small small small local local local

Although I missed the session, a friend of mine was at the Think Small session (video, PDF)by Tara Hunt and Chris Messina at Gnomedex and he made sure I knew about it. Their message of smaller, faster, cheaper innovation online was well received by the gathered geeks who are getting whipped into a lather over the explosion of small and cheap applications showing up on the web. They are also beginning to understand these apps achieve their full potential value when they interoperate with other small apps. In other words, the value is in the relationship. 30 Boxes was given as an example.

These web wizards aren't the only ones finding value in relationships and rapid innovation. In my other life with BALLE, the goal is to support the locally owned small business. One of the central tenants for supporting locally owned small businesses is that local owners are more likely to act in the best interest of their community. Again, the relationship between the business owner and the community has tremendous value.

I feel there are many more parallels between the explosion of Web2.0 small apps and the local living economies movement. Stay tuned for more thoughts, or leave your own here.

Gnomedex and the male ego

I am here at Gnomedex 6.0 at the Bell Harbor Convention Center in Seattle where snark and chest thumping rule. It's a generalization of this audience, however there have been enough moments in the conference where ego trumped style to destroy an interesting dialog. As an outsider to this world of bloggers and deacons of web2.0, there appears to be ample battles being fought between the bloglines.

Today the most explosive exchange came between Dave Winer and Blake Ross when Dave jumped down Blake's throat for not listening to Firefox users, or something. Blake got defensive and mentioned some post Dave had made on his blog about a Firefox feature Blake was involved in and then it just turned into a lot of shouting. It all seemed very male ego-based and very silly. At least they are passionate about something, although I would love to see more passion expressed around issues that actually mean something in the world.