mesh conference

We’re pretty excited about having Chris Thorpe do the media keynote for mesh 2010. Chris comes to us from The Guardian, one of Britain’s leading newspapers, where he is the Developer Advocate in charge of the paper’s Open Platform. This puts him at the forefront of one of the most fascinating frontiers in the media industry: namely, the transformation of traditional media entities such as newspapers into digital-information services that distribute their content in a variety of different ways online. And sometimes that involves experimenting too: an offhand remark during a lunch presentation by Clay Shirky, for example, recently led to the creation of a “ChatRoulette for news” called Guardian Roulette.

The Guardian’s Open Platform is based on an open API (i.e, application programming interface) similar to that provided by Google, Twitter, Facebook and other companies provide, which allows developers and programmers to use The Guardian’s content in a variety of ways, and build it into third-party services at no cost. The New York Times also has an open API, but it only provides access to a small part of the text in each story, whereas The Guardian’s provides the full text of every story.

In a blog post last year, British MP Tom Watson wrote:

I’m not bowled over much these days. But Guardian Open Platform is a chasmic leap into the future. It is a work of simplistic beauty that I’m sure will have a dramatic impact in the news market. The Guardian is already a market leader in the online space but Open Platform is revolutionary. It makes all of their major competitors look timid. Governments should be doing this. Governments will be doing it. The question is how long will it take us to catch up. (British MP Tom Watson)

Chris gave a presentation last year at the Future of Web Apps conference, which is embedded below, in which he talked about how The Guardian’s use of an open platform is “building the stacks of a mutualised newspaper.”

There’s also an interview with Chris here:

Interview with Chris Thorpe (The Guardian) from Publishr on Vimeo.

We’ve just announced mesh10 (details here and tickets here) and over the next few weeks more information will appear on the site about our keynotes, panels and workshops. This year we’d like to include a panel in our Society stream that focuses on how the always-on, real-time Web is changing the way we learn, think, grow and relate to one another other – essentially, the impact it’s having on the very fabric of society.

And so we’re looking for introductions to interesting people who think about these issues, and are now reaching out to people in our community who might have great ideas about moderators and panelists for such a panel, or thoughts about aspects of this topic that ought to be discussed. Perhaps you know of a neuroscientist who’s doing interesting research on how brain pathways are remapped under intensive internet usage. Or perhaps you know of someone who’s studying the way children learn when they have the web as a research tool.

Whatever your ideas are we’re interested! We’re looking for smart, dedicated and provocative big-thinkers and interesting perspectives on this larger topic to help us make the most out of this opportunity. We do have one request though – please help us to manage the inflow of suggestions by making serious suggestions only.

You can enter your suggestions here or below. Thanks for helping out!