Here’s another neat Plazes feature: a plug-in for web pages that grabs your current Plazes location, sticks it on a map, and returns a chunk.

(Since the demise of Plazes, this obviously no longer works; I’m leaving this post here for posterity).

Steven found this photo taken at the reboot meetup on Thursday. La-dee-dah — don’t I look all exotic and European with my glass of wine and my smirky look!

Yesterday I wrote about Plazes, a neato “geosocial” service. Tonight I saw it work in the real world.

At about 1:00 a.m. I was just finishing up on the late-nite blogging and email checking when a new email came in:

So I did was I was told, and clicked on the link, which took me to:

Ton found me originally because (a) Rob Paterson (big in Europe) told him to watch out for me and (b) because his Plazes told him I was here:

So I replied:

…and got dressed, went out to the lobby, and found Ton and Martin having a drink. I grabbed a hot chocolate, sat down, and we talked for over an hour about everything from Robert Scoble to making open source bread and open source cars, to just what all those people with laptops open during presentations at reboot were doing.

So Plazes was a social prosthetic device that (relatively) effortlessly enabled a conversation to happen that otherwise never would have.

By lucky coincidence I ended up crammed into the back of a Mercedes with Stefan Kellner and Felix Petersen — the “Plazes guys” — tonight on the way to dinner. They’re thoughtful, intelligent guys, but they’re otherwise completely normal. I think one of the most useful roles of conferences like reboot is to expose easily star-struck and meek people like me to thoughtful, intelligent people with brilliant projects like Plazes who happen to be otherwise completely normal: it makes it seem possible that, with some work, we too could become thoughtful and intelligent.

You would think that a small place like Prince Edward Island, 130,000 small as we are, would escape any recognition at a conference like reboot, with people from 20 countries, but only two Canadians (me and him).

But you would be wrong.

Guy Dickinson from Manchester found and watched the entire set of Zap Your PRAM videos over a series of long train trips.

Dina Mehta is a blogging colleague of Rob Paterson. Although they’ve never met, Rob’s daughter Hope stayed with Dina in India and they became good friends.

Johnnie Moore from London is a blogging colleague of Rob’s too (“oh, Prince Edward Island… you must know Rob Paterson!”). Johnnie’s game to come to the Island.

Danish organic farmer Thomas Harttung has had meetings with the Island’s Foodtrust organization.

Tonight on the way to the after-party, I had a great conversation with Mark Wubben a reboot attendee and high school student (name, alas, unknown)Germany The Netherlands. When he heard I was from PEI, he said “oh, you must know Steven Garrity.” Turns out he is a regular listener of Steven’s Acts of Volition Radio show, and has bought many CDs based on hearing new artists there.

Here I was thinking that I’d have to fall into the usual “small Island province off the east coast of Canada” routine at reboot; little did I know that our reputation precedes us.

Happily, I also got the chance to spread a little Island love outwards: I told Dragos Novac, from Krogos Software in Bucharest, Romania to thank his countrymen at Interakt for their excellent PDFreports product which we used to generate the lists of electors in the 2003 Provincial General Election.

Similarly, I told MySQL co-founder David Axmark the story of how we used MySQL installed on an Apple iBook to help us process the election returns after the unfortunate coincidence of a hurricane with election day, and the attendant loss of power.

Yesterday the insanity of having a fully equipped laptop but no spring jacket hit me squarely, as I found myself shivering down the frigid streets of Copenhagen at 11:30 p.m. with exhausted wrists and a weakened mind. I have decided that today I will divert from the well-trodden lemming path, and leave the laptop at home. I’ve got the REI jacket loaded up with pen and a Moleskin and I’m ready to rock. As such, today’s blog will be delivered to you on bits of paper with tiny scrawled notes that you will find in the oddest of places.

Evidently all computing innovations that we thought were invented by young technoturks in the 1980s actually sprang to being, formed almost as fully as we use them today, back in the late 1960s. So we learned by watching Doug Engelbart’s 1968 Demo tonight at reboot. Mice, hypertext, outliners, keyword searching, regular expressions, it’s all there. If you ever have a chance to see it do: you will be amazed. I’ve attached a brief audio excerpt from tonight’s showing, captured on my iBook in the hall.

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.