Posts
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SIP and Mobile Services
Bill brought up some excellent topics at his presentation at BAMF this weekend. The one that struck me the most was his mention of SIP as a major item for future development of mobile applications. Given that right before the meeting I was blogging that I wanted “a service that respects my mobile device not as a remote and minimal information terminal, but as a first class node within a worldwide network” that really grabbed my attention. I was somewhat familiar with SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) from the Voice Over IP side. SIP is used in some VOIP implementations, and has been around for a while. I wasn’t at all familiar with the proposed uses within the mobile realm. For a quick techie overview of the protocols, which should make sense to anyone familiar with basic networking, check out this overview from Cisco. For information about how SIP fits into mobile applications, check out the FAQ from Forum Nokia. Just fucking fantastic stuff. They address issues of IM and presence over the mobile networks and programmed handset to handset communication.
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First BAMF Meeting Tomorrow
Tomorrow is the first meeting of BAMF. Unfortunately we ended up needing to collect some money to cover the space. Michael O’Rourke was very generous in offering their space at Dimension 7 and we just need to cover the costs of setting the place up, cleaning up after it’s done, and use of their AV equipment. I looked around some to see if I could find a sponsor, but no one wanted to sponsor the first meeting of an informal group. Given that a bunch of us volunteered our own time to get this set up, and that the presenter is a volunteer, and that the cost is only $10, I’m hoping no one has any problems with that. Cause if they do I might have to smack them. That always gets things off on the wrong foot so I’m hoping to avoid it.
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Thank You Eric
Just got back from the first LobbyCon in San Francisco, thanks to Eric Rice for taking the initiative and getting everyone together. I personally had a really good time. I think it was very successful at recreating exactly what goes on in the lobby of tech confs. There was lots of geeky talk going on, I got to meet some people I know of from their online presence, and ran into some people who I don’t normally get a chance to talk to. Apparently Jonas was there for a while, but really didn’t like the venue so he took off. That’s unfortunate, I would have liked to get a chance to talk to him. But that’s what happens when you try to do something different. If you’re doing it right, you should get a reaction. Hopefully there are a bunch of positives, but unfortunately there will be negatives as well. The important factor is that there is something polarizing and not just a lukewarm mix meant to please the widest audience possible.
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LobbyCon San Francisco
Eric Rice as proposed the first LobbyCon, to be held tomorrow night (August 12th) at 7:30pm in the W Hotel lobby in San Francisco. I guess I’ve been hacking too much, cause I almost missed this. Sean Bonner posted the initial idea as LobbyCon after BlogOn. I had much the same impression of BlogOn as Sean did, and we spoke about it afterward at the dinner. We have all the tools at our disposal to organize a somewhat ad-hoc conference, providing many of the advantages that we currently get from the larger events. I think it sounds like an excellent idea, but I’m normally told that my guerrilla style events just wouldn’t work. I would love for that to be wrong, so I’m going to the event tomorrow night to try to contribute what I can. Hope to see some of you there.
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Bay Area Mobility Forum First Meeting
We’ve made the arrangements for the first Bay Area Mobility Forum meeting. It’s Saturday August 21st at 2:00pm at 150 Folsom Street in San Francisco. I would like to personally thank Michael O’Rourke at Dimension 7 Studios for helping out with a location to host the event.
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Tor - Anonymizing Overlay for TCP
I’m over at DEFCON listening to a presentation on Tor. The presentation is pretty interesting. The presenter is pretty funny at points. He’s using the term “sending a Guido” to paraphrase strong arming someone into giving you info they don’t want to. It’s an interesting turn of phrase. Plus the connotation is that the design of the system takes into account that there is a degree of “social capital” expenditure to attacking most anonymous systems. You can “call in a favor” to get info, but once the capital required is high enough the attack is no longer feasible. Sounds kind of like social software, but twisted somewhat. Maybe it’s just that I’m aware of the diffusion of social issues into software design, but I don’t think I’ve heard the standard attack cost argument applied to calling in social favors.
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HTTP Delta
Jeremy Zawodny has a post about RSS scaling problems. Something that came up as a partial solution at one of the blogger meetups was the HTTP delta proposal. It’s specifically meant to address this issues:
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Tom Ehrenfeld, Author of The Startup Garden
Small Business Trends has three posts that constitute an interview with Tom Ehrenfeld, author of The Startup Garden:
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BlogOn Expectations
BlogOn was yesterday, and I’ve let the issues percolate for a while before trying to write up what I took out of yesterday’s conference. On the whole there was some interesting discussion, there were definitely interesting people, but I think the conference as a whole was a miss. Why? Cause if you take a look at the BlogOn website, the subtitle is “the business of social media”. I don’t think there was nearly enough focus on the tranformative power of social media except as related to technology. There were some exceptions, such as the session which talked about how social media transforms corporate communications (“press releases used to be something that companies struggled to get journalists to pay attention to, now journalists are seeking out press releases already online so that they can do their research” - FANTASTIC point!) I liked the sessions in the afternoon more than those in the morning. I went to the business of blogging track, not the company presentation track. Here is were you might say “Aha! But Mike, if you wanted to hear about companies using social media why didn’t you go to hear about companies wanting to use social media?” Well, I took a look at the wiki page reserved for presenters, and noticed that no one added their link. NOT A SINGLE FUCKING ONE! That says to me that either none of those companies are really serious in their use of social media, or we’ve completely screwed up our definition of social media. Either way, I didn’t feel like hearing a bunch of companies pitch when there was at least a chance of hearing about solutions to real issues in social media.
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BlogOn Commentary
The first couple of sessions were a bit of a let down actually. There wasn’t much being talked about that stood outside of the normal questions. I can excuse that however. This is “the business of social media”, and it does seem like a much more business focused group than a lot of other conferences. So I can chalk a lot of this up to businesses being focused on what is somewhat known already, and not the really completely witchy edge of trends. This stuff still is pretty much “out there”, even if those of us who live online find it old hat. Given that however, I’m really hoping that we get deeper into the business issues than other events have. I would like to see info about how to make money using social networking, or how to measure savings within a business from hooking people together within an organization using blogs and social networking. We make these nebulous statements like “hooking together people within an organization gives you better access to your internal information resources.” Sure. But how much? How can you figure out if a roll out is successful or if it failed? How do you measure “better connections” after they happen, let alone estimate them before an implementation? I’m hoping to see these kinds of issues discussed. I should add them to the wiki.
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