Kim Polese at Web 2.0

Innovation is moving to a new layer. She's now running a company, SpikeSource, that makes software the way Ford built cars, the way Dell builds computers. It's a new breed of company, open source IT services. How do you take advantage of all the abundance you see in the open source world? They're building an automated system for assembling software.

Web 3.0 will be when any application you can conceive of can be built using open source components. Goodbye egosystem, hello ecosystem. The humble IT guy will lead us there — The Medici of Software.

Doc Searls is consulting on it, so you know it's gonna be good.

Lessig at Web 2.0

Free Culture came out about six months ago. A Forbes writer called him a moron, idiot, and a buffoon. This was a right to remix without permission that our culture guarantees, and the world of text knows this freedom well. Beyond text, "multi-media" (it's all one now, no more multi) democratized. Music (DJ Danger Mouse), Film (Tarnation), Animation (Hey Ya Charlie Brown, just awesome), political ads footage (My First Love, RLM, omigod! Can't find the link, someone please send it. Thanks Mike, via Jason).

Observation: Lessig could go on Def Poetry Jam in a heartbeat, his delivery is that artful and rhythmic.

Text heads (people who think of the world as text) are oblivious to the problem. Jack Valenti, on the other hand, sees this as a terrorist war, where many of the terrorists apparently are children. You do it with Shakespeare, it's creative writing. You do it with a George Lucas film, that's theft. Free culture becomes a lawyer's culture. Louis Daguerre, in 1839, produced the Daguerrotype. Later, Eastman was conceiving technology for Kodak. If the (D)aguerre (M)achine (C)ontrol (A)ct had required you to obtain permission before taking someone's picture, the world would be a drastically different place today.

Be sure to listen to this one (and Jason's right next to me on the right, some of those cackles you hear are yours truly). Standing ovation, Lessig Rocks!

Ding Dong INDUCE Is Dead?

John just made an announcement to that effect. [Update: he clarified shortly after that vigilance is necessary as long as Orrin Hatch draws breath.] I have the feeling Professor Lessig will have something to say about that in a moment, as Ernie Miller did last night: "[T]his is only a postponement. Expect the INDUCE Act to rear its ugly head once again, either during the lame duck session or next term."

The Information Legacy

Elliot Noss from Web 2.0 on Brewster Kahle: "the internet archive is such goodness." Click through to Elliot's post for Brewster's magic quote.

Web 2.0, Media Panel

Good coverage of IP, DRM, and all kinds of juicy issues, listen to the whole thing.

Martin Nisenholtz: "Journalism is largely about storytelling, and if it's going to touch you, it's going to do it based on emotion." But no matter how compelling a story, "We [the NY Times] have a massive UI problem. ... We want to expose this stuff by having the Web [i.e. bloggers] expose it. I don't think we can solve this UI problem on our own, the UI is the Web." Shelby Bonnie agrees, and wants to do more internally at CNET to break down the barriers between big journalism and the blogosphere. Martin and John debated whether bloggers report "news:" can you attend and participate in a school board meeting and "cover" it in a traditional journalistic sense? John's point: traditionally, editors had the role of ensuring the validity of the reporting, now (as Dan Gillmor has written) it's the readers.

Steve Gillmor asked about the implications of podcasting for their business models. Shelby: RSS is one of the great blessings of the last couple of years. Interestingly, in all the ensuing discussion no one on this panel mentioned seeing diverse/distributed/independent content creation as a threat.

Cory asked about TiVo and Replay. TiVo cooperated with Hollywood, while Replay got sued out of existence. Recently the studios tried (unsuccessfully) to block TiVo-to-Go. "You spent years playing ball with the studios and they still are dicking you over." Mike Ramsay sees the company as more on the consumer advocacy side, but sees working with Hollywood as just part of reality. Cory: "No one ever successfully gave the studios a say in their future." Mike had to disagree.