Today's mail brought a reminder of PC Forum 2006 (March 12-19). This year's theme will be: "Erosion of power: Users in charge". As usual, Esther Dyson and her team at Release 1.0 have put their finger on the pulse. They say:
We have already found tremendous energy and excitement in the IT industry around this year's theme, Erosion of power: Users in charge. As transparency wins and information flows faster and faster, individuals are getting the upper hand. In a growing number of cases, systems are being designed on the premise that the user is in control. But will consumers rise to the challenge of controlling their own data, let alone their own destinies?
Putting users in charge (as both publishers and readers/subscribers) is the core thrust behind what we're trying to do with Structured Blogging and our other efforts at PubSub to break down the "Gray Web" of changing and structured data that is captured in walled gardens today.
Some thoughts on what will be possible once Structured Blogging becomes common can be found on Peter Caputa's blog where he discusses Peter Brown's recent review of WhizSpark. (Note: Brown used the Structured Blogging WordPress extension to write his review.)
