Mena Trott: Interop is essential for blogging tools; we say yes to everything our users ask for; also things they want but haven't asked for. We provide import to and export from Movable Type. Our customers are webloggers; they don't want lock-in, so we gave them import/export. That kept us on our toes for the last two years. It hasn't hurt us.
The death of HTML
Cory: "can Macromedia overcome the web's limits without destroying what makes the web the web"
Kevin Lynch, Macromedia: HTML for documents, Flash for applications. URI not good for data; conflict between application model and page model.
RJ Pittman also describes the death of HTML. Applications will be inherently connected... breaking the page barrier. Self-adusting user interfaces (what does this simplify to?)
Mena: Moving away from the web browser, moving toward the device.
(HTML has been dying every year since it started.)
Merrill Brown at Real; mass consumer media, small professional media, large professional media. "Premium content" = major league baseball. Very undecentralized. (for example, I want to comment on a baseball game with my friends, but the licensing scheme doesn't allow it; the images are copyrighted)
A lawyer in the audience disagrees with the appliance theory; likes MT because it is modular. Mena says that they're building TypePad which is easier but less flexible.
Cory on DRM: of course there's demand for something that lets you do less with your music.
* paid for where there's high demand; lots and meters downtown
* subsidized as a business attraction; parking at a mall
The trouble with online social network systems: When someone introduces people to each other, they get social capital from the interaction. The value is in the process of linking. When you publish your rolodex, you don't get that social credit.
We're monkey's with keyboards; the important thing is the social fabric.
Our minitel is twisted pair -- the pairs of copper wires that go into your home or business. Circuit-switched, metered, voice optimized networks are obsolete.
We've laid enough fiber to get to neptune and back but none of it has gotten to my basement.
We have a dumbell internet - high-band at the center and in the home, and narrow in the middle -- with the telco.
IP is voice revenue eroding; you can't protect the incumbents and get more bandwidth to the home. Protecting the incumbents /is/ what dampens innovation.
If phone companies started to account for their network at replacement value on Monday, they would be bankrupt by Friday.
The phone company is like the family farm. We let shoestores fail, but not phone companies.
QOTD: You can call french fries "freedom fries", but the freedom fries are still sold in a restaurant, and listed on a "menu"