Evan Williams, founder of blogger, showed off Odeo. He says the software is ready for prime time. Joked that he made up Podcasting in 1996—big laugh. He showed the Audioblogger software which is Blogger's outsourced mp3 service provider. He joked how Eric Rice made the situation even clearer by starting Audioblog—big laugh.

Evan went back and forth as to if podcasting was a big or little industry. On one hand he said there is a lot of hype, on the other hand he said Adam Curry claimed 50,000 downloads a day. He said there were 4,000 podcasts in one of the podcast directories.

He said he thought the time people spend in the cars and walking in the streets are the reason this is going to be big. He said he would rather listen to a smart person then music—is he alone?

Evan said Chris Andersen said that MTV moved from music to TV shows because people stayed around longer and the rating were better with things other then music. He says there is also only two fomats right now: talk radio and audiobooks. He thinks there are other concepts that will emerge. He added that time shifting has not come to talk radio yet (he obviously doesn't know about Howard Stern on bit torrent—just kidding, he's right).

Clearly the biggest issue in this is the creating of the podcast… we're dealing with that. Evan pointed out that we are not trained to record audio, but we are trained at how to write at school. He's got that right.

Odeo has three big buttons Listen, Sync and Create. He is making a directory of shows, letting people create them, and letting people synch the feeds down to their iPod. You can play audio right on the home page.

Good, clean looking stuff. Odeo also has a top 10 and you can tag the audio. It also

You don't have to make your podcast on Odeo to be hosted on Odeo. For example, he had the Engadget podcast on the site. They also stream the show, but if you don't want your show hosted they will remove it.

You can add shows on Odeo to a personal queue if you don't want to subscribe to the RSS.

They have a web-based download tool that downloads files for you and creates an Odep playlist for you. They don't delete old files yet, or create playlists by show… i'm sure they will add that.

Odeo studio, in-browser recording studio built in Flash. You hit record and it records your audio. No big deal there, although people clapped for it. The cool part was you could add notes and sounds ("elements") to each segment. So, if you had stock audio of a footsteps or intro music you could drop that behind your talking. You can fad it in and out as well. Very simple to do and very good looking interface… very slick for sure.

You basically record everything live… so you don't put the background sounds in after the show—you have to do it live! So, that makes it a lot easier but if you screw up it's in there forever.

It doesn't let you interview someone unless they were right in the room with you right now, but Evan, Phillip Torronne and I discussed before the panel the Skype and iChat solutions.

I asked Evan about using Flash MX communications server to record conversations. He said that they were most excited about that ability to record conversations between folks.

Evan sees hosting fees paid by bloggers are the first revenue stream and selling audio as the second revenue stream—look out Audible! He talked about how much money Audible makes and his eyes were most opened when discussed that. Clearly that is the business here.

He also talked about letting advertisers come to the site and record commercials then pay to place them on shows. Neat idea, but that's not going to happen—advertisers are discerning and don't want sloppy ads. He also mentioned podcast hosts reading commercials on behalf of sponsors based on copy… that's possible. Getting advertisers for highly-branded content is hard enough but getting them to sponsors a large swath of random podcasts.

Seems the business is build this to a certain point and sell it to Google, Yahoo, etc. The hosting model is not great, that's a commodity business. The premium content is really the best play, but if you succeed at making it easy for folks to create content there might be less of a market for premium content (why pay).

He mentioned having a library of songs that you could legally pay for and play on your podcast some day.

He said an GMAIL invite style rollout shortly.

He talked about making walking tour MP3 files, or "the sound of the day." Comedy he sees as big. He like the odd stuff, the stuff that doesn't exist already. 

Started putting up some photos from eTech at MyPhotoFriends.com.

ETech was a great event for several reasons, but the panels and speakers unfortunately weren't on that list. Most speakers were focused on very specific issues, so there was little big picture perspective. I guess I'm used to doing events where CEOs speak, as opposed to the tech people, but I think that the problems at ETech were mainly that there were no moderators to keep things on track and ask the right questions.

Regardless of the fact that most of my time in panels was focused on working on other things with my laptop and the anemic wifi connection. (Note to self part I: if you ever do events again have two T1s from two different vendors running on multiple wifi routers. Note to self part II: give people a table so they don't have carpal tunnel by the end of the event from hunching over their laptops.)

By far the best part of the event was getting to catch up with old friends, meeting new friends that I only knew online and finally meeting some new folks.

Here is a random sample of some of the people I got to meet and/or catch up with at the event.

Finally got to meet and hang with Jason Shellon of Google.com. Jason landed at Google by way of the Blogger.com acquisition. He's a very cool guy who was being given a hard time at the event over the whole "Blogger.com only supports ATOM And not RSS" thing. Frankly, I don't care which syndication scheme people adopt, as long as they pick at least one (i.e., we have RSS but not ATOM, but I don't think anyone's Feed Reader cares).

Dave Winer's name came up a couple of times because of the whole RSS thing and although I've never met the man I got an earful. Apparently Dave is considered a jerk by many of the folks at ETech — although a very talented jerk. Two attendees went off on a Winer bitch fest of epic proportions over dinner one night, ending with a detailed psychoanalysis of the man that went something like this: every time he gets something successful going and gets to a position of power (i.e., with RSS) he self destructs. Anyway, I'm looking forward to meeting the real Dave Winer at some point soon.

Also got to meet two of the Weblogs, Inc. bloggers Judith Meskill and Sean Bonner. This was the best part of the event for me, since I've been working with Judith for months and Sean for a couple of weeks without ever meeting them in person! It really is an interesting change for me to be working with editors without having ever met face-to-face. I have to say it is a different model than doing interviews with editors where so much is based on appearance and how people carry themselves in a business setting.

In the WLI model we decide to partner with people based on reading their blogs. If the blog is good, we do it. If their blog is not so good, we don't. Regardless, Judith is very cool and sociable and everyone seems to like her a lot (a good thing for the blogger who does our social software weblog!), and Sean is a fun guy who is very clever. Sean was letting out all kinds of one-liners in Joi Ito's IRC. Even if WLI never makes a dime it will be worth it for all the intelligent new friends I'm making because of it.

I grabbed dinner with my old friend Scott Heiferman who is the founder of MeetUp.com, the post-dotcom bubble sweetheart. MeetUp is total genius, but I wasn't surprised when Scott came up with it. Scott and I both worked at Sony in the mid 90's before we became entrepreneurs. He started iTraffic and later sold it to Agency.com, I started Silicon Alley Reporter and later sold the rebrand SAR (known as VentureReporter.net) to Wicks back in April. So, we've got a lot in common and we've been friends forever. I've already respected Scott because even when we were having dinner back in the mid 90's he always thought big. One of his failures, RocketBoard was total genius: a free keyboard that had advertising-buttons on it (i.e. an eBay button, and Amazon button, etc.) Now I have a keyboard with Microsoft with all these quick keys on them! Ahead of his time — again!

Caught up with another old Silicon Alley peep Greg Elin who is doing an interesting project called Fotonotes.net. He is trying to create a standard that attaches notes to photos and stores the info inside the photo.

Dori Smith is someone I've been trading emails with for the past couple of months since we started WLI. She is an author of tech books and has her own blog (naturally). We're talking with her now about helping Sean and Greg out with the Apple weblog, and perhaps starting a JavaScript blog.

Loic Le Meur is a serial entrepreneur from Paris who has created www.ublog.com, the Blogger of France. Loic is a smart guy and he filled me in on a bunch of the ups and downs (not to mention tax laws) of being an entrepreneur in France.

Seemed like I spent half my time with Dan Gillmor of The Mercury News and Jeff Jarvis of Advance.net/Buzzmachine.com at the lobby bar. Dan and Jeff are two of the quickest guys I've ever met in terms of analyzing media, politics and technology and it seemed at times when we were talking that we were moving through topics and insights so fast that we would collapse. Reminded me of the old dotcom days when there were so many things going on at once that processing it all was all we did.

The good old days are back, albeit without the money. The driving force is still technology, but instead of emails and web pages we're talking about wifi, blogs, social software, rfid and convergent devices. This technology is being superimposed on a world that has, seemingly, gone out of control since 9/11. Unlike the discussions in 1996-2000 that were about how much money all this technology was going to make, we're now talking about how blogging technology will impact democracy in the middle east, or how social software and blogs will impact the presidential election.

I can't tell you how recharged my batteries are. The dotcom revolution and Silicon Alley Reporter meant so much to me, not because I almost became a millionaire, got an insane amount of press and became a mini-mogul. That time period meant so much to me because I was involved in a dialogue that was changing the world. The dialogue is back, and in many ways so am I.

PS – Look for Part II of everyone I met at ETech in the next couple of days. I've got a stack of business cards I've still got to get through.

I'm in Dan Brickley's "Fear of a FOAF Planet - Acronyms and Activism on the Semantic Web" panel right now.

He is addressing a bunch of problems with FOAF, like people lying about themselves and relationships.

He defines FOAF as "A web of files describing a web of people," and praises FOAF for being simple.

Says they didn't account for "lies, mischief, mistakes." There is no central control for people creating Faksters, and people can say anything about anyone, anyway they want, and because people host their own files there is no way to stop them.

Of course, I don't see this as an issue—people have lied since the beginning of time and if they do so on GeoCities, SixDegrees, Orkut or in FOAF what difference does it make?

Update: Marc Canter is blogging eTech.
Update: Dori and Dan Gilmore are blogging the event too.

Jeff Jarvis is here and is doing a great job blogging things. Here are his comments from Joi Ito's panel.

If you know of anyone else blogging eTech put their URL in the comments below please.

Matt Webb had a really interesting panel at eTech on "glancing" at people while working. He put the entire presentation online below. Worth checking out.

Just got word from the CTO of Tribe.net who is down here at eTech that Tribe.net is going to support FOAF! So, you'll be able to import, export and search your friends list. 

Friendster?
Ryze?
Orkut?

When are you going to support FOAF!?!? If these other services don't support FOAF I think we should boycott. It is simply too much work to manage all these sites and they should not own and lock up OUR data. Let my data free Friendster! Let me export.

I'm at eTech at a panel on mobile social software applications (i.e. friendster, mobile phone, SMS, IM, etc,) so you're reading this on our wireless, social software, Calacanis or etech blogs right now.

The first company to present, Dodgeball.com, lets you tell a group of folks where you are on you mobile phone and then lets you know what other people are doing and where they are.

They put up a matrix of companies like Vindigo, meetup, UPOC, and Flash mobs with the variables: location, social, mobile and spontaneous. So Dodgeball.com does all of them, but UPOC does three of four (not location-based) and meetup does two of four (location and social, but not mobile or spontaneous). 

The cute part about Dodgeball.com is that users don't need GPS, instead they put in what bar you're in and then Dodgeball.com tells you other events going on around you. So, it is a hack but a good one. Of course the thing falls apart because it requires the user to say where they are as they bar hop, which users won't do (or will be too drunk to do.)

A second project, Fiasco, is a "street game for mixed physical/digital play." A final project is an interactive TV news service where the users can talk to the newscaster while they are reporting news (trust me, I do a lot of TV news, you wouldn't want to talk to a lot of the "talking heads" out there.) The community feature of the application was more interesting. A bunch of people can create a video chat room where they talk to each other while the newscast is happening. Of course this was the ORB that was done at NYU's ITP program a decade ago.

I'd rather pop in DVD and watch it with five friends online while we all comment on it. Sort of MST for my PC.

OK, off to lunch.

I'm at eTech in Tomas Krag's (http://wire.less.dk/) talk, "Wireless Networks as a Low-Cost, Decentralized Alternative …", which is an interesting look at the impact of free wifi in third world countries.

Tomas has a bunch of examples of adhoc networks including Satellife and WideRay in Uganda, SchoolNet Namibia, DarkNet and FirstMile Solutions in Cambodia, DJurslands net in Rural Denmark, Rebel Net/The Peoples network in Indonesia.

Rebel Net is using Linux computers and wifi to hook up 2,000 schools to the net in Indonesia. Tomas says that there is a lot of corporate pressure to not install these networks because big business will lose money.

Why do this when people don't have clean water? He says it is not either/or, we don't not send kids to school because they don't have shoes. Also, he says he is not great at drilling wells and he is good at cheap wireless.

There is no big picture, he says. He says he is happy and it is fun helping people one day at a time. He says he doesn't think about the big picture because it is too depressing. It's refreshing to see someone just trying to do a little good in the world.

Went to dinner last night with about 25 folks including a bunch of old friends John Battalle, JC Hertz, and Justin Hall, as well as a bunch of new friends like Sean Bonner, Judith Meskill, and Jeff Jarvis.

Jeff is working on a some cool projects with Joi Ito on bringing blogging to countries like Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and North Korea where freedom of speech is badly needed. Jeff brought a friend of his from Iran who is pushing the blogging trend there. Blogging is becoming a clear lever in the spread of democracy, and Jarvis is the one jamming the lever under the rock.

After dinner danah and Liz hosted a round table on categorization on blogs, which I figured was about how to categorize your blog posts. You know, categorize your posts so that you can help your users find data or share feeds of categories amongst multiple somewhat related blogs. However, the goal seemed to be to figure out if Slashdot was a blog of not.

"Is Slashdot a blog?" seems to be the most important question in the blogsphere right now. Mostly because it gets so much traffic that average bloggers want to get rid of it and Drudge Report so that their blogs don't seem so small in terms of traffic.

danah had some bigger points, more academic, like if we can't define what a blog is then how can we have a discussion on it? As far as I'm concerned the biggest question in blogging is: how can we make this profitable for those people who want to make this part of their living. If the best blogs out there are going to keep growing, or even just going, year after year it is going to take money. Some people are ok with doing it organically, but I'd really like to see people who want to make a living, or at least cover their expenses, be able to do that. That is the goal of Weblogs, Inc.

Had a long talk with John Battelle about September 11th, the dotcom bust and future media businesses. We both manned dotcom magazines at the peak, and as such he is one of four people I can talk to who had the same experience of going from having too many advertisers and not enough editorial pages to having too many employees and no advertisers.

John likes the Weblogs, Inc. model, but he thinks that blogs still have a little ways to go in terms of their value proposition. I agree with that, there is a lot of room left for innovation in blogs.

My top ten observations at the conference thus far:

1. A shared T1 for 100+ laptops being manned by geeks is not enough.
2. If you say open source or Linux you will have five people hoot and holler.
3. Joi Ito's IRC room is more entertaining then the conference itself. People were regularly harassing and dissing the panelists, people asking questions as well as the people in the chat room. It's sort of like passing notes around class in high school, except you can pass the notes really fast.
4. Marc Canter is insane, but I'm still drawn to talking to him because every fifth or sixth comment is interesting, every 20th is thought provoking and every 50th comment he says is really smart. I'll take those odds over the brain dead folks I interface with in LA anytime (not everyone in LA is brain dead, just most—I'm joking, save the flames please).
5. Apple computers outnumber PCs about 3 to 1.
6. It must be really strange for someone to walk into a hotel lobby bar and see 40 out of 50 hunched behind laptops at 11PM.
7. It is ruder to look someone in the eye when talking to them then it is to carry on a conversation while checking your email and Yahoo while talking to them (I already told my girlfriend this but she doesn't agree).
8. Joi Ito has the best toys. His SLR digital Canon camera ($1,000) is the digital camera I've been waiting for, and his portable laptop table is a must have at $50.
9. Not having an official conference dinner is just as good as not having an official dinner because you get to have smaller groups plan things together and it becomes an adventure.
10. Don't offer Justin Hall to stay in your room unless you're a) prepared for him to take you up on it and b) you're prepared to wake up to a boxer clad Justin doing email in bed for hours while telling about the intimate details of his personal health and hygiene issues ("I got this brush in a love hotel in Japan!",  "This nail clipper is amazing, it save the clippings for you!", etc).

Here are some photos from eTech on Tuesday.

In my third panel, Untethering the Social Network or What Happens to Social Networks in the Untethered Wilds?,  moderated by Joi Ito. Howard Rheingold, Mimi Ito, Scott Fisher, Danah Boyd are joining Joi.

Howard is giving a history of communications from the phone to IRC to SMS right now.

The big take away for the panel is that you can't hack mobile phones. The carriers don't let you do anything with their systems, unlike PCs which are open. Ironically, mobile phones are more social then PCs. So, the more social device is closed, and the less social device (the PC) is open.

Another take away is that blogging is similar to sharing pictures on phones in that the sharing is occurring, for the most part, between a couple of people (as opposed to hundreds, thousands, etc.)

I'm in my second panel "Next Generation File Sharing With Social Software" by Robert Kaye, MusicBrainz.

This talk has basically focused on shifting the focus of P2P networking from quantity to quality by basically adding social software (i.e. browsing) to Napster and Kazaa. This idea has been around forever, I mean Kazaa and Napster did allow you to browse people's hard drives, but the idea here would be to do something a little more like Firefly or Amazon's "People who bought this bought that" feature.

Of course, the only reason this has not happened already is the RIAA coming down hard on everyone involved. In order to make this system work the speaker said you need to cloak your private social network by having SSH and having the network be invite only.

For now if you want to do this simply go to Friendster, click on your friends lists and see who they list in their music and movie choices, or better yet just send your friends a message asking for new music choices.

In my first presentation called Finding the Right Moment - Fluidtime: Timing Tools for Social Networks by Molly Steenson, Interaction Design Institute Ivrea and Michael Kieslinger.

So far this is an interesting panel which examines the various behaviors, personality types and outcomes in time management and coordination over wireless devices. The various personality types include the time manager, the connector (a la Malcolm Gladwell), the time juggler, the time opportunist, and the time squanderer.

A time juggler is the one who never has a set schedule, a opportunist is the kind of person who sends a text message saying "I'm in your neighborhood, want to grab a Starbucks?" and the squanderer is the one who sends text messages over and over telling you that they are 10, 5, 3, and 2 minutes away while you wait for them to arrive.

Hypercoordination, is another theory in which people do extra coordination as a form of socializing and reinforcing everone's role in the group.

In an interesting application they discussed a laundry mat that sends a note to you when your laundry is done, while taking into account how many minutes you've been late in the past. Just what I need, the washing machine gaming me.

I just landed at ETech and I'm in a panel call Finding the Right Moment - Fluidtime: Timing Tools for Social Networks.

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, and Danny Hillis are sitting directly in front of me. Jeffrey Veen is in the row across from me and Justin Hall is here as well.