The plan is that I will be blogging here from etech - O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference, held this week in San Diego. The programme is available here, in case anyone wants to pick out a session or speaker they would particularly like me to tackle.

Currently, I’m sitting between the registration desks and the materials pick-up area, on the theory that if anyone I know is here they will walk past me. It’s very quiet at the moment, which has led one of my friends to tell me to “twitter” to find people to talk to. He’s talkins about this site, which I’d seen a while ago and dismissed as silly and annoying. Basically, people use mobile phones, the Web, or IM to update their whereabouts/thoughts/doings. I suppose that unless you tell your friends your ID you can be basically anonymous to the world at large - after all, how interested is anyone in knowing that some random person was, two hours ago, hanging out in a park in San Diego? But quite a few people I know seem to be using it, and it wouldn’t be hard, if you did want to make their lives difficult, to log their updates and put together a pretty good picture of their lives. And of their friends. It might not mean anything very much to have nominated a friend on one site (for example, the social networking sites, where no distinction is made between friend, acquaintance, casual contact, and a typo). But if you sat down and did a careful analysis and found that I listed the same friends on Livejournal and Twitter, and that we all had CIX accounts, you might start to feel a lot more confident of your inferences.

We talk a lot about privacy issues (and some of the people I see using this are in fact concerned about personal privacy) and yet many of us are perfectly willing to live as public personalities - if we’re not famous enough to be of interest to the mass media to document us, we apparently will do it ourselves.

A second Blindsidish sort of issue strikes me about this, which is that although it might be an interesting tool for, say, a political candidate to use - I’ve seen quite a bit of TV news since I’ve been here referring to this and that presidential candidate - it’s highly unlikely anyone will try it. Supporters might use it to keep track of each other and plan meet-ups. But politicos themselves are unlikely to see it as anything but a security risk. We talk a lot about the digital divide between those who have/use technolgoy and those who can’t/don’t. Politicians and government tend to be in the latter class. We have talked for years about the poor legislation drafted by politicos who don’t understand the technology they’re legislating about, but they may also have increasingly little understanding of the *people* they’re legislating *for*. Which may also be part of why government systems are so rarely built with users in mind. So the most significant digital divide may be that between us and the people who decide on the technology of government systems (such as ID cards, the NHS system, etc.). The LibDems are the most likely to experiment with stuff like this, because when you’re #3 in a two-horse race you have very little to lose. The more successful you are, the less inclined you are to change anything in case you might damage your successful position.

wg