Harvard in Cupertino.
Dinner last night was fun with Chris Locke, Denise Howell, Halley Suitt, Kevin Marks, Robert Scoble, and my brother Peter Winer (no weblog, yet). We didn't cover that much business, talked a bit about outliners and QuickTime (not related) and sang a new blog song, sung to the tune of the Meow Mix theme. The words go like this. Blog, blog, blog, blog, blog, blog, etc etc.
Kevin, who works at Apple, says we should wire RSS up to Rendezvous. Basically when someone pops on the network who has an RSS feed, this info would be available to all people on the network. Of course as a Windows user I wanted to know if this would work for me. We're going to look into it.
Denise, who is an attorney, asked me if I knew Ernie the Attorney, and I said I sure do. I asked what we can do to help build the network of attorneys with weblogs, and she told me about a conference at Yale in November, apparently on just that subject. Okay, I gotta be there, or maybe John Robb (or Jon Udell) can go. I'm going to look for a pointer, I'll let you know when I find it.
And many thanks to Halley for opening up Harvard to the bloggers. I had some great talks with the Harvard people, and of course had a few comments during the sessions. They seem quite curious about weblogs, and that's good. I think the combination of business schools and the new communication tools are a natural fit. Our economy needs the kind of boost that only new technology can provide, and weblogs and news aggregators are ready and waiting.
Now some notes on the conference itself. The speakers and panels were excellent, the conference was very academic, not really a surprise I suppose. The highlights were Clay Christensen's thought-provoking talk about innovation that works and doesn't; a panel of IT people from huge companies (GM, Jet Blue); and the closing session by Gary Loveman, the COO of Harrah's. He's a wonderful presenter, and had a great story (except the part about their patents, yuck). Andy Grove was mostly impossible to understand, speaking in a muffled voice, and when we could make out his words, he came off as aloof and princely. Dan'l Lewin from Microsoft was pure advertising. Scott Cook chairman of Intuit, uninspiring, a spin doctor. The VCs were so stupid, who cares what they think anymore? Not me. Net-net the professors and customers were interesting, the industry was not. [Scripting News]
9:31:28 AM 
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