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 the markup for my hCard (as produced by the hCard Creator)

<div class="vcard">
    <a class="url fn" href="http://devhawk.net">Harry Pierson</a>
    <div class="org">Microsoft</div>
    <a class="email" href="mailto:hpierson@microsoft.com">hpierson@microsoft.com</a>
    <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.

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.

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?

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.

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.