keynote: why we (still) love the web

my brain is almost full. luckily (?) I have a week away from work to let it all sink in, while I cut drywall and pound nails, etc.

I also have my fingers crossed that I’ll win something in the evaluation form drawing. 🙂

(hey, this multi-page thing for categories is totally broken. I’m sorry, I’ll try to figure it out this weekend.)

whoa…he’s a midget.

“people of the internets”

his early life online. dude, he must be right about my age. phish newsgroup. solving an argument about feeling earthquakes by using the net: usgs gopher/web site. on his slide: “I find my people” (precisely.)

possibility & constraint. the 5k. getting to the math part: 40,960 bits: random grid, 850 words of english, tiny picture of bridge at the huntington (!!!), powers of 2 (okay, weird stuff with hypercubes), 2^40960. more than the number of milliseconds since the big bang times the number of particles in the universe!!!!
ascii. hello: positions, binary, off/on switches.

html. layered with CSS/JS. only certain moves allowed, like chess.

what makes sense: natural language. what works. what is beautiful, in a platonic (excellent) sense.

“design is the successive application of contraints until only a unique product is left” — Richard Pew. (I’m reminded of my conversation with the artist of teeny-tiny watercolors last night.)

evolution, going from static to dynamic.

oh, hey he mentions my favorite explanation of contraints: poetry! over the 20th century artists have played with contraints.

a weird euphonia to a chunk from a book where each chapter only contains one vowel. (apparently, the “u” chapter doesn’t make a lot of sense.)

somewhat silly metaphors about creativity, I guess.

flickr group that is all images with circle in square, as a spontaneous choice for contraints. then the fibonacci spiral of square/circle photos. made by a programmer who sells them as posters for $4. limiting number that come from each individual: another constraint. (I’m tired enough, and have been typing enough, that I’m mistyping more.)

kids can’t not play, at least until 7-10 yrs, sometimes at the edge of pain, power relationships, or sexuality.

“play is the exultation of the possible” — Martin Buber

the web is our playground. (yes!) kinship with other people who know html. 🙂 but each of us can say ‘our’ and mean something different. oooh…cool image of social network.

back to the hypercube. we all occupy parts of that space (the web of a trillion dimensions)…with those connections. and that’s why we continue to love the web, even through the crash and all. Brad told him that the first WV was kinda depression, because it was right at the crash.

a wave of very intense emotion from him.

q: game neverending (?) — what happened to it? it went away, but elements of it went into flickr.

q: has college friends who are flickr addicts; do you have a sense of who is into it? UAE is apparently a big audience, like Brazil for [????]. wishing he was into golf for the social interaction, father playing bridge with people he wouldn’t just invite over to hang out. come for the photography, stay for the social relationships. a flickr marriage?! playful interface is addictive.

q: why beta? will the real version be totally awesome? at the beginning it was very different; only thing the same is the profile. stopped releasing stuff a couple of months ago because of stuff that had to happen with aquisition.

q (Molly): amazing in a year of killer apps — what do you do with flickr? hit photos for contacts page, like blogs where people emit what they want to and you can aggregate it all. better relationships, because he sees what’s going on with friends. lots of horsing around at work.

q: decision to open API? also has game neverending pedigree conceptually. realized that they had to be able to ask little questions from the server, so they had to build an API, and might as well release it. 20% of all traffic is api-based. (!) wanted people to be able to get pictures out of system, and didn’t have time to build export feature, same with other features they thought about. (some heckling re: a misspelled search term) cool, beautiful, interesting, never would’ve thought of in 10,000 years.

q: video? a good question, still figuring out the best way to do it.