Neil Gershenfeld

The morning opened with Neil Gershenfeld from MIT, talking about manufacturing technology using computational assemblers. That is, getting the systems to manufacture components directly, without the manual intervention that is normally required. So, you hook a bunch of CAD/CAM systems together with various devices to automate manufacturing.

He also talked about spreading micro-fabrication labs to places in India, Ghana, the Samis of northern Finland. That there's value in teaching people how to build the technology directly, not just the abstract technology concepts. Ie, give people the ability to build computers, don't just send them the computers as-is.

After Neil there was a discussion about this hardware type of hacking. I didn't take many notes but captured this quote from someone on the panel: Put creativity in the critical path.

Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow gave a great speech starting with the problems we see with technology today like spam, and possibly logical solutions like charging for email and how that only creates further problems because it raises the cost of email for everyone. He then went into a riff on DRM and how DRM is simply a system of control, which collapses if any one component is compromised. In the interim it serves to constrict technology development.

Complex ecosystems are influenced, not controlled

He's put the text of the speech online: All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites.

Justin Chapweske

Justin Chapweske presented on Swarmcasting. Unfortunately I think his session got picked for trimming (because the others had run long) so he sort of had to rush through. Basically swarmcasting is some technology to sit on top of HTTP and enable distributed downloads alá BitTorrent, except that you replace your HTTP stack with the Onion Networks stack so your applications don't need to be modified to use the technology.

Jimmy Wales — Wikipedia

Jimmy took the audience through Wikipedia. I don't have much to note about the talk, however it lead into a great group discussion on folksonomies.

Panel discussion: folksonomies

The panel consisted of Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia, Stewart Butterfield from Flickr, Joshua Schacter from del.icio.us, and Clay Shirky from NYU's ITP and other places.

This is just a collection of notes and quotes:

• When wikipedia introduced its taxonomy it was chaotic for several weeks in the English articles but settled down eventually.
• Tags are for noting aspects of things and not necessarily a replacement for taxonomy/classification
• Flickr tags started as retrieval method for people but became a way for people to group content
• Joshua Schacter noted that while all three groups use tags, they're tags for different purposes:
  • Wikipedia has one or more people who categorize articles into their hierarchical taxonomy. Since it's a wiki, anyone can change the categorization but the group as a whole will correct it if the consensus is that the categorization is incorrect.
  • Flickr's tagging consists of people tagging content they created as a way to recall (and possibly as a way to group content with similar photos by others)
  • del.icio.us' tagging consists of people tagging pages created by others
  • Technorati's tagging consists of authors/content creators tagging their own content.
• A questioner asked if there was a way to link all the tags together, but would that have any value since the tags may be the same word but have different meanings depending on the context they were tagged in.
• Joshua Schacter: When you categorize something it's your instinct that's the most reliable and reproducible thing.
• Question: that these systems would be perfect for RDF…why don't they use it? Joshua Schacter: that tags and RDF can work together, it's not either or. That RDF is complex and the delicious version on top of RDF was measurably slower.
• Question: wouldn't tags be more useful with various sorts of meta data (eg language). Answer: Tags are lower barrier to entry. If you encumber them and make them more complex it lowers the usability and utility of tagging.