Recent Ignite Presentation

My friend sent me the following:

Our city had an Ignite event. I saw it in the paper today, the first mention I had seen, and luckily it was just a couple blocks away at the pub and theater where they show 2nd run movies. Pretty diverse presentation quality, and hugely full of irony. The whole thing is a celebration of tech and new media and twittering and such, but it looked like it was being run by the geeky 9th grade boys who started the AV club and were just threading the film projector for the first time, in front of the whole class, with the teacher looking on impatiently. The Mac that was running the show had its desktop projected on the movie screen, along with the pointer and all the other stuff, so we got to watch the operator fumbling around with every slide show. But if you let yourself relax into the spirit of the event, and the pint of Arrogant Bastard ale, it was fun.

Intellectually, I think the concept of 20 slides at 15 seconds is a fundamentally sound way to stimulate creativity. I have thought about how I might do one, and always concluded it would be way harder than "normal."

Google Wave

Google rolled out their new platform for communication and collaboration. Called Wave, you can view the presentation to the development community at the Wave web site. The video is long - lasting 1.3 hours - but worth the effort. To use a trite phrase, This will change so many things!

The concept behind Wave is that e-mails, blogs, wikis, documents, photos, polls, surveys, tweets, etc. are all forms of communicating. Why not focus on the information, rather than the envelope or delivery method?

In the last two years of development, our good friends at Google have challenged most of our conventions on the way we communicate (electronically). For example, why should we have to forward the whole history behind a message when we reply? Why can't we easily see the development progress of a presentation? Why must we bring up separate tools for wikis and blogs? Why can't we insert a web link or photo without cut and paste?

All these communications will be integrated on the Wave platform. They will remain in the cloud and available to share and edit. All browser based and open source. This means that desktop machines and mobile devices will have equal access and capabilities. It will be browser, and thus machine, neutral. Organization of all this information will be the way you like it: folders, tags, or just one large heap. Of course, Google will find anything in your piles.

The program is not yet available to us. Google wants the developer community to use it, write neat extensions, and pound on it. They hope to have something for the rest of us in the Fall.

This is huge!