Sergio Villarreal and Kent Brewster gave an interesting, if mostly offtopic talk on Web Hacks: Good or Evil (or: Welcome to Web 2.666). Many web technologies started off as “hacks”, notoriously <img> and XMLHttpRequest.

The rest of the presentation followed loosely from the premise that “content” is, will be (via services like Dapper) and needs to be “everywhere”, largely via feeds and now JSON. From this came three observations:

• JSON everywhere as an alternative to feeds
• “IP” is a questionable concept
• Suddenly, everything is hackable (e.g., via a service like Yahoo! Pipes

And three recommendations:

• Don’t wait for pipes to drain your feed (publish JSON)
• Don’t stop writing!
• The web hates authors and loves writers (continue to create, as opposed to selling previous creations)

The last seems like an observation, or a repeat of the previous recommendation, but is a really nice soundbite.

The presenters struck me as being far too optimistic (or pessimistic if you want) about the impact of their technologies (Brewster is a technology evangelist for Yahoo!) — closing slide “Copyright is dead” and imagining a copyright-ignoring YouTube appearing in Kazakhstan, and having an impact.

Factoid: Brewster said Yahoo! has about two dozen full time people reviewing content flagged as porn, mostly moms, with higher than standard cubicle walls.