Last week Molly and I were in San Diego for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, where Molly and Michael Kieslinger's did a highly-lauded Fluidtime presentation. I'm sure it's been overblogged and superwikied, so I won't belabor the details, but I did have a couple of observations of the trends I noticed in the conference, which could be trends in emerging tech, or maybe just this group.
That last concern apart, it was a great conference, if only for all the hanging out in the lobby bar. I think having it in San Diego, away from the Bay Area where people felt comfortable and could leave at night, was a good one. It made everyone stew in the same juices for a couple of days and although I'm now exhausted from all the socializing, it was well worth it. I will now know to prepare for any conference that has lots of social network and mobile technology participants: the combination of highly social people with lots of cutting-edge mobile technology in a town that no one really knows means dinnertime decisionmaking paralysis on a scale like never before.
Oh, one last random thought I had there, which mixes scientific metaphors in an attempt to explain Howard Dean's success and subsequent failure: it was because of a combination of first mover advantage amplified by a highly networked environment (the media). It seems analagous to a forest fire in August. A spark in a fuel-rich system that has no inherent controls, it reacts strongly, but the strength of that reaction can distort any examination of the underlying landscape. When the initial fuel burns away, it reveals the layer beneath it, which may or may not be able to support further growth.
Posted by mikek at February 15, 2004 09:33 PM | TrackBackJust to play devil's advocate regarding your Howard Dean explanation -- does that mean he started too early?
Posted by: Ray at February 17, 2004 11:31 AMNo, I don't think that Dean started too early it's just that people expected that the amount of online discussion to be proportional to the amount of support in the population at large, forgetting that bloggers, journalists, the delegates and the electorate are very different populations, with very different desires and loyalties. Now we may be experiencing a backlash against that with an anti-Dean movement, as people try to compensate for their embarassing early support of Dean with an equally rash abandoning of him, but I think that there's a much better understanding of the underlying shape than there was when it was just an online campaign.
Posted by: Mike at February 17, 2004 02:08 PM