etech Tuesday morning session

Rael Dornfest

• "remixing" -- that "prosumers" and general consumers are opening their boxes and exploring
• Going behind the curtain.
• Syndicated e-commerce means you don't need to own every component of your application.
• "All progress depends on the unreasonable man" --George Bernard Shaw via Rael Dornfest

Tim O'Reilly

• Tim o'reilly: pattern observation. Design patterns and internet applications.
• Pattern language -- Christopher Alexander.
• "Users add value to shared data"
• "make participation the default aggregating user data as a aide effect of their using your application (shirky via o'reilly)"
• Don't design for single device anymore
• Capture and share the social fabric underlying the application, rather than artificially constructing another
• Why is it that enterprise software has to be continually reinvented while tcp/ip is 30+ years old. That it has to do with the core packet idea of TCPIP.
• Ora into data visualization (look at treemap)

Stewart Butterfield -- flickr

• Web services as startup strategy
• Issue: loss of control over pace of things happen by open web services, impact on scalability
• ~250,000 api requests / day 3m pageviews / day

Danny Hillis -- Applied Minds

• They build stuff to 1.0 then hand off to licensees or other developers
• Demo of graphical map table and new 3d map table
• He echoed the ideas of building services ased on user contributed content. The value of the service increases as the amount of content is contributed.
• Metaweb -- sharing and rendering of public data in public space

Jeff Bezos -- Amazon / a9

• Syndicated search via a9
• Modified rss to add three tags to indicate # of items returned, current index and next index
• "Channels" of search results.
• Can select specific data sources for search and rank them in order of preference
• Can turn on/off displays of results from data sources
• Notion of "consuming search" -- connecting to 3rd party search services and getting results (via RSS with above modifications)
• Aggregated search results
• Aside: He clicked "Yes" when asked by Windows Update if he wanted to shutdown.
• Make it possible to integrate 3rd party search into their interface via RSS
• OpenSearch RSS

Todd says throw the book at Bernie E.

Turboville: The Rise and (Hard) Fall of Bernie Ebbers: Not only did they throw the book at former WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers, they reinvented what the book looked like. [...] This verdict has teeth, and it demonstrates that when chief executives and other high level management conduct themselves in a manner unbecoming to business professionals -- unethical or illegal – there is a price to be paid.

etech Tuesday morning session pt 2

The second half of the morning covered in the labs briefings from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, and AT&T as well as a fun bit on John von Neumann by George Dyson.

Rick Rashid talked for Microsoft...focussed on devices they are developing, one of which a person wears in order to capture (and digitize) as much information as possible about the person's environment for further use. Another, like the map table at Applied Minds, was a desktop surface which combined real time image analysis with a projector so you could use direct physical manipulation of objects which may have other images projected onto them from the projector. Eg: a sheet of paper is turned into a viewport for a set of images.

Gary Flake talked about Yahoo! Labs and the work they are doing there. He introduced a new game called the Tech Buzz Game which Yahoo is using to tap the collective wisdom of the web which I initially thought was comparable to Slashdot's moderation and meta-moderation, but is instead more comparable to the delphi coracle of John Brunner's Shockwave Rider. There's a couple things going on, first they've defined a new market auction concept: Dynamic Pari-mutuel Auction. That this works by having people predict the popularity (or obscurity) of various terms in search land, in the specific case a Buzz index. If your prediction is correct you get more "dollars" to spend and bet on further predictions. They developed this in tandem with a company named NewsFutures. That it's an electronic market in outcome prediction. The market is infinitely liquid and does not require a market maker (these are my notes, not necessarily my opinions).

Peter Norvig talked about Google Labs. I...I didn't take many notes, which generally means I wasn't interested or didn't find anything to note down. He demoed a personalized version of search but it wasn't clear if it's live yet. Basically you slide a scale ranging from no personalization to (I guess) high personalization based on a profile you've completed. The search results are then filtered based on the intersection between your profile, your personalization level, and the actual results.

The only bit I'll note from George Dyson's talk was this quote which I'm certainly mangling: Real Progress is crossing phenomena which he may have attributed to Nils A. Barricelli though I wasn't too clear on that.

Kevin Kealey presented from AT&T. Mostly about spam, and the realization from AT&T's perspective that all this crap is weighing down their networks and costing them real money. So they have developed technology (which he's going into further in a session I just missed) to filter spam/spim/spit and bots and whatnot at the network layer.

Afternoon etech: content free notes

Nothing much to post for the afternoon. I missed the first half of the sessions dealing with the hotel.

I managed to get bac in time for Sam Ruby's session "Just" Use HTTP. The crux of the session is that there are many, many specs, and that they all build on the base protocols and standards like HTTP and Unicode. HTTP itself is vague on various matters like character encodings for content, which is less a problem for people reading web pages than for applications consuming web services. HTTP also doesn't specify the character set for URIs (as an aside: I tried to use URI inside IBM for years and was frequently flamed on the various WWW* fora...it's nice to see if finally used).

I'm also sitting in on Amazon.com: E-Commerce at Interplanetary Scale which....which I'm not getting anything from.

Good idea: trackback on session pages

O'Reilly, sponsors of the etech conference, have set up trackback pings for the various session pages. Good idea (personally, I think any page which can be linked to should have trackback and/or pingback enabled, except for the stupid trackback spam problem). Only problem: it doesn't work. The previous post included links to two session pages. The trackbacks to those session pages returned errors:

Ping 'http://www.oreillynet.com/cgi-bin/tb/tb.cgi/e_sess_5974' failed: HTTP error: 302 Found

Which is just the result in MovableType, the trackback doesn't show up on the page so I'm not sure if it was recorded and I just can't see it, or if something else is going on.

(Yes, I could try debugging it, but not from the conference floor)

Remix

The theme of etech is Remix: the notion that there's all this stuff out there (data, services, applications, even physical products like Tivo) that people are taking and remixing, creating something new, possibly useful, certainly interesting derivations. Much of the content industry is aghast at this sort of thing, the RIAA being the classic example in going after mash-up DJs like The Kleptones or Beatallica. This week's The Economist has an article fortunately timed to this conference: Economist.com | The future of innovation The rise of the creative consumer. How and why smart companies are harnessing the creativity of their customers:

How does innovation happen? The familiar story involves boffins in academic institutes and R&D labs. But lately, corporate practice has begun to challenge this old-fashioned notion. Open-source software development is already well-known. Less so is the fact that Bell, an American bicycle-helmet maker, has collected hundreds of ideas for new products from its customers, and is putting several of them into production. Or that Electronic Arts (EA), a maker of computer games, ships programming tools to its customers, posts their modifications online and works their creations into new games. And so on. Not only is the customer king: now he is market-research head, R&D chief and product-development manager, too.

At the heart of most thinking about innovation is the belief that people expect to be paid for their creative work: hence the need to protect and reward the creation of intellectual property. One really exciting thing about user-led innovation is that customers seem willing to donate their creativity freely, says Mr Von Hippel. This may be because it is their only practical option: patents are costly to get and often provide only weak protection. Some people may value the enhanced reputation and network effects of freely revealing their work more than any money they could make by patenting it. Either way, some firms are starting to believe that there really is such a thing as a free lunch.