A slice of foo

2003-10-12T13:58:00Z

Foo Camp Yogi Bera: You can observe a lot by watching.

Tim Bray: Foo Camp Notes captures a bit of the diversity that is present at Foo Camp. What follows below is an attempt to impose coherence on a slice of this diversity.

Raffi Krikorian: Let me start by ssh'ing into my Tivo back in Cambridge... This is the way that Raffi began his talk at Foo Camp. This statement did not appear to be designed as an attention getter, this was simply a casual and everyday occurance. For Raffi, that is. For me, it was mind blowing. Sure, I knew at a certain cerebral level that such things should be possible, but at a gut level, it didn't occur to me that this could be so routine. Not yet, at least.
Bram Cohen gave a talk on the technical and legal aspects of BitTorrent - a product which enables allows large number of people to simultaneously download large files. I was already familiar with this product as I've downloaded CDs worth of Linux distributions with it. This talk actually came before Raffi's, but something clicked when you combine the two - Brian Behlendorf was at the same two presentations at at the end of Raffi's, he leaned over to me and said that he wanted to be able to get content for his Tivo via BitTorrent. As soon as he said it, it just felt right.
Beth Goza is definitely a gadget junkie. One of the cool toys she showed off was an Archos AV320 Video Recorder. "You can now enjoy anywhere 40 hours of near-DVD quality MPEG-4 video with MP3 sound.". The AV340 has a twice as much storage. The Sony CLIÉ had a smaller form factor.

Raising this up several meta-levels: a couple hundred people descended on FOO simply for the opportunity to collaborate and share. Most of the people present I didn't know two years ago (before I started blogging). Most of them didn't know me then either.

Now we know each other and collaborate via shared published content. Increasingly, this will be visual. People will be able to effortlessly capture what they see and share it with friends and family. The recipients can time shift this content as they see fit.

The limits are no longer technological. Many of the products cited above had built in limitations that are intended to either benefit the producer of the product or the producer of content for the product. This will ultimately be self defeating. People that produce interesting content and share it liberally will enjoy a wider audience than those that only do one or the other.

William Gibson: The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet. This is one of Tim O'Reilly's favorite quotes. Never was the point more forcefully driven home to me than here at FOO.