Identity Woman

I've been to Mashup Camp, ETech and MIX in the past month and a half. So has Kaliya, otherwise known as Identity Woman. She calls MS out for a http://www.identitywoman.net/?p=296 as well as the lack of an official wiki for the event. She's right on both counts. I thought some of the logistics of ETech were suspect, but they sure did assume that every single attendee would need power and laid out power strips accordingly.

I kept seeing Kaliya at these events, but I didn't get to meet her until she came to the SPARK @ MIX session Monday afternoon. She's one of the organizers of the Internet Identity Workshop. Sounds like a cool event, but it's right before my daughter Rileyanne's first birthday and you know Jules would NEVER forgive me for missing that.

ETech Day Three Quick Thoughts

After my marathon blogging session last night and taking notes all day, I'm a bit burnt out on writing. But here are a few quick thoughts. More details to follow.

• I'm digging the Live.com home page and the integrated Live Search. Since I'm on a rented laptop, Live Toolbar will have to wait. Coolest new feature IMO is the Search Macros, though it's a tight race with the new image search interface.
• Jon Udell and Michael Goldhaber spoke about attention economy today. I still don't get it, though Jon had some interesting ideas about metadata. I'll believe that attention is a currency when I can buy a car with it.
• I liked the session on the Yahoo! Design Patterns, though the title and abstract of the session were awful. The title was "The Language of Attention: A Pattern Approach". The inclusion of attention just confused the issue. Why couldn't they just call it "A Pattern Language for User Experience"? Because it doesn't have the concept of attention shoehorned into it.
• I really like Eventful, even though I'm on record as thinking their business model doesn't work. Their new demand feature is pretty cool, though it doesn't really help their business model any.
• George Dyson's session on "Turing's Cathedral" was fascinating, though he tried to cover too much ground in the time alloted.
• I'm not sure what the point of Joel Spolsky's Blue Chip Report Card was. Apparently the alien from Reddit is cute and Motorola newer cell phones (RAZR and PEBL) are taking Joel's advice on becoming "blue chip". This is somewhat related to points the folks from Adobe (previously Macromedia) made, except much more obtuse.
• I have no idea what the point or business model of Plum is, even though it was featured as a keynote (a last minute promotion it appears from the conference guide). Seems too complex and centralized to actually work.
• I wrote last night that Casting Words isn't really a business because nothing stops me from going directly to Mechanical Turk and getting the transcription services myself. Today, I found a Casting Words task on Mechanical Turk so I decided to figure out how much they're making. The task I found was to transcribe about 28 minute podcast and they were offering $5.41 for anyone willing to do it. That's about 19.5 cents per minute. Tack on Amazon's 10% charge brings the total to around 21.5 cents a minute that Casting Words is paying for transcription services. Given that they're charging 42 cents a minute, that's just under a 49% profit margin. Exactly what are they doing to earn that profit? What's their value add and is really worth a 100% markup?
• Anyone want to start "Cheap Casting Words" with me? We'll pay 22 cents a minute (11% more than Casting Words) and charge 36 cents a minute (14% less than Casting Words) and keep the 12 cents a minute markup (a 33% markup). :)

UPDATE (8:45pm) - Added Quick Thoughts on Yahoo!, Eventful, George Dyson, Joel Spolsky and Plum. Added more detail about the attention economy sessions from today.

Microformats Panel

I still haven’t seen a good general session on microformats. I’m thinking it’s because any one given microformat is so simple that you can’t really fill more than about ten minutes talking about it. So this panel was about six or seven different microformats. The format of the panel stunk – I lost track of what was being discussed pretty quickly so I spent the time surfing the microformats website.

The idea of microformats is to adorn visual markup (i.e. xhtml) with semantic information about the data underneath. Probably the best example of this is hCard, the microformat version of vCard. Here’s my hCard (as produced by the hCard Creator)

Harry Pierson

Microsoft

One Microsoft Way, 18/2194

Redmond, WA 98052

425/705-6045

And here’s the markup:

<div class="vcard">
    <a class="url fn" href="http://devhawk.net">Harry Pierson</a>
    <div class="org">Microsoft</div>
    <div class="adr">
        <div class="street-address">One Microsoft Way, 18/2194</div>
        <span class="locality">Redmond</span>, 
        <span class="region">WA</span>
        <span class="postal-code">98052</span>
    </div>
    <div class="tel">425/705-6045</div>
</div>

See how the class attributes provide the semantics for the underlying text? Cool.

I’m beginning to get microformats. At first, I was bothered because I thought they were hijacking the semantics of the class attribute. But I didn’t realize the class attribute could be used for “general purpose processing by user agents”. And the link microformats like XFN and rel-tag are even simpler than hCard.

So again, bad session but cool concept. I really see potential for mashing up Ray Ozzie’s Live Clipboard with microformats.

Michael Kunivsky and Matt Cottam on Sketching in Hardware

For a while, I really didn’t understand where this session was going. Michael spent a bunch of time on the issues of user experience design that I’m not familiar with. I still don’t know why he was talking about the Cuddle Chimp. But then he started talking about the importance of the sketching process to the practice of design. His meta point is that sketching is the root design tool, and different mediums are better or worse at supporting sketching. Drawing, as you might expect, is the best medium for sketching. Hardware is the worst. Michael rated a variety of sketching mediums based on Speed, Provisionality and History Preservation. By this time I figured out they were talking about enabling sketching of hardware.

Then Matt got up. I didn’t get his bio written down, but he is a professor of experience design. And he was talking about a product he’s been involved in to enable rapid sketching of hardware user experiences using simple sensors and motors. The product is called Nada and it supports Flash and Java. No .NET? Nope, but I spoke to Matt after the session about it. The demos were pretty cool. He controlled the opacity of an element in Flash with a hardware potentiometer. He controlled the speed of a fan based on the current temperature reported via a website. He showed a variety of other sensors like light sensors and flex resiststors. These demos weren’t that compelling, but the potential is huge. It can connect to variety of hardware systems including serial port devices, MIDI devices, plus kits like Teleo and Phidgets. I’m thinking Scott needs to check this out for a future installment of Some Assembly Required.

Rod Smith on Do It Yourself IT

This post is a combination of Rod’s short keynote and his breakout session I went to right after lunch. Rod’s meta point is that lots of enterprise applications don’t get built because they aren’t affordable to write. Chris Anderson would call this the long tail of software. Rod introduced the idea of “situational applications” – something you build for a specific situation then you throw it away. I actually prefer the term “disposable application” since it focuses on the fact you will throw it away.

He demoed a proof of concept called QEDWiki. QED == Quick and Easily Done. It seems a lot like JotSpot. You have a palette of components that you can drag onto the page and wire together quickly. They built a slightly interesting application to mashup store locations with weather data in under five minutes.

In the breakout, they got into much more detail on QEDWiki. There’s a wiki programming language - I'm guessing conceptually similar to WikiTalk -and a AJAX-y drag and drop authoring environment that sits on top of it. Pretty cool, but as he got under the hood it seemed pretty complex. The amount of wiki code the visual authoring environment spits out is significant and the implementation of one of the reusable components is massive. Building a wrapper component for the Yahoo Traffic service took “around a day”. That seem large to you?

Assorted Remaining ETech Day Two Keynotes & Sessions

Jeff Han on Multi-Touch Interfaces
This was a cool demo, but was basically a live version of the associated video that made the rounds on the web a few weeks ago. There’s huge potential here, but he kept doing the same zoom in and out demo over an over. Can’t wait to see practical availability of this type of device.

Cory Ondrejka on Second Life
I’d heard of Second Life before, but I had never really seen it before today. Wow. I hacked around with MUSHes back in college, so it was a little familiar. But I didn’t realize there were people making real livings in Second Life. Who knew you could make $150k a year prospecting virtual real estate? Cory only had 15 minutes to talk, so we only got a taste of Second Life. He’s got a full session tomorrow, so I’ll post more then.

Linda Stone on Attention, the “Real” Aphrodisiac
Unlike the other talks on attention, this one didn’t try and frame it as an economy, so that’s a good start. Linda talked about this state of “constant partial attention” that we’re all pretty much in all the time these days. Her meta point is to value technology based on how it improves the quality of your life – which of course most technology doesn’t do today. She also had a great quote: “Email is an attention chipper shredder. Think Fargo”. Heh.

Mark Pilgrim on GreaseMonkey
Maybe I’ve been living under a rock, but I’ve never used GreaseMonkey so I wanted to see what it was all about. Mark’s a great presenter, so it was a fun session though it wasn’t as much about GreaseMonkey as you might expect. Mark spent a significant amount of time on how to become an expert and when to write (while you’re still filled with wonder and before you become an expert). Great advice, but at best tangentially related to the topic at hand. He also spent a bunch of time on how they dealt with some security issues he discovered. That did lead to some discussion about how GreaseMonkey works with respect to sandboxing and the like. I guess I’ll just need to download it and play with it.

The So-Called Attention Economy

I’m just going to come right out and say I don’t “get” this attention economy. I mean, I understand the problem of information overload which seems to be at the root of this attention stuff. But is it an economy? Whenever someone gets going on attention economy, I think back to the .com days and wonder if anyone ever called that a “traffic economy”. It’s more like the next generation of productivity – Productivity 2.0 if you will. If Productivity 1.0 was about information at your fingertips (to steal an old piece of Microsoft marketing hype), then Productivity 2.0 is about noise filtration. It’s a natural outgrowth of making so much information digitally available. But it’s not an economy.

Today there were to keynotes explicitly about the attention economy. Seth Goldstein is from a company called Root, which is one of these so called attention economy applications. It actually seems to have a lot in common with Felix’s myware idea. Basically, it tracks what you pay attention to and uploads it to a central server. I get why last.fm wants my music attention data, because there’s value in aggregating it with other users. But I don’t get how general purpose attention data can be aggregated in such a way that I would consider posting it to some server some where. If I spent two hours surfing Flickr last week, shouldn’t that data be local on my machine (where said surfing occurred) and not up on some server that’s out of my control.

Later we had David Sifry on the Economic Model of Attention. Most of what David talked about I agree with, but I again I don’t appear to draw the same conclusions. Sure, time is scarce and perishable. But I don’t buy that it’s currency. Besides, any economic “model” that claims money isn’t scarce seems fishy to me.

As I said, I don’t get this attention economy stuff.

Felix Miller on The Musical myware

Felix is from last.fm, which I haven’t used. However, I’m definitely going to give it a try after seeing Felix’s talk. Last.fm is all about harnessing collective intelligence for music. The basic idea is that you install a plugin to your music player and it uploads everything you listen to the central server. Then they can do analysis of the collective data to make associations and recommendations. Sounds cool. Gotta try it out.

Felix was also making a more meta point which was where the name of the talk came from. He’s talking about myware as a play on spyware. The idea is to “spy” on yourself in an unobtrusive manner and then use that collected information to help you sometime in the future – in this case help you find new music by spying on your music playing habits. There’s major privacy concerns of course, but the idea is pretty interesting. Something to noodle on at any rate.

Dick Hardt on Who is the Dick on My Site

This is a sequel to Dick’s now-famous Identity 2.0 talk. He’s definitely had an influence on this crowd – the two speakers after Dick used a similar presentation style. However, what I didn’t realize from watching the Identity 2.0 talk is that it’s much more effective on video than in the audience because he’s spending so much time looking at the screen (though that may be an artifact of a new presentation).

The other thing about this talk is that it’s basically a product pitch for SXIP 2.0. That – for me anyway – was much less interesting than the more conceptual Identity 2.0 talk. However, I will be trying out the new SXIP stuff when I get back home next week.

Felipe Cabrera on Amazon's Mechanical Turk

Felipe’s a good guy (I knew him when he was at MSFT) but this session wasn’t anything exciting because it’s all old news. There are some things humans are better at than computers, typically things involving judgment such as “which is the best picture of this store?” Yes, I saw that when Amazon first released Mechanical Turk.

They did have a partner on stage, a company called Casting Words that offers podcast transcription services for 42 cents a minute. But how is that a business? I’m not sure what kind of percentage Casting Words is making out of that 42 cents a minute, but couldn’t I go directly to Mechanical Turk and ask for transcription services myself? There are no Casting Words tasks currently on the site as I type this, but I imagine if I watch a while I'll see a Casting Words task. Then I could simply use a site like HIT Builder to farm out my own transcription tasks. What’s my incentive to use Casting Words at all?

Furthermore, there’s not really a business model behind Mechanical Turk itself. If Microsoft launched its own version, there would be plenty of takers for that work as well – the workers will gravitate to where the best paying and most interesting work they can do is. There’s no incentive to provide your artificial artificial intelligence services exclusively to one company. So Mechanical Turk wouldn’t work as a stand alone business. But as a feature of Amazon it works great. In fact, when the service first launched the only tasks came from A9. I’m guessing it would be worth it to Amazon to run the service even if they were the only ones using it.

Ray Ozzie on Simple Bridge Building

Ray has posted extensively about his session this morning, but if you haven’t read it the basic idea is “How do we bring the copy and paste paradigm to the web?” Sure, for this crowd he might have been better off saying “the UNIX pipe paradigm”, but the result is the same. How do have a simple way of letting an end user connect systems together? The idea of using the clipboard paradigm is brilliant in its simplicity.

The coolest part of the demo IMO was the integration between the Live Clipboard (of course, it’s branded Live) and the desktop. Copy an event out of Eventful, paste into Outlook. Copy an image out of Flickr, paste into the file system. Even cooler: Paste an image feed out of Flickr and paste into a folder in the file system with integration into the Feeds API to keep the local folder in sync with the Flickr feed (OK, the Feed API integration wasn’t done in time to demo). This was the best demo of the all the keynotes.

I need to think more about the implications of this. First off is the importance of data formats. I’ve written about RSS as the generic list semantics on top of XML, but I’m thinking microformats will be huge when combined with Live Clipboard. Also, there’s the implication of user driven integration. Pat Helland derides the clipboard in Metropolis, but the support for structured data eliminates the Pat’s primary issues with the clipboard as an integration medium. Finally, there’s huge implication in the enterprise for this, but I’m not sure how positive it is. IT shops are already struggling with thousands of shadow applications built on Office running in the wild. If I can copy structured data out of an enterprise app and paste it into Excel without losing the schema, it will encourage still more of these shadow apps. IT will hate it, but users will love it.

ETech Day Two

So I ended up writing four and a half pages of thoughts on day two, so instead of one big-ass post, I'm going to break it up. Of course, I was distracted by the death of my laptop during the morning keynotes. Plus, any notes I have of the session up until the first break are on said dead laptop (I picked up a pad of paper to tide me over until the rental laptop showed up). So your quality may vary.

ETech Day One

Of course, I my copious notes are on my dead laptop, so this is all from memory. Granted, it was only yesterday and my memory isn't THAT bad (yet).

Rael Dornfest on the Attention Economy
You know the old saying if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all? The one thing I will say is that it felt like a sales pitch to come to the conference. Given that we we're already there, it seemed like an odd choice. I'll have more about Attention Economy with my post on today's sessions.

Tim O'Reilly on O'Reilly Radar
Tim had (not surprisingly) a bunch of interesting things to talk about. Probably the most interesting was the stuff about Bionic Software which Tim describes as a system "that combines the biological and mechanical systems to create an enhanced system that is more powerful than either alone." He described this as Intelligence Augmentation, instead of Artificial Intelligence. Bruce Sterling later talked about the importance of how things are named, and IA over AI is a great example of that.

However, Tim also went on at great length about the architecture of participation and harnessing collective intelligence. He's given many examples of these, however I'm wondering if he's over generalizing based on a few success stories. Companies like Amazon and Ebay are successful because they're in the middle of financial transactions. Google's been able to monetize the long tail of search to an amazing degree, but the growth of that market is slowing and Google has been unable to significantly monetize any of their other efforts (so far, though I doubt that trend will continue). Sites like del.icio.us and Flickr are great, but I don't see evidence of a business plan outside of "get acquired". On the del.icio.us about page, it specifically says that del.icio.us started as a hobby. Granted, hosting costs these days are such that you can run a hobby site for nearly nothing and cover that cost with Google Ads. But as a business, if there's only a few business success stories, why place the importance on the crowd's wisdom?

Bruce Sterling on The Internet of Things
I couldn't do this talk justice even with my notes, so here are a couple of things that stood out:

• The guy introducing Bruce was a little to lavish with his praise. It was actually a little creepy. Bruce even remarked on it.
• I wish Bruce hadn't read so many quotes from other people. It was hard to follow when he was providing his own opinions or someone else's. He didn't use many slides (yeah!) and the ones he did use didn't have bullets (even better!) but when he's quoting someone else, I think it makes sense to put the words up on a slide.
• He seemed to alternate between praising and disrespecting the crowd in the room. For example, he commented that "hype is an attention interrupt" which seems validate the work of many Web 2.0 companies even though so many people dismiss it as hype. However, he also made the comment that Web 2.0 was an effort by alpha geeks to wrest control of the web back.
• The main thrust of his talk was about applying Internet concepts like sorting and searching to the real world by creating links between real-world items and virtual counterparts. So you would never lose your keys again because you could easily Google them. I need to pick up his latest book "Shaping Things" for the flight home - it's not like I'll be using my computer.

Stick around, I'll be posting my thoughts on today's session a little later.

My Dead Laptop

So between this mornings multi-touch interface demo and the session on Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, my laptop died. At least, the display did. Sometimes I can get it to work for a short time by closing and re-opening the lid. But in the constant jostling environment of a confernce audience, getting it to keep working has proved impossible.

Of course this couldn't happen while I'm at home with convienent access to the help desk. I'm at the Emerging Tech conferences for pete sake!

I would have just bought a laptop at CompUSA or something, but that qualifies as a captial expenditure and my boss wouldn't sign off on it (primarily because of the paperwork he'd have to fill out). Luckily, CRE Rentals was able to get a machine over to me in a few hours so I'm back online. I guess I won't be doing any more coding this trip, but I guess I'll survive.

More from ETech later. In the meantime, check out Ray Ozzie's blog entry on Wiring the Web. I may be biased, but it's the coolest new thing I've seen here so far (though the multi-touch interface is pretty awesome too)

Off to Emerging Tech

I flew down to San Diego for the Emerging Technology Conference today. I'm here thru Thursday which is the longest I've been gone from home since TechEd last year. And I'm only home eight days before heading off to SPARK and MIX for an even longer trip. Well, the SPARK/MIX trip is just one day longer than ETech. But a day can seem like an eternity to my three year old son who was predicting "Daddy come home in one minute" as I was pulling out of the driveway.

I skipped the pre-confernece tutorials, though several looked interesting. I'm really looking forward to hearing Bruce Sterling speak tonight.

And for those keeping track of my travel shenanigans with Alaska Airlines, no problems with the flight today. Apparently they only screw up when I'm in a hurry. And even better news is that I've re-earned my MVP status. I used to fly with them all the time, but then with the new role and new baby I just didn't fly much last year. But they had some "quick earning" program that let me re-earn my status. They even gave me MVP status for the flight today, so I got to sit in first class. Crowded flight too, so it was nice. Of course, in what has become true Alaska Air style, I had to wait on hold and deal with a subordanant flunky for twenty minutes before I could talk to a supervisor who could get me registered into the quick MVP program, but it turned out OK so I guess I shouldn't complain.