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The Conference is really interesting, the rules is that everyone gives the speaker 10mins of time to present then you can jump in and ask a question or disagree with the speaker. Everyone has a microphone on their desk along with Electricity and Wired network if you can't bear the nice clean wireless network. This rule is good for speakers who are sometimes not making quite enough sense or stumbling on trivial elements.

Yochai Benkler gave a great talk raising the bar for the conference and using tons of examples from his book. David Clark followed up with end to end theory which was very heavy but most people could follow. Henry Tirri didn't really get a chance to finish his presentation because of the questions and general defending of the mobile of phones. Duncan Watts, gave a excellent presentation why Sociology matters for community. Michael Furdyk followed up with a social network for teenagers and the plan to inspire and Inform for teenagers. Andrew McAfee, focused on how light-touch technologies can add up to something special for enterprise companies too. Eric Miller, talked about the semantic web but in a form which made a lot sense and didn't once mention rules or owl. It went down well and although there were lots of questions, all seemed positive. Nicholas Carr finished off the day with his talk about the end of the local IT team. Actually he goes further that this and suggests that we will all have client machines and the applications will also exist in the cloud. Nicholas started off suggesting that the same thing happened to the electric company, Utility computing caused the questions and disagreements to come thick and fast. He never quite finished his talk but the debate carried on after the first day of the conference.

Day two kicked off at its early time of 8:30am on the dot with David Reed who talked about the tubeless internet. It started well with lots of references to the tubes but for a conference which was not about the plumbing but the services on top of it, it seemed very heavy and technical. Juha Christensen from Sonopia talked about virtual mobile operators and the benefits. The conference crowd wanted to know more about what was possible while Juha talked about the benefits to the end user. Bit of a mismatch, but a good talk neath less. Zimbiki who recently were bought by Yahoo, talked about the net in terms of mashups and the like. While David Prior went once step further by demystifying the term mashup by doing one live on stage which he felt everyone there could have done. He also released the source code for others to learn from. After lunch, Ross Button led a talk which was far too enterprise driven and full of heavyweight technology. If he had mentioned Soap, I would have had to stop him. Larry Peterson picked up where Ross had led the conference with a super stimulation called planetlab. Planetlab is a network for distributed visualisation. So instead of testing with tens of lan machines, you can test things like P2P systems using upwards from 600 real internet computers. Sean Scott almost brought everyone to tears with his efforts to find a cure for his mums rare disease using only a filemaker pro database and off the net technologies. The human aspect really came in well in his talk. Clay Shirky was frankly great as he made it clear that we can not forget layer 8, the human. Also demonstrated why you can't always turn human behavior into a 80:20, 100-10-1 rule. John Clippinger finished up the conference with a great talk about network and social identities. He uncovered two projects he's been working on. https://eclipse.org/higgins and https://www.cloudtripper.com.

The whole conference was simply amazing and the people in the conference crowd were very high ranking execs and seniors. Going to breakfast and dinner meant sitting next to the head of innovation at Ford, Pepsi's Director of Emerging Tech, Coke Cola's online strategy manager, etc, etc. The conference was tightly held together and well worth going to if you ever get an invite.