Wired Cola

Barcamp 2008 is happening at Granville Island. I'm there.

Vancouver Hacker Space: Somewhat hardware-oriented open hacking organization in East Van. Need to ask the speaker about the person in his organization who is looking to set up a techshop-type space.

David Ng, talking about . . . lots of stuff . . . I came in late, but Science Creative Quarterly looks hilarious. Oh, and Puzzle Fantastica looks cruel!

Hey Fred: Igor Faletski from Handi Mobility is talking about the mobile web! He says it's dead.

I think I know where he's going with this, and I agree, but I think Fred would suggest that walled gardens, erm, actually make money.

That said, I think we're about 2-3 years from the utter and total disappearance of WAP-type services and most walled gardens. Igor apparently agrees with me!

What Igor's really arguing against is the walled gardens and separate content. He appears to not, per se, be trashing mobile-oriented views, but he's adamant that the data behind the screen be common (in other words, Facebook should have an iPhone-optimized view, but not a separate facebook-type service for mobiles). I think that's something of a straw man at this point, but also ignores profitable organizations that have grown up on the mobile side, and may well be able to move to the web. If, that is, they ever need to?

Igor's company did m.translink.ca. 9000 texts per day are sent to Translink using their text-for-next-bus service.

Igor says that "Every second user [of m.translink] has an iPhone." That's a rather rapid rise to market dominance....

"Every fifth user of m.Translink is coming from a desktop." The big deal here is that there's features in the mobile version that the main website doesn't have.

"WAP is dead" (95% of mobile users are using HTML browsers).

Lunch: meat, cheese, apple. Met Peter van Garderen again, having last seen him at Barcamp 2006. He's still running Artefactual, which is cool.

Next session: RDF, describing microformats and semantic additions to the web. There's a Firefox plugin called Operator that exposes semantic data seamlessly. It's pretty cool!

As an aside, I think microformatting is much different from tagging, but I don't know if I can back that up. As another aside, it's interesting that the presenter is using Chrome for presentation, and Firefox to demonstrate the plugin. Nerd-types have really cottoned to the strength of Chrome as a not-crashy browser, but dang, Firefox plugins keep getting wilder and wilder. I still use Safari as my primary browser, but I'm about half a plugin away from needing to have Firefox running continuously just as part of my normal workflow.

Okay, back to the comments. Now we're hearing about "Media Reuse" from a founder of playtheweb.org, Rob Linton.

Media reuse faces two problems:

• technical issues of reusing media (I hear ya!)
• legal considerations (which amount to legal use is tricky and often hard to figure out)

So, we should build tools to do this, that solve both issues.