Tim O'Reilly starts off talking about maping and Geolocation as an emerging and developing idea that people are just starting to notice. He passed it onto John Hanke from Keyhole who is demonstrating their new mapping service (app?) that is satelite imagery based, photorealisitic and allows you to zoom into street level. Right now they are still growing but they are working on a 100 terrabyte map of the entire earth. The are using this in connection with transit athority traffic information as well as blog like posts from the users the fill in additional information. Looks incredibly cool.

Here is the MP3 file.

Technorati is tracking over 4.1 million blogs and has a median responce time of 7 minutes. That is, 7 minutes after someone blogs something, Technorati knows about it. It's about who is talking about what, and where they are linking however links don't mean truthfulness. Every 5 months the blogosphere is doubling and english is longer the majority, it's still used more than anything else on it's own, but less than 50% of the blogs are now in english. There's about 4 posts a second happening, and there's massive spikes durring some events - After the conventions there was a huge increase in blogs. Likewise with the Nick Berg beheading, the Dean scream, and the Kryptonite bike lock stories. All of these were massive stories and created lots of links, and lots of new blogs.

RSS - 31.2% of blogs have RSS feeds and only 28.2% of RSS feeds are full text feeds. (side note - I blogged about this the other day but I no longer subscribed to anything that doesn't provide a full text feed). The more people that link to you, the more chances you have an RSS feed and that it's full text - perhaps this is because people have more options of how to get your content.

Here's the MP3 of the session.

I've been ranting about Plazes which is a very cool geolocation foaf-type thingy. Since there's a lot of people here at WEB 2.0 and several hotspots in the building, this seems like it would be the perfect chance to test it out with a bunch of people. Sadly, only Jason DeFillippo and I are using it at the moment. So.. go sign up already!

Rael Dornfest (who is always interesting to listen to) moderates a panel with Russell Beattie, Jory Bell, Juha Christensen and Trip Hawkins about the state of the mobile web. Rael runs MobileWhack and never runs out of cool mobility issues to discuss. The first thing he's talking about is how things work differently in different parts of the world and why this group of people might have something interesting to say about it. Juha doesn't think there's any kind of a killer app, while Russell says it's more of a collection of apps that becomes killer. There's always a going to be two devices - Computers and Phones and it just depeneds on how much one acts like the other. Phones aren't really being used for "browsing" as much as they are for "searching" and the closer to browsing you get, the more computer like your device needs to be. One the fly searches however are great for phones with those capabilities. Taking a little bit of the web with you so to speak. Trip says the mobile phone is turning into a mobile social computer and while the carriers are focused on voice, they are like a gas station that is focusing on selling the gas, but their built in convenience store is realy part of the draw and will be the tail that wags the dog. He's also talking about how most people don't know how their phones work and aren't using much of the features, and carriers are worried about how adding more apps to this causes more problems. Russell is talking about SMS and that it's so successful (mostly outside of the US) because it's so painfully simple, his 65 year old grandmother in Spain knows how to use it because there's just one field, and one option (send). You have to try to not understand it. Rael is talking about the OSX app Quicksilver and how it's the same kind of thing, super simple UI that gives you only the option you need at that moment. Trip is talking about how computers in the shape of phones are much more prolific than the computers themselves and it's a disruptive technology.

Questions:
Elliot from TuCows asks if the multipule delivery methods will work, Trip says people just have to get used to it.

Jeff Jarvis asks about pod casting and asks about media and entertainment being delivered though these devices. Russell doesn't want to downplay pod casting as he thinks it's pretty cool but thinks that service is going to keep improoving and people will be able to stream the content they want on demand and won't be worrying about downloading the content beforehand.

The discussion leads to the point that there's way more phones being sold than iPods so as cool as they are, phones are still more out there and that will be the focus.

Here's an MP3 of part 1 session (20 mins), and here's one of part 2.

is up now talking about the trials and tribulations of archiving things online for ever, for free. Books, music, movies, videos, etc, anything they can get their hands on and that you want to give away, they are trying to provide a place for that, as well as dealing with the legalities involved because in the US giving things away is no problem until you do it online, then all the sudden everyone wants to sue you. So their are starting with things that are in the Public Domain, but it sounds like figuring that out for sure it kind of tricky.

Currently Joe Kraus is showing off Jot. It's a cool wiki-ish app that does the standard wiki stuff but also allows you to e-mail pages around and rank users (giving them specific access based on that). Additionally it lets you use forms and include structured info on the page. One thing that looks really cool is the ability to integrate RSS feeds and google searches and all kinds of feeds like that.

This seems to be the main competitor for Socialtext who happens to make some really great wikis.

Last night was pretty grim in the main room due to a serious lack of power, howerver that seemed to be because of the dinner and since that is over there's now powerstrips everwhere. No more throwing punches over who gets what plug. Funny enough most people seem to still be not using them and forgetting the #1 rule of using laptops at conferences.. ABC = Always Be Charging.

is hosting a party on the top floor and it's pretty much the usual after conference corporate party with drinks and music and schwag. However, this being hosted by Google also has what you see to the right - it's a constantly changing rotating globe showing where searches are coming from and in what language they are being made. It's completely mezmerizing. Well, I'm mezmerized at least.