Xeni Jardin

In 2002, when phonecams first came on the scene, naysayers dismissed them as a fad. Cellphones were to make calls. Cameras were to take pictures. Combining the two into a single hand-held device was technological folly -- an idea that would soon go the way of the e-book. These days, one in 10 cellphones includes a camera. So much for the naysayers.

IF, as sci-fi writers have been warning us for decades, robots are plotting to rise up against humans, this week presents them with a prime opportunity. Androids, bots and cyborgs from all over the world, along with the people who build and love them, are converging on the Los Angeles Convention Center this weekend for Wired magazine's NextFest. Now in its fourth year, but for the first time in L.A.

The "Live From the Blogosphere!" confab is equal parts literary salon, cyberpunk press conference and geek cocktail party. And before the party is over, strangers who've traded secrets but know each other only by code names will have met in the flesh for the first time, and a young hacker possibly will have become a millionaire. Six of the biggest personas in blogging have converged on the Electronic Orphanage, a small black box of a gallery in Chinatown, to deconstruct the blog.

It began as any good Internet fable should -- two Internet-savvy twentysomethings who had never met face to face sit down in a coffee shop and, over a handshake, agree to develop a new idea. In this case, the coffee shop was on Melrose Avenue; the idea was Blogging.la. Started in November by programmer Jason DeFillippo and designer Sean Bonner, both active bloggers, Blogging.la is a collective writing effort to capture the vibrant nature of Los Angeles.

THIS week's Web Scout was to start '07 with an atomic bang: a column detailing the swirling intrigue and recrimination surrounding New Media's highest-profile divorce (stay tuned). However, as deadline approached, it became clear that the tangle of allegations required more investigative spadework than time allowed, and so I fell shamelessly back on the oldest, most reliable of saws in the column writer's toolbox: Predictions 2007.

LAST week, as if to spite the Fourth of July, the Internet coughed up two nice examples of the antidemocratic way much of the online world operates. First we saw the fallout from the well-known blogger Xeni Jardin's decision to erase dozens of posts from her Boing Boing blog, without telling her readers or co-authors she did so until the act was discovered more than a year later.