Etech Notes
Grok Headline matches for Etech Notes
ETECH Notes: Von Neumann's Universe
ETECH Notes: Von Neumann's Universe
03/17/2005 03:56 AMCory Doctorow:
Here are my notes from George Dyson's talk from the 2005 O'Reilly
Emerging Tech conference, called "
Vo
n Neumann's Universe." Dyson's father, Freeman Dyson, was a
contemporary of Einstein, Godel, Von Neumman and all, and raised
George in their company and still tells him stories about those days.
George Dyson has been collecting historical notes and recollections of
the early days of the computer (and the bomb). His presentation, which
draws on personal reminiscences, was funny, bawdy and fascinating
Von Neumann's reports were all public and non-proprietary -- they were
freely shared with NCR, IBM, RCA, etc.
The memory was really unreliable and sloppy -- the difference between
a 1 and a 0 was very subtle. Getting all this stuff to work was akin
to getting today's unreliable Internet services to work.
The hackers' notebooks are full of bile: YAWN, CLOSING DOWN IN
DISGUST, MANIAC LOST ITS MEMORY REGAINED ITS MEMORY, GARBAGE, CODE
ERROR MACHINE NOT GUILTY, DAMN IT I CAN BE AS STUBBORN AS THIS THING,
IBM IS PUTTING A TAR-LIKE SUBSTANCE ONT HE CARDS, MOUSE CRAWLED INTO
BELT: RESULT NO MORE MOUSE. I HAVE NOW DUPLICATED BOTH RESULTS HOW
WILL I KNOW WHICH IS RIGHT?
Link
Update: Carrott reminds us that George Dyson
gave a similar talk at the Long Now Foundation in Jan 2004 -- you can
download the audio from their lecture series page.
ETECH Notes: Bezos on vertical search
and A9
ETECH Notes: Bezos on vertical search
and A9
03/17/2005 03:56 AMCory Doctorow:
Here are my notes from Jeff Bezos's talk from the 2005 O'Reilly
Emerging Tech conference, called "
Ve
rtical Search and A9." A9 has added a ton of tools to let people
design their own domain-expert searches.
There are lots of things you can do if you're a domain expert in
vertical search. If you're a medical pro and you search on Vioxx,
you'll get different results from Web search and PubMed.
The data-sets are different and the relevance ranking and the
transformations on the query are all different too.
PubMed takes the user-query and does sophisticated transformations,
e.g. "Heart attack" into many medical terms.
The Web-search on Vioxx is mostly about class-action lawsuits, while
the vertical is about medical info.
A9.com has a visual metaphor for vertical search -- columns for web
results, image results, and reference results, your bookmarks, etc...
LinkETECH Notes: Web Services as a Strategy
for Startups
ETECH Notes: Web Services as a Strategy
for Startups
03/17/2005 03:56 AMCory Doctorow:
Flickr's Stewart Butterfield just delivered a fantastic talk called
We
b Services as a Strategy for Startups: Opening Up and Letting Go,
at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. It was a guided tour
of the lessons learned from the exhaustive and powerful Flickr API,
which has attracted tons of innovative development. Here are my notes
from the talk:
We've gotten a lot out of the open API:
* Trust: do you trust your data to someone else's service? Why
put my photos there when I can keep them on my own server and
know they're safe? API is a safeguard against us being bad
* We've added features we wouldn't have done on our own
* There's cred with the alpha geeks: very influential and good at
getting the word out; when it's Xmas and someone gets a new
digital camera, they're the ones getting asked what do do with
their photos
* Discipline: Makes us plan ahead further than we could have
* Unleashing creativity: Gives people a greater sense of
ownership when they can contribute, they buy into the process
Link<
/a>
ETECH Notes: Life Hacks Live!
ETECH Notes: Life Hacks Live!
03/19/2005 03:03 AMCory Doctorow:
Here are my notes from Danny O'Brien and Merlin Mann's
Li
fe Hacks Live, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in
San Diego. Danny's been doing variations on his Life Hacks talk since
the last Emerging Tech conference -- it's basically an effort to
research the productivity patterns of very prolific geeks and convert
them to wisdom that anyone can follow. Merlin has been adapting the
fantastic productivity cookbook
Getting Things Done into a series of tools for geeks, on an
equally fantastic blog called
43
Folders. They're now working on a book version of their stuff for
O'Reilly called
Life Productivity Hacks, and today's session
was a preview of it -- it was uproariously funny and incredibly
inspiring.
Here's a recap of last year, in bumper stickers:
HACKERS HEART PLAIN TEXT
Geeks store what they do in text and spurn big apps, using plain text
editors. Simplicity and speed, ease of search and extraction, cut and
paste. All you need in a filing system.
MY OTHER APP IS IN ~/BIN
If it wasn't plaintext, there's one app that they loved, like mail,
Excel, PowerPoint, etc. The rest was little glue scripts in ~/bin,
secret scripts they are embarrassed about and don't share with others,
though it turns out that they're all really similar.
SUPER PROLIFIC GEEKS DO IT IN PUBLIC WITH COMPLETE STRANGERS AND LIKE
IT. OH YES.
(don't put this on your car)
Geeks get their credibility and prolificness out of sharing everything
-- put it in public and the public organizes it for you. Put it on a
Wiki and others will fix it.
LinkETECH Notes: Danny Hillis and Applied
Minds
ETECH Notes: Danny Hillis and Applied
Minds
03/17/2005 03:56 AMCory Doctorow:
Here are my notes from Danny Hillis's talk from the 2005 O'Reilly
Emerging Tech conference, called "
Re
mixing Technology at Applied Minds." Applied Minds is a company
that Hillis founded because he wasn't having enough fun as a Disney
Imagineer and wanted to start a company where all he'd have to build
is "1.0" designs that he could license out to GM and the like to
develop the 2.0 of.
We have musicians, artists and even an astronaut around, which lets us
exploit a real mix of talents and viewpoints.
Shows an amazing desert-exploration vehicle with a high-masted
Infrared camera, the ability to inflated/deflate tires from inside,
every legal radio band, etc. -- a project for fun, called the
Multimog.
Remixing toy: You can connect a car, a robot and a connector. They all
work together. We've licensed this to a toy vendor, but the problem is
that we have no way to know if they'll ever bring it to market.
Here's a cancer-simulator visualization that attempts to discover the
chemical signature of which cancer drug works for which patient --
lots of cancer drugs are only effective for five percent of patents,
which makes them useless.
LinkETECH Notes: Surowiecki on Independent
Individuals and Wise Crowds
ETECH Notes: Surowiecki on Independent
Individuals and Wise Crowds
03/17/2005 03:56 AMCory Doctorow:
Here are my notes from James Surowiecki's
In
dependent Individuals and Wise Crowds, or Is It Possible to Be Too
Connected?, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San
Diego.
Surowiecki's book The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and
How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and
Nations is meant to be quite good -- it's sitting in my pile of
things I need to read as soon as I get a chance. Based on his talk, I
think I might bump it up a couple of positions.
Wisdom of crowds works on problems where there's a true answer,
or when some choices are better than other in some Platonic
sense. The reason this works is that people are operating on
private info, which may be bad or fragmented.
The opinions are diverse -- not consensus but disagreements.
People don't know much about what others are betting on or
guessing -- not a lot of interpersonal interaction.
Compare with Linux: large group of people working on problems,
but ultimately one person writes the code that gets committed.
The decision is centralized: one or a small number of people get
to commit code to the kernel.
Compare with ant-hill: Often a metaphor for human behavior. How
to use a bunch of dumb agents (ants don't know much) whose
interaction produce stunningly intelligent results, e.g. finding
food with least amount of energy. E.g. ant graveyards and food
supplies are equidistant.
Ants follow simple rules and pay a lot of attention to those
around them: interaction is the essence of intelligence. The only
way to get where they want to go is by paying close attention to
one another.
Here's my message: HUMAN BEINGS ARE NOT ANTS. We do not have the
biological programming or tools to allow this kind of interaction
to produce intelligence. We don't have the ability to sense or
secrete formic acid.
Link
ETECH Notes: Folksonomy, or How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Mess
ETECH Notes: Folksonomy, or How I
Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Mess
03/17/2005 03:56 AMCory Doctorow:
Here are my notes from "
Fo
lksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess," a
conversation between Clay Shirky, Stewart "Flickr" Butterfield, Joshua
"Delicious" Schachter and Jimmy "Wikipedia" Wales at the O'Reilly
Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego. Folksonomy is the process
of letting users generate and apply their own tags to shared items
(such as blog-posts, encyclopedia entries, photos, links, lists or
interests, or what have you) and then discovering which tegs users
share with one another. Unlike previous ventures into this field, the
tags aren't "controlled" -- any user can invent one and any user can
apply them to anything, and yet it all
works.
Jimmy: We launched ours last summer after knowing we needed it for a
long time. For the first two weeks in English Wikipedia, it was a
madhouse with all kinds of categorization. The Germans were more
reserved but after a few weeks it caught on there. Eventually, because
people could adjust categories, it all settled down. We did it because
that's the Wikipedia way -- we never considered doing it any other
way.
Stewart: It's not really categorization on Flickr -- it's about
letting users remember. If I add the "Norma" tag to pix of my mom,
whose name is Norma, I don't think it goes into the Norma category.
The unfortunate thing about the term "folksonomy" is that it implies
that it's a replacement for categorization. People categorize things
by noting what they do or don't have: mammals have hair and live
babies; does it have property a? then it's a whatever.
Joshua: I was collecting 20,000 links in a text-file, and somewhere
along the way I started adding a hash mark and some text, so I could
e.g. grep out all the WiFi links and send them to a friend. Later I
built a Web version so I could send an URL to a friend, but it was
standalone. Eventually I made it massively multiplayer. The
interesting group behavior is the tagging that isn't categorization,
e.g., "To read" -- not a category, though it has a big group and a lot
of social and user context. People make tags for groups working
together, workflow in RSS -- that's what's most surprising.
Link
ETECH Notes: Feral Robotics and Some
Other Quacking, Shaking, Bubbling Robots
ETECH Notes: Feral Robotics and Some
Other Quacking, Shaking, Bubbling Robots
03/17/2005 03:55 AMCory Doctorow:
Here are my notes from Natalie Jeremijenko's
So
cial Robotics, Scmocial Robotics: Feral Robotics and Some Other
Quacking, Shaking, Bubbling (what would the opposite of feral be?)
Robots, at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San
Diego.
Natalie is a genuine cyberpunk heroine, whose hacks include hacking
robot toy dogs into feral volatile organic compound sensors; setting
up voicemail boxes you can call when you want to record your
interactions with Homeland Security coppers, and surreptitiously
filming jumpers off the Golden Gate bridge.
Feral Robotic Dogs: It's a website. Everything reduces to a website. A
couple years old, dates back to the launch of the Sony Aibo. One in a
series of interactive toys that express behaviors programmed in our
labs -- they're fun and interesting and sci-fi-ey. But what do you
learn from them? You learn construction from construction toys,
monopolization from Monopoly. What do you learn from interactive toys?
Interaction?
These toy dogs out of the box beg for bones or sing the national
anthem.
I became interested in this when someone said to me that a robot dog
would make a good pet for me -- what does that say about my capacity
to care for living things? What might we learn from these things? What
do we need to learn from these things.
Here's the website (xdesign.ucsd.edu/feralrobots) with instructions
for upgrading the raison d'être of your robot dogs.
Warning label: OUT THERE IN HAPPY FAMILY HOMES IN THE OFFICE OF
CORPORATE EXECS, IN TOY STORES THROUGHOUT THE GLOBE IS AN ARMY OF
ROBOTIC DOGS. THESE REMI-AUTONOMOUS ROBOT CREATURES, THOUGH CURRENTLY
PROGRAMMED TO PERFORM INANE OR ENTERTAINING TASKS, ARE ACTUALLY FULLY
MOTILE AND AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.
LinkETech come-down...
ETech come-down...
02/13/2004 08:03 PMRight then. Emerging Tech is
over and everyone's heads are full and we've all got a little bit of a
hangover from last night celebrations and socialising. I'm now back in
Los Angeles, having taken the train up from San Diego with the lovely
Phil and Anno. The train journey was filled
with little aggravating child noises and I was sitting in the wrong
direction so arrive in LA feeling queasy and dizzy. The train goes so
close to the Ocean that it's almost impossible not to want to
sacrifice all future working ambitions, get out at any convenient
station and run giggling into the water with warm sand between your
toes. Manfully, I have resisted.
I fly back to the UK on Sunday evening - arriving back sometime
around early lunchtime on Monday. I think I'm going to have to make an
appeal for a long weekend off work to try and digest everything that's
been going on and make sense of it. I think my understanding of the
event is even more blurry this year than last. In the meantime posting
is likely to be more erratic than usual...
Etech 2004
Etech 2004
02/10/2004 02:51 AMOff to Etech tonight, staying through Tuesday night. Proposed to do a
Participant Session at the last minute on business models for social
software and social networking. Its such short notice, it probably
won't self-organize, so at the least I'm...
Is ETech Elitist?
Is ETech Elitist?
02/10/2004 11:47 AMI've not had a chance to keep up with the happenings at this year's
Emerging Technology Conference, but I've heard two things that bother
me so far: Russell says: Interesting conference - too bad I wasn't
there to get a longer impression, but boy it seemed like there were
some serious pecking orders there. And someone else I know there said
this via IM last night: You are missing some good conferences this
week here, although I have come to...
ETech day 1 starts
ETech day 1 starts
02/10/2004 02:51 AMArrived at ETech. Lots of people
and not enough time to blog. The Internet in my room isn't working,
but hopefully, they'll fix it today. Today is the Digital Democracy
Teach-In. Should be fun. I'll try to post notes.
A few one liners I scribbled in my notebook:
"I wanted to be a revolutionary, but all I got was this stupid
blog."
"I'm not an academic, but I play one on my blog."
UPDATE:
from gapingvoid
[etech] Technorati
[etech] Technorati
02/10/2004 02:48 PMDave Sifry, another of my heroes, is listing some of Technorati's
stats: 1.6M sources, a new weblog every 8 seconds, the index updated
within 7 mins of a posting. [I'm here even though I alsoreally wanted
to see Eric Boabeau's talk] [Damn! My first draft of this put this
badly! I left the "also" out of the previous sentence. I'm here
because Technorati is so damn cool and interesting. And so is Eric.]
Dave shows a hack he created last night: A list of the top products
discussed in the last 24 hours. He has us post to our blogs...
Photos from ETech
Photos from ETech
02/10/2004 02:51 AM
Rob Kaye is promoting bluetooth this year...
My ETech 2004
photo album (feel free to use any of the photos)
I'll be uploading through the day.
Blogging eTech
Blogging eTech
02/10/2004 02:50 AMIn addition to the slew of live-bloggers and wiki coverage already
taking place at
O'Reilly's Emerging
Technology Conference in San Diego (Cory's a featured speaker, and
I'm popping in to schmooze for a few hours later today!), Jason
Calacanis just launched
www.bloggingetech.com.
Etech next week
Etech next week
02/10/2004 02:47 AMAdriaan and Boris are coming!
Emerging
Technology. 
I will be at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference in
San Diego from February 9th to 12th. Joichi Ito, for whom I
work, and Boris Anthony will also be present.
There's going to be quite a few familiar names at ETech (e.g. Marc
Canter), and I will be meeting most of them
face-to-face for the first time. It should be a very busy but a good
event. [chaotic
intransient prose bursts]
Virtually at ETech
Virtually at ETech
02/10/2004 02:47 AMA shout out to all my peeps at O'Reilly's
ETech conference
this week. I'm disappointed I can't join you. Tim, Rael,
and company have done a marvelous job coralling the cool and the
mind-blowing -- and that applies to both the ideas and the
people. ETech is bigger and more geeky than
Supernova, but sometimes
it's fun to let your inner geek out.
I'll participate virtually via the blogs and other online tools.
As I've noted on the other side with Supernova, remote virtual
participation isn't nearly as rich as physical presence. But
it's
something.
CC at O'Reilly Etech
CC at O'Reilly Etech
02/10/2004 02:41 AMCreative Commons will be an exhi
bitor at the O'Reilly Emerging
Technology Conference in San Diego next week.
Etech is regarded by many as the best tech conference of the year,
always in step with the latest creations and aspirations of the alpha
geeks, having evolved from
the Peer-to-Peer Conference in early 2001 and P2P & Web Services in
late 2001 to the current multi-tracked annual conference starting two
years ago. (Incidentally, the Creative Commons concept was in
troduced at ETCon 2002. How time flies.)
Matt
Haughey and Mike
Linksvayer will be attending. Stop by the Creative Commons booth,
or better yet our parti
cipant session (time and location yet to be announced). We'll be
introducing a new CC metadata-enhanced application. Hint: it's
described in one of our tech
challenges, heretofore unmet.
If you're in the area but not an attendee, you can still reg
ister for a free exhibits pass, or an exhibits plus keynotes and
birds-of-a-feather (participant sessions) pass for only $50. Hope to
see you there!
Google at ETech
Google at ETech
03/11/2003 11:38 PMThis is interesting. I'm not sure what to make of it, but apparently
Google is a platinum sponsor at the 2003 Emerging Technology
Conference. Hm. Amazon.com, ADC, and Macromedia are also on the list.
A few of the sponsors have speakers on the list of featured speakers.
It looks like Google's Craig Silverstein is giving a keynote. I
haven't decided if I want to try and go this year. The conference will
be during a very busy time for me....
ETECH is coming up....
ETECH is coming up....
01/16/2004 11:28 AMO'
Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference....
O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference…
Posted Jan 15, 2004, 6:54 PM ET by Judith Meskill
O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology
Conference — taking place at the Westin Horton Plaza,
San Diego, CA, Feb. 9-12, 2004 — will have a Social Software track. This promises to
be an excellent event with a broad spectrum of notable speakers that
includes (but is certainly not limited to): Helen Greiner - iRobot Corp., Cory Doctorow - EFF, Lili Cheng - Microsoft Research, Gilman Louie - In-Q-Tel, David Sifry - Technorati, Joichi Ito - Neoteny, Elizabeth Lawley - Rochester Institute of
Technology, and, of course, Tim O’Reilly - O’Reilly &
Associates. [The
Social Software Weblog]
This is the key event of the year. We're gonna party like is
USED to be 1999.
I'll be there - sponsored by Laszlo Systems and I'll be giving
a :05 minute talk on FOAF and the PeopleAggregator.
But clearly the most exciting event will be the field trip to TJ
and the House of Mole. Something not to be missed.
Loïc is coming to Etech
Loïc is coming to Etech
01/12/2004 03:01 AMWill participate at
E-Tech in San Diego Feb 9 to 12, let's meet there.. Just signed up
to O'Reilly's Emerging Technology
Conference in San Diego, Feb 9-12.
I know many of you will
be there, let me know if you have some time so that we can meet during
the conference.
Hope to see many #Joiito participants at
Jeannie and Jibot. [Loïc
Le Meur's WebLog]
Hey - at least ONE person will be paying full fair to Etech.
Well maybe not, I'm sure Loïc will get some sort of VIP
treatment and comped. Afterall - he IS a famous French
entreprenuer - right?
Links from Day 3 of ETech
Links from Day 3 of ETech
03/19/2005 02:33 AMThis is a dump of lnks of interest to me that come up during talks
during the third day at Etech. Newest at top.
An Intimate History of Humanity by Theodore Zeldin
Matt Webb says this is one of his favorite books from 2004.
More fun with etech audio
More fun with etech audio
03/19/2005 03:04 AMEv gave an amazing demo of Odeo. That thing is going to be as big
(or bigger) than Flickr, I'm sure of it.
Here's the whole talk as
a ogg file (my mp3 export in audacity refuses to work) and some
photos of the screens on my feed (lots more I'll upload
later).
Danny and Merlin's lifehacks talk was good too, here's the whole
thing as an ogg file as well.
Links from Day 2 of ETech
Links from Day 2 of ETech
03/17/2005 03:25 AMThis is a dump of lnks of interest to me that come up during talks
during the second day at Etech. Newest at top. Late start because I
was running in the AM.
Ta-da Lists
Really simple to-do list management.
Cory Doctorow's notes
Cory's notes from James Surowiecki's talk, "Independent Individuals
and Wise Crowds, or Is It Possible to Be Too Connected?"
The SchoolTool Project
"SchoolTool is a project to develop a common global school
administration infrastructure that is freely available under an Open
Source licence."
Instiki
"Instiki is a Wiki Clone (What is a wiki?) that’s so easy to set up
and so pretty to look at, you’ll be wondering whether this is a real
wiki at all...Instiki only relies on Ruby—no Apache, no MySQL, or
other dependencies(yay!). Instiki runs on Windows, Linux, OSX, and any
other platform where Ruby does."
Dodgeball
"A service which aims to coordinate social interactions between mobile
users"
Pac-Manhattan
"Pac-Manhattan is a large-scale urban game that utilizes the New York
City grid to recreate the 1980's video game sensation Pac-Man. This
analog version of Pac-man is being developed in NYU's Interactive
Telecommunications graduate program, in order to explore what happens
when games are removed from their 'little world' of tabletops,
televisions and computers and placed in the larger 'real world' of
street corners, and cities."
[etech] From the Labs
[etech] From the Labs
03/17/2005 03:00 AMFifteen minute presentations on what's going on in labs... Rick
Rashid, Microsoft Labs. "SenseCam" is a wearable recorder, presumably
part of MyLifeBits, the Gordon Bell project. He takes us under the
hood. E.g., they wait for stability to take a photo in order to avoid
blurriness. "The ultimate blogging tool," he says [if you've confused
blogging with living]. He says there are 12 operational units so far.
They're building a new generation: Smaller, GPS, continuous audio. He
also talks about "surface computing" that lets you manipuate images on
a surface. [It's very similar to a concept video Bruce Tognazzini
did...
Etech Bound
Etech Bound
03/14/2005 06:25 PMHeaded to my third Etech next week. I'll only be there for part
of it, so drop me a note if you want to meet....
You say Etech, we say Etcon, Etech,
Etcon. Etcon, Etech.
You say Etech, we say Etcon, Etech,
Etcon. Etcon, Etech.
02/01/2005 09:56 PMThe Early Bird discounts for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology
Conference run out on Monday. So hurry hurry hurry, and I'll get the
first round in come March 14-17. There's a considerable amount of
coolness on the program, and to balance...
[etech] iRobot
[etech] iRobot
02/10/2004 02:48 PM Helen Greiner, iRobot president and cofounder, is giving a
commercial. She shows an ad. She tells us her company is hot. She
tells us that her company's robotic vacuums (Roombas) pick up more
dirt than conventional vacuums and cost less than the competitors. The
only topic of technical interest she touches on is how Roombas escape
from tricky areas of houses. In her demo of the vacuum, she actually
sprinkles crumbs on the floor, like every door-to-door vacuum sales
person in history. Oy veh. Vacuum robots are just the tip of the
iceberg, she says. [Let's hope so.] The...
Pecking at ETech?
Pecking at ETech?
02/11/2004 04:17 PMRussell says:
Interesting conference - too bad I wasn't there to get a longer
impression, but boy it seemed like there were some serious pecking
orders there.
And someone else I know there said this via IM last night:
You are missing some good conferences this week here,
although I have come to the conclusion that a lot of the bloggers are
pretty pompous.
I'm not sure what to make of that. Pecking
orders? Pompous? It bothers me, I guess.
That's odd. I
haven't noticed pecking or being pecked. Pompous? Nothing more or less
than I would expect. I wonder if I'm missing something? I'm generally
fairly sensitive about this sort of stuff. Anyone here at ETech have
any specific examples?
I DO think we're talking about blogging too much, but pecking?
Via Yusuf
ETech TrackBacks
ETech TrackBacks
03/20/2003 09:59 PM
Rael Dornfest:
_
The O'Reilly
Emerging Technology Conference has TrackBacks (and their
associated auto-discovery RDF) baked into every single
keynot
e,
tutorial,
session, and
BoF
page. This means you can target your bloggings of the event,
providing both us, the organizers, and your peers with live
feedback on the goings on. <good on you,
terrie!>_
Links from Day 1 of Etech
Links from Day 1 of Etech
03/17/2005 03:25 AMThis is a dump of lnks of interest to me that come up during talks
during the first day at Etech. Newest at top.
Citizen journalism, one-handed department
"There has been so much debate over whether bloggers are journalists,
the real issue has been obscured: are IRC chatters journalists? Mr.
Sun has done some careful investigation and found that the IRC
conversation logged below preceded the supposed revolutionizing of
journalism by bloggers." Totally unrelated to the conference, but a
funny reminder that I don't read Mr. Sun enough.
Ten Hour Takeover
"Ten Hour Takeover is your chance to choose the music Radio 1 plays."
The BBC asked listeners to send a text message song request. Ten hours
of music totally driven by the listening public. Awesome.
"Average UK adult listens to 24 hours of radio a week" according to
Paul in the presentation, BBC Programme Information Pages: An
Architecture for an On-Demand World. Wow. That's amazing. For
comparison, I found this document about American teenage radio habits
stating that US young adults agee 12-17 listen to an average of 13.5
hours of radio a week. Maybe it's because we've got more Clear Channel
and they've got Radio 1?
Cory's notes from George Dyson's talk
Dyson's talk on "Von Neumann's Universe" was one of my favorites so
far, and makes me want to take a field trip to Princeton to visit the
Institute for Advanced Study.
Near Near Future
A blog from a woman who's, "currently working as a new media
consultant for a multimedia and virtual reality park in Turin." I like
the way she's got her categories displayed across the top of the page,
using a larger font to display categories with more posts.
pasta and vinegar
"A blog by nicolas nova about pasta (human computer interaction,
innovation, technologies, futuristic trends, location based services,
mobile computing, user-centric stuff, video game design) and vinegar
(digital culture and various weird stuff)."
The real digital divide (The Economist)
"Encouraging the spread of mobile phones is the most sensible and
effective response to the digital divide"
(The above link is not from the conference, I read this on the plane
and it's very interesting, I recommend the whole Technology Quarterly
in the March 12th-18th The Economist. A lot of what I read in it feels
relevant to what I'm thinking about and hearing at ETech.)
Google Sets
"Automatically create sets of items from a few examples." Here's an
example with peanut butter & jelly.
Tech Buzz Game
"The Tech Buzz Game is a fantasy prediction market for high-tech
products, concepts, and trends."
applied minds, inc.
Danny Hillis is talking about walking dinosaur that's electrically
driven and fully articulated and all kinds of amazing robots that I'll
find links for and pictures of later, I want to listen now.
Flickr Graph
"Flickr Graph is an application that explores the social relationships
inside flickr.com."
Flickrfox
"flickrfox is an extension for Firefox (version 1.0) that lets you
browse your Flickr photostreams in a sidebar."
Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager
Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager looks really cool but doesn't seem to
work in Firefox. It graphs the popularity of baby names over time.
Loïc's Etech report
Loïc's Etech report
02/12/2004 03:20 PM"No one owns who my
friends are". Great FOAF session today. Dan Brickley who created
FOAF, gave a good overview of what it is and how it is used.
I
enjoyed the idea of dating on
phones via bluetooth and FOAF.
This way you can date
somebody who is in the same room, same restaurant, immediately, with
the same interests as you... Great stuff.
Marc and Eric also OF COURSE showed People Aggregator. I really
like the idea of linking the friends I have in Orkut with the friends I have in Linked In, with the
friends I have in ...
I am not sure these networks will agree
to share their databases with you (or anybody else), Marc, but let's
see what happens. I agree on the fact that if we all own our own
identity on a FOAF file, it is better than having to fill-it in in 10
different networks...
Also saw a demo of NewsMonster, it is an RSS
reader that supports FOAF. Nice work, John. "There is too many social
networks. You do not own my data, I do. "
John is also working
on "Exportster", which is a plugin that should be ready within a
month. Its goal is to be able to export the data from the different
networks and sync them.
"We export the data from social
networks and sync them all, so that there is one macro level FOAF
file, in order to have a unified data model."
Tribe also
announced that they support FOAF.
Greg Elin showed fotonotes.net that is
coordinating a semantic photo project which is exploring the issues
combining FOAF and RDF for photos, impressive.
Marc Powell
talked briefly about
Indyvoter.org, "injecting the virus of political dialogue into
online social networks", also supporting FOAF. [Loïc Le Meur's WebLog]
BTW What my hands are trying to convey are the two dots over
Loïc's letter i. :-)
[etech] FOAF
[etech] FOAF
02/11/2004 08:25 PM Dan Brickley is explaining Friend of a Friend. (I had a chance to
talk with him about this yesterday in a hallway.) It's an XML standard
that allows people to express information about themselves...the sorts
of things you might say on your homepage. There are currently 2M FOAF
descriptions in the world. There are different styles of FOAF files.
You can be very explicit about relationships: "Jane is my arch
nemesis." But there's also a more implicit, evidence-based approach:
Libby and I went to the same school and work for the same
organization. ("I lean toward this one," says...
Etech TrackBacks
Etech TrackBacks
03/20/2003 08:50 PM
The O'Reilly Emerging
Technology Conference
has TrackBacks (and their associated auto-discovery RDF) baked into
every single
keynot
e,
tutor
ial,
se
ssion, and
BoF
page.
This means you can target your bloggings of the event, providing both
us, the organizers, and your peers with live feedback on the goings
on.
<good on you,
terrie!>
JeannieAndJibot session at ETech
JeannieAndJibot session at ETech
01/08/2004 08:01 PMIf you hang out on #joiito or are
interested in learning more and plan to be at ETech, please vote
for, si
gn up for and contribute ideas to the session we are planning.
We're going to try to play with RFID's and the Jeannie's cafe idea and
we need a head-count so please sign up early if you're interested.
Hopefully Hecklebot
will be there as well.
[etech] Don Norman keynote
[etech] Don Norman keynote
02/12/2004 02:11 PMDon's new book is Emotional Design. He uses lots of photos, so the
following minimalist representation will not have the, um, emotional
impact of his talk. People have emotional reactions to, and
relationships with, products. Positive examples: A tiny Sony camera
and Mini Cooper. We have two information processes: Cognition
(understanding the world) and emotion (judges the world). There are
three levels: Visceral (biological and pre-wired), behavioral, and
reflective. Bottled water is their bottles. A Perrier bottle is
emotional. A cheap plastic one is behavioral. Those fancy blue bottles
appeal to us viscerally. The 1961 Jaguar E-type (the one in...
[etech] Reinventing radio
[etech] Reinventing radio
03/17/2005 03:00 AMFour guys from the BBC are talking about radio. They say it's a
popular medium. It's growing. In fact, in terms of the hours per week
people spend listening to it, radio is at an all time high. It is,
they say, a re-emerging tech. The BBC Radio Player lets you listen to
any radio program over the past week. They're broadcasting 4M hours of
radio over the Net every week and 6M of on-demand music [or possibly
vice versa]. So, they ask, how can we make radio more social and
interactive? Last April they tried an on-air experiment to...
Xgrid Shown Off At eTech
Xgrid Shown Off At eTech
02/12/2004 12:45 PM[etech] Day 2 - Justin Chapweske
[etech] Day 2 - Justin Chapweske
03/17/2005 03:00 AMJustin, of Onion Networks, talks about "the swarming Web." Standard
http, he says, doesn't work well for transferring large files: You
have a 64% chance of failure if you transfer a gigabyte. (Here's his
"large file hall of shame".) "Swarming" is like RAID for Web content.
Even as bandwidth increases, we need more reliable servers. And better
make 'em fault tolerant. And he doesn't like setting up mirrors
because it's a bad experience for users. Instead Onion Networks uses
swarming — the technique BitTorrent uses — as a native Web
format. "It's ad hoc, Self-provisioning, it scales on demand." It...
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