For as much we fill our discourses with stories about fantastic cutting edge technologies and systems, it is rare to see the skill and art of interaction design reap the fruits of so many new innovative tools.

I am just out after a few hours into the RSS Winterfest, a premiere event bringing together some of the best minds in Internet technology, online publishing, blogs and the opportunities that these new technologies make available to us.

The event is being webcast live, and anyone with a decent Internet connection can jump in and hear the ongoing discussion and presentations unfolding for all of the morning sessions. The presentation window integrates an audio player (either Real Audio or Windows Media) and a content area where a slide or other informative content is displayed.

In some of the sessions a text box allows participants to submit questions during the event so that the presenter can answer them during her session.

The experts in the panel are great, the audio is good quality and I can hear it everything just fine, and nonetheless everything appears to be OK, I have a gut feeling that this is nothing like online events should really be.

Or is it?

The Web conferencing technologies used for many live Web events use solutions and approaches that would have difficulties in being successful in the real world as we know it or we were to use the same approaches through other popular media we are more familiar with.

Streaming audio for example is an example of a live event that is first encoded, made and converted into different bitrates so that different connection streams can be served with the best relative quality possible. Due to the processing time to do this and due to the nature of how streaming players manage playback nowadays, by the time the stream gets to me, the real speaker online is already at the next sentence or beyond. There is no effective "liveness" and the window of interaction is often limited to a window in which I can type a question that someone will answer, maybe, at some time later.

I have no feedback or acknowledgement that my question has been submitted or that my question is the 7th of other 25 that have been submitted as well.

I don't even know how many other people are attending with me the event. Each one of us is isolated and kind of invisible to the others. While this is not a characteristic of many Web conferencing tools, it is one typical of so-called webcasting solutions as the one selected by RSS Winterfest for this event.

Far from intending to be critical of the event, which brought in people I had never heard talking live before (like Jon Udell, Steve Gillmore, Ross Mayfield or Chris Pirillo), I chose to keep my perspective and distance, and to see through it what was missing in the direction of making the event the success everyone would surely want it to be.

Interaction, involvement, sense of being part and active contributors to something being built are the real powerful solutions to make online events so much more interesting and useful.

Keeping a panel discussing items without being able to interact with them in a more meaningful way than just submitting questions with a high risk of not being looked at is much like listening to the radio and trying to make a phone call to talk to the interviewee of the day. As we know, it is a rare chance to be able to get the line and to be actually chosen as the one who can ask something live, if at all.

So, we are not doing much better than radio in this respect. Realize the fact that when you listen to a radio and you are offered a navigable monitor in front of your eyes, there is no magnet keeping you there, still, listening to that static, radio-like presentation, in which your interaction, contribution, is worth as little as nothing.

Wouldn't it better then to audio-record all of the great comments and ideas from the thought leaders and then to have them all available on a page to explore, in the order and in the fashion that each user prefers, as for each one to build her own version of the overall discourse?

And while I truly enjoyed some valuable insight bring brought about by Chris Pirillo and Jon Udell, I missed so much not being able to spot at least their faces, their visual expressions, that I felt caged in a scaled-down version of something rather more alive going on on the other side of the ocean.

So, even though video feeds are difficult to access for many, showcasing an updated screenshot for each one of those two to three participants that are having the mike would bring so much more to the table, while making everyone more comfortable, intimately closer to the presenters and in synch with their facial expressions and reactions.

And yes, opening the mike to live questions from the audience would be so much appreciated and valuable, as that is where the greatest interaction can take place. Fine for filtering and submitting questions by text, but if I am selected, let me talk to these guys live, not through an ambassador.

Missing video feeds or even sample photos of the people in the online panel, I have a hard time picturing those people participating but not listed in the official agenda (probably added later) and wonder who they are and what company they belong to.

I think another great opportunity for these live events online is the one of leveraging the ability and willingness of people to actually contribute and work for a common benefit and goal. With effective collaborative methods as the Open Space methodology or others, great brainstorming sessions can be created while having multiple groups attack multiple parallel issues in different breakout rooms.

Coming out of an event where the participants contributed to the design and definition of new ideas, methodologies and approaches is certainly a much more ambitious and powerful enterprise than simply broadcasting an audio stream of a roundtable of experts talking to each other.

The most curious and final aspect of my initial reflections on this "streaming" live event is that it goes to the opposite direction of where RSS, its driving topic, is going.

RSS is a user-centered medium. It allows me and you to select and pull the information we are most interested in, when we want it. It puts back power and initiative in the ends of the final user.

Webcasting and streaming are primitive forms of online conferencing, providing little interactivity, a strong and easily imposed top-down delivery mechanism, and little space for dynamic and rich interaction. The presenters are caged in a golden dome and listeners have no eyes to see them.

As technology evolves beyond us at ever faster speeds we need to realize that the fundamentals of communications must drive our sensible adoption and intelligent deployment of these fantastic tools.

Let's stop surfing on these new tools, let's start rather designing the waves we want to make with them.

Robin Good