Site seeing

This is a selective list of the folks/readings that really impressed me during the Media Center’s Emerging Technology, Business and Policy for Senior Executives conference in Palo Alto this week. I tried to distill it down from everything that was presented to the items most worth checking out (from my admittedly biased perspective):

“All Social Networking Panels are the Same,” David’ Hornik’s post on VenturaBlog. Hornik, a strange cross between Neal Fondren and Buddy Hackett, was one of the most amusing speakers at the conference.

Esme de Guzman Vos’ blog on municipal wireless and broadband projects. She was one of the better, thought provoking speakers there she’s an advocate of Hot Topic Publishing.

Grouper: This software lets you set up a closed peer to peer network. As I started thinking about it, the potential for newspapers really bubbled up. For instance, what if 21 daily papers used this to share sound clips, video, pictures and stories? What if you expanded it beyond the 30-user limit it currently has and created a peer-to-peer news service with it, giving each participant the ability to upload and download news and information for use on their respective websites. This could completely disrupt something like, say, the Associated Press …

The Long Tail: Chris Anderson’s seminal Wired magazine piece that identifies and explains the long tail.

The Long Tail – the blog Chris Anderson is using to collect his thoughts and do research on his upcoming book about The Long Tail.

Dan Gillmor’s blog: Dan is a former business columnist for the San Jose Mercury News who also wrote We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People, a seminal work on user-generated content. Dan spoke during dinner one night, and while I really admire his work, I’m not completely sold on his seemingly absolute belief in user-generated content and the inherent evil of “corporate” journalism.

Rojo, “a web-based service dedicated to helping Internet users efficiently manage online content and information flow.” This is a Beta product, but there was some buzz about how great it is. I made a note to myself to check it out …

Yelp.com, a recommendation-based local search engine. You create a profile and look for recommendations within affinity groups that you belong to.

ANT – RSS reader for videoblogs.

iPodderX – RSS reader for Podcasts.

PubSub. According to the vendor’s hype, “PubSub will dominate the Internet in the next 10 years.” Yes, and the Cuecat was “the biggest computer innovation since the mouse.” Might be best to wait to see if PubSub is all that, but the idea is intriguing if not terribly unique. This really is a sort of AdRover for the Blogsphere. Type in your search terms and get a notification when some blogger somewhere posts a match. Interesting.

del.icio.us – This is “a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.”

Flickr and mappr – Flickr is photo sharing software with an open API, which allows Mappr to use it to create “an interactive environment for exploring place, based on the photos you take.”

Wikipes – A wikipedia approach to recipes, a “global cookbook.”

Feedster jobs: An RSS approach to job searching that Feedster offers. Feedster CEO Scott Rafer says 5,500 job listings are being added each day via RSS. If anything, though, this might show some of the limitations of RSS, which often was extolled as the Internet’s holy grail during the conference. Compare Feedster’s jobs to something like Indeed.com, which spiders every job it can lay it’s nasty little spider legs on. The results are much deeper at Indeed.com.