odeo? It seems to be the most logical thing to do, interaction-wise. Here’s a practical example:

I have a mac, an ipod, but I also listen to a lot of content on my laptop mp3 player. So, Odeo would ask me first, my mp3 player of choice (you know, from the usual list: winamp, windows media player, itunes), and second, how I usually subscribe to podcasts (itunes, a news reader, a podcatcher like ipodder). According to my choices, Odeo would “customize” the “subscribe / listen now” experience by making each button (or link) produce the adequate filetype for my preferences. In my case, that would be a pcast so I could get it into iTunes and from there to my iPod (this on the Subscribe end) and a “standard” .m3u for the “Listen Now”.

Considerations:

What the method I describe above makes odeo transparently accomodate all sorts of users and formats without compromising sidebar space or user frustration levels (something I preach about when consulting on usability). You transparently create 2 options (again, “Subscribe” and “Listen Now” - your mileage may vary) and instantly give users the possibility of using any of their sofware players, news readers/podcatchers, mp3 portable players, etc.

Seems like I couldn’t go without posting about Technorati’s business model after reading this post on Tom Foremski’s weblog. There was something with the whole deal with Live8 that kinda messed with my head as someone who usually stays close to ground on business surrounding blogs - but what they’re pitching to corporate ears now, the “selling” of the blogosphere is something I’ve always thought about and wondered how long the blogosphere would resist without.

So, I’ll give you the skinny on what Tom Foremski goes on about (read it on detail on his post): He, Sam Whitmore and Peter Hirshberg were on a panel entitled “How the Blogosphere is changing the game in PR and marketing” (coincidently, my previous post is exactly about this). Tom “reports” how Hirshberg (representing Technorati on the panel) was pitching about how corporations could harness technorati’s blog tracking features in order to, and I quote, “control your corporate message”.

Here’s Tom’s view on it (quoted from his article):

Well, Technorati is offering services that will help companies control their corporate message by identifying those blogs and their social network, that have posted around the “wrong” message. Then, I would imagine, some sort of corporate “SWAT” team could parachute in and engage those off-message bloggers.

“You need to become involved in the conversation,” Mr Hirshberg strongly advised his audience.

I was surprised by how aggressive Technorati was in its pitch because it has a very good standing within the blogging community, a community that bristles at the thought of others commercializing its work.

This is scary. Not for lots of people who cope (and need) the business side of things, but to the average blogger, raving about products to their friends and family, carelessly posting what they believe in, unknowingly being monitored and jammed into a portfolio for marketing efforts by companies who will be paying technorati to keep up-to-date on their market.

When is a conversation (if you haven’t read my previous post, I recommend you to, because it is where I connect blogs to conversations) public, and when is it private? When is it a privacy violation to take any written content and sell it (or the statistics surrounding it)? I’ve got mixed feelings all over this.