ConvergeSouth begins today. Of the three conferences taking place this week – this is the one I miss not going to the most. As Ed Cone says, not better, but different. Grassroots. Bottom up. I’m sure attendees will have a good weekend.

Speaking of conferences, Om Malik gives a summary of how this week’s Web 2.0 conference went.

BrightCove, in the wake of a great demo, from what I hear, at Web 2.0, is adding board members. Jeff Jarvis says he’s impressed and might want to join as well. More in the NYTimes.

Related: Wired: Are You Ready for Web 2.0?

Weblogs.com gets acquired by Verisign! More at PaidContent here and here. More at Roland Tanglao and Verisign and Dave himself. Congrats Dave! Whadda week!

Are we seeing a bubble? Sensible folks like Rafe believe this is the case. I don’t know if it’s a bubble. There has not been the same growth in jobs that occurred in the late 90s. Maybe that’s to come. There has been a lot of money flying about. This week’s buyouts and acquisitions have shown investors and larger companies waking up to what’s been growing around them these past five years. Efforts that, in many ways, call back to what the web was supposed to be in the first place, and what visionaries were calling it to be ten years ago – a participatory medium and platform – not a one-way publishing tool. These efforts are no where near where they should be – but you can see evidence of that early promise – and I gotta tell ya – it’s a great time to be doing what I do for a living. It’s exciting to look around at what’s taking place. But am I seeing this from the wrong perspective?

PaidContent: AOL-MSN Start Talking Again On Combining.

Tony Pierce interviews Ev Williams.

An overview of the the Eclipse Web Tools project at O’Reilly.

PaidContent is following Web 2.0 from afar with a list of links. TechCrunch has a list of companies who have presented so far.

Speaking of PaidContent, they have the scoop on Weblogs Inc getting bought by AOL! Congrats to Jason Calacanis and the Weblogs Inc team! I think it’s awesome news. They have built an online media empire and are a template that hordes of others are following.

Pictures from We Media and updates on its blog.

It was great to read We Media Versus Web 2.0 to help confirm my own thoughts as to the interplay between these two conferences: We’re all trying to come at the same problem, though with two very different world views. What the East Coast media-centric world called “We Media” or “Citizen Journalism” is what the West Coast-Silicon Valley crowd called “Web 2.0”. It is content versus application/platform. I would replace “versus” with “and”.

Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! asks what would it it take to make it easier to follow online conversations.

Shelley Powers: Sleeping around Web 2.0 Style.

Speaking of Shelley, she is revisiting her Web 1.0 past in “The time is now… 1997”. Definitely will be fun. I need to upload some of the older versions of my personal site for laughs, giggles, and reflection. The jump from 1996 to 1998 – where I started a blog and became ummm – boring – is rather amazing.

Are facts commodites (great post that will have you thinking – read it)? A scenario and thought related:

What if you were a Katrina survivor, radios and cell towers are down, no electricity or WiFi – and all you have is word of mouth – rumor – to guide you? What if you are illiterate? Or disabled? I’d argue the pillars of Infrastructure and Protocol permit facts to be commodities. When either denies facts to spread – they get locked down in hidden cells that only those already in the know can unlock or they get warped and misrepresented as they fight to be free.

I know I’m blessed to work in an industry that deals with this. We’re nowhere close to being where we can be – or where we need to be – there is a lot to do yet.

Three conferences I wish I could have gone to: We Media, web 2.0, and ConvergeSouth.

post-gazette: State College-based blogger Aaron Wall was sued in August for defamation and revealing the trade secrets of Traffic-Power.com

Sun welcomes you to 1999 with it’s non-announcement. Did any of you waste your time with the Google-Sun webcast? It was an infuriating circle-jerk with no substance. Was the entire idea to poke at Microsoft? I mean.. really… that is so 1999.

I like the ideas behind Ning, primarily becasue they seem to have empowerment at their root. But I can’t say much about it since I don’t have a developer account yet.

A huge congrats to Brent Simmons and Ranchero on being aquired by NewsGator.

Another huge congrats to Waxy and Upcoming.org on being aquired by Yahoo!.

Looking good so far. Moving paradox1x.org is a precursor to a much larger move. This was relatively simple since I use Movable Type with MySQL. Literally all it took was copying the database, copying the file system of the site, changing Movable Type’s configs and rebuild. I’ve been careful never to refer to inner content on the site with its domain name so I was able to test from a mirroring URL. Now I have to move a Drupal/CivicSpace site (Philly Future). I think, other than recreating some cron jobs at the new host, it should be much of the same.

Now on to interesting Monday morning matters…

Jonathon Schwartz, in a recent keynote, asked his audience “which they’d rather give up – their browser, or all the rest of their desktop apps”. Guess the answer already?

…All these trends show a slowing upgrade appetite calling into question the power of traditional distribution. In stark contrast to the value of volume, community and participation.

…The cost of reaching customers, traditionally the most expensive part of building a business, has largely been eliminated – resulting in massive, global participation.

In a related post, for an entirely different industry (are they so different?) Jeff Jarvis says that Google commodifies news. That gives Google too much credit if you ask me – but it’s definately on the right track. It’s the entire web, and our participation in it, using web services like Google, using standards for transmission like RSS and Atom, that commodify news distribution.

But has news itself become a commodity? David Shenk, way back in 1997, in his book “Data Smog” worried that on the web, that this would have a negative effect. That on the information highway, most roads bypass journalists. I don’t know if news or journalism has become a commodity. I believe there is a growing need for services where people can find news sources they can trust. There are opportunities here for those who can bring clarity – who understand that community and participation are vital to that. Jeff mentioned that new role for journalists in an earlier piece, “Editor as news gatherer”.

In a related article Ed Cone, shares how blogs are part of this: “Rise of the Blog”: Blogs and wikis are part of a wave of low-cost software that has streamlined the way information is published, edited and found on the Web. They allow just about anybody to work in their Web browsers and write in natural language..

So the same forces that are in play in software are in play in the media business. More at Jeremy Zawodny‘s.

Speaking of technology and its relationship with community, participation and empowerment, read Wired’s profile of Tim O’Reilly.

In Philly the city Wi-Fi provider contract is about to be signed. In related news Google is bidding to be San Francisco’s free Wi-Fi provider.

Did you see Serenity? Richelle, me and Steve did. We were blown away. A great, great movie. I had worried that it wouldn’t translate to the big screen. I was wrong. I can’t tell you much because there are real surprises in it. One of which left us completely on the edge – I mean if they were going to that that then they might do anything. Reviews from friends: Bill, Shelley, Dave (and if I missed ya – let me know).

Testing….If you are seeing this – you are seeing paradox1x at its new host. Commenting and trackbacks won’t work since the site is configured to operate from a mirroring address until DNS changes.