Well, I would have liked to have written a post about each speaker today...but there just wasn't much to yap about.  In my opinion, there were really only two compelling talks so far this morning.  The first was from Mikal Maron of Mapufacture and Jesse Robbins of O'Reilly Radar.  They gave a really great talk about crowd sourcing data for disaster response and recovery.  They showed some great examples of where this has been very effective (Myanmar Cyclone, China Earthquake, SoCal Wildfires) and some where it hasn't been so great (Steve Fossett search).  But overall, I think this has some great application for doing really good and important things with crowd sourced data.

The other good talk came from Jennifer Kilian of Frog Design.  She talked about the importance of design not so much from the traditional "form follows function" point of view, but from the "form follows emotion" point of view.  She presented a very compelling case study about Merian GPS (a Euro product) that, in my opinion, showcased a product that exhibited near perfect design.  And the most important part: It wasn't design for design sake.  It really fully considered the user experience and was built around that.  I think that the world of "paleo" GIS can really take a lesson from this.  We seem to always design from a function point of view with very little consideration of design.  Whether we want to believe it or not, design matters.  In the new world of Web 2.0 (well, new to the GIS community) design considerations will be just as important as functional considerations.

So, design and disaster...two words that could have described the rest of the morning session.  Lack of design consideration was evident in most of the other presentations this morning...and well, I won't say anything about the disasters.  (Oh and the wireless has been very spotty today, so sorry if my updates aren't as frequent as yesterday).