Webware

The Web 2.0 Summit wrapped up Friday with conversations about the Internet, politics, renewable energy, and space. Below are videos of on-stage talks, courtesy of TechWeb.

In a panel discussion in which The Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington is joined by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Democratic campaign organizer Joe Trippi, Huffington argues that "were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president," in part because the blogosphere has "an obsessive-compulsive disorder." Trippi agrees that "the (Internet) medium demands authenticity."

In response to Huffington's remark that "politicians definitely need to adjust how they behave," never assuming that they are having a private conversation with anyone in public, New York magazine's John Heilemann says to Newsom, "So Gavin, there's no off-the-record ever again now."

Newsom, who says he is "obsessed with Facebook," agrees: Politicians need to "get over it," he says. "You're on the record. If you get into public life, you should expect nothing short of it."

Continuing their discussion, the quartet focus on how the political spectrum is changing, largely because of the vast exposure to information that the Internet affords. But not everyone can afford to access the Internet regularly, Newsom says.

"We have a huge digital-divide problem," argues the San Francisco mayor, who has been working hard to bring his city municipal wireless broadband. "We are slipping; we are not making any real advancements." Hundreds of thousands of people still rely on network television to gather their political insights, he says.

Meanwhile, Huffington says citizen journalism on the Internet is playing a major role in transforming the lingo and polarization of American politics.

"We are so completely used to talking about right versus left," she says. "It's a lazy way to talk...If you really want to transform politics, you have to transcend these divisions and really define the new center, and I can't really think of anything more important."

For The Huffington Post, at least, "right" and "left" are now "the forbidden words."

Newsom, a Democrat, chimes in: "If you don't want to be part of the Democratic Party or the Republican Party, you better be part of the get-it-done party, and the peril of all of this is that you've got to deliver."

Next up: Web 2.0 Summit moderator John Battelle, head of Federated Media Publishing and longtime journalist, invites serial entrepreneur Elon Musk up to the stage to talk about the three areas Musk identified in college in which he wanted to get involved: the Internet, renewable energy, and space exploration.

Musk acknowledges somewhat smugly that he wasn't confident during college that he'd be able to innovate in the latter two areas; the Web provided the easiest (read: least expensive) endeavor. "I'm more of an engineer than anything else, I guess."

But once the PayPal co-founder could afford to buy himself anything he wants, he says, he started investing in cutting-edge technologies such as solar energy (SolarCity), electric vehicles (Tesla Motors), and space travel (SpaceX).

"The point of Tesla is to get to mass-market electric cars, but to get there, you need to start with something. And if you look at any technology developments, in almost any sphere, you start with something which is expensive," Musk says, referring to the Roadster's current $109,000 price tag. "The first thing is about making the technology work, and then you go from there to optimizing the technology."

Musk points out that, like cell phones and laptops, in their early days, "internal combustion engine cars were considered toys for rich people, because everyone then was riding a horse."

In discussing recent Tesla news regarding fund-raising and layoffs, Musk compares running a successful start-up to running a highly trained military unit. He says taking a "special-forces approach" is necessary to becoming large and successful.

"The minimum passing grade is excellent," he says. It's "the difference between special forces and Army."

Closing the summit is former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who famously went from losing the 2000 presidential election to winning an Academy Award for the global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth and a Nobel Peace Prize. He came to the Web 2.0 Summit to talk, at least in part, about Current Media, a Web video company he co-founded that partnered up with Web darlings Digg and Twitter to cover the election last week.

"The Internet democratizes information," Gore says, arguing that Sen. Barack Obama's win had much to do with how his campaign made use of the Web.

Gore also focuses on the motivations behind Web innovation, and he uses a lesson he'd learned from a dog trainer to illustrate his point.

"A puppy has to have a purpose," he says. Likewise, "Web 2.0 has to have a purpose. We have to have a purpose."

As the conversation turns to the collective human purpose of cutting down on pollution and its devastating effects, Gore notes that people generally need a sense of urgency to act.

"The urgency center of the brain is geared to snakes and spiders and fire," Gore says, explaining that people generally require a bit more processing and analyzing, as well as conscious decision making, to react to many other potential dangers. "It needs to be stored in the cloud. It's the aggregate bandwidth that counts...so that we can respond to it collectively."

Former Vice President Al Gore onstage at the Web 2.0 Summit.

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET News)

SAN FRANCISCO--The central theme of former Vice President Al Gore's speech, concluding the Web 2.0 Summit on Friday afternoon, was electricity.

He spoke of "the electrifying redemption of America's revolutionary declaration that all human beings are created equal," as emphasized through Barack Obama's election victory on Tuesday, and how it "would not have been possible without the additional empowerment of individuals to use knowledge as a source of power that has come with the Internet."

Gore reiterated what so many people have said before--that the Obama campaign was a vindication for how the new tools of the Internet can be used toward legitimate change.

"What happened in the election opens up a full new range of possibilities, and now is the time to really move swiftly to use these new possibilities," he said. "I made a talk earlier today about how the early uses of electricity 100 years ago were aimed at sort of specialized applications and gimmicks and do-dads and whiz-bangs that demonstrated the special qualities of this new conveyor of power."

He meant, essentially, throwing an electric sheep. (Apologies to Philip K. Dick.)

"Now we just take electricity for granted as everywhere, and it has empowered a whole civilization," he said. Gore said the analogy stands for Web 2.0 as well. "When people are displaying interactivity or user-generated content or social networking, that's kind of the gee-whiz stuff...We need to move past that."

Electricity, too, is key to Gore's urgent call to action, which he detailed with an immediacy that was needed at a conference where some panels drifted a little too far into the speculative future. America needs a "unified national smart grid" distributing renewable solar energy across the country, something he estimates would cost $400 billion in a decade. But it would create thousands of jobs, Gore said, and it would pay for itself within three years.

When Obama takes office in January, Gore said the new president ought to set "a national goal of getting 100 percent of America's electricity from renewable and noncarbon sources within 10 years. We can do that."

He continued: "The declaration from President Kennedy that we would land a man on the moon and bring him back safely was thought by many to be impossible."

Gore had come onstage at the conference to a standing ovation and so much applause that he had to tell the audience to quiet down. His story is familiar: he famously won the popular vote for the presidency in 2000 but lost the electoral vote to George W. Bush, and he went on to win both an Academy Award for his environmental-awareness documentary An Inconvenient Truth and the Nobel Peace Prize last year.

In 2005, Gore founded Current TV, a cable news network that he created with Joel Hyatt in response to his dissatisfaction with the television industry. "One of the main reasons why our political system has not been operating very well until this election is the deadening influence of the television medium as it has been operated," he said.

Gore encouraged the digerati in the audience to keep pushing forward as they face what he says is the most pressing struggle of our time, climate change--the subject matter of An Inconvenient Truth. The fact that the Web's candidate of choice won this time is no reason to rest easy, he said. Media democratization needs to continue evolving.

"Just as Barack Obama's election would've been impossible without the new dialogue and new ways of interacting--the Web--the only way (climate change) is going to be solved is by addressing the democracy crisis, and the country hit a great blow for victory this week, but we have to take this issue and raise it in the awareness of everyone," Gore said. "I think that it is very much in its infancy, barely beginning, and I think that we are not many years away from television sort of sinking into the digital world and becoming a part of it."

Cynics might say Gore, who calls himself a "recovering politician," is still bitter at a sterilized news media that didn't sufficiently back his calling in the 2000 presidential election. Needless to say, his views remain controversial. But onstage, Gore seemed plenty comfortable in his new role as a thought leader rather than an elected official.

"Who knew that you were the guru of Web 2.0, as well as global warming?" conference organizer Tim O'Reilly asked Gore jokingly after the former vice president had illustrated an analogy involving "crowdsourced" information and cloud computing, two of the decade's most buzzworthy digital talking points.

If the audience was any indication, Gore has gained resounding acceptance as an information-age guru, a bit of an irony, considering that 10 years ago, erroneous reports circulated that he had once claimed to have invented the Internet.

"When we have really had these great leaps forward has been when new information ecoystems have made it possible for individuals who are thinking and processing information, and who have aspirations and hopes...to connect easily with lots of voters around core ideas," Gore explained. His preferred analogy was the invention of the printing press five centuries ago, in which he connected general historical events to the rise of literacy and eventually the creation of democratic governments.

"The installation of a new sovereign, the rule of reason, and the emergence of a marketplace of ideas that was accessible to individuals--that really empowered this kind of collective intelligence," Gore said. "And the American constitution could be, by analogy, a brilliant piece of software that regularly harvested the results of that."

An audience member asked Gore how much he thought governments should regulate Internet use, and Gore fired back, "As little as possible." There was more applause, and as he left the stage, there was yet another standing ovation.

Gore might not have invented the Internet (or even claimed to do so). But if the Web 2.0 Summit was any indication, plenty of Silicon Valley's most loyal are more than happy to have him help reinvent it.

Former Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore is scheduled to talk to attendees of this year's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco at 4:30 p.m. PST Friday. Here, you'll find our take on his speech, in real time.

Update: The talk is now finished, but you can catch up on the entire thing by clicking the replay button below.

Let's face it: Video search blows. It's easy to use YouTube's search box to find straightforward Internet video memes like cats playing pianos, skateboard tricks, or Rick Astley remixes; try for anything more intricate and you might be out of luck. There are established companies in the space, like the U.K.-based Blinkx, but none of them has captured the market share that video search potentially could.

Enter VideoSurf, a company launching later on Wednesday at the TechCrunch50 conference that's been getting a choice spot in the tech-blogger limelight thanks to a Los Angeles Times preview.

VideoSurf CEO Lior Delgo told the Times that instead of only being able to search text tags and descriptions, the company's search technology goes frame-by-frame to recognize specific people. Additionally, VideoSurf says it has already indexed multiple video sites, from hubs like YouTube and Hulu to the digital libraries of networks like Comedy Central and ESPN. The company has attracted investment funding from former Vice President Al Gore and Joel Hyatt, the co-founders of Current Media; Hyatt is chairman of VideoSurf's board of directors.

But there's a caveat: nobody in the tech press has actually seen this company in action yet. Search Engine Land was very impressed by a demo, calling the company "genuinely radical," but doesn't appear to have done anything hands-on. The last shadowy video company that was this hyped was arguably Joost, which is still trying to stay afloat after failing to catch on. So don't count the chickens before they hatch, even if we're talking about a grainy cell phone camera video of chickens playing "Never Gonna Give You Up" on a piano.

Current TV launched in 2005 with a dual-platform message: It was a TV station with a built-in Web component. But it was clear that it was really a TV station first, that the site was its feeder system. Today, though, Current TV becomes just Current. The new Web site is a much better destination than the previous version, and makes Current into an honestly multinetwork media product. Current's Web site has content and social features that make it interesting if you never bother to tune in Current on TV.

Current's new site brings excellent design to standard social bookmarking features.

Current has become a good-looking social bookmarking and community site. Topic pages are far more visual than on Digg or Delicious, and it's extremely easy to create an entry with good art on it: When you paste in an URL, Current immediately grabs all likely photos and videos from the page and lets you choose any of them for your intro art. Users can respond to posts with their own links or via Webcam--there's a Flash-based cam recorder.

One of the biggest features of Current is that user-contributed content can end up on the TV channel. Current milks our fascination with being broadcast for all it's worth. Current's editors curate user-generated content through "Assignments" that work much like standard Current topics pages, except that users know the editors are scanning them for content to put on the air.

The argument clinic

Current also solicits for viewer-created ad messages, or "VCAMs." The advertisers provide resources (logos, music, and so on), and filmmakers can try their hand at real commercial video. They can even earn a few bucks. I don't like the idea of a media company asking viewers to create advertising for other viewers, but there's no question that some of the ads created by the Current community are leagues better--and very different--from what Madison Avenue would turn out.

In addition to the core function of the site, which is sharing and commenting on media, there are some cool bonus features. The "Viewpoints" feature is an entertaining wall of video arguments. There's also a clever interface for viewing Current's TV lineup. It shows you what's playing at the moment so you can play it on your computer if you like. It's designed more so dual-screen viewers (TV across the room, computer on the lap) can quickly find the ancillary materials for what they're watching. There's no actual live feed of the Current TV broadcast on the Web--I was told the cable and satellite companies didn't want that.

The weirdest programming guide you will ever see. But it works.

Current.com is missing a few features: There are no RSS feeds and there's no Web-based video editor. There's also no Facebook version of Current. I got vigorous "we're working on it" nods from the Current developers when I asked about these features.

It is very difficult to make both parts of a Web-TV hybrid product work financially and for users. The economics don't easily mesh, and the user experiences are very different. Current (whose chairman, of course, is former vice president and newly minted Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore) brings new thinking to both parts of the equation. It's still primarily a TV business, but the Web site works as a standalone product as well as complimenting the Current mission very nicely.