I was part of a great event today held at UofT and put on by KMDI and Habitat. It was about the NextWeb or Web 2.0 or whatever you want to call the emerging culture of genuine interactivity on the Net. I'm hoping there will be more events like this, certainly I was inspired to start thinking about organizing roundtable discussions similar to when I used to run the Monday Night McLuhan Seminars. Here's the write up from today's event:

From tag clouds to del.ici.ous, shareable XML to RSS aggregators, MMORGs to open source, the internet continues to evolve into a community event. Join us for an afternoon of discussion on Monday, April 3rd where we explore the implications of the internet as a platform.

Web 2.0 is used to describe the current paradigm where the software that enables the internet is much less important than the services that can be delivered. While this term is becoming increasingly used within the popular discourse, it is a term few are aware of exactly what it comprises.

Is Web 2.0 the next logical step in the development of the internet? Are there other better possibilities? This round table discussion will bring students, practitioners, and theorists together for two panel discussions on this key topic.

Schedule
1:00 to 1:10
Welcome and Introductions
Nina Czegledy, Senior Fellow, KMDI
Caitlin O'Donovan, Habitat New Media Lab
1:10 to 3:10
Cracking Open the Web
Moderator: Gale Moore, Director, KMDI, Knowledge Media Design Institute, University of Toronto
The Web has many possibilities, and pit-falls, as an open platform for shared development and distribution of content and services. Distributed knowledge and processing, open source systems and moving off the desktop (i.e. thin clients) will be discussed with panelists:
- Philip Smith, Community Bandwidth
- Charles Finley, Executive Director, KMDI’s Project OS|OA
- Jesse Hirsh, Open Flows
- James Walker, Bryght & WT
- Jutta Treviranus, Director, ATRC, Sr. Research Associate, FIS & KMDI
- Nick Koudas, Professor of Computer Science, UofT & KMDI
3:10 to 3:30
Coffee + pastries
3:30 to 5:00
Community as Entertainment
Moderator: Ana Serrano, Director of Habitat New Media Lab, Canadian Film Centre
How the internet is utilized has changed significantly in the last five years; we browse Flickr instead of the Web, or we log into virtual worlds to check the auctions. This panel will explore how community has become the basis of entertainment with Massively Multiplayer Online games as virtual sandboxes, tagging as collaborative organization, and RSS/blogging.
Panelists include:
- Barry Wellman, Professor of Sociology, UofT & KMDI
- Alexander Manu, Professor & Director of Beal Centre for Strategic Creativity. OCAD
- Jason Roks
- Evan Jones, Regenesis Extended Reality Game
5:00 to 6:00
Refreshments & Discussion
For further information please contact:
Nina Czegledy, Senior Fellow, KMDI
Caitlin O'Donovan, Production Programs Manager, Habitat New Media Lab