Notes from Gnomedex: Dave Winer – Keynote

Notes from Mr. Winer’s keynote, the first of the day, at Gnomedex. (tag: Gnomedex).

• Somebody keeps yelling Freebird.
• A chorus of cheers pours down from the cheap seats.
• Uses the term ‘podcastosphere’.
• He wants to have an ‘unconference’-style keynote.
• The Internet is the platform without the platform vendor–nobody gets to be the platform vendor (none of Yahoo or eBay or Amazon created HTTP or SMTP).
• What a surprise–Marc Canter has something to say.
• The Internet continues to disrupt, despite influence from enormous companies like Microsoft.
• Dave McClure – Companies are waking up that there’s competition due to this platform neutrality.
• Doesn’t think the W3C was effective. The Web hasn’t changed much–it hasn’t evolved. Web developers routed around them.
• He’s currently demo’ing how he blogs. Thus far, it’s not all that interesting. I’m not particularly excited about editing OPML files.
• Oddly, he started demo’ing a tool (or toolset) without actually introducing what it was. I asked, and it turns out it’s an OPML Editor.
• In timely information, the relationships between bits are the most important e.g. Wikipedia.
• He’s rather rudely skewering some poor bastard.
• This was mostly a beta demo of a new open-source product, as opposed to a traditional keynote. That’s okay, but I’d rather hear something a little more philosophical.
• The session ended up, unbelievably, with a group song — “Yellow Submarine”.