Day 2

The party of last night, made this day start at a suitably late time. I just got into the venue in time for Blaise Aguera y Arcas’s demo of Photosynth. This guy is one of Microsoft’s biggest PR assets, and I hope they chain him to the building or something.

Rod Beckström closed off the keynotes with a great presentation about his principles of flexible network structures explained in his book “The Starfish and the Spider”. I’m definitely going to read that book.

My head could not cope with any of the sessions planned for that afternoon, so I spent the rest of the day hanging around the expo and we made an early exit.

Day 3

Today and the last day of the conference, we got in in time for Cory Doctorow’s presentation about the European Copyright Wars. Cory mainly explained the various legislations in place both in Europe as in the US and listening to him, you would think the battle had already been lost.
It seems that EFF and EDRI are making strides in this fight and they can use all the support they can get.
I asked Cory what he thinks about the Pirate movements and he replied he thinks it is useful to have people out there who take an extreme position. We are fighting a war here and some nukes may come in handy. I’m checking out the feasability of a Dutch Pirate Party.

Then it was off to the final keynotes where Tim O’Reilly interviewed Ari Virtanen from Nokia and managed to bore the entire audience to death. This interview missed all the sharpness and candour of the Microsoft one. The one guy who asked why Nokia changed the size of their plug, got applause but Cristiano couldn’t muster the courage to stand up and ask why the N95 is such a horrible phone.

Reshma Sohoni finished off the keynotes with some stuff about Seedcamp and then it was thanks and greetings from the O’Reilly crew and the Web 2.0 Expo was over. We played some final rounds of Werewolf with the regular crowd, and headed out for dinner.

During dinner we talked about lots of stuff including cameras and experience design. About why iPods, iPhones and TomToms are the best devices in their fields for random definitions of ‘best’.
It’s interesting that with all the talk about it and the importance of the subject, that a lot of people still do not get it. I thought the stuff we heard at dConstruct was pretty self evident, but it looks like there’s still a lot of awareness to be raised on this issue.

Day 4

We will be around for one more day before driving back to the Netherlands on Saturday. Let’s see what Berlin has to offer on the touristic side.

There has been a lot of talk since Apple released their iTunes Plus service. Besides being DRM-free, the files were also marked with some personal details of the user. Even some Dutch blogs started talking about how Apple created a new kind of DRM for their DRM-free content. I got in a nice discussion with the writer of this article and I would like to make some things clear here:

1. The “disturbing” information has always been in files you buy on iTunes. Therefore I believe it is not valid to demand the removal of this information from the plus version of the file and not the normal one as that would be putting the rights of one customer before the other.
2. The info is not DRM. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management and is used to manage your rights, others and anyone have who might want to use the file. The info is not used for any management and is therefore more of a watermark. Watermarks are not DRM, end of story.
3. As #2 states it is not DRM, it is again not valid to demand the removal of this info from the plus version and not the DRM version. Buying DRM free music does not grant you more privacy than others, that is just stupid.

Don’t misunderstand me, I have to agree that including this info in the files is silly as it is easy to manipulate and just stupid. Furthermore it is a bit misleading of Apple to not make it clear to everyone that this info is in the files.