ApacheCon 2003 has wrapped up. I posted an earlier writeup of some highlights, but it skipped so many others. The great thing about ApacheCon (and this was my first one) was meeting the others who work on Apache projects. I cannot even fairly try to describe the highlights of conversations without necesarily leaving out too many others. Suffice to say that I leave with more itches than ever -- and a serious resolve to scratch.
Doc Searls's (google for his blog) keynote, The Untold Story of Apache and DIY IT (or something similar to that) provided quite a few insights into the hows and whys (anyone who reads my blog probably knows the whats) of what is happening with the internet, businesses, government, media, etc. Amongst many other things he put into a new (to me) perspective a lot of the reasons why things are happening the way they are. He promised to put his presentation up on his site, and Danese (whose last name I don't know, but she works for Sun and has an active blog -- go google for her) pomised tp post her notes to her blog, and offer them to Doc to acocmpany his slides. It is worth reading, though without Doc talking I don't know if the ideas will come across too clearly. War, heh.
Chris Pirillo (google again) had the other keynote and misunderstood his audience a whee bit I think. That said, he was a very animated speaker and had good points, though nothing as new to me as what Doc was saying. He talked about syndication replacing spam. Seriously. He made it sound like a good thing, too! His presentation would be better received by marketing and sales people as it really addressed how to do bulk communication and marketing now that you cannot rely on having an email even received, much less read. He is possibly right in some of his assertions and predicitons, but I truly don't care about this problem.
He addressed one-to-many communication, which works fine for me via email (listservs and rules that get processed before spam filters), news (rss feeds from selected blogs for anything I don't get from the paper), and irc for real time. The one-to-one communication is the real problem, as is perfectly illustrated by the GPG/PGP key signing event at ApacheCon. Over the next week or two I expect to receive probably thirty emails from various Apache affiliated people. These will be encrypted emails and will probably be flagged as spam as ascii armored encryption looks disturbingly like anti-bayesian filtering crap spammers have started doing. I want these emails, I know they are coming and because filtering software is still very weak (it is, sorry SpamAssassin guys, you make a great product, but it isn't as flexible as I need yet) many will be lumped into the hundreds of spam emails I receive every day. Chris was very entertaining anyway =)