Where The Rich Network
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Those with big bank accounts attend yearly conferences to dissect big issues, but also to revel in their richness.
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Letter: Setting the record straight on network location awareness and Vista Group Policy.
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By Chok Suat Ling  THE highest traffic volume to one of the world's top social networking sites Friendster is from Malaysia, says a recent report. CHOK SUAT LING finds out why Malaysians are so enamoured with such sites.  Everyone's at it these days.
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Analysis Prospects bright in the Wi-Fi arena
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The Web 2.0-social networking phenomenon's seemingly irresistible force field has ensnared yet another niche: travel.
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Also: Paul Allen project maps the brain. Read these stories and more from around the Web on News.com Extra.
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By YURI KAGEYAMA  TOKYO - Visit Japan's top social-networking site, the 8-million-strong "Mixi," and you'll see prim, organized columns and boxes of stamp-size photos - not the flashy text and teen-magazine-like layout of its American counterpart, MySpace.com.
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By Chok Suat Ling  KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysians have taken to online social networking like a duck to water.   The highest traffic volume to one of the world's leading social networking sites, friendster.com, comes from Malaysia.
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One of the best things I like about the Internet is the boundary-less nature of this amazing network. I can check out user views of people (from here in India) around the world on the India issues.
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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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Robert Nardelli's plan to fix a bloated showroom network? Starve out the weaklings.
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Investor's Business Daily - Not all social networking sites are for kids and up-and-coming bands. Two sites, aSmallWorld.net and Ratings.com, are networking sites that cater to the super-rich. The invitation-only sites are compared with that of Harvard Business School&#39;s alumni report and some advertisers use the sites as ways to get in touch with the wealthiest. At aSmallWorld.net the average user is only 32 years old. It says that many people have homes on multiple continents, with 65% of users calling Europe home and 20% in the U.S.
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More and more venues are becoming hotspots. Using the wireless 802.11x protocol better known as Wi-Fi, these hotspots can be found in airports, libraries, coffeehouses, restaurants, shopping
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The rich really do become richer -- here's how.
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People who sign in to the newest social network won't be looking for dates or posting a list of their favorite movies. They will be searching for companies to invest in and listing their interests in areas like clean energy or enterprise software.
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By Jefferson Graham  Yahoo is the most widely used online site, but youth-oriented social networks are the fastest growing on the Internet. And everybody wants a piece of the action.
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A new "Connectivity Scorecard" measures how well nations use networks, cell phones and computers to boost their social and economic prosperity.