What a wonderfully stimulating day today at eTech04! After the keynotes came the first in a series of sessions that touched on a number of topics that I’m heavily involved with these days.
First up was the Technorati session, which highlighted some new features of the Technorati Cosmos, a powerful index of blogs and links to blogs. One of the new features is a news service, which has the potential to pick up big stories even faster than google news. Doc and Kevin have some additional links and comments.
After lunch I attended a session presented by 3 folks from Disney who gave an overview of how blogs and wikis are used both in operations and in r&d inside their company. The production environment uses a set of blogs, which they call shiftlogs, to record activities related to a 24×7 TV operation. The wiki is used more in the research area and after a somewhat slow start is currently receiving moderate use. Simple training and introductory sessions helped new wiki users adapt to this very different collaboration tool. Cory has some additional comments and notes on this session.
The final related session was Sam Ruby’s review of the role that wikis, blogs and mailing lists played in the development of the new syndication format known as atom. Afterwards I had a great discussion with ChrisTWiki wiki in particular. He’s posted a brief review of current wiki offerings, which I’ll review carefully in anticipation of moving away from TWiki (subject for a different post) later this year.
So far, this has been one of the most stimulating and interesting conferences I’ve ever attended, and the best thing is that there are still two days to go!
Sounds awesome. Can’t wait to hear more. Man, I got to get myself transfered to a group that can legitimately send me to ETC next year. 🙂