~Thursday~ Xolani and I were up and at ’em again today to catch the 7:45 #12 Method Road city bus all the way downtown, as that’s where he’s working and where I was attending day two of the WWW2010/FutureWeb2010 conference at the Raleigh Convention Center.
There were four kids on the bus this morning, which is a rarity at such an hour. I mean shouldn’t they be getting on a school bus? One of them kept singing “Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb. Mary had a little lamb, her feet was white as snow,” over and over and over again. How many times you wonder? 37.
Hopefully, some day a responsible grown-up will teach the child about “inside voices,” public space etiquette, and that it was actually Mary’s fleece that was as white as snow—which would not only inform about animal vocabulary, but indirectly broach the topic of subject verb-agreement between said animal characteristic and its first person singular conjugation of the verb “to be.” But I digress…
At one point, one of the kids, a girl, just wailed, and because of how loud she screamed I thought her brother had hit her until she said, “That was my spot,” indicating the seat he’d gotten into before she could. Other timeless tirades and tragedies took place during the three-to-four mile trip, around which timeless ejaculations (from parent or child at various times) were heard: “If you kids don’t settle down, I’m going to make you get off this bus,” “Stop kicking your chair,” You lied mommy,” and “Mommy, are we there yet?”
The morning WWW2010 keynote address was delivered by danah boyd (she appears to be an e e cummings type person writing her name in all lowercase), and I found her Privacy and Publicity in the Context of Big Data presentation very, very interesting.
From 10:30-12:00, I attended a great session called The Future of Social Networks and the Web, which was a panel discussion consisting of Fred Stutzman, founder of ClaimID, panelists include Chris DiBona of Google, Dave Recordon of Facebook, Henry Copeland of Blogads, Zeynep Tufekci of UMBC and Wayne Sutton, networks consultant.
I absolutely loved Zeynep Tufekci, described as “an assistant professor and social networks researcher who works at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County,” and whose “research focuses on the social impacts of technology, theorizing the web, gender, research methods, inequality and new media,” and hung on her every word every time she spoke. I have subscribed to her blog, Technosociology.
I was going to “run errands” during lunch, that is find a post office or mailbox at which to mail my dad’s 79th birthday card, but my buddies, Jason, Jen, Garrison, and Nick coerced me into joining them for lunch instead. We ended up eating at Buku, and ate al fresco and from where I saw a mail truck parked across the street. I walked over to it and asked the driver if she’d take my card to mail, and as expected, she did. Woohoo.
I had Buku’s Classic Greek Salad, which was good, but not all that “classic.” I mean it had the expected lettuce, tomato, and feta cheese in it, but no grape leaves, anchovies, olives, cukes, and onions, although the fried pickled artichoke sprinkled about it like croutons were a nice touch and most delicious.
The two afternoon sessions I attended were just okay, not riveting or anything. The first one was The Future of Intellectual Property and the Web, during which three lawyers, and one gentleman, Eric Fink, who was not a lawyer but taught at Elon University’s Law School gave presentations.
In Mr. Fink’s current research, he is looking at legal issues from a sociological perspective. The non-lawyer focuses on trademark and copyright issues in virtual words, such as Second Life, and ponders questions such as, if someone in Second Life builds an original graphical representation of a tractor and at the end slaps a John Deere logo on it, have they infringed on John Deere’s intellectual property? Things that make you go, “Hmmm.”
I was disappointed in the second afternoon session called Core Values and the Future of the Internet as the primary reason I attended the session was to see Sir Tim Berners-Lee, known as the inventor of the Internet, and he ended up being a no-show. Annoying.
As I walked up the street to catch the bus home, it occurred to me that there was not going to be a stop for the #12 Method Road bus near the same place I’d gotten off, but on the opposite side of the road, because it was a one-way street, so the bus wouldn’t be traveling back on that road. I turned at the next street, where I found a stop for the #11 Avent Ferry bus, which I took to its stop at Carmichael Gym on campus, where I switched to the Wolfline #9 Greek Village, which drops me off closest to my house. I love knowing how to navigate both the university bus system as well as the routes of the city bus system in the vicinity of my home.
In the afternoon at the conference I had tweeted: “LGBT Social BOF, 10PM, Flex Club, 2 S. West St., Downtown Ral, Trailer Park Prize Nite Drag Show @ 12:30AM #www2010 #fw2010 #WearBadge” so I went down to Flex at ten just in case anyone showed up.
A guy had a table set up who was raffling off free gym memberships—two one-week long ones and several other one-day ones. He was handing out little papers to fill out with your name and phone number on them, which of course will later be used to solicit from the “non-winners.” I wrote: John Monyhan, (919) 233-0594. Sorry if that’s your number.
No one from the conference showed up, or if they did they didn’t have their conference badge on and/or they didn’t introduce themselves to me. I stayed until about 12:10, leaving before the show started at 12:30.