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I apologize for having conferences on the brain lately, but as you may or may not know, some friends and I are organizing one (it’s called mesh, and it’s in Toronto May 15th and 16th), so it’s kind of been eat, sleep and breathe conferences lately. And there’s also been a lot of talk about the subject over the past few months, the most recent instalment of which was Jeff “Buzzmachine” Jarvis’s post about the successful “unconference” on journalism he attended in Philadelphia.

Jeff clearly hates traditional conferences, as many people – including me – do, and so he is totally down with the idea of getting rid of the usual PowerPoint presentation crapola and letting the “audience” become part of the show. As he put it:

“There’s a meeting coming up about linking and I was quite obnoxious in my response to the invitation, pitching the Winer gospel of the unconference. I told the organizer to blow up the panels and tear down the essentially insulting distinction between panel and audience and get the people in the room to truly link.”

Jeff’s comments are just part of the ongoing discussion about how (and how not) to have a conference about Web 2.0 topics, since Web 2.0 is all about the conversation, interactivity, and so on – which the “unconference” idea is all about. And this discussion covers the spectrum from the BarCamp end of things, where the event is more or less a get-together of like-minded people in a room somewhere, all the way to the more organized and traditional ETech or New Comm Forum or whatever. And, of course, it also covers the spectrum from free all the way to those $1,200 a day mega-conference/trade shows.

For the record, mesh is not an unconference, although the benefits of those are obvious. But that doesn’t mean it has to be a boring old mega-conference riddled with PowerPoints either. We’ve been wrestling with how exactly to do it (and using some Web 2.0 tools while doing so, as Rob describes), but we think that there is a Third Way, one that mixes the best of traditional conferences – the organization, for example, which can help those who might not be quite ready to become part of the show – with the best of the unconference, such as the interactivity and openness to ideas, and the desire to get a real dialogue going with the participants (not attendees, and not “the audience”). Others seem to think that a combination is also a good thing.

And that’s why we plan to have an “unconference room” set aside, one that will be open to all to talk about whatever they wish, as well as workshops loosely organized around themes, where debate and ideas can really get flowing, and some other cool ideas that I can’t give away just yet – including a different approach to keynotes than you would get at a standard conference. We’ve got lots of things in the works. In the end, it comes down to letting people become part of the dialogue in as many ways as possible. That is what I think Jeff wants, and that is what we want. And we think that is what you want.

Got any thoughts? Let us know. Send me an email, or post a comment here or over on the conference blog.

It’s been interesting to watch the evolution of the blogosphere’s reaction to the Microsoft Vista and Apple stories – both of which started out as big headlines (complete with exclamation marks) about a lot of code being rewritten in the Microsoft OS and Steve Jobs selling a bunch of stock, but evolved as smart bloggers responded to both with skeptical posts. It turns out that rewriting 60 per cent of the Windows Vista code is likely not what is happening, and that Steve selling stock is a little more complicated than it appears, and not as negative as outlets such as The Register made it seem in their initial story.

In writing about these stories, Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 makes a reference to sausage in his post about it, which I assume is a nod to that great quote from German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck about how “People who enjoy eating sausage and obeying the law should not watch either one being made.” Scott says this kind of thing is “what happens when the ‘community’ is in charge of the facts,” but I think that is overstating the case somewhat. No one was “in charge of the facts,” and in fact very few newspaper reporters are ever “in charge of the facts,” or at least rarely all of them. Facts emerged, and some things emerged that were not facts, and were (relatively quickly) shown to be not facts. In other words, sausage was being made.

More recently, there has been some backlash against Robert Scoble of Microsoft, who lashed out at the writer of the original Vista story – and at The Register (which has a bit of a history with The Scobleizer if you want to look it up). Scoble said that:

“We should now start deriding people who link to non-credible sources. I will. Anyone who links to that jerk down in Australia anymore is simply not doing bloggers any favors. Same for anyone who links to the Register.”

This got Phil Sims’ back up over at Squash, since he knows David Richards, the author of the original story on Vista – and provided a somewhat mixed (ethically speaking) description of his media colleague. Following Scoble’s rant, Phil has said he is aghast at what the Microsoft blogger is recommending, particularly since he is the co-author of a book called Naked Conversations. Domenic Jones has accused The Scobleizer of censorship, and the two have bashed it out in Scoble’s comments section – a wonderful illustration of what a comments section can be for.

Is Scoble recommending censorship? Domenic may have a point, but I think that’s going a little far. He has definitely flown off the handle, however – and is that in part because the story was about his employer? Perhaps. But while there has been noise and fury, and errors a-plenty, there has also been reasoned response and correcting of errors – although not by the original authors, which is something to note (Shelley at Burningbird has her own inimitable response to Scoble’s proposed link policy). In other words, journalism has occurred. It may not be the best-tasting sausage you’ve ever had, but there it is. And to give Scott credit, he ends his post on a reasonable note:

“Consumers will ultimately benefit from greater access to more varied and more accurate information, but they will be witness to the ugly process of the truth being made.”

Update:

Scoble has posted something like a “mea culpa,” and gets some support from James Robertson after what he sees as an attackby Nick Carr – and there are some interesting points made in the comments on Nick’s post, which Scoble takes part in, that are worth reading. Mitch Ratcliffe also has some perspective on the whole affair, and so does Rick Segal (clever headline, Rick).

I know that all the fuss about Michael Robertson and ajaxWrite.com was ages ago in blog time – days being the same as years in the blogosphere – but I wanted to write about it anyway, because Michael said some interesting things to me in an email that I wanted to pass on. Besides, I was on vacation. I only blogged a couple of times, believe it or not – once to mention Dave Winer (because I couldn’t help myself) and once to mention our Web 2.0 conference, which I expect you all to come to.

Michael, whose track record includes mp3.com, Linspire.com and many other startups of note, sent me a message about the launch of ajaxWrite, at which point I mentioned that I was already pretty familiar with it – warts and all – since it had been all over tech.memeorandum.com for most of that day (okay, I checked memeorandum the odd time too while I was on vacation – so sue me). He mentioned that the site had been “a little slow because of the unexpected traffic,” but that other than that things were working fine.

Naturally, I asked him how he thought ajaxWrite would stack up against Writely.com, since many people – including my friend Mark Evans – noted the obvious similarities with the Web 2.0 service that Google just bought (which I have used many times in planning mesh and quite like, particularly because it allows real-time collaboration on a file). Here’s what he said:

“Writely has a richer feature set then ajaxWrite does because they offer online storage and sharing. We just launched ajaxWrite, so we’ll match them over time.”

In other words, it sounds like the version we’re looking at now is just 1.0, or maybe 0.9. Not surprising, since Writely has been around for some time now, and Michael has presumably been watching its success. He added:

“Having said that, ajaxWrite has a significant advantage. It looks and operates like a true desktop application, not a web page with some pseudo-menu-buttons. This means it’s immediately comfortable to desktop users, making a seamless transition possible. Imagine software/services being embedded into the browser/email/OS to seamlessly launch support for popular file formats as encounter them.”

Then I asked him whether it bothered him at all that Writely had been bought by Google and therefore the field had grown substantially more competitive. Here’s what he said:

“No. I don’t subscribe to the “google is invincible” nonsense that the press promotes. They now have near-Microsoft status on the FUD meter. A blogger simply suggests that Google might be working in a category and the tech press automatically assigns the space to Google.”

He went on to mention all the attention paid to the “mythical” Google Office, back when the company was rumoured to be talking with Sun Microsystems about something important (which turned out to be a fairly lame toolbar bundling deal).

“It was stunning how many people were talking about ajaxifying OpenOffice after the silly Sun/Google love in. I like Openoffice, but it’s a pig. It will never be a web app. To even suggest this shows a lack of understanding of the technology. If Google is all knowing, all coding and all products like so many people believe, why would they buy a tiny shop like Writely? Because they don’t have anything going on in this area and need something – that’s why. Yes, Google can throw money at it, but give me the small talented team over the rich behemoth any day because they’ll move faster and be more responsive.”

Them’s fightin’ words, Michael. Let the battle begin 🙂

In case you haven’t read enough opinions about it already, Alec Saunders thinks ajaxWrite is a dud, Mike Masnick thinks the odds are stacked against it, TDavid thinks it’s part of an unsustainable Web-app explosion and Paul Kedrosky says it is yet another example of Michael’s “stick in the eye” marketing. Oh yes, and apparently ajaxWrite – despite its name – isn’t really Ajax at all. Any comment on that Michael?

Some of you out there in blog-land may know that I’ve been helping to organize a Web 2.0 conference here in Toronto over the past few months – along with my technology reporter/blogger colleague Mark Evans from the National Post, lawyer/blogger Rob Hyndman, entrepreneur/blogger Mike McDerment and Expedia.ca founder (and now blogger) Stuart MacDonald – and I’m pleased to say that we are locked and loaded, and our website is now live.

It’s being held on Monday the 15th and Tuesday the 16th of May in Toronto, at the MaRS Collaboration Centre, just south of the Ontario legislature buildings at Queen’s Park and it is called mesh. So get over there and sign up – and tell all your friends about it, too. Book early and book often! Subscribe to the RSS feed for updates, and tag anything you think participants (not attendees) or panelists and moderators might be interested in with the tag “mesh06links” at del.icio.us. Got any ideas for workshops or questions that need answering? Let me know here, or post a comment at the blog at www.meshconference.com/blog.

As you can see if you visit the site, we’ve got some incredible speakers and panelists lined up, including Om Malik of gigaom.com, Paul Kedrosky of Infectious Greed, Steve Rubel of MicroPersuasion, Tara “Miss Rogue” Hunt of Riya, law professor and columnist Michael Geist, podcaster extraordinaire Amber MacArthur, political blogger Andrew Coyne, entrepreneur Jason Fried of 37signals.com, veteran blogger and commentator Stowe Boyd and many others. A full list and schedule of events over the two days will be coming soon, so watch the site (and the associated blog) for details.

Why did we call it mesh? Because “A Web 2.0 Conference In Toronto” was too long to fit on a T-shirt (not to mention boring). Plus, mesh says it all when it comes to what the interactive Web is about – and what we are hoping to do with this conference, which is to get some of the best minds on the planet together to talk about what’s going on out there, and what’s coming next. So let’s connect, share and inspire – let’s mesh.

Well, I guess the blog hiatus I mentioned yesterday didn’t last too long – my old friend Dave Winer has gone and done something outrageously stupid, even for Dave (and that’s saying something). After a couple of posts in which he made cryptic comments about someone stealing ideas from him, and how he was going to retire from blogging and disappear somewhere, now comes a bombshell from Dave’s long-time friend Rogers Cadenhead, who took over the RSS Advisory Board and so earned the everlasting Wrath of Winer. ^TM

According to what Rogers said in his post, he got a letter from an attorney acting for Dave, asking for money to be repaid and intellectual property of his – related to the OPML project – to be returned and any use of that property by Rogers Cadenhead to cease. As described by Rogers, this refers to development work that he did for Dave on scripting.com and Weblogs.com, and also some things he did related to the development of OPML, which according to Rogers is largely an open standard.

Of course, this whole affair stems from the RSS debacle, which gets weirder by the day. And let’s remember one thing: Rogers Cadenhead has supported Dave throughout the years, trying to work with him on RSS and other matters – and in fact, tried so hard to defend Dave that others have accused him of being a “Winer lackey” and “sycophant.” And this is what he gets for it. As he puts it:

“[Dave] has succeeded in making me sorry I took his invitation back in 2004 to get involved in RSS, a syndication format that will forever be mired in childish personal animus because of his mistaken belief that allowing other people to contribute to its success will rob him of credit.

Dave has a response here, but it does little to change the perception of a spoiled child who wants to hang on to what he feels is his toy, and not let anyone else have it. And as Shelley points out at Burningbird, very few people are talking about it (other than a few brave souls such as James Robertson), which in all likelihood is because they are Dave’s friends or because they are afraid of him, or because he is so toxic that they don’t want to get involved. And what sucks about that is it allows a beneficial technology to be held hostage by a single man.

If posting is light over the next couple of weeks, please don’t be concerned – I’m in Florida, enjoying a little sun and sand and relaxation with the family. If you know the state at all, it’s a little town called Venice, just south of Sarasota – very quiet. Not much happens here, and that’s just the way I like it. It’s already been a couple of days now since I checked tech.memeorandum.com, and pretty soon even blogosphere legends such as The Scobleizer and Dave Winer will be but a distant memory. I can’t even check out any of the cool new services that Mike Arrington at TechCrunch.com and Pete Cashmore at Mashable.com are undoubtedly writing about because I’m on dial-up 🙂 Ain’t life grand.

As I’ve said before, I think Dave Winer – one of the first bloggers, and the guy who created the specification for RSS or “really simple syndication” – has a couple of different personalities. There’s the nice Dave, who gives advice to new bloggers and sort of sees himself as the eminence grise of the Web, the one who also wants to be part of the whole blogosphere as it develops — but that can quickly turn into the other Dave, who gets all snippy when he doesn’t get invited to speak at conferences to pass on his wisdom.

“I felt so wronged, why do they lie about these things, don’t they know eventually they’ll get caught in the lies, or don’t they care. (BTW, that includes Scoble too, I asked why he didn’t give me a heads up, and the answer was unsatisfying.)”

This is an ongoing theme with Dave – and it’s tied into another one, which is that everyone steals things from him:

“Now I see things a bit more clearly, it looks like Esther wants us to think these are her ideas, and how inconvenient it would be to have the person whose ideas they really are, there, in the flesh, explaining how the stuff really works.”

Of course, this then leads us into the whole RSS thing, about which there has probably been enough written already, where Dave tries to stop anyone who is doing anything with RSS – all the while protesting that he doesn’t want to be the “Lord God of RSS.”

But now there are signs of a different side to Dave – a kind of scary side. Here’s what he said on Sunday:

“Why not wait until after the OPML Editor 1.0 release ships to try to hijack the format. After that I won’t fight with you. I probably won’t even fight very much now. The fight has pretty much gone out of me.”

I’m feeling the stress of all the fighting, and age… Why not let me go, quietly and peacefully, I’ll stop writing my blog, I’ll stop developing new stuff, you can be me if you want, I won’t be in your way.

Whoa, Dave. Take it easy, dude. Just because you didn’t get to speak at SXSW and Rogers Cadenhead tried to set up an advisory board on RSS, that’s no reason to start talking crazy. Update: Now Dave has taken things a step further and says he’s planning to stop blogging altogether.

The marketing tagline for the 1970’s shark-attack movie Jaws 2 was “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water.” If you replaced the word “water” with the name “Nortel,” you’d probably have a fitting tagline for what’s going on at Canada’s favourite love-it-or-hate-it networking-equipment company, Nortel Networks (or “No-tell” Networks, as one wag dubbed it). Except, of course, that for Nortel the latest financial restatement isn’t just the sequel to its previous financial troubles — it’s the third in a series of such restatements, each of which affected several years worth of results.

In case you need a refresher course in how not to run a giant telecom supplier, Nortel has spent the better part of the past three years restating its results, changing chief executive officers and otherwise reorganizing itself. Not long after John Roth left the company and was replaced by former chief financial officer Frank Dunn, the company announced that its results were not reliable. That produced the first restatement, which altered revenues and profits for several years, and led to an internal review that eventually produced a second restatement to correct errors in the first one, which delayed the company’s official filings for more than a year. As a result of the review, Mr. Dunn and half a dozen other executives were fired.

Former U.S. Navy officer Bill Owens came on board to straighten things up and get customers back on board, but after an acquisition that didn’t get many cheers and a failed succession plan that got a lot of boos, he left and was replaced by former Motorola executive Mike Zafirovski. And a new CEO seems to require yet another restatement, this time for various contracts that were signed in 2003, 2004 and part of 2005. Why? Mike Z says it’s because the company is now applying more stringent rules to how it accounts for contracts. And guess what? He said he can’t say for sure that there won’t be more restatements or “adjustments” as they go through the rest of the deals from last year.

To continue with the horror-movie analogy — one that some Nortel investors might see as appropriate — let’s hope the company isn’t trying to create a 10-movie legacy like the Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street franchises. Investors have suffered enough already.

What started with a rumour last night – which Om Malik (among others) wrote about – has become fact: Google has acquired Writely.com, which provides something approaching an online version of Microsoft Word. Needless to say, this has revived talk about the much-rumoured Google “Web Office,” with Web apps that take the place of the different parts of Microsoft’s Office suite – the one that accounts for a fairly substantial proportion of the software giant’s revenue and profits, in case you’re keeping score at home.

Om has a nice graph that puts the issues into perspective, with Google’s Web-based versions of Word, Excel, mail and so on — all of which Microsoft charges almost $400 for. Google’s price? Zero. My friend and fellow M-list wagon-trainer Kent Newsome doesn’t think this model will scale, but it doesn’t really have to scale all that much before it becomes a threat to Microsoft. In effect, there is nowhere for the software behemoth to go but down in terms of market share. Yes, it’s true that not everyone wants to use Web-based apps, and there are issues with the reliability of free services such as Gmail.com (which has been down several times today and yesterday).

But at the same time, Writely and JotSpot Tracker (an Excel-style spreadsheet app) and presentation tools such as Thumbstacks.com are likely to be good enough for many people, and perhaps even small businesses – and as some smart person pointed out recently (if I remember who, I will insert it here) it isn’t always the people or services that are better than you that should concern you, it’s those that are good enough to draw your customers away.

For me, having used Writely.com to plan the Web 2.0 conference I’m helping to organize in Toronto this spring, Writely is definitely good enough. And if you combine it with something like Gdrive, then the relevance of Microsoft’s Office becomes less and less compelling.

Former Merrill Lynch and Oppenheimer analyst Henry Blodget of Internet Outsider – which is where Henry pretends to still be an analyst, even though his legal settlement with Eliot Spitzer prevents him from actually becoming one again – has posted a long rant about Google announcing a proposed settlement in a “click fraud” case. Among other things, he seems upset that the search company disseminated this info by posting something on the official Google blog. Here’s what he says:

“To make matters worse, the company released its “statement” about the settlement on its blog. A $90 million payout on a critical issue at the forefront of every Google observer’s mind… and the company has an anonymous associate general counsel type up an “update” on a freaking blog. Google needs some new PR people, and it needs them now.”

Anyone agree with that? I’m not sure I do. I may not believe that the traditional press release is dead, but I would agree with Steve Rubel that blogs are serving the same function for many companies – and rightly so. Why shouldn’t Google put out news by posting something to the blog? I assume the company is still complying with disclosure in other ways, such as filing to various securities-related newswires and so on. And smart reports for wire services are watching the Google blog and filing stories about what they put there.

Want to keep up with Google’s statements on something? Subscribe to their RSS feed. I’m not sure why Henry thinks this is such a huge deal, unless it’s that blogs are somehow a joke and “real” companies do things the old-fashioned way, by sending out press releases and email spam and so on. How is posting on a blog any different than putting a press release on your website? Plenty of companies do that and no one complains.

Update:

Henry has expanded on why this bothered him. Still don’t see it, Hank.