PlaNetwork 6, Marc Canter

Yesterday at the first concurrent session at PlaNetwork I spied a boisterous, larger-than-life character I’ve read and read about for years: Marc Canter.

In 1984, Marc founded MacroMind which eventuallly morphed into today’s Macromedia. Lately, he’s been popping up on my radar as he voices his take on blogging, syndication, social networks, collaboration, Open Source, klogs, the fusion of art and technology, and more. Fasten your seat belt and look at Broadband Mechanics.

I told Marc I’d been to Broadband Mechanics the night before, and though the WebOutliner looked cool, I could not get it to work. He gave me a demo. What an awesome product! An open source front-end to web content of all sorts. The Outliner is a creative cockpit for writers, artists, and everyman — what Apple used to call “the rest of us.” It’s high-tech under the hood and the simplicity of sophistication on the outside. Marc chided me for not following the directions properly: “See where it says ‘Click twice’? You’re supposed to click there twice.” Duh. I’ll give a more complete review of WebOutliner after I’ve played with it some more.

Later in the day I was waiting to ask Marc a question as he advised some fellow on a new product that relies on web services as a carrier. Rattling off concepts at a staccato pace, Marc said, “So at the semantic level of the meta-meta-meta, it’s really simple stuff.” Deal with it.

From an interview with Marc that appeared in Corante:

Broadband Mechanics is building new kinds of tool and tool environments which will enable average everyday people to create and maintain new kinds of on-line communities which integrate, aggregate and provide appropriate levels of customization to media, communication and personal publishing.  To help make this all happen - we’ll also be promoting the concept of open standards which will help all tool vendors, existing media vendors and end-users get this all to happen.

From The Marc Canter Show:

Don’t think of this as just a web site. Scalable content should adapt to take advantage of the inherent capabilities of a media type.

Marc Canter has been both a mentor and a pain in the … and there is
nobody in the business whom I admire more. The Marc Canter Show
is Marc’s vision of the future here on the internet. Sometimes I don’t
quite understand some of his ideas, but if you ever visit the bleeding
edge, you will find graffitti from Marc on the bathroom walls.

Posted by Jay Cross at June 7, 2003 11:20 AM | TrackBack