Just found out that the guy who made it, Michael Wesch, will be discussing the video at the Web 2.0 Expo today today at 4:00 pm.

It all takes place at the Web2Open gathering that is an unconference running in parallel (and in conjunction) with the main conference.

This is the kind of loosely coupled teaching/training that is going to take us into the next “age”.

Like last night.

I was driving back to my hotel in Palo Alto from the Web 2.0 Expo at San Francisco’s Moscone Center West. I turned on the alternative station and heard Loveline come on with Dr. Drew.

I could tell something was different as they started the show — there was a quick note that they had rescheduled the guests for the evening (two porn actresses) and were going to take calls about the Virginia Tech shooting.

What ‘Virginia Tech Shooting?’ I asked myself.

I listened for a few minutes. Not much info. I scanned the FM stations. Nothing there but entertainment. I switched to AM and moved from news site to news site, picking up details.

What a sad moment.

This AM as I listened to CNN while getting ready to head back to the conference, I heard an account from a professor in the building where most of the murders occurred.

He described hearing gunshots and barricading himself into his office. He detailed how he went to watch video on CNN’s web site to get an idea of what was happening around him.

And I am at one of the biggest tech conferences to ever focus on how we, as an industry, create things like streaming media tools, etc. — and how they [might]((http://chris.pirillo.com/2007/04/13/live-internet-video-stream/) be used.

I honestly never imagined that one — streaming video to monitor a massacre in your immediate proximity.

Stranger still is the fact that, after the Dot Com Crash, I worked at Real Networks for a year — monitoring the live performance of those CNN feeds — rallying the troops when surges brought things to a halt — triaging the system when it all went to hell.

I was the guy who woke up the Real news chief when the space shuttle broke up on re-entry in 2003. The team I was on monitored the video readiness as the U.S. prepared to invade Iraq and the fall(?) of Bagdad.

Sigh — may you live in interesting times is both a blessing and a curse.

• Monday 9:00 – The People Formerly Known as the Audience – Derek Powazek, Heather Champ
• Monday 10:10 -Rich Internet Applications with Apollo – Mike Chambers (Adobe)
• Monday 11:15 – Open Source Business Models for Web 2.0 – John Roberts (SugarCRM), Mårten Mickos (MySQL AB)
• Monday 1:30 – Venture Capital 2.0: Bright Future or Broken Forever? – Michael Arrington (TechCrunch), Jeff Clavier, (SoftTech), Michael Eisenberg (Benchmark Capital) David Hornik (August Capital), Josh Kopelman (First Round Capital), Chris Moore (Redpoint Ventures)
• Monday 2:45 – Keynotes with Tim O’Reilly, Jeff Bezos, Mena Trott, Joe Kraus, John Battelle, Jay Adelson, Kevin Lynch, David Knight, Jay Bhatti, and Kerry Fleming
• Monday 5:30 – Expo Hall Booth Crawl
• Monday 8:30 PM – Birds of a Feather Sessions (BoFs) – Measuring the Business Value of Rich Internet Applications – Andre Charland (Nitobi), Ryan Stewart (ZDNet)

He really helped me get my head around some of the foundations of designing these next generation online social experiences.

Highlights quotes were:

• “Social apps is the world that IM has made”
• “I am made greater by the sum of my connections, and so are my connections”
• “I give up personal productivity for network productivity. I sacrifice for the group.”
• “Fashionista recommendation is a different UI than a feature lookup (size, color, etc)”
• “What happens when the money gets serious? Well, what happened to the blogs? TechCrunch is no longer a blog per-se, it is a media property.”
• “Reputation is fragile both online and offline. Squander your rep and CBS may fire you.”
• “I often play psychologist for social apps. I set them on the couch and ask about their childhood.”
• “Find people who tag items the same way you do and you will find a social group based on shared ways of thinking and speaking.”
• “To understand social apps, you have to be in the flow, not outside. You can’t get it unless you are using them and you can’t explain it to people — you’ve got to do it. You can’t learn Karate by thinking about it”

Took notes in MindManger — here’s the .PDF or the .MMAP files.