Geodog

Pre-Supernova Party, Berkeley CyberSalon, Mashup Camp, SF Tech Session, all in one week!

I'm in the middle of a dizzying and fun geek week, the likes of which I haven't done in a long time. Last Thursday was Kevin Werbach's Pre-Supernova party. I attended the 2002 Supernova conference that some have argued that Web 2.0 was born at, and have been to every other one or so since. Kevin is well connected to lots of interesting people, so even when I can't make the conferences, I try to make the parties. Thursday's party was lots of fun. For the price of a drink, I was told "the true story of Feedster" by one of Feedster's current execs, but had to promise not to blog (his version) of it. I chatted with one of the founders of meebo, the in-browser IM application that I started using after I saw it demoed at NetSquared. I didn't have time to blog the event, but I did take a few photos and post them onto my Flickr account, and one of them was picked up by the new Silicon Valley gossip blog.

Tonight I went to a Berkeley CyberSalon panel on the future of Radio and saw a very different crowd. While the Pre-Supernova party was mostly under-40 crowd, the Berkeley CyberSalon was almost all over-40, some of it well over. Tim Pozar, Roger Coryell, Carol Pierson, and Gregg McVicar, had an interesting conversation about the decline of radio, with some great details of Berkeley history from the audience (the emcee of the first Grateful Dead show in Berkeley and the person who set up the first live internet broadcast of a protest had good stories to tell). Alas, I fear radio geeks may be a dying breed, as the demographics of this audience might indicate. I was surprised at how little most of them (Roger Coryell was the exception) talked about what was happening with internet radio and podcasting. The ominous shadow cast by the RIAA seems to have mostly taken it off the table for "legitimate radio", and the monopoly ownership of broadcasting encouraged since 1996 and the political climate seem to be killing off all but lowest common denominator radio (my conclusion, not the panels).

Tomorrow I am taking off work to make the long drive down to Mashup Camp (although I won't be there for the 7:45AM start -- what kind of geek conference starts at 7:45 AM?) I'm not quite sure what to expect there, because if there is any structure to the two days, it hasn't emerged yet. Still, lots of very interesting people, some of whom I know in person, and some of whom I only know by reputation or from reading their blogs and trading emails, will be there. There is even a chance that I will be able to show off something that we did at work, and get some good ideas / services that I can bring back to work.

Then later in the week, of to the first SF Tech Session that Niall Kennedy has organized. I'm going half because I'm interested in what is happening with small business and non-profit groupware, especially open source groupware (and have gotten into a flame fest with the master of flames, jwz, on the topic in the past), and half because it will be an opportunity to meet and hopefully buy dinner for Kellan, whose code I have been using and with whom I have been corresponding since the SARS Watch Org days.

Somewhere in there I will keep up with work and see (a bit) of my family.

Is it 1999 all over again? It does feel like being in the center of a flurry of creativity, and yes, it also feels like a bubble, with this small somewhat incestuous group of people who spend a lot of time talking and partying each other. How many bookmarking/mapping/calendering/todo applications is there room for? And do my sisters in Boston, New Jersey and Maryland care or even notice? The difference, so far, is that Wall Street hasn't turned the fire hose of cash towards Web 2.0 that they turned towards the internet. Hopefully they won't. The positive part, the part that I feel lucky about is that the promise that was talked about in 2002 at Supernova in a basement in Palo Alto during the depths of the tech depression of 2001-2004, of decentralization, citizen journalism, social software, a new world of pervasive connection to the internet, and rich internet applications, is coming into being, and it is fun being part of it.

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