ETech Opening Session Monday, March 6, 2006 Rael Dornfest -------------------------- Contributors: Gabe Hollombe (gabe@avantbard.com) is light green Leon Chism (leon@chism.org) is dark purple Ian Kallen (spidaman@arachna.com) in pink -------------------------- looking for externalities to watch that will impact future trends. "data web" growing in importance. etech is a nexus point for what you can do and what you should do. etech is a place where "distant analogies" are possible. 300 applications for sessions. last year was obout remix. flickr launch was announced here. del.icio.us announced here. web 2.0 was "born" at etech life hacks was born at etech? parent hacks: life hacks for those who no longer have lives. we all subscribe to too much information, and we are too available. attention. what's the point? subscription is moving stuff from one in box to another. "context is irreplacable" design: ajax business: gets lots of internal spam that virges on data. chat: ?? investigating how data moves about small islands. TV: bit torrent. using the net to find more things that are more appropriate. Attenuation is the next aggregation. Tim O'Reilly ============ The O'Reilly Radar what they see and the way they see it. subtitle: Watching the Alpha Geeks they pay attention to what the early adopters do, and extrapolate and generalize. find folks innovating on the edges and amplify thier effectiveness. pushbing the envelope is fun. our filters: tech has to be on track with long term trend disruptive tech. tech. uptake is accelerating tech has grassroots support -- bottom up RSS and rest as opposed to w3c WS standards soup tech inspires passion tech has deeper social impact better info makes a difference in its adoption and use pattern recognition (look for big picture stories) latest open source app surrendiptiously turned out to be google. yahoo. apis. applications are the new wave of open source. sharing the new "valuable resource" web2.0 future belongs to info businesses using internet as platform harnessing collective intelligence new titans have figured out how to get users to add the value. google: link analysis. ebay: ratings. craig's list. mechanical turk. carny hoax in late 1700's and early 1800's. metaphore for internet apps. the web app does have people inside them. these apps require constant care and feeding. not software artifacts, but software processes how do we bring people _into_ the machine? amazon released a tool called "mechanical turk" does things that computers aren't good at but people are trivially capable of transcribes podcasts a little bit at a time. explicit use of people is less interesting that implicit use. "tag clouds" flickr. digg. put the users to work for you. Bionic Software - Taking User Empowerment to the Next Level ----------------------------------------------------------- You Mon Tsang boxxet? allows users to moderate articles up or down. not in one stream. their spider will bring in stories it thinks is interesting. people rank it; train the spider in their preferences. ? old skool user agent technology ? alexa has opened their web crawl bringing the power of the big guys down to make average users smarter/better intelligence augmentation as opposed to AI. augemented reality. recommended George Dyson's talk tomorrow. Physical Hacking ---------------- Make -- martha stewart for geeks. widest circulation of any publication. instrumenting the physical world is becoming cheap. rfids are becoming ubiquitous. voice controlled blender.... see http://web.media.mit.edu/%7Emonster/blendie/ tells us about the future: controlling the physical world in ways you don't expect the tools exist for this today. need to get better at documenting how to do this. (tim doesn't like his daughter's boyfriend) photo notes.\ http://www.instructables.com/ version control for h/w design. cad/cam? napkins? new version of make mag in SecondLife (secondlife.com) documentation will also be prototype; instructions will have object instantiated examples in 2L wifi phone booth at burning man to plug into the net from anywhere. mashups. last.fm users rating similar artists have a plugin for itunes. watches what they do/hear and evaluate. like pandora... builds custom radio stations (what would the RIAA say?) showing SecondLife/RealLife party, and a slide of a guy with a SecondLife VR interface. how recursive can you get? tim recommends Ray Ozzie's 8:40 talk. zimbra demo =========== integrate disparaste info systems into the collaboration environment zimlets: developers integrate into server. "mashups 2.0" integrating client and server. integrate zimbra with Asterisk open souce PBX. clicked on a phone number link and it connected him with the linked number via the zimbra/asterix pbx (zimbra == pay to play) take a calendar event, drag it to a chat section in zimbra and it'll call/bridge all of the numbers together Back to Tim O ============= we may be getting to a point where we're getting all these disparate info feeds and the winner will be the one that interops best between all of them. if we dont do it well, we'll have to give up our freedom to a monopolistic implementation Cory Doctorow introduces Bruce Sterling ======================================= Bruce is a machine for inspiring geeks. "My and my pal Bill Shakespeare" Cory is proud to be wearing a "utili-kilt" bruce was CC before there was CC. "Hacker Crackdown" long form etext on BBS's. Bruce was on cover of first WIRED magazine Bruce is living in Belgrade. Watching a failed state try to dig out. "beyond beyond" Shaping Things. Beyond the Beyond Blog: http://blog.wired.com/sterling/ Shadowed. Expects a barn burner. Bruce Sterling ============== someday oss people would be policital disidents. 1989 european rebel type dissidents "The Internet of Things" has to write design manifestos before he writes a book. net of things is going to a long time to evolve. if it ever happens at all will probably take 30 yrs to happen barcodes took 30 yrs he'll be 82 when it happens. we are buidling the future shetlers of our own decline. debating the proper terminology for the Internet of Things (IoT) words like flickr, wikipedia, not real but mean something mark wiser of xerox parc is the leader of the field. and dead. don't freeze the language too early. need to be kicking around terms. freezing language would freeze thinking. or at least confne it. example of freezing lang too early: Artifical Intelligence computers = thinking machines metaphor harmed technical development "computing" sounds too much like human mathematical thinking. maybe we should have called them "ordinators" (french for computer) they have no intelligence. no memory. boxes and strings. not alive. what is ordinating? well, we struggled with making computers think like a human brain when we should have instead explored the vast set of problems computers are really good at like Google, which seems artificially intelligent but it's not designed or presented as a thinking machine. it's not Ask Jeeves. wouldn't fool a 5yr old child. it's a search engine, that's all. we shold pay more attention to the facts. do we want AI that passes a turing test? or do we want a search engine? search engine wins every time. at least its relevant and _fast_, to the point don't call computers computers or thinking machines, call it a Link Sorter or a Tag Shuffler or it Ordinates when he tries to describe the IoT, current terms work well. Classic CS terms don't work. the human interactions with technologies are much more important IoT changes how we relate with things. it's always with us 1. interactive chips; label objects with unique ids; RFIDs 2. local and precise positioning systems (geolocative systems) - where are you? 3. powerful search engines 4. cradle to cradle recycling, sustainability, sorting/shuffling of garbage 5. 3d virtual models of objects, having objects as virtualities in the network before they become objects 6. fabricated objects. digitally made from virtual plans. [editor's note: Like Stephenson's DiamondAge or Gershenfeld's Fab fab.] Spimes: manufactured objects regarded of material instantiations of an immaterial system. virtual objects first, actual objects second don't need to inventory things. jsut ask them where they are. Hax0r. just ask and you get the history/situation of things, isntantly. where's your shoes? just google them all this is talked about in Sterling's _Shaping Things_ he wants this to be an attention framer. he doesnt expect this to stick, but he needs a single syllable noun to call attention to the big concept. also wants Spimes to be google-able. http://research.techkwondo.com/files/WhyThingsMatter.pdf spime is a theory object. a concept that acretes attention. indexed, trackable (and track backable) attention. ppt. flash animation. meme that builds on itself. Pattern Recognition. My Today's everyday object is tomorrow's emerging object. "Hot" tags. good new words are like brooms, and can clean out the old words. hype() is a systems call on your attention. hype is only bad if you drink it like koolaide. opposite of hype is reality. in politics. in tech, opposite of hype is argo. techno jargon. it isn't the truth. its a super specialized geek language. designed to keep people out, and designed to not be taken up and gain traction. this community can create things, but not name them. adam greenfield: Everyware.. The dawning age of ubiquitous computing. Bruce could have used that term tonight. But didn't. Adam says "every current word is associated with contention" either with funding or personalities. doesn't work in google. doesn't carry enough new freight with it. is it prematurley optimized? literature loves the debate of names and implecations. this is what its for. ubicom will be neither ubi nor com. it will be patchy and limited. its about sorting, tagging, linking, and sorting. the clashes are good. prevents premature gelling. "web 2.0" the network as platform spanning connected devices. a very long definition consisting of a roll call of social movements, funding sources, and strong personalities. The Laws of COOL sleptical of web 2.0 hype. 1. is has no context of what was going on in the last generational change. we can't name a change of this scope while its happening. need more history to evaluate the changes. it isn't certain that open content systems align with decentralized control b/c they require centralized and controlled backends. in the guise of empowering users, web 2.0 is really a ploy to return power to the geeks that built web 1.0 they stole our revolution, now we're stealing it back, and selling it to Yahoo!! doesn't think web 2.0 developers understand the markets or environements they are trying to serve. "lashup". a full assement will never happen. BS doesn't think we're capable of introspection on our total situation public goes from "wtf is he talking about" right to "not that agian". goal is to create concepts that become completely obvious, everyday, boooring RFID: Applications, Security, and Privacy. "read the tech manual before you blow off your own thumbs" ThingLink : wikipedia's term for Spime. or Everyware. short thing links. long thing links. special thing links. guids. bar codes. isbn. modest. punchy. to the point. likes Wiki. blogjects (see link above) Jullian is here. objects capable of provoking blog conversations. contribute information and get some trackback. tangible. you can do this today. get a grant and build one pronto. can't do that with a Spime. a spime is a blog that emits objects. not an object that emits blogs. eKO: evocative knowledge objects. mobile social software. locative media. ambient computing. bluesphere ??? blue tooth network coverage. info shadow? data shadow? if no one is dissmissing you as hype, and no one is considering you dangerous, you aren't thinking big enough. loyal opposition is hugely valuable