Blogging the PlaNetwork conference in San Francisco.

My computer is crashing a lot this morning, all of a sudden. So, not sure how much this is going to work.

Marc Canter is being introduced and applauded. His daughter, Mimi, started crying.

He is talking about working to change the world, but realism that we need to think about making money, so that the people who are not so idealistic will work along with the idealists.

We are going to make money because of digital convergence, Hollywood, etc. A lot of interest in people selling things, and the media stuff is at the core of it all. We don't need to get buy a billboard to get attention on the web. So, we need to use the power of the people and the online world to trick the big corps to supporting open standards in the online world.

New pardigm: you don't pay for software. You only ask for money when the software is valuable. Let them dabble for free. We need to show the big companies that this new model of tools can help them sell their wares.

Redefinition of online communities: old model is message boards. These have evolved into blogosphere. We are starting to loosen up the term. But, need to go further.

Marc is singing operatically, to demonstrate that he is a trained singer. No coincidence that he is named canter.

He is listing all the separate islands of digital media and online forms. Jukeboxes, broadband, digital cameras, etc. At the inner core is you, your family, your homeland, the parents setting up stuff for kinds. The first community is you and your family.

If you are single, young, the first community is your core group of people. Your posse.

Any software that doesn't take care of that, doesn't help build that, is not what he is into. The second level of community is what we commonly talk about, membership communities. The third level is the whole world wide web.

What Marc is going to show today is one version of the ASN. It is interconnecting communities. People who are offline know people who are online. So, everyone can be interconnected. Cyberspace meeting up with meatspace (one of Marc's signature tag lines!). Slide: unified digital lifestyle.

Going to demo WebOutliner. New tool paradigm. Because they are online, he can afford to give them away for free. Create seam between when dabbling and serious use. So, with WebOutliner, you can save on their server for free. When you want to save it on your own server, that is when you pay.

Talking about his question and answer with Doug Engelbart (which I blogged) about different levels of user needing different levels of user interface.

End-user is the content, and we can interconnect together. We don't have to pay for Hollywood or whoever to get our content. We can, but we don't have to. The real value is in the people who are interconnected together. The software interconnects the people together.

So, he envisions a tool that deals with all three levels of community. We manage these things in our head right now, but we need a tool that addresses this. By enabling people with tools, you let everyone else's creativity come out.

Telling story of someone from DuPont in 1985 needing to animate some molecules, having to wait to use $1M of tools to do animation, and switching to $3k Mac plus multimedia tools to do the same thing, faster. Wide-access to tools faciltiates this creativity.

All of Marc's slides will be online on the PlaNetwork wiki, etc.

The Problem: things are too complicated to get to work right now. Need to be a serious nerd. So, need to make things easier to use: especially for online communities. Need to make it like push-button.

Talking about Hot or Not software, and his son. Rating of people based on their face, and you can pay money to link to a person. His son wants to create his own hot or not, for his friends, with gossip. Just wants to do it just within his circle. Each way people can work together can become its own community.

Comparing change from 3D animation to Flash, making community needs to evolve through that significant a change in ease of use.

Marc is talking a lot about companies who want to make money by selling digital / media shit running through the ditial pipes. So, these tools enable this and make money, so it can become a viable financial module.

The Solution: carete and matina new kinds of online communities. All the things people do that can be interconnected: IM, web, blogs, etc.

Showing WebOutliner. The next version can create communities, reviews, all kinds of things. Define community, who is in the community, define activity of the community (like sports team, or birthday party). Then, edit modules of the community activity.

Showing architectural module. Interconnection of Ryze and other social networks. With WebOutliner, not only keeping track of people, but also keeping track of communities. Can track updates on communities. This is what he calls the "community commons". Want to be able to sort by community, by interest, to be able to search.

The tool is broken up into two parts: your private space, and your public face. He is showing his private space, editing a birthday party community. Something that sends out an eVite, has a music playlist, is a website with a blog, photo uploading feature, an agenda of the party. Can work on home LAN, and work as a stereo, slide projector, etc. So, community of sets of parents, switch the settings over to each parent as each kid's birthday comes up. Settings related to each local network and all the devices attached.

Many kinds of communities that can interconnect with each other. First thing: a meta-community API. Day 1, they ship with this API to interconnect communities together. First level of interconnection is people: digital identity. Sharing media, sharing information. Lots of standards to take into account.

Wanted to create software that works on a home LAN that coordinates things. This can be sold to companies like Sony, etc. Sell them on idea of community = more people = more money, and they will get into it.

Showing WebOutliner demo, written in DHTML. Attaching media onto an outline node. Can post outline to blog or send as email. Now going to show how to edit his birthday party club community.

Showing content of a birthday party: name of birthday party, playlist of music, journal of daughter's happenings leading up to party (mentions that this could also be applied to a social rally or a business meeting).

Showing the community editing mode. Showing different relationships of people, the agenda, his home LAN settings. Each has a council that has a face / interface to control all these things. Push-button community creation.

Traditional communities invite people in. New ones like Ryze allow you to ask to join. Need to supoprt both. Talking about acitivity templates making it easy for people to fill things out. Underlying data in XML, in OPML.

Wrapped around the data is a social software mesh, that interconnects things. Then he jokes: once it all works, like all good software, you throw it all out and start over. This is how you create a standard.

Talking common data structure, common APIs, tools that can edit it. That's what connects it up. That is what this is about.

Questions about control of interface. Answer: tiles of word, icon, or picture. So, this level of it is customizable. The only underlying UI piece is the ability to drag the tiles around.

Question about communities that already exit. Answer: version 1 of WebOutliner is all about connecting to existing the community. Mentioning ThreadsML, SSA, and identity standards which are priorities to facilitate it.

Mimi is in Marc's arms now!

Question (I can't hear it). Answer: Interest in things that are complimentary to WebOutliner. Idea that all these services can't flow through to each other, through these tools. He is going to help enable these connections. He is talking about an open standard that is very lightweight for a person API. A DNS for people [Note: iCite iCNS should be able to work as a DNS for people.]

Different communities can have all kinds of profiles on people, but a kind-of people DNS can connect these up.

Question about peer-to-peer or centralized services. Answer: it has to be both, but in general, support a lot of different services.

Questions about OSAF. Answer: this is complimentary. Wants to use OSAF address book and other things. Not waiting for them, but hopes it will be there. Imagining community servers that have all the services people in a meatspace community need, based on free software. How can you argue against free. Then, that can connect to eBay or whatever.

More applauding as presentation ends.