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.

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’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 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.

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.