Two very interesting discussions:  open source VoIP technology, and Identity 2.0.

1.  Surj Patel talked about mergers of online applications with telephony.  Some examples:  amabuddy -- amazon over voice (great); dodgeball -- social app with hacked free sms; google sms -- over wireless voice next?, and more.  He predicts that software will get better and punks will start writing cgi scripts for their own phone-network applications.

Surj himself is building an open source linux cellphone.  It's made of inexpensive components.  He predicts he'll have a prototype in 3-4 weeks.

2.  Nivi introduced us to "email for voice":  slawesome.com.  He just put it up a week ago.  You can also use it to make podcasts.  He wants to take text and make it into interactive audio and video. 

3.  Brian McConnell talked about providing on-demand access to any audio resource, using Asterisk as the telephone part.  He's created a telecast system.  Call 415-368-3022.  You'll hear an English radio station that's coming from somewhere in Switzerland.

4.  Blaine Cook talked about the slowness of the telephone companies.  For example, someone discovered that TMobile voicemail uses caller-ID for authentication, and caller-ID can be spoofed.  TMobile offered to hire the person who pointed this out (but TMobile didn't fix the problem).  Everything can be spoofed -- ANI databases (central to E911) -- and so the rules by which the telephone network works are crumbling.

Last year during the Republican National Convention, Blaine and his colleagues did radio streaming so people with cell phones could listen to radio news.  They did text-to-speech, so that people could get voice messages about what was happening.  Same during the election -- working with four people for 20 days, they built a system that allowed a voicemail message to be delivered to 10,000 people in 20 minutes.

2.  Identity 2.0:  Dick Hardt gave his celebrated presentation.  His view is that Sxip will be widely adopted because it's simple, clear, open, and allows claim-based mechanisms to determine identity.  He said that talking about identity now is like talking about the net in 1993 -- everyone needs really basic information to grasp the concept.

Brian Fitzgerald talked about OpenID, and a lively conversation ensued.

It's very hard to blog this conference -- there are so many things going on at once, and everything is interesting.

After lunch (waaaay over my head) (not the food, the conversation), I went to hear what O'Reilly is up to in terms of new book publishing techniques.

Rael Dornfest did a very zippy demo of Aardvark (not available online), which is a combination of a wiki and a blog for authors and publishers that exports to formats for publishing.  You can write your book in the right format, with everything beautifully tagged, and your readers can read it chapter by chapter.  The point is that everything is becoming atomized online, so let's publish in an atomized way as well.  Very interesting.

1.  Howard Rheingold is working hard on pulling together information about collaboration and cooperation across many disciplines.  He's been teaching a course at Stanford, and wants to do a book. 

2.  Jonathan Aquino talks about yubnub.  He says it's a command line operating system.  Yubnub makes it possible to save web sequences (sequences of web pages) as an arbitrary word.  Then you can run these sequences (either by going to yubnub or by using a yubnub plugin).  So, for example, people have created commands to find a pizza place in a particular locality, using Google local. Or commands to find scholarly papers, using Google scholar.  Yubnub harnesses the power of traditional command line syntax for the web. 

Someone suggests that he find a way to allow web services to be invoked in the command line.  Someone else says that it might make more sense for yubnub to be the library, and to have all the commands run at the client. Someone builds a new command that invokes split-screen web search results (from Yahoo! and Google) during the session.

3.  I dropped into O'Reilly's Web 2.0 meme mapping.  He's having the crowd list what's different about the new web.  People are talking about cost-effective scalability, collective intelligence, components, data ownership remixing, addressable data, differences in how products are built.  It's a lively discussion.

4.  Scott Gray (ex-LearningLab) has a couple of things to talk about.  (I'm sure he has many things to talk about -- he's irrepressible and superlative by nature.)  First, he wants to tell us about what he thinks is the BEST TECHNOLOGY EVER. 

What is it?  It's using spectrum that we have trouble generating (terahertz gap spectrum, between microwave and infra red) that can bounce through materials safely and tell us what's inside.  He's telling us that organic materials resonate at these frequencies.  So you can point a reader (a tricorder) at yourself and see whether you have cancer, or a virus, or you can point at a road and see whether there's a bomb buried there.  The detector technology for this spectrum is very advanced, but it's expensive and difficult (right now) to generate the waves.  There's a company that is working hard on this, and Scott thinks there's a huge future here.

He notes that Star Trek gave us the communicator, and Get Smart the slamming doors -- this will be a Star Trek device that we'll carry around.

Then he switches gears and talks about online education.  He's into training people how to program by putting a lot of effort into technology (so they have a live terminal view of their environment) and not that much into teachers.  Teachers can be coaches, answering queued-up questions.  Students can be exploring, education can be cheap, and it can all be constructive.  No simulations, no self-grading, and lots of interaction between teacher and student.  No one-sided lectures (he got some reaction here from people who pointed out that we got interested in his first topic because he told us about the Star Trek link; context and scaffolding helps).  He's working hard on how to  educate asynchronously.

It's an enormous group.  98% build things, invent things, do things.  Then there are a few of us who just write things.  David Weinberger captured the sense of the introductions here.  I'll try to blog sessions tomorrow - but it's likely to be hard due to all the activity.

So far, I've had some great talks about 3D printers (in 20 years, we'll all have printers in our homes, like dishwashers, that will print out new cellphones, new stuff we need), online identity formation, opening a university in a virtual world, and aggregating event data from all over the world.  What I'm interested in finding out is how realistic new forms of online connection are, and hearing  about great new things.