Dave Winer takes the stage to a ton of applause.

Today he is talking about software, and his common theme of Developers and Users partying together. He will be doing his keynote in Unconference style (his fav thing). It is patterned after the blogosphere – no speakers, no panels, no audience, not top->down, just a conversation. Dave believes that regardless of how smart the speakers are, the smarts are with us (collectively?), not up there on the stage.

Note – connectivity was problematic the first day of the event, sometimes to the point of distraction. While Chris warned the event space time and time again about how serious the guests would be they seem to have underestimated demand and usage. There are more than a few guys here with multiple machine, and a couple of videobloggers and podcasters who, while not streaming will be uploading some big-ass files. Slashdot down due to the overload from this IP – too many agg’s hitting the same site at once.)

Dave –
Unconferneces are like blogs, there is no need for an editor to approve our discussion or transmission of ideas – its a conversation between 400 people. The same thing is true of the web as a dev environment. Its the platform with out the platform vendor. In Dave’s opinion, the Internet lets us break free from the big companies as described in his:
Bill Gates VS the Internet post form a couple of years ago. The Intenet is like the Timex watch ads from back in the day (takes a lickin and keeps on tickin).

With connectivity up and down, Dave takes some time to talk about the issues we will be discussing and how MS people are gonna show they ‘get it’ , and how we can all participate in the internet environment – no one gets to decide how we work. Competition prevents domination(there is a little controversy to this later, as some say Dave broke a non-disclosure agreement in a previous blog posting, but it seems BS, and Dave discusses it here.

At this point Dave asks if we can get some discussion from the crowd, and… Chris is doing the DONAHUE! (both Chris, his fiancee, Mom and Dad have done an incredible job running, managing, and keeping the discussion going. They are runnign thru the space taking questions with a wireless mike).

A large bunch of us just killed our wifi connections so Dave could pull an IP address and start the demo. He just demoed the first half of his new OPML editor/outliner. I am in the beta group for this last week and it seems so cool. It aint aesthetically pretty, but it is elegant and simple and more importantly FULL OF POTENTIAL. Oh yeah, and Dave releaseed it under the GPL (yeah Open Source!). Someone just asked if there was a spellchecker, Dave – in a amusing tone told us we can add one. It seems like he is really making this as open and extensible as possible (even though he admits it wont be ready for release for another 3-4 weeks. Dave feels this is the next thing after RSS

Instant outline is like instant messagin
A way of extending outlines, and LISTS (this subject will get bigger with the MS announcement)

Dave points out that this is competition without control (none of the big players created the big tech they take adv of now)

More to come…

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