Well it's day two of the big Open Source conference known as Open Source Bridge, happening here, at the Portland Art Museum all week long. What is "Open Source" well that's basically the technology that makes websites like the Sentinel possible. Open Source is a catch all for IT platforms, tools, and systems that are essentially freeware. Things like the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the free content management system WordPress are two popular examples.  

Often these technologies are developed in whole or in part by volunteers. Often the products are given away for free.  In all cases, the 'code' or the applications or the 'techno guts' that make an product work, must be available free to the public once an open sources product is released. 

Ok, did I mangle that definition folks?

This site is designed with an open source system called Drupal. And while the technology behind it is technically open source, Drupal is not for the faint of heart. Aka, don't try to develop one of these sites at home kids [and really, why would they want to...]

But open source is the way of the future...or at least one way. As the Microsoft proprietary software world crumbles to open source apps like WordPress and to online apps like those controlled by Google, the people at this conference will be increasingly shaping the future.

Portland has a famously vibrant open source community. So it's a big deal that this year's conference has come back to Portland. Portland Mayor Sam Adams will deliver the keynote speech tomorrow at 9am. The event is billed as "organized by developers for developers...for people working on open source projects or who want to learn the open source way."

So that's why I am here. I'm going to be trying to learn the open source way and find our the future of the technology that is changing how our news is transmitted and the way we all share information. That and these folks like to drink! There's a pub crawl tomorrow night and another one tonight.  But don't belly up to the bar if you don't know your CSS Poindexter!

UPDATE 5:15pm
I'm at the session about the death of print and the rise of ePub tools for iPad and other mobile devices. The session is lead by Lennon Day-Reynolds a software developer for Portland's own Dark Horse Comics. Even though this is a very technical conference, Day-Reynolds keeps to tradition and opens with a joke...

"memetype
MERA-INF/
  container.xml
OPS/
   books.opf

...ect, you get the idea!"

Big laughs
 
  Ok, so that's not really true. He didn't open with that. But on the subject of exaggeration I all ready got a comment about portraying developers as the stereotype nerds. [Personally I'm a dork not a nerd. Dorks are to the arts what nerds are to the sciences...or so I say.] Anyway, I want to rescind my original photo characterization. Folks here look more like this.

 The basic take away from this session is that the iPad rocks. Open source people are not so keen on the fact that Apple is very restrictive in allowing wild wild west style developers to do their thing. 

"Just hack it," says Day-Reynolds. "We know how to deal with that."

But the logic is, the easier it is for these folks to build applications for readers and mobile devices the more common and pervasive these devices will become.  

Amazon and the new iPad store are the major players for content in the emerging Kindle iPad ePub universe. 

There is a LOT of buzz around the new Wired Magazine App. See video trailer below. But there was also some discussion of a iPad book version of Alice in Wonderland that is multimedia and engaging in a way that no book or website could ever be.

I for one think we are finally at the most exciting part of the new publication technology arch. Now is the time when a lot of multimedia tools will be able to converge seemlessly. The weaving together of text, audio, graphic and video elements will give us new story telling and story consuming experiences never seen/heard/felt.

That's the dork part of me speaking.