Vloggercon 2006 Wrap-up
Thursday, June 22, 2006
The weekend before last was Vloggercon in San Francisco. For those not in the know, a vlogger is a video-blogger. The convention was held at the Swedish American Hall in the Castro, a short bike ride or 20 minute walk from my house. Tickets were sold out about a week before the show, so I was the only member of burntwire.tv (my experimental video podcast collective) to attend. Some of the awesome peeps i met or ran into again include: Ryanne Hodson, Michael Verdi, Josh Wolf, Irina Slutsky, Steve Garfield, Zulma, Mary Ann and many more. For the $50 I spent to get in, this event was definitely worth it. For those who did not get their tickets on time, there was a video webcast and an IRC backchannel for the show (freenode/#vloggercon). Ryanne is prepping all of the video for an online archive that anyone will be able to access. Unlike so many of the enterprise-oriented-business-suit conferences out there, this is an open conference that anyone can contribute to. Vloggercon attendees are still uploading photos, videos and blog posts about the event. You can search for these by the tag "vloggercon2006" on Flickr, mefeedia, blip.tv, technorati and fireant.
Overall, I was very impressed with the conference. Some people had complaints about the noise overflow, but the internet video streams, wiki and IRC room were very useful to both attendees and remote participants. The sessions varied somewhat from the technical to the political, but the best two in my opinion were Net Neutrality and Brainstorming the Future.
The net neutrality debate was inevitably one-sided with this crowd. It seems pretty obvious that nobody at the conference is happy with what the bells are trying to do with our internet. AT&T and Verizon would like to compete with the cable companies for video content delivery. Seems fair, (they own the fiber) but unfortunately they want to split the internet into two tiers (fast lane, slow lane) to do this.
Currently, every bit of information on the internet is treated equally by the switches and routers and trunks that are the backbone of the net. We call this "net neutrality". If it were not for net neutrality, the internet never would have been able to flourish as it has. The dotcom boom never would have happened. But it did - and now apparently, they are tired of us using their fiber at our own discretion. If the bells get their way, they will (IMHO) ruin the open model of the internet.
The bells want to jump into the video franchising business without any checks and balances from local government and they have the money to lobby their position. I think for now, that they should have to jump through just as many hoops. Almost everyone at vloggercon produces their own content. Vloggers are only one of the groups which stand to lose their voice if the bells get their way. We need big companies like google and yahoo to stand up for us now. They should either match the lobbying dollars or ramp up their involvement in becoming ISP's.
I'll see you next year at Vloggercon.
Overall, I was very impressed with the conference. Some people had complaints about the noise overflow, but the internet video streams, wiki and IRC room were very useful to both attendees and remote participants. The sessions varied somewhat from the technical to the political, but the best two in my opinion were Net Neutrality and Brainstorming the Future.
The net neutrality debate was inevitably one-sided with this crowd. It seems pretty obvious that nobody at the conference is happy with what the bells are trying to do with our internet. AT&T and Verizon would like to compete with the cable companies for video content delivery. Seems fair, (they own the fiber) but unfortunately they want to split the internet into two tiers (fast lane, slow lane) to do this.
Currently, every bit of information on the internet is treated equally by the switches and routers and trunks that are the backbone of the net. We call this "net neutrality". If it were not for net neutrality, the internet never would have been able to flourish as it has. The dotcom boom never would have happened. But it did - and now apparently, they are tired of us using their fiber at our own discretion. If the bells get their way, they will (IMHO) ruin the open model of the internet.
The bells want to jump into the video franchising business without any checks and balances from local government and they have the money to lobby their position. I think for now, that they should have to jump through just as many hoops. Almost everyone at vloggercon produces their own content. Vloggers are only one of the groups which stand to lose their voice if the bells get their way. We need big companies like google and yahoo to stand up for us now. They should either match the lobbying dollars or ramp up their involvement in becoming ISP's.
I'll see you next year at Vloggercon.
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