I’m going to try and record rough notes as they happen – I’ll refine at the end of the day I hope.

Tim O’Reilly’s Keynote
Hackers beat entrepreneurs every time.
Hackers create magic – in the Arthur C. Clarke, sufficiently-advanced-technology send of the word.

What are the bigger patterns in the magic being wrought? How is networking changing our world.

First shift -> a generation of creators who assume that the Internet is the platform as default. This was the fundamental lesson of napsters, over MP3.com. MP3.com had big server farm and said “We have all the songs”; whereas Shaun Fanning said “Why do I need to have all the songs? my friends have all the songs, the netcloud has all the songs…”

Second shift -> “ask forgiveness not pemission” -> reverse engineering of web sites, extract what you want and discard the rest: “the URL is seen as a primative but powerful command-line”. This turns Db-powered websites into software components. As the web becomes more systematised, then it turns into a more and more powerful data-source for applications.

The critical breakthough pattern of the PC-centric era, was to see Windows as Marc Andreesen derogatorily put it “just a bag of drivers”.

We’re getting to the stage where the “bag of drivers” for the Internet-as-operating-system.

Ray Kurzweil – Study trend-analysis so that you know your inventions will make snese in the world where you finish your project, rather than the world where you start your project.

Trends: Unix: loosely-coupled architecture, simple rules based and biased towards communication. Analogous to the architecture of the internet.

However – an architecture of control is being built upon the internet.

“Control points naturally emerge out of even the most radically decentralised structure…”

While the Internet is an architecture of particpation, not permission, we are moving through a phase of evolutionary systemisation. We have to work hard to maintain the network’s participatory nature.

“SOme architectures are more particpatory than others”

Cf. Natalie Jeremienko. Need to mak simple rules for particaption, that let people keep joining the party, and make sure that the endpoints are still where the play is.

Simple rules: John Postel – “be rigourous in what you send out, be liberal in what you accept in”

How do foward-looking businesses adapt? Win/Win to supply refined web services? People are going to brute force your stuff anyway, so work with that audience to refine and cut out the inefficiencies. There is a fundamental oppotunity to move from being a website to being a supplier of network components. Powerful exmaple waiting to happen = MapQuest.

Examin business model in context of tech. trends – back to Kurzweil quote. How can your company be a citizen of a collaborative network???