Live from Banff
I am delightedly in over my head. At the opening reception, I found myself talking with Roland Tanglao, one of the presenters at Blogs n Dogs. He was holding an odd little gadget which he identified as an iriver, by which he began recording the ensuing conversation with myself and two other Blog-n-Doggers, the editor of a materials management magazine from Boston, and a Vancouver pod-caster. Roland monitored the audio with an ear bud and held the iriver close to whoever was speaking. It may end up on his web site, Dogma Radio, along with other informal discussions on technical subjects.
At the other end of the room, Kris Krug and Sarah Pullman of Vancouver were recording a podcast onto an Apple laptop computer. Kris is one of the presenters, a cofounder of company "that uses open-source Drupal to supply Web designers and developers with community and content management tools," according to the program bios. Like I said, I'm in over my head. But back here in my room I did find the podcast that Kris and Sarah made tonight, as well as the web site of Eric Rice, another wizard presenter who was shooting videos at the reception that will no doubt end up at his site. I wasn't able to open the video Eric shot earlier today here in Banff, because I don't (yet) have an iPod video player. The real cost of this trip to Banff is likely to be the wish list of gadgets which I will leave here coveting.
Most of the folks here are so comfortable in the emerging new world of Web technology, which they refer to in shorthand as Web 2.0, that their conversation is filled with language and developments which I can only try to remember later and look up and learn about. Web 2.0 itself is a term that I heard mentioned numerous times, and when I asked Roland what it meant, during his taped interview, it was as if someone had asked what snow meant at an Inuit convention. Roland may edit that part out. I've heard of Flickr but don't know much about this free photo storage website that everyone here seems to use. My trusty Blogger site is patronizingly referred to as the one that everyone started with before they moved on to more sophisticated blogging tools that will be discussed, I hope, during the rest of the conference.
So my head is happily spinning with the wired energy of the mainly Vancouver-based cyber-gang gathered here at the Banff Centre. I will need to chill with some Henri Salvador crooning in French on my Nano, if I'm to have any hope for a full night of sleep.
Tags: blogsndogs
Sunday, December 04, 2005
