On the Net: The SXSW festival online
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The South by Southwest music festival is spreading through online broadcasts and downloadable podcasts.
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Travel: Benji Lanyado sifts the web for the cream of Europe's capital of culture: music, art, exhibitions and, er, fry-ups
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A site for searching, compiling and downloading music called BlogMusik acts like a publicly available online iPod for anyone to use. And it's only the beginning of a movement that could become the "Napster" of Web 2.0.  In Listening Post.
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People around the world are coming together to celebrate the world wide web and its impact on people.
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LAS VEGAS -- I'm surrounded by anywhere from 120,000 to 200,000 of the country's top minds in the computing and consumer-electronics industries, but I still couldn't find a decent WiFi connection in the convention center yesterday or Wednesday. I don't mean to whine, but, really, if we can put a man on the moon, can't we put one lousy reporter on the Internet for more than a few minutes?
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On her blog, Elizabeth Naramore has posted some thanks to the sponsores out there that are helping out with this year's PHP Appalachia event and some last minute details for those attending.   I wanted to give a quick acknowledgement to our sponsors for the event, as posted by Ben on our PHP Appalachia site. We have so many sponsors, and so many door prizes to give away, a good time will definitely be had by all. Their donations are really helping our grass roots gathering come together, and we all greatly appreciate their efforts. I also want to give a quick thanks to Cal Evans who also personally donated numerous t-shirts and goodies as well.   She gives a rough schedule for things, including how the talks will run and links to some info on the area to let you prepare for your trip.
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Wired's geek festival comes up big this year with lifelike robots, homes of the future and immersive games. Peep a preview of this weekend's activities.
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David Sklar points out some of the new base sites that are being offered on the PHP-based mashup site, Ning.    It's been a lot of hard work, so I'm quite excited that we've just released three great new Ning sites: Ning Videos, Ning Photos, and Ning Group.   Plus, all three sites have the juicy bits that every site on the Ning platform gets -- things such as cloneability, complete customization, and built-in REST APIs. I've been watching the feeds for clones of photos and videos -- I suppose seeing who's cloned sites you care about is the Web 2.0 version of ego surfing.    He also talks about some of the features of the Ning Photo cloneable site like the slideshow and, in Ning Video, the embeddable player. The Ning Group application also has parsing abilities to help with sharing documents/music/photos/etc with anyone.
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Elizabeth Naramore has posted a wrapup of this year's PHP Appalachia (un)conference held in North Carolina, including some pictures.   3+ days of collaboration, exchanging information, hiking, building campfires, and basically getting silly is now on my "highly recommended things to do before you die" list. Not only does a gathering like this provide you with an outlet to expand and share your knowledge on a professional level, it gives you an opportunity to relax with like-minded people and just plain have a good time.   Twelve developers made their way out this year for three days of hiking, talks, and just enjoying the camaraderie of being with fellow developers. She also mentions a few other topics that were talked about, spur of the moment (true to the form of the (un)conference).
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Blog: Capitol Music Group recording artists will be visiting the virtual world There.com.
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Hasin Hayder asks a question in his latest blog post that some in the PHP community have been wondering for a while now - is the International PHP Magazine dead?   I am a subscriber of International PHP Magazine for years. I bought the subscription looking at the back issues. They were sexy, resourceful and yup, very good. But I think these guys don't care about the magazine anymore. It became just a funny stuff for them. All the readers/subscribers and viewers doesnÃ¢ÂÂt bring any value to them. Look what they are doing actually...   He points out six things that the magazine and its staff are doing including RoR articles in an issue, content on the site that's way out of date and the smaller size of recent issues. Comments to the post point out that there has been issues released but that the magazine is published by a non-technical company that just might be pushing this particular publication aside.
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Wired checks out the six leading candidates' online efforts. While there's a lot to like, we see plenty to suggest that this geek thing is still pretty new.
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The TC40 conference, which (important caveat) I did not attend, had a big impact on the space I occupy. Sometimes I think we put too much emphasis on Techmeme, but it is important, and for the two days of TC40, most of the top articles had something to do with the conference. Yet most of the people in the TechMeme loop were not there. This makes me wonder if we can do better with these conferences that become the cursor for a few days. And the answer is of course we can. But it may mean reconfiguring the conference to take the emphasis off the people in the room and put it on the people on the net. As Jim Forbes points out, if you wait for hotels to change, you're going to wait a long time. They're not really in the conference business, they're in the bedroom business. So anything that keeps people out of the hotel is likely to stay out of the conference -- like really terrific networking. So that suggests a different approach, one that does not rely on hotels.  I've done four conferences, three of them at universities, and one at CNET in San Francisco. At two of them, we hosted as many people as they did at TC40, because we had multiple tracks, and a very large facility. And the last three were all very much present on the net. The first, not so much. If I do another conference, we'd try to push the envelope on the net side of things, and probably not try to host as many people in person. Instead of 500 to 1000 people, I'd try for 50 to 100 people. Kind of a middle-ground between the experts at the TC40 conf, and the audience. More like a TV studio than a conference. Everyone would be either a blogger or reporter. All would be encouraged to participate. And everyone would lead a chat room, or a blog comment section, or a video track. We could have much more diverse video nowadays, because of services like justin.tv and ustream.tv, and I'm sure many others, who provide outbound bandwidth. All we'd need at the facility is enough bandwidth to connect to these services, and if you're not at a hotel, that's not at all hard these days. You could do it at Stanford or Cal, or even the Hillside Club. If you're not deep inside a building with thick walls, EVDO can serve as a backup. If you can't get on through the LAN, try a WAN instead.  I'd also like to see less of a focus on the interests and success stories of venture capital. Something has really changed, even the VCs seem to know it. Money is undifferentiated, so why pay so much attention to what the money people say. Let's get people with big ideas to contribute them, and to disagree with other people with big ideas. That's not to say I'd exclude the money people. But I would insist that they be people who are participating in the networked conversation, not just at the show, but 24 by 7, on blogs, on Twitter, on whatever. I had this discussion with Loic last week. I didn't think and still don't think that it was a good idea for him to have French politicians speak at LeWeb last year. I didn't think it was a good idea for Chris to invite John Edwards to speak at Gnomedex in 2006. Why? Because these people don't have blogs, they don't understand the net. They want to use it, for sure, to get money and votes, but they don't have a vision for it, beyond that, so what they have to say is uninteresting. "Give me money. Vote for me." That's all they say. If they want to come, great, let them listen and ask questions. And look for politicos (as with the VCs) who are making a difference on the net. People like Fred Wilson or Paul Kedrosky, for example. I'm sure there are many more. And I'd work to develop more ways for the back-channel to participate, to come to the front. That's the key to the future of conferences, how to extend them into the net, so the communication path is every way imaginable, not just from the venue out to the world. I want to feel like I'm in a nerve center, whether I'm at the venue or sitting in my living room in Berkeley. I had that feeling, btw, or an inkling of it, watching the AlwaysOn conference eariler this year, which had excellent presence on the net, real-time. The TC40 conference promoters, amazingly, actively thwarted the back channel. I don't know what their thinking was, but I think it was wrong.  Maybe someday these conferences could host real-time development, where media hackers put together new communication systems and deploy them before the conference is over. The moon mission approach to development, if you want to get something done quickly, make sure you know where you're going and are excited about it. Sometimes it's amazing how quickly these things can bootstrap. I'd also like to see a mix of interviews and debates, and open discussion. Dinners in every major city that wants to have them. The truly great tech conferences of the future will be world wide events, as the web itself is world wide, and will be inclusive, not exclusive, and cost very little to participate in, if not $0. Mundeemo: "Don't forget a row of suicide booths.."
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MANHASSET, N.Y., Feb. 5  /PRNewswire/ -- Downtime isn't an option in the high-stakes, high-profile world of online events. If the audience can't get in, the hosting organization can't realize its revenue goals -- or bank on the trust of would-be attendees in the future.
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By JAKE COYLE  If you've been to a concert in recent years, you've seen the outstretched arms bearing digital cameras and cell phones that rise above the crowd like periscopes.   Increasingly, the footage from those concertgoers is turning up online.
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On Saturday, a new form of social activism will go live on the net. John Borland reports from Berlin.
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Blog: New entrant into the online music scene is a potential haven for indie musicians--but how will it do in an already crowded online music market?