Tue 9 Sep 2008

The Internet Is Not A Toy

Turns out that they've worked the kinks out of the Internet and it's become a fully-fledged useful tool these days. Also the turnaround time from me saying something to somebody getting laughs at my expense is a bit over 2 hours.

Around 3:00 p.m. last Saturday, I was standing on a stage at Google giving my first talk at DjangoCon. How mind-blowing that was will be covered in a later post. Anyway, Google were broadcasting the talk live to their offices in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where a small group were watching the conference remotely. Somebody in Brazil took a shot of the broadcast screen with their camera phone and uploaded it to Flickr. Cal Henderson found the photo and added a caption for his keynote at DjangoCon (2 hours after my talk). Somebody in the audience in Mountain View took a photo of that slide and uploaded that to Flickr. I saw the photo of the slide in my hotel room later that night.

So we've gone from live to transmission to Brazil, uploaded to Flickr, downloaded to a table at the back of the room at Google in California, displayed on the screen in Cal's talk, uploaded version two to Flickr for others to view. That's a ridiculous number of network connections just to make a joke.

Topics: conferences/DjangoCon2008, funny, media