In his blog on PBS.org, Mark Glaser writes about the recent Wall Street Journal D All Things Digital conference — a premium-priced conference for high flyers on, well, all things digital. Glaser’s blog post is an easy, breezy read with some ironic takeaways:
1. Live blogging was prohibited, he writes, because organizers feared it would create reason for more people to choose not to attend.
2. Video-taping was prohibited, which is a pretty standard rule at such events, even though the gifts given to paid attendees included a Flip HD video camera — which is so small and easy to use it practically begs you to take videos wherever you’re not allowed.
3. The founders of Twitter spoke but, according to Glaser, didn’t have anything to say. Is anyone surprised by that? I’m sure if they’d had a window of 12 seconds (the visual equivalent of 140 characters) they would have seemed pithy and brilliant.
Not ironic, but certainly important, is the recognition that the progress of the WWW has moved from its first generation of on-demand information, through its second iteration of social and participatory applications, into the third generation of data clouds and on-demand applications