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.

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.