Conference Report: O'Reilly ETECH
Created by Matt Pasiewicz (EDUCAUSE) on March 07, 2006
I'm in day two of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. So far, so good. Day one was spent in a couple of half day sessions. One on AJAX and the other on Creating Passionate Users. The Passionate Users session was interesting, but would have been better if I'd not had a little background in both psychology and marketing. I'll try to dig back through my notes to see if anything really caught my eye. At a minimum, I'd recommend checking out Kathy Sierra's blog. The AJAX one was fairly good. It covered some basic do's and don't's and highlighted a few AJAX frameworks that could be used. The slides and code are available here.
Last evening, the highlight for me was Bruce Steerling. Very entertaining. I'm hoping to read more from him. The really interesting Cory Doctorow provided an entertaining intro for Bruce. I'd love to see either of them speak at an EDUCAUSE event. My battery was dead, so once, again, I'll have to try to track down my notes. Hopefully a podcast of his speech will show up on ITConversations.com before too long.
One of other really interesting sessions was Jeff Han's live demo of a multi-touch display. WOW, really, really fun/cool! I'll refer you to Catherine Howell's blog coverage of the topic for more information.
I remember a lot of talk about trust, attention and identity management at the Corante's Symposium on Social Architecture (see my coverage here). Attention Economics is at the forefront of O'Reilly's 2006 Emerging Technology Conference. I have to admit, it still scares me to no end; there is just not enough talk of the potential for unintended consequences. Can you really trust your privacy with some of these new trust networks? Maybe if they were backed by a Ralph Nader, a library or maybe endorsed by an organization like the EFF. The one thing not so new thing that really drifted back on my radar is the really high value that corporations place on the ripples of data that people create. I can't help but wonder what would happen if public-good, cultural records organizations might place a higher value here and what the trade-offs would be.
I also listened to another demo of Second Life today. I believe it has been covered fairly well at EDUCAUSE events, so I won't spend much time on it here. On note of interest that I didn't recal coverage of in the past ... apparently, UC Davis used the system for some hallucination research.
Technorati's Dave Sifry had a brief, but interesting presentation about attention/socially assisted information discovery. He called for a need to incorporate an understanding of time and people deeply into your design. Despite some advances in search supported by technologies touted by many, IMHO there still isn't a good way to create multiple trusted filters for searches and affinity groups. Someone is going to figure this out ... hopefully a group representing a consortium of cultural record organizations. ;)
Last evening, the highlight for me was Bruce Steerling. Very entertaining. I'm hoping to read more from him. The really interesting Cory Doctorow provided an entertaining intro for Bruce. I'd love to see either of them speak at an EDUCAUSE event. My battery was dead, so once, again, I'll have to try to track down my notes. Hopefully a podcast of his speech will show up on ITConversations.com before too long.
One of other really interesting sessions was Jeff Han's live demo of a multi-touch display. WOW, really, really fun/cool! I'll refer you to Catherine Howell's blog coverage of the topic for more information.
I remember a lot of talk about trust, attention and identity management at the Corante's Symposium on Social Architecture (see my coverage here). Attention Economics is at the forefront of O'Reilly's 2006 Emerging Technology Conference. I have to admit, it still scares me to no end; there is just not enough talk of the potential for unintended consequences. Can you really trust your privacy with some of these new trust networks? Maybe if they were backed by a Ralph Nader, a library or maybe endorsed by an organization like the EFF. The one thing not so new thing that really drifted back on my radar is the really high value that corporations place on the ripples of data that people create. I can't help but wonder what would happen if public-good, cultural records organizations might place a higher value here and what the trade-offs would be.
I also listened to another demo of Second Life today. I believe it has been covered fairly well at EDUCAUSE events, so I won't spend much time on it here. On note of interest that I didn't recal coverage of in the past ... apparently, UC Davis used the system for some hallucination research.
Technorati's Dave Sifry had a brief, but interesting presentation about attention/socially assisted information discovery. He called for a need to incorporate an understanding of time and people deeply into your design. Despite some advances in search supported by technologies touted by many, IMHO there still isn't a good way to create multiple trusted filters for searches and affinity groups. Someone is going to figure this out ... hopefully a group representing a consortium of cultural record organizations. ;)
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