A Day at OpenTech

I spent my Saturday at the OpenTech conference in London and it was a day well spent. I do have to learn to go and listen to new things though, although talks from Tom Morris (who I later met for the first time), Simon Willison and Gavin Bell were interesting, those were subjects I already knew about or were aware about to a fair degree. What did strike me however were some of the last sessions by Tom Loosemore and Chris Jackson.

Between them they told stories which included building a peer-to-peer TV network for persisted content, and a project to become 'the DNS for media'. I've always had an interest in home entertainment, and these talks made my eyes light up. I'm really pleased to see that Tom has posted his presentation.

Tom's 'impossibox' was capable of storing 1TBs worth of media data, roughly a months worth. If that were to be networked in a P2P fashion, you could have months of recorded TV, redundantly stored in every house on your street. I think this plays into the networks hands here as well. This isn't real time data and can be sync'd, or you can download a program or series at the networks leisure without breaking net neutrality. Throw in, if there were 100 such networked boxes with a mile's radius, chances are you could take care of the P2P sharing at the local exchange so you wouldn't even need to push large amounts of data all over the place.

Although this future is a 'slightly bonkers' version, it sparks the imagination. Just think of the social networking benefits of being able to capture this data, see friends recommendations, read comments, video mashups, trailers, directors (or other users) commentaries. So much potential.

Great talk.

Social Networks and Inner Dialogs

"With Britain home to four million blogs, the inner monologue is in peril. But when everything is made public, something is lost" - Marina Hyde

Amazing! That comment and the rest of the article made me question why I even write blog posts in the first place. Yet, I'm still here, typing away. The part about the inner dialog makes me think about one of JDs daydreams from Scrubs (yes, I love that show). It all got me thinking, there certainly is a lot of information on the superhighway, and it's becoming more and more important how we filter that as more and more people have a voice and use it. I've certainly seen some complete gibberish on some of the social networks out there, along with the many blogs.

Does your inner dialog feel repressed in todays world? I certainly find myself talking/thinking to myself as much as any other time. Except now I think about how I can turn it into a blog post lol.