Shapes of Things to Come

I attended a conference organized by Wolfgang Coy these past few days called the "Shapes of Things to Come". It was an interdisciplinary conference, I had the distinct impression of being forced to learn philosophy, history, business, law and some far out compting fields such as ubiquitous computing in just 3 days.

My mind is spinning.

I could probably write a blog entry on each of these concepts, but here are just some reminders for myself:

• Roman coins can be seen as a communication medium
• I've finally understood Metcalfe's law
• The Finance Minstry in Germany is planning on introducing a tax number for German citizens sometime very soon
• The concept of free speech, Parrhesia, needs translating into German
• Infosphere is a new buzzword
• There are lots of cool computing stuff that is wearable: wearcam.org, Twiddler, FrogPad, QBIC
  
• I want to have a Logitech Anoto Pen. Now please.
  
• Kristóf Nyíri introduced me to Dunbar numbers and the philosophy of Skype.
  
• Herbert Hrachovec applies Hegel to the Wikipedia, getting some wonderful stuff out: Wikipedia is a "minimal gesteuerte dialogisch-dynamische Textproduktion mit offenem Ausgang" (a minimally guided dialog-oriented, open-ended, dynamic production method for text) and a "Seitensprung des Weltgeistes" (love affair of the universal spirit)
• Geert Lovink surfed a bit for us, showing us some Web 2.0 stuff: Listible, Netvibes, 43places, Writely and so on. RememberTheMilk appears to be for the guys. The audience expects a critical theorie of blogging from him, any day now.
  
• Software Patents are bad (I knew that already)
• Sony and its rootkit DRM are evil (ditto)

I need some sleep to try and assimilate all this. Or to quote the Hegel talk: "(M)eine Gedanken entwickeln sich systematisch durch Ablehnung, Transposition und Konservierung anderer Gedanken".