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WiFi WLAN stars at Dyson's PC Forum

Public meetings may never be the same again; as webloggers in the audience start posting "live" and feedback comes - equally live - into the conf room ...

People still don't really understand how wireless LANs change the world. If you need to illustrate it, send them off to MSNBC's report of Esther Dyson's PC Forum where the star of the show was not any PC, but WiFi itself.

Steve Levy, as usual, manages to conjure up the magic:

"We're only beginning to grasp how weird it is to have wireless Net access all the time. One harbinger: during Tuesday morning's session with Qwest telecommunications CEO Joe Nacchio, several conference participants were typing their impressions into personal 'Web logs,' online diaries available to all on the Internet.

"One of these 'bloggers,' Doc Searls, got an e-mail from a friend across the country, who noted that Nacchio—who at that moment was onstage complaining about how tough life was in telecom — had sold huge amounts of stocks over the past two years. He sent Searls a page from Yahoo Finance with the particulars and Searls linked it to his log. Then the friend sent the information to another blogger in the room, Dan Gillmor, who copied the link to his own site, acidly commenting on the inappropriateness of Nacchio's whining.

"Though it's not clear how many in the room were reading the Web logs, apparently there were a lot. In any case, it seemed that the room palpably chilled toward the pugnacious executive. This is a dangerous trend for public speakers everywhere."

Levy adds: "A company called Joltage provided this forum high-speed wireless access to the conference area itself, winning the infinite gratitude of the crowd. Each day more people came into the ballroom for the morning program, and immediately set up their laptops, thereafter splitting their focus between the panels onstage and their own e-mail and Web browsing. At one point, says Michael Chapio, Joltage's CEO, his ad hoc WiFi 'hot spot' had 250 users online at once—half the total attendance at the conference!"

The speakers didn't seem to mind, says Levy; "as Kevin Werbach said, 'It's a lot better than having people sneak off to their rooms to read their e-mail'."