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.

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.

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)