Category: ETech 2006
Shut Up! No, *You* Shut Up!
Clay Shirky introduced a pattern language for moderation strategies, using Slashdot as a case study: Freedom’s just another word – with increased freedom to publish, the level of annoyingness increases and mechenisms are required to mitigate increased noise. Slashdot’s defenses – members defend readers from writers by ranking comments on individual posts…around 20% of comments…
Attention Focussing Strategies
Jon Udell‘s session on Attention Focussing Strategies was framed around four key concepts: Heads, decks and leads – drawn from print publishing metaphors, giving people the abilty to scan information at multiple levels of detail. Active context – resources that are self-updating and queryable, rather than a static list of information (wishlists, feeds, linklists, blogrolls,…
Rich Local & Social Experiences
Jointly presented by Meetro and PlaceSite, this session explored various locative media developments. The central question posed, ‘Who are you NOT meeting right now?’, is particularly appropriate to the conference environment. Location as a principal factor is deconstructed as one of the driving factors in community. Regarless of the mediated nature of networked communities, physical…
The New Community
Communities occur when people have the ability to use their voice in a public and immediate way, forming intimate relationships over time. Web 1.0 communities were the era of company towns. You can use you voice, but only within the format and rules of the bossman…The Well, Salon Table Talk, Builder Buzz. The new generation…
Playsh, the playful shell
Playsh is a ‘narrative-driven "object navigation" client, operating primarily on the semantic level, casting your hacking environment as a high-level, shell-based, social prototyping laboratory, a playground for recombinant network toys.’ More literally, playsh is a command-line interface that uses MUD and text adventure conventions to navigate and manipulate the web. Features include: looking for patterns…
The Future Of Interfaces Is Multi-Touch
I read about Jeff Han’s work on multi-touch screens just a few days ago, but seeing the technology demonstrated live indicates that a transformative paradigm in UI experiences may be unfolding. The multi-touch screen is essentially a touch screen that responds to simultaneous touches at multiple points on its surface, This enables users to form…
Simple Bridge Building – Ray Ozzie
Ray Ozzie, founder of Groove Networks and creator of Lotus Notes, now one of Microsoft’s many CTOs demonstrated LiveClipboard. Coincidentally, Ian and I were just last night speculating on a network enabled clipboard that would allow users to copy and paste from other screens to their own. It seems Ozzie’s work on Windows Live has…
The Internet of Things
Introduced of Cory Doctorow, science-fiction author Bruce Sterling, spoke on the themes of ubiquitous computation. Now based in Belgrade, Sterling continues to blog and write fiction as he observes the rehabilitation of a failed state. The Internet of Things, predicts Sterling, will take around thirty years (as did barcodes) to emerge fully…also predicting that at…
From Coder to Co-Founder: How to Move from Engineering to Entrepreneuring
O’Reilly’s Marc Hedlund has run a number of how-to sessions on startups and entrepreneurial skills at ETech and ETel. Today’s tutorial, Entrepreneuring for Geeks, covers the technologist who wishes to build a business from an idea. Hedlund began with twenty amusing and useful proverbs for seeking VCs and investors: it’s good to be king –…
A (Re-)Introduction to JavaScript
Simon Willison‘s tutorial on Javascript is very timely – a number of other Web 2.0 services have brought JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest and the DOM once more to the fore of web development. AJAX-based rich internet applications, such as Gmail, Google Maps and Flickr, have come to characterise current web development paradigms, with JavaScript overtaking Flash as…