1000 Flowers Bloom

The Unsung Photographer of Web 2.0

I have really been enjoying Scott Beale of Laughing Squid's photos since I discovered them over the last year. He goes to nearly every tech event and shoots terrific pictures. You can see his photos from ETech 2006 here.

For some reason though, I don't think he gets the respect from conference organizers that he deserves though. The reality is that having Scott at your event means that a lot of high quality pictures will get taken, posted up on Flickr and seen all around the tech community. This is a big deal and it's real.

I hope more organizers recognize the value that he brings - if you're willing to give passes to speakers for free you should do the same for your photographer.

Launching Aggregate Knowledge

I'm proud to announce that we are officially launching Aggregate Knowledge today.

Our goal is to deliver the best content to people based on the aggregate behavior of everyone who has gone before them. We think that the wisdom of crowds can help people get at the best of all the information that’s out there.

It seemed fitting that we launch at ETech 2006 since the theme here is the Attention Economy. Our Recommendation Engine uses attention information to provide relevant content and products.

We're live on Zvents, an events search engine, youcan see an example here about how we power their related events. Notice that this is a chocolate festival so you will see a fancy food show at Copia but  you will also find that because it's at a winery many of the recommendations are for wine tastings.

We're talking to some retailers and other website owners about powering related content on their sites. If you're interested in trying it out please drop me a line and I'll hook you up with a free trial.

Etech 2006 Grumbling

Ok so even though Aggregate Knowledge officially is launching at this conference I do have some things to grumble about.

1. No wifi in the main conference room. Well it might as well be no wifi because no one can actually get on it.
2. Freezing in the main conference room.
3. Can't get into any of the breakout sessions because they're too full. Which really seems ridiculous to me since they knew how many people would be at the conference.

Otherwise though I have to say that I am impressed with the number of quality people that are here at hte event. It's pretty cool to see so many folks that are actively engaged.

I had a cool conversation last night with Kareem over at Fox Sports, Thor at Ruby Red Labs, Chris from Flock and Greg from Chordiant on a wide range of topics from the death of privacy to what the most broken Microsoft Office application was. Conferences need to facilitate more of these kinds of cool moments.

Etech 2006 Conference - David Sifry – Attention Economy

What is Attention? Fundamentally about time.

How do you evaluate where long term value exists in the Attention Economy? Fundamentally attention is time directed to a purpose by people.

Most economic models focus on what is scarce. We talk about scarcity of capital, scarcity of space, scarcity of labor pool in a capitalist system. It’s a good tool to use to understand tradeoffs.

What is scarce in the attention economy?

• CPU Cycles? No.
• Storage? No.
• Network Bandwidth? No.
• Money? Ability to provide      basics of food and shelter… Well ok we like money but we already have lots      of resources.

What does Bill Gates not even have enough of? Time and people.

Information is not scarce – information overload is the problem. Human beings are only wired to have certain number of meaningful relationships.

We can’t hoard time – use it or lose it. It’s a perishable resource
Aggregate Attention Artifacts. Where I spend my time is very valuable. Clickstream data is implicit metadata. I don’t have to do anything to create this data other than live my life.

Help me be more productive. Technorati – what are people saying about me, right now.
Make sure you incorporate an understanding of time and people into your design.

Attention is both a currency and a perishable.

Hyperlinks are votes of attention. Create opportunities for economies of scale.

Etech 2006 - Seth Goldstein - Root Markets

Web 2.0 = Attention 1.0

Attention about money or is Attention about time? In New York we focus on the $.

Is Attention about Privacy? It’s about sharing Attention. You want to express yourself as openly as possible, as publicly possible as early as possible.

Receiving Attention makes you influential.

Why Attention now? Web services have enabled the recording and sharing of attention choices in real time?

Root – an open exchange for the attention economy

PPA = promise to pay attention

PPAs form attention bonds

If you default on a PPA your reputaitno suffers.

Why are attention bonds important to wall street? Because they can be pooled, securitized and traded.

Historical analogy – wall street turned mortgage payment promises into a trillion $ CMO market.

Personal Attention – your attention is valuable

• Impression – fraction of a penny
• Click – 0.75
• Email Address - $1
• Mortgage lead - $25
• Army Application - $2000

Who do you want o pay attention to? Who do you want to keep your attention from?

We should own the attention data.

Root Vault – it’s a place to send your attention data. Send your attention data through an extension.

Cool visualization tool demo.

ETech 2006 - Dick Hardt - Who is the Dick on your site?

Talk about Identy 2.0 - simple, secure solution.

There are many Dicks, how do you know which one is me? How do you know which one of me with my personas.

How do we prove who we are in an online world?

Prove it's me in the physical world with a drivers license. What do I do in the online world? 

How does Amazon know all about me? How do i tell the Hyatt that I'm allergic to down feathers. How do I move my friends from Orkut to Tribe?

How do sites use my data? Who and how much disclosure. 

What's the solution? SXIP identity

Identiy History

• Identity 1.0 - DAP, etc.
• Lightweight - LDAP, Passport
• Multiple directories with a domain centric models
• Identiity 1.5 - SAML, Liberty Alliance - requires Trust between sites

Identity providers and relying parties handle this today. THere's explicit trust between Indentity Provider and Relying Party 

Salesforce uses a simple and flexible ASP model. Little choice as a worker? Should your identity provider always be your employer?  

Emerging model called YADIS. Better model - no trust required, and more flexibility.

Identity 2.0 - Higgins (IBM), SXIP, Identity Cards (Microsoft)

Ning created a working site in 12 minutes.

A member site can now ask for if available by asking for information a user already has and not overwhelm them with a ton of fields. I can also use this to send data to sites that I want to send data to.

Chris - Dick Hardt has a GREAT presentation style.

ETech 2006 - Felipe Cabrera - Artificial Artificial Intelligence

Mechanical Turk intro about how a Hungarian invented a chess playing machine and beat people with it. There were intricate gears pulleys etc. when he showed people. In fact he was cheating. There was a human chess master inside the machine.

There are many things that you can do with computers. Computers are good at some complicated things. Computers are bad at things that require judgement.

Need to incorporate people into the decision process.

A human bulids some software that turns around and asks humans to do something. There is a web service API that lets people find people to do things for other people. They have had upo to 43,000 users to do something at once.

You as a developer just make a call as you normally would but instead of a computer figuring it out it a human does.

He went thorugh a bunch of examples of how businesses can use this.

Chris - my impression after trying this a few months ago was that not many people were using this. It's a cool idea though.

Efficient Frontiers uses it to figure out if keywords are relevant or not

A9 uses it to figure out which is the better picture for a store

Castingwords.com uses mturk to do transcription. Quality is good because there are large numbers of people on it.This wouldn't have happened without mturk and webservices.

We think this is the tip of the iceberg. All the webservices that Amazon deploys are scalable and have high availablity.

NOTE - http://www.castingwords.com/etech - free transcription

Etech 2006 Conference - Jeff Han - Multi-touch Interfaces

Cool demo of a multi touch sensor. Most kiosks are single touch at once. The multi touch lets you do gestures. The difference now is that things are scalable, and much more sensitive.

Shows making vortices and swirls.Showed using a lava lamp simulation. Lots of fluids interactions. It means that multiple users can interact with a shared display and the interface disappears.

using both fingers he showed organization and manipulation fo photos. It behaves as you would expect it to. A child or grandparents could use this. There's no tools involved, you just use your hands and anyone can learn this.

He went into a technical dicsussion about how it works.

This technology allows you an infinite desktop. It also works for video.

Exciting to have a really zoomable user interface. Showed a demo of a map interface with this. Very intuitive and easy interface.

Etech Conference - Ray Ozzie – Bridging the Web

I started doing semi-transcripts at Web 2.0 and I thought folks might like a few of these for ETech as well. I may have gotten some of the transcription a little wrong but the gist of this should be correct.

Ray Ozzie talks about Mashups as “composite apps”.

The GUI in the form of the clipboard created a bus between apps. It allows users to create composite apps by using cut copy paste and some composite data formats.

When I look at the web what I see is a bunch of largely siloed sites, I see schemas and formats that we could exchange between sites

Where is the clipboard of the web that lets data flow between apps?

Why isn't the clipboard for the web the clipboard?

If users are already familiar with weaving together PC based apps why don't we carry this on? I challenged my team about a month ago to use script code within a page to jam things in a clipboard.

Demo of script on the web page that has a little widget called live clipboard. It simulates a button control and when you right click on it you can copy and paste. It takes a structured data item into the clipboard.

It implements a clipboard on the clipboard. It's an invisible edit control on top of a button.

He showed a cut and paste of an event in Eventful into the Microsoft Windows Live Calendar. He then showed cut and paste of an event to and from Outlook to Windows Live.

Presented an idea about cutting and pasting RSS Feeds into aggregators.

He also showed cut and paste of location information from one profile MSN Spaces to his Facebook profile - this information would be kept in sync between the profiles.

Showed cut and paste of Flickr Photos and tags.

There is power in simplicity. The community needs to embrace this standard for this to be useful.

Chris - I think that this is pretty cool!! Really great idea!!!