Day 2 of Web 2.0

It’s Day 2 of the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco. I forgot to bring my compact flash reader, so I won’t be able to post new photos until tonight (but I will then). Forgive me if some of this is fuzzy — I caught 4 1/2 hours of sleep last night. Nice wifi, though!

Joe Kraus, the former co-founder of Excite whom I interviewed for Darknet after he co-founded DigitalConsumer.org, announced the launch of his new company, JotSpot, a wiki company. He showed off some new functionalities that will extend wikis in new ways (I’m sure Ross Mayfield of Socialtext was very interested in seeing these on display).

Brewster Kahle, the visionary founder of the Internet Archive, is up now. Brewster was the inspiration for ourmedia.org — the idea of creating a global repository or library for grassroots media. Marc Canter and I will talk with him later about some remaining issues befor the project can launch.

In his 15-minute talk, Brewster mentioned some metrics:

• There are 26 million books that have been published in history. Of that, half are out of copyright. A million books can fit in a terabyte box the size of a bookshelf.

John Markoff in the New York Times today reports that Google plans to digitize books that are out of copyright starting in January, he said (I can’t find the link, though).

The Internet Archive, Brewster said, is working with a Toronto group to digitize books and put them online at the cost of $10 per book.

“What are we allowed to scan?” he asked. The Archive’s goals bump up against the realities of copyright law. First, there’s the issue of identifying which books are out of copyright. Next is the problem of books that are under copyright but out of print. “That makes no sense!” he said. “What are we going to do with the orphans?” Those orphans consist of most books printed in the 20th century — 8 million out-of-print books that it would be illegal to digitize and put online.

The veteran archivist got a round of applause by mentioning Kahle vs. Ashcroft, a civil lawsuit to achieve the “socially critical goal” of digitizing out-of-print books and putting them online.

• On the audio front, there are 2 to 3 million disc recordings (CDs and albums) ever sold, he said. (My research suggests the number is higher.) “What can we do with music?” Brewster said. “Lots of people are not served terribly well by the recording industry.” (Laughter from the 500 or so audience members.)

The Archive has music recordings from 700 rock bands as well as 3,000 concerts and Grateful Dead concert recordings from between 1965 and 1995. And he said you’ll hear some good news about the availability of classical music under European copyright laws during the next two months.

• There have been 100,000 to 200,000 theatrical releases of films worldwide — about half of them Indian. There are about 600 films made in the U.S. that are not under copyright, including “Night of Living Dead,” and the Archive has 300 of them online. “You can go up there, cut ’em up and make new films,” he said.

• Television is the latest frontier, with the Archive recording 20 hours of television from countries around the world around the clock. Making it publicly available, however, is “a thorny issue,” he said.

When ourmedia soft-launches in a month or so, perhaps a third of our initial offerings will be existing Internet Archive content — and most of the rest will be material licensed under Creative Commons and stored on the Archive’s servers.

Later: Here’s News.com on yesterday’s Web 2.0 presentations: Investor doesn’t see browser in Google’s future.

Some notable quotes from today (a rolling list):

A speaker quoted Jeff Bezos’s insight from last night: “We’re still in the first day of the first chapter of web 2.0.”

“In Europe, Google is completely invisible.”

“Skype has 10 million users and is the fastest-growing application online.” 7% of Poland’s population is already using Skype, a Skype board member said.

We’ll see fewer IPOs because the exit strategy is to get acquired by Yahoo, Google, Microsoft and other companies that figure it’s easier to buy than build.

“Everybody’s carrying around a little computer today. They just may not know it.”

“More cell phones are sold in four days than all the Apple computers in history.”

Later still: Bullet points from Dave Sifry, CEO of Technorati, who’s on stage now. (Surprisngly, only about a third to a quarter of the audience has heard of Technorati.)

• English is no longer the majority language of weblogs. It’s still the plurality language, but all the other languages combined now outnumber English in the blogosphere.

• The number of blog postings worldwide has skyrocketed this year — now it’s 4 entries per second. The biggest spikes this year have come from the Kryptonite bike lock story; the Dean scream (which got a lot of “link love”); the Nick Berg beheading, and the political conventions. Since the end of July, the number of blog posts per day have really taken off as people blog about the November election.

• Only about 28% of RSS feeds are full-text feeds. But people who are influencers (with lots of people who link to you) are more likely to have an RSS feed.

More: There are the same number of Internet users under age 30 in China as there are in the United States. (Mary Meeker)

Afternoon session: Alas, the wifi network kicked me off for the past three hours. Back on now.

Marc Andreeson:

“One of the more amazing things to me was watching Microsoft get a monopoly position in the market and then do nothing with it.”

“This is going to get very interesting over the next 2-3 years. … Browser innovation pretty much stopped in 1998. … Microsoft is certainly going to respond competitively if Firefox, Opera, Safari [get more traction].”

“You can see the future in the mobile handset business. There’s no product loyalty or lock-in when there’s innovation from competitors.” Customers flock to the best product or service.

“Google is being led by the nose into a direct confrontation with Microsoft. Press, Wall Street, analysts, users. … I don’t see why a desktop application and OS company and a search company can’t both win.”

Dan Rosensweig, Chief Operating Officer of Yahoo, who appeared alongside Andreeson:

“The Web is the most selfish medium ever invented — people want what they want, whre they want it, when they want it.”

“The ability to monetize has become stable, predictable, reliable.”

From the floor, Steve Gillmor of ZDNet asked whether Yahoo would commit to open standards for RSS so that RSS does not split into competing proprietary standards by the heavy hitters. Rosensweig essentially dodged, saying he couldn’t commit to open standards but that “we’re all going to surrender to what the consumer wants to do.”

Marc Canter then asked Andreeson about the development community dipping into the billionaire boys’ club to support open standards like FOAF (Friend of a Friend). Andreeson responded, “The answer is obviously open standards. FOAF exists and the day the major companies support it is when it’ll take off.”

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.