pdf conference: fcc commish hits a dipping point

About 8 minutes into FCC commissioner's Jonathan Adelstein's speech here at PDF, 10-20 audience members shifted in their scattered seats, stood up, and left to turn to other matters - like perhaps Dasani water.

His combination of dryness, truisms we all know about, working for the Man and a really, really bad opening joke left everyone unimpressed. And what was remarkable was how it "tipped" so suddenly. Like the room breathed a sigh of disappointment then turned its energy elsewhere.

I can't blame them, but it is too bad. There's nothing wrong with the chance to hear a government official say "Let's get the data out there. Let's not be afraid what the public thinks."

The collective downturn was probably pushed along by the twitter back-chat, where digital tools make the group's take on its own experience more palpable to the group. To quote one twitterer: Buzzword buzzword bland corporate-speak buzzword. FCC commish = FAIL.

tags: pdf2008

pdf conference: edwards remote and savvy

After flight cancellations barred her realspace attendance, Elizabeth Edwards is appearing right now at PDF for her conversation with Andrew Rasiej on the role of the Internet in the campaigns, in media, and in culture.

She is wonderfully pithy - smooth even, though in a very genuine seeming way - on these topics.

On the latest Pew stat that 50% of Americans get political information online, she was skeptical. Getting your news from CNN.com, she said, "is not getting your information from the Internet."

She's surprised that after the success of the 2004 "swift boat" attacks - as much as she "despised" it - that there haven't been more similar uses of the web to get a message out.

Andrew asked if she thinks presidential candidates themselves actually gets the Internet and its potential, or if it's still seen as "mostly a spigot." Her answer, "... mostly a spigot, but because it's such an effective spigot, they're beginning to see it in other ways."

But she says change comes slowly. "After Bill Clinton," she joked with dazzling ease, "we still had Eliot Spitzer. Politicians are not as easy to train as we'd like them to be."

UPDATE: It got even a little cooler moments later ...

This post brought to you via Skype, Blackberry camera, Eudora, Mac Preview, and MovableType


tags: pdf2008

pdf conference: women who tech

The Women Who Tech here at PDF 2008, creating a space where there wasn't one.

tags: pdf2008

pdf conference: it's crowded here

tags: pdf2008

pdf conference: visiblizations

Presenting a series of a series of vivid, usable tools for visualizing the blogosphere, Matthew Hurst of Microsoft Live Labs said you can "induce" a social network once you begin to see the links and spheres of influence. This work is a timely evolution from the research and awesome visualtion of usegroups done by Marc Smith and Microsoft's Netscan project.

The possibilities are great once you can effectively tracking not only links, but impact across that virtual community. Writing about blogs and deliberation for the Kettering Foundation in 2004 (pdf file), I said that the blogosphere was not "deliberative" by the academics' definition, but that in the exchange and propagation of ideas across the web, we could envision a "proximity deliberation" as ideas encountered each other, built off shared reference points and reformulated opinions after these encounters.

The measurements that Hurst is doing begin to make these deliberative encounters less proximal and more palpable. If we can "induce" a social network, then we can begin to reveal it to itself and offer it actionable ways to act like a network.

tags: pdf2008