Listics

Professor emeritus of Geology Kenneth Deffeyes… starts out promising that there is no truth to the rumor that the Bush administration wants to change the name of the species to Hetero Sapiens.

Hubbert’s Peak: world production plateaued in 1970… the Saudis assure us that they are maxed out. This tells us that the good news is that OPEC is no longer in charge of prices. The bad news is that nobody is in charge of prices. By 2024 total world production WILL begin to decrease. I’m stopping this note taking nonsense so I can listen to the speaker!

Back to note that there WILL be rationing — either rationing by inconvenience or a more Rooseveltian rationing by allocation… Hubbert is either right or wrong… if one does nothing, then one is betting that Hubbert is wrong. If Hubbert is right, what is one to do?

Consultants answer questions, disruptants ask them.

Isabel is talking about our workshop from last night… she’s a slinky tall blonde… would look good in a rubber suit… also a genius I think…

Isabel has inspired a photo shoot of the “Girls of WTF.” I’ll upload these when I have a full set.

Campaign for something — not against them. Engage the larger audience in conversation.
1. It’s all about the phone bill.
2. It’s all about real costs to the custormer.
3. It’s about local economics
4. Don’t make partisan… it touches everyone.

First Actions –
Nationwide Study of real Costs
GAO study to reduce costs…
Raise conversation to include broadband.
Create an innovation coalition around the broadband.
Target key investors in the telecoms

It must be about the customer….
Ease of transition from existing to new world..

User experiences everything
design must clean

First Results…
Its about votes
Impact on local teleco costs
Impact on education
impact on local economics

Author of “Let Them Eat Megabits” and “Why the Internet is Bad for Democracy,” Eli Noam is speaking. Touches on the market failure of the entire information sector appearing before our very eyes.

Bob Frankston: “The past is the fodder for lectures.”

Martin Geddes: Eli noam, “…one sandwich short of a picnic.”

Martin’s here, blogging the conference.

Thanks to Whiskey River for the following:

“Finally you come to a point where you almost know it all. You are very wise. You are very pure … except for the fact that you may well have gotten caught in the last trap … the desire to know it all and still be you, the knower. This is an impossibility. For all of the finite knowledge does not add up to the infinite. In order to take the final step, the knower must go. That is, you can only BE it all, but you can’t know it all. The goal is non-dualistic - as long as there is a knower and known you are in dualism.”
- Baba Ram Dass
Be Here Now

Fourteen years ago and more, when we were packing up to leave Berkeley. I ran across the old 1971 vintage copy of Be Here Now. The pulp it was printed on and the cheap purple ink had fused to a uniformity of brown pages that were perfectly illegible. I was glad I had read it then, because it certainly wouldn’t have been here now.

Congratulations Tim Bray!

Good luck to Dave Winer in the Wired Rave Awards this weekend! Nobody has worked harder to evangelize the use of the web by the common person, nor has anyone given more of themselves - their energy, their intellect, their work product - to make it happen. Dean Landsman posted regarding Dave as the Blogfather the other day, and everything he says rings true.

Dave is up for a software designer award… here’s what the competion looks like:

SOFTWARE DESIGNER
•Jonathan Abrams – Friendster
•Toivo Annus, Janus Friis, Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallin, •Niklas Zennstrom – Skype
•Bram Cohen – BitTorrent
• iTunes Music Store Team – iTunes Music Store
•Dave Winer – RSS

Here are the judges…

Paul Boutin
WIRED Contributing Editor

Doug Engelbart
Co-founder, the Bootstrap Institute; inventor of the computer mouse

Rob “Commander Taco” Malda
Founder, Slashdot

Jonathan Schwartz
Executive Vice President, Software Group, Sun Microsystems

David Vaskevitch
Chief Technical Officer, Microsoft

I hadn’t heard of Dave until a few years ago, but I wouldn’t be surprised if our paths have crossed at some early Interop or Comdex or XML Devcon or somewhere. We have Sandhill Road in common, although our experience there is separated by a few decades and the Junipero Serra Freeway (I’ve always tried to stay as far away from the hot Woodside end of SLAC as possible).

I met him at BloggerCon where I found him to be less than cordial, but in fairness he had a lot on his mind. Hey, some of my best friends are fucking psycho nutcases with serious personality disorders. Dave is like way mainstream.

But what makes him special this spring is that, because of his love-child, RSS, he is up for a Wired Magazine Rave Award in the best software designer category. If you asked me about best software I’d have to go with something geospatial and all ArcIMS or something, but - shit! A little XML Interop hackistry is certainly cool too. And Dave goes way back years and years with this stuff. He worked on the SOAP spec with the IBM team. He’s an old XML RPC kind of guy. What I get about Dave is that he’s helping to lead us beyond the browser.

RSS may soon be the old news. It’s time to put a fork in it and give it an award. RDF is happening, and Atom is out of gate. I have no clue what direction Dave will be heading next. But I know that now that RSS is mainstream, Dave will be breaking new trails. I hope his buddy Boutin gives him the award so he’s in a good mood at BloggerCon II. Oh, and because he deserves it.

Dave… you won’t be reading this because you have drawn your line in the sand regarding my insights. But seriously man… I hope you get the award this weekend. You really do deserve it, and RSS is really good stuff. I can say this now that I’ve found an aggregator that handles all RSS versions, ATOM, modules like dublin core, content:encoding, xhtml:body, and basically kicks ass. It even exports and imports that mind-numbing OPML bullshit!

Good luck, ya big lug.