Notes from Etech
Reminder to self: tie up important project details before going to a big tech conference. As it was, my time in San Diego was full of meaningful conversations and meetings, plus a handful of memorable sessions. But I spent too much time doing intense project work, which had me in the hall with my laptop and on the phone doing reviews. Still worth it, but not ideal.
Here are some of the speakers that left an imprint, with links to the session notes (sometimes complete transcriptions and/or powerpoint slides).
- Bruce Sterling, The Internet of Things
I enjoyed his sprawling vision of how smart network of physical things can change our waking life, and even more his critique on our use of language to describe our technologies. As Molly Steenson put it, Sterling may be constructing a new literary theory, and it’s fascinating to see him think it through in front of us. - Ray Ozzie, Simple Bridge-building
Microsoft’s CTO shows off his Live Clips technology, and it’s very promising. The idea is simple but powerful: structured data streams can be cut-and-pasted into other Web and desktop applications. Could be an enormous leap forward for linking together all these dynamic pieces of the Web in a meaningful way, and extending the linkages beyond the Web. - Jeff Han, The Future of Interfaces Is Multi-Touch
I loved this. It’s a new way of interacting with digital objects, making the manipulation of things on a screen an almost tactile experience. I had a similar reaction to this demo as I did seeing the original Macintosh demo back in 1984 (I was thirteen). I want this! - L. F. Cabrera, Ph.D., Artificial Intelligence: What It Is and What It Means for the Web (Amazon’s Mechanical Turk)
There are two competing views of artificial intelligence at Etech, one that asserts that machines are inherently non-intelligent, essentially good for “linking, ranking and sorting,” and one that believes that intelligence is an emergent quality of those very activities. Amazon seems to be in the former camp, as its Mechanical Turk turns mobs of microtask-completing humans into virtual computers. It’s the opposite of Moore’s Law: we’re doubling the number of humans needed to fill data processing requirements every eighteen months. Okay, I made that up, but that seems to be the direction we’re heading. - Eric Bonabeau, Ph.D., Hunch Engine
There were a lot of interesting ideas in this talk, though some thought it was less coherent than it could’ve been. The core idea is that in the infinite search space that we now have access to, we operate on an “I know it when I see it” basis. The “hunch.” Perfection is not the point, but an approximation of the archetype in our head. Given this, the best approach to getting good results is “evolution via intelligent design.” Think Kai Power Tools for everything, with its interface so good for generating mutant patterns, allowing user selection and then further mutations. Imagine something like this for architecture, or web design–software that generates ideas, and further mutates them in the directions we push them until we’ve got something we like . This is what Bonabeau showed off.Bonabeau makes the point that today we relinquish our control to “heuristocrats,” people like architects who arbitrarily limit exploration of possibilities with their “expertise.” Only by going around heuristocrats can we get full value of the information we have at our disposal. - Matt Webb, Ben Cerveny, playsh, the Playful Shell
This is pretty geeky, but also very timely as we look to gaming as a metaphor for compelling user experience of all types. Playsh is a command line interface that uses text adventure (e.g. MUD) metaphors as an interface for roaming the Internet and manipulating data. What’s potentially powerful about Playsh is its ability to recast data and URIs in metaphors and language tailored to a user, and more importantly, have their actions persist in the environment to affect other users. - Brian Dear, When Do We Get the Events We Want
Brian unveiled EVDB’s latest feature and it’s very interesting: a demand feature. This gives users the option to specify the events they’d like to see, rather than simply responding to the events put in front of them. Imagine the benefit for an indie rock band: they could plan a whole tour based on the stated demand in various cities across the country, avoiding costly bookings where there was no interest. Very cool. - Tom Coates, Native to a Web of Data: Designing a Part of the Aggregate Web
This was one of my favorite presentations, in part thanks to Tom’s cogent and comic delivery, but mostly because his ideas are so well-baked. Open data, or whatever we want to call it, is a particular focus of mine these days, and Tom’s prescription is on-the-money.Money line: “We’re moving from a web of Web pages connected by links, to a Web of data sources connected by APIs.” I couldn’t agree more– thus my excitement about scrAPIs. To get the meat of it all, read the notes or listen to the podcast of the similar presentation he did at London’s Future of Web Apps conference. - Danah Boyd, G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide
Danah’s talk was surprisingly practical, with many tips for building and maintaining a thriving online community. The most compelling aspect of the presentation, however, was the section on how language is incredibly nuanced for any given community. Beyond jargon and slang, a single word such as the “N” word can have multiple contradictory meanings that can be misunderstood. This poses challenges to online community managers as they seek to maintain high standards and non-threatening environments.Important research, though I have the feeling it’s just the tip of the iceberg.