Plazes crossed my radar several months ago, likely because of a mention on Joi Ito’s blog. I visited, registered, but never really got what it was for or about, and never returned.

Today I was cured of this through a presentation by its founders Stefan Kellner and Felix Petersen, two super-smart guys from Germany.

Here’s the thing you need to get: location based services — stuff on the web that is tailored, automagically, to wherever you happen to be at a given moment — are hard because, at least right now, the folks with the best geolocating abilities are the mobile phone companies, and they’re not giving the information up, at least not in any sort of open, hackable way.

Stefan and Felix’s brilliant innovation was realizing that they could built geolocation on top of the unique MAC addresses that most every Ethernet router, wired and wireless, have. They have a little app, called the launcher that figures out the MAC address of wherever you happen to be and sends it up to their server.

For example, here’s the Plazes page for the reboot hall. Because I ran the launcher when I opened up my laptop, the Plazes server has the MAC address I’m using, and knows, from other users at the same location who’ve been ahead and “blazed the trail” with information about the location, where I am.

This is such an elegant solution to an otherwise cumbersome problem, that I was smiling throughout their talk. Neato.

The unspoken secret of my attendance at reboot was that, until this morning, I hadn’t looked at the program for the conference. I knew some of the names of the speakers, read somewhere that the conference was, vaguely, about “the future.” But as to the “themes” and “topics,” well, I was too busy figuring out how to get here to pay attention to that sort of thing.

My conference planning, thus, was sort of: conference, Copenhagen, wiki, cool, Air Canada, hotel, register.

As such it came as a pleasant surprise that one of the speakers was organic farmer Thomas Harttung, speaking on The Biological Way – Mind the Gap. Thomas is a compelling speaker, a bona fide farmer, and someone who has thought deeply about food, biology, farming and spirituality. The transcript of an earlier talk will give you a taste of his thinking.

His organic farm here in Denmark serves 35,000 clients with organic fruit and vegetables delivered to the door.

And here I thought it was going to be all packets and wikis and gazombozasa.

Fifty-three seconds of the main hall at reboot, just before things get going. I left the headphones at home, so I’ve no idea whether there’s any actual sound here. Let me know.

Here’s the Technorati page for blog posts tagged reboot7.

The word of the day from The Old Farmer’s Almanac: blatherskit.

A heavy early morning: woke up at 4:30 a.m., had an iChat with Catherine, who was just getting in, and slowly, slowly fell back to sleep, only yo awake with a shudder at 7:30. World only slowly coming into focus. Here’s 1:22 of sound recorded on the outdoor plaza at reboot, where I’ve just arrived.

Tonight at the reboot meetup, I met Olle, who proved to be a kindred spirit in innumerable ways.

One of the things we talked about is compatibility as regards workmates. The question we posed: how can you determine whether you will be able to work with someone in a “synergistic way.” In other words, you “get” them and they “get” you, and things flow along effortlessly. Or at least thrillingly.

We were talking open source project development, not moving rocks, so we assumed that some degree of intellectual, philosophical and/or spiritual symbiosis would be required. But how do you gauge whether it exists before you’re in too deep — deep enough that the inevitable “break up” must happen.

Some of the ideas on the table: you’ve read the same books, appreciate the same programming languages, read and appreciate each others weblogs.

We could agree that we’d both been members of both very compatible and hopelessly incompatible teams. We could describe in bitter detail where things went off the rails when they did, and why. But when it came to any sort of predictive measure, I don’t think we reached any conclusions; but we had a lot of fun trying.

Which brings me to my main point. As I mentioned earlier, I’m staying in the same hotel, and thus inhabiting the same subnet, as Cory Doctorow.

Cory has iTunes music sharing turned on.

I’ve got his 7,941 song music collection streaming randomly through the ether into my ears right now.

I should be asleep, but I can’t turned it off: this guy’s got an amazing pile of albums, a collection that hits an uncommon lot of “because you bought this, you might be interested in this” buttons for me. And I’m afraid that he’s going to go to sleep soon, and the stream will go dark.

Would Cory Doctorow and I be able to work together because I dig his taste in music?

Hey, look, I’m staying in the same hotel as Cory Doctorow and Matt Webb. Kind of like staying in the same hotel as Johnny Carson and Mick Jagger in an earlier day. Kind of.

I’ve uploaded some photos of Copenhagen I took this morning, including this one of my trusty borrowed bicycle (one of the City Bikes):

Okay, so I wasn’t actually on a bike when I recorded this, but I can’t break the casting concatenation habit. More rambling from Copenhagen: borrowing a bike, visiting the Danish Architecture Centre, chicken salad sandwich, getting lost.