I had previously blogged about and quoted bits of the Bruce Sterling “Internet of things” talk as it was edited and aired on O’Reilly’s Distributing the Future. Yesterday I heard the full talk from IT Conversations which I found superior. It’s a really good talk, and it made me feel better about the occasional contentiousness amongst the denizens on the new media frontiers. “It’s a clash of sensibilities that really need to clash” indeed.
As an aside, I don’t know what to make of Distributing the Future. It is highly produced, which I think is my problem with it. It’s well edited and has all the stuff going on, but that actually puts me off. The highly compressed voices, the zippy editing and such leave me cold, especially compared to the similar or same material on IT Conversations where it isn’t so highly treated. I’ve actually unsusbcribed and resubscribed to DTF several times. When I hear the arguments about how “no one will listen unless the production standards are as good as NPR” I think about this show, one that I’d like better if they didn’t produce it so much and instead gave it more room to breathe.