Where Real, Cyber Worlds Collide

Leander Kahney Email 04.25.03

SANTA CLARA, California -- Although the speakers and attendees are gathered here in Silicon Valley, much of the real action at this week's O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference is happening in cyberspace.

During the first two days of the gathering, where pundits and technologists swap ideas about the future of all things digital, most of the 800-plus attendees spent their time huddled over their laptops. The exhibition space is rigged with a pervasive Wi-Fi network, which allows attendees to be in constant electronic communication with each other, and with the outside world.

During most talks, a strange, soft sound like rain on glass can be heard. It's not rain, but fingers on laptop keyboards, furiously blogging away.

The Guardian's Jack Schofield says most of the attendees are authors, journalists, bloggers or all three, and that most of the talks are the subject of at least 30 real-time blog reports.

Such connectedness was fitting, given the subject matter at hand.

Clay Shirky, a noted Internet pundit, said in a Thursday morning keynote that the melding of real and cyberworlds is the future of "social software," a major theme at the conference.

Shirky said lately it was rare for him to attend a meeting that didn't include a cyberspace component. Attendees used IM or WiKis to share information like contacts, Web addresses or PowerPoint presentations.

"People are meeting face-to-face and online at the same time," he said. "(The online arena) acts as a shared memory of the meeting. No meeting is complete unless there's an online component at the same time."

Attendees are also constantly chattering via instant message or IRC. Rael Dornfest, the conference chair, is using an IRC channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/etcon) to quickly locate wayward attendees. Dornfest simply asks everyone the IRC channel where so-and-so is, and someone usually responds in seconds that so-and-so is sitting in front of her.

Dornfest uses IRC for speed and convenience, but he just as easily uses a couple of virtual meeting tools -- Intro and Confab -- that debuted at the conference.

Macromedia created Intro to find people at the conference with similar interests. Attendees provide information about their interests, and the software matches people of like mind, showing their location and interests, allowing them to communicate through instant message.

Stewart Butterfield, founder of Ludicorp, whipped up Confab especially for the conference. Confab, a virtual meeting place, is the cyberspace corollary of the real-world conference.

The software presents a map of the conference hotel, allowing attendees to find each other's locations in the real world (as long as they are online) and send each other instant messages. Using it, people discuss talks as they happen, make contacts and plan face-to-face meetings.

Although Butterfield created this "panopticon"-like software, he was surprised by the melding of online and offline interaction at the conference.

One evening, Butterfield went to the bar to use the wireless network and have a drink. A group of people were sitting around with their laptops, drinking. Every now and then someone laughed or answered an unspoken question. Butterfield realized they were communicating online.

Attendees are also collaborating on conference reports. On Wednesday, half-a-dozen people worked on a report of one of the talks as it was happening, using Hydra, a collaborative editing tool.

"The idea of collaborative editing has been researched for years, with notable results," wrote Jason Kottke, a well-known blogger who contributed to the real-time report. "But now for the first time it has been implemented in a way you actually want to use."

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