ETech - Third day thoughts

Remix preso was excellent. It should have been the opening keynote. It would have introduced the notion of "remixing" much better than in Rael Dornfest's opening talk. Notes here.

Yet another BBC talk. Today's preso was on how the BBC was working on opening _all_ their content to public use under Creative Commons. All you see is big ass media companies in the states blocking any sort of remixing use of media. Those Brits are really forward looking. I used to think the BBC was some big stodgy company--not any longer. Notes here.

I had a flash back moment to 90's Internet crazyness. Evan Odeo (founder of Blogger, sold to Google) was presenting his new startup. If you hit the website, there's nothing up yet. But for folks at the session he gave a tour of the site and it's features. People were snapping away with their digital cameras and phones like there was some big, big, big idea there. People, it's just podcasting. I like podcasting, but come on, we're not talking Netscape in 1995. On another note, goes to show that ideas aren't that original. See my old personal NPR idea. Notes here.

The Bloglines session could easily justify the entire cost of ETech for those looking to start up a new web based company. Maybe not for tech heads but for more business oriented folks like me, it was invaluable information for being able to talk intelligently with software engineers you're working with to build your website. Another interesting thing about this session was how it contrasted "building web apps" given by 37Signals. SDE versus a designer's perspective. Imagine what either of these to folks' apps would look like if they teamed up? Probably increadible. Notes here.

The author or The Long Tail made a an interesting insight (he's still researching). That's the notion that the long tail is really made of millions of small tails. What's a small tail? Take a sub genre of something like Punk in music. It could have it's very own long tail. There should be a few top selling Punk titles that make a bulk of purchases but many more in the tail that together make up a big amount of purchasing. You can apply this to really any sub or sub-sub genre in Google. Seems to make a lot of sense to me. Notes here.