Tim O'Reilly at O'Reilly's P2P Conference, 2/14/01
Unstructured and unedited thoughts from the first morning of O'Reilly P2P Conference:
- There's a lot of excitement. Lots of hype (of the anti-hype variety). It's the first real P2P conference. Sold out show. Turning people away. There's was a guy camped out in the hallway at 4:00 AM who flew over last night from France. They turned him away (just kidding).
- "The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think." - Tim O'Reilly (paraphrasing someone else?)
- People look at you funny when you don't have that nylon thing around your badge. I didn't sneak in, really. I need to talk to the folks back at registration.
- There's a conceit here that these people and systems are destined to take over the world. They're probably right in one form or another. But I sense from some of them a lot of myopia. Myopia of the sort that discounts the factors of commercialization, marketing, packaging, usability and anything else besides who has the best technology. The kind of myopia that led certain people to think everyone would be running Linux on their desktop by now and that discounts Microsoft's success as having to do with anything other than evilness and unfair practices.
- "Napster is decentralized enough." - Clay Shirky
- "Decentralization is better as a tool than a goal." - Clay Shirky
- Clay Shirky is very smart.
- Won't developing a ubiquitous P2P application inevitably mean developing for Windows more than any other platform? I wonder how the Linux P2P geeks feel about this.
- Clay says, "When you can serve an HTML file from your PC as easily as you can serve a music file [from your PC, via Napster], then you've really accomplished something." My question: Why?
- Perhaps I'm too used to having fast connections and control over fixed servers to understand?
- I'm not sure what Richard Stallman said, but despite what Johnny Deep implied, according to my sources, Ben Franklin published Poor Richard's primarily to make money. He would not have been happy to have the readers copy and freely distribute it amongst themselves.
- Web content is the only type of content that is location-specific. This makes it hard to mesh with P2P systems. It's not like MP3 files that have no home. The home (URL) is important. It's what, in part, defines and identifies it. This may change, but not easily.
- Making lists in Blogger should be easier.
I'm seeing a more decentralized architecture in my/Blogger's future (which is, in part, why I'm here), but I haven't quite figured it out. Dave thinks he has with the Desktop Websites thing, which I've been meaning to comment on. I'm not so sure. I hope to have more insights over the next few days...