LIFT07: Blowing the web apart, Ivan Pope

Giving a "User-Generated Talk". The talk is a "widget embedded into the conference". Was an artist, entrepreneur and anarchist. "I've never blown up anything".

Widgets are everything that goes between the HTML tags. "I'm not a coder or designer, so this is a bit obscure to me". Everything there is a fragment of content, assembled by the makers.

Interested in how you fragment every piece of content, take every item down to its smallest part. Let consumers decide how it can be used. Every component of web pages should be widgetised so it can "reassemble itself". "Pick up the fragments and recomposite them into something similar to what you started with".

You can see people mucking around already, on sites like MySpace, on weblogs or on start pages like Netvibes. Blog software and social networks stop you from doing what you want here.

Moderator: there's a movement in SF of trying to widgetise the web, driven from San Francisco: microformats.

Q: The idea of widgets sounds great, but how does this affect advertising? What happens if end-users just aggregate widgets from different sites?

IP: We need to work out the answer to that question. Working out biz models for individual widget companies isn't the point. Advertising, possible. Content owners need to attach monetisation opportunity to their content as it goes out. I want a world where I don't put my stuff into my blog, I want to put my blog into my stuff (?). Blogs should be a set of widgets, dropped into a container.

Q: This is an interesting idea, a transition from page paradigm of the web to a flow paradigm.

IP: It's backwards and forwards, it's a swirl.

(The backchannel degenerates into a discussion on blowing midgets apart)