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Today I was at an informal gathering of a few bloggers in Stockholm, on the roof café at Kulturhuset. The man behind the initiative was Joi Ito. Joi turned out to be a nice guy, down to earth and filled with interesting ideas (this was no surprise to anyone who has been following his blog, of course). The other people who attended (Maya, Per, Max, Ludovic, Erik, Jon, Kim, David and Roine) were also really cool and we discussed a lot of interesting issues on both large and small scales.

Well, Max is only 6 months old so he mostly kept quiet throughout the entire thing.

The discussion went on for about 4 hours, and I am not too good at remembering details, se I’ll cover a few points that I remember.

What begun with talk of preventing spam in blog comments, turned into a large-scale debate on how to implement a global, easy to use authentication system where you would not need to use usernames or passwords. The consensus was that at this point we had no idea how to do it. However some interesting points on the pitfalls of biometric authentication were discussed. We also came to the conclusion that the system would have to be easy for the end user, but would not necessarily be simple to program or implement behind the scenes. We’re such a clever bunch

The main point was that comment spamming is a problem, and in order to stop it, you need to somehow make people register a unique identity which can be verified or blocked. Right now, the new version of MovableType is doing it with your email address, so I suppose it works too. But I had the idea that you could send your public key. Now that I think about it, it should probably be tweaked more so you dont actually send your key, but somehow negotiate it’s identity with hashes or something, so you can avoid actually giving it out. In any case, a question worthy of discussion.

We delved briefly into spreading the blogging vibe into Sweden, and it was said that the best time would probably be winter. The advertisement should read something like “Stay at home, blog”.

We also covered the topic of the banning of mobile phones in certain areas, as well as banning of camera-phones in for example in book stores or corporate offices.
When it comes to corporate offices, I suppose it’s only fair, since you don’t want pictures of your latest cool thing slipping out. When it comes to book stores, I think it’s a much more complicated question, which must be seen from a broader perspective. Technology is moving forward, and whether you (or the store owner) want it or not, eventually you’ll be able to snap pictures just by blinking, and uploading them to your blog or whatever. The stores will have to adapt somehow, or the law will have to adapt somehow. They certainly wont be able to force you to remove your ocular implant before entering.
We also talked about reverse surveillance and how the banning of camera phones prevents you from fighting back against government surveillance. Camera phones are great tools, which can be used to record crimes, sad times, happy times and special times, all at the press of a button and without the need to carry an extra gadget with you. The question is, who will win, the banners, or the advances of technology?

After Joi left for the airport, some of us stayed behind to discuss the intricacies of object orientation in modern programming languages and various aspects of learning Japanese (as most of those present had some sort of experience with learning Japanese).

In the end, I had a really great time and hopefully will be able to meet you guys again.

Tags: Blogging, Civilization, People, technology

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 13th, 2004 at 11:16 and is filed under Blogging, Civilization, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.