DivaBlog

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/DaneseCooper and my new blog at http://danesecooper.blogs.com/divablog

On the last day at eTech we were treated to the incomparable Larry Lessig speaking about the Future of Culture. He'll be at OSBC in early April doing a whole hour, and I highly recommend listening to him.

Also yesterday was also the "LifeHacks" talk. Cory Doctorow took better notes than I did. These guys are interested in helping make people more productive, and the talk focused on all the distractions that can come with some of the new technologies. I found myself disagreeing with much of their advice, however (although they did have some cool sites to talk about like 43 Folders) . Call me a weirdo, but I actually like having more than one thing going in my brain at a time. I am often seen knitting at conferences because it helps me listen for instance. So I have little friction from "context switching" on the computer or in my life (although increasingly my husband would take issue with that characterization). Okay, maybe I do need to focus more...:-)

Last (but not least), my pal Chris DiBona was there to launch the new Google open source site ! Chris and others have been working really hard on this for awhile and its so good to see it up and running. Open Source is just bustin' out all over the place :-)

And before I wrap up my notes on eTech 2005, I must commend my very good friend Duncan Davidson for his outstanding photo coverage of the event. It was so much fun watching him work (and checking the photostream to see what he'd captured). Hope he does a repeat in future!

But the absolute high point of Duncan's participation at this eTech (to my mind anyway) was his question to Larry Lessig. Duncan has been studying up on Creative Common's Licensing and he wanted to know whether they would develop a license that only grants rights to creative content to licensees who modify that content...except Duncan had a more shall we say graphic way to express it (and Larry's first response, "...I don't think I've ever heard it said quite that way...and if people choose to, ahem, do that with your content...that would be an interesting way to enforce remixing, yes..."). Duncan's an original all right :-)

And as long as Creative Commons is coming up, congrats are in order to the very cool Paula LeDieu who has evidently snagged the Executive Director job there. She'll continue to work for the BBC part time on the Creative Archive project that she has been directing for the last couple of years, which is a very good thin for them as well. Go Paula!