Let me start this blog by saying that Marc’s keynote was without a doubt the best keynote of etech.
He raised an interesting point right upfront by stating that society, at some point, created a scale at which one end was “socializing” and at the other end was the idea of “getting work done”, and never the two shall meet. With the uptake of technology and the shifting of social behavior to include connected digital mediums, work and socializing are much closer to being tightly integrated than ever before.
He then ran through a list of books that have influenced sociological, both online and offline, thinking up to now; The Evolution of Co-operation, Governing the Commons, a book by Irving Goffman (didn’t get the title), The Hidden Dimension, Social Network Analysis, Visual Explanations, Visual Display of Quantitative Information and Communities in Cyberspace (which he was a co-editor on). He also spoke about an article or a book called “The value of reputation on eBay: A controlled experiment”
He spoke about how online aggregations resemble voluntary associations far more than groups, and then ran through some points by Ostrum;
This then led onto a slide about conversation communities and that the key tasks for participants were; discovery, selection, evaluation and motivation.
He created his link between the research carried out by netscan and the move to a mobile tool by saying the netscan has used over 1 billion message headers to create the meta data for its results and that recently the Chinese Microsoft publics newsgroups are growing larger than anything else.
The next slide spoke about social community being implicit (Technorati) vs. explicit (eBay and Amazon) and how information which used to be “a place apart” is now “everyplace” and that as a result, we are seeing the cell phone turning into a mouse.
He spoke about a number of social mobile apps, including; Ntag - people networking, Spotme, Barpoint, Air click, Sem@code and Trepia.
All this was a nice lead into a Microsoft project called AURA.
AURA is about making tag driven applications simple to build, linking people through to shared object / places and building collective knowledge about things and places.
In a nutshell, AURA’s an interesting system which allows you, through the use of a barcode reader which is attached to a PocketPC device, to scan barcodes in a retail environment and have information on that product or company come back to you via GPRS/WiFi signal. He finished up by mentioning that their is an AURA portal being finalised along with some enhancements to the application they have currently built.
He finished up by mentioning two other systems being developed by Microsoft Research; John Krumm’s "Locadio" and Ken Hinckley with "click and pur".
I’ve got a whole day at Microsoft Research next week and have managed to grab whatever time Marc can spare me to go to have a chat about AURA and anything else he can let slip….
Howard spoke about a number of things which were essentially elements out of his book SmartMobs.
Mizuki (who got me interested in Joi Ito and all the things that includes :) spoke about how mobile email and picture messaging are essentially major elements of the new social technical systems. She mentioned how kids in Japan have upwards of 200 contacts in their mobile phone address books and that how people in Japan live in-between the mobile and real space. IF your interested, Mizuki has written some amazing papers about mobile culture in Japan.
Scott Fisher spoke briefly about the WorldBoard Project and then ran through a list of locative based services currently available, including; Goopas (english press release), R-Click - an RFID system (english press release), the Environmental Media Project (featuring a video with Howard), Chusazaku, the Murmure Project, Campus Aware, City Poems, Urban Tapestries, PDPAL and the Locative Network.
Danah explained about social hacking mobile phones and the issues around social hacking versus technical hacking.
Joi then finished up the panel discussion by talking a bit more about mobile vs. computer social hacking, the ability of mobile devices to access IRC, Technorati and how it shows the gaps between power blog’s (the A-List) and blog’s of small communities (viewed regularly by no more than 4 to 5 people). He also touched on ENUM, Geo-coding and, of course, Orkut.
The highlights of the question time included; Kevin Marks asking about consoles and the addition of internet connectivity to them. Danah answered by saying that consoles are social devices and therefore an important part of peoples every growing social network accessible devices. Mimi threw in that was interesting to watch the migration of networks to portable devices.
Mimi also used a line that will become part of my vocabulary; “Weblogs and moblogs are about marketing intimate moments”.
Another great session and it was a “can’t miss” opportunity to see so many of the worlds leading internet and mobile voices up on stage at the one time.
The external RSS part of the session was mostly about the go.com portal (including abcnews.com) and how the news team is taking wire feeds, pushing them through XSLT templates (which includes rights and clearance processing) and then finishing up by putting them into a template processor. The template processor then spits out content in whatever format is required; primarily for the web, but also into Wireless WML for mobiles (as well as AvantGo and PocketPC formats).
The content can then be syndicated to the Disney Enterprise portal or through to the general public (via RSS feeds), which will hopefully end in driving traffic back to the go.com sites, which is their intended purpose. The areas that are causing them issues are; standardization, separating the presentation from the client and educating the producers at Disney about the whole RSS thing.
The other area they covered was in relation to “massive content via RSS”. This was all about enabling rich content payloads in RSS feeds using an enclosure tag. In other words, a way to download content asynchronously and have it pre-cached, waiting fro the user to hit the “play” button. It was interesting to hear how they are using this type of content delivery in Japan already (of course), Spain and soon Latin America, as well as caching at the edge of the network in Japan. From what i gathered, this is primarily done through the use of the Disney Motion plug-in which you can experience at the Disney Channel.
Michael then got up and presented a fascinating insight into the internal uses of RSS, WIKI and blog’s.
This focused on a number of different internal uses including;
Shift logs, which are used to report to the next shift of engineering staff what happened during the previous shift. This used to be done in a FoxPro db (with minimal features) and they had email notifications to keep people updated. Now they have given all of the staff NewsGator, which not only integrates seamlessly into Outlook but also makes the incoming RSS feeds look just like email.
Ratings info is also available as an RSS feed for people who need it. Original ratings information is taken from Nielson ratings, converted, and pumped straight to NewsGator. Nice…..
Discrepancy reports are also being done via RSS which is allowing for detailed info and reports to be created which are then available to everyone….no more worrying about if you sent the email to all the right people. It also dramatically reduced the movement of email which can result in a lot of savings, including cost.
In the future they are looking at using RSS or ATOM type technology for a news clipping service, intranet portal modules and having media content for review.
The conclusions they have drawn since using RSS feeds is that it is useful for businesses where information flow is critical and that it’s inexpensive compared to other solutions. Integrating the RSS feed reader into Outlook was critical to its uptake but they do have a need for authentication of feeds.
They went into a bit of detail about the use of WIKI and blogs in DIG (the Walt Disney Internet Group) and how people use them to get notifications quickly and how they are easy to update and contribute to. They are also using an RSS plug-in for the WIKI as well.
There are currently six blogs being used in operations/engineering with about 100 users, one blog in the DIG with 50 users and the WIKI has over 200 users.
This was a great session and was the first time I have heard anyone explain a really good sanctioned business implementation of RSS, WIKI and blogs.
This was definitely one of my favorite sessions of etech.
Their new application, FlashCast, allows you to author rich-media content in Flash MX on the desktop, and to then transfer it to a mobile phone client which is essentially a beefed up version of the flash player the released a while ago called Flash Lite. The original mobile flash player, which was found on a number of Japanese DoCoMo i-mode handsets, is already being replaced by FlashCast which is already being rolled out onto the DoCoMo 505i (link to 505i info on this page) and 500 series handsets.
According to Jim, the fact that you can interact with content not only by the keypad, but also with voice and SMS is what will allow the next breed of interesting applications to be built. Combine it with the ability to utilise XML through HTTP, giving you access to XPath, XSL and RSS, and the alpha geeks (particularly those at etech) will be able to hopefully build some cool connected applications.
What would be really cool is if you could build FlashCast components as Macromedia Central channels….that would be nice….I have a meeting with Jim on Tuesday while I am in San Francisco, so hopefully I’ll come back with some answers and cool ideas for its uses…
Here start my notes and thoughts on some of the sessions from the 2004 O’Reilly’s Emerging Technologies Conference held in San Diego. This is going to take a while, even with the fact that I used OneNote to keep track of everything, I have a lot of notes to go through…plus...it doesn't help that the hotel room i have at the Mosser Hotel in San Francisco hasn't got a broadband connection in my room....:(
Stick with me …
Now that was pretty kewl....but the kewler thing was that they had a signed picture of MacGyver (Richard Dean Anderson) up on the wall.....now thats really kewl.....
Photos at the moblog
Their have been some amazing sessions that i have been to and i have met some amazing people as well.....i'll be typing all my notes and info up over the next day, or so, so you can expect a big burst of blogs real sooon.....
The session wsa primarily on User Centered Design and its always interesting to see how other organistions/people go through the initial stages of concept development and the user lead design process. The session was interesting because it was partly hands-on....breaking down into groups of two and stepping through the actual process (all be it a quick, shortened down version), and involved the use of....wait for it....paper. A few people walked out at that point as if they were completely against having to do any work..or were just waiting for moses to hand down the 10 commandments....a good user design process needs to not only be explained but actually experienced.
All in all, it was a pretty good session, but these things tend to all flow from the same point....a little bit of light humour involving Jakob Nielsen, lots of little bits of paper being written on and then organised into interaction flow...its comes down to if you've seen process...you've seen them all..
With my current obsession with all things IDEO, you can see how they take this standard idea and really flesh it out, though it does help that they obviously have a larger budget and an amazing group of talented people to throw at the projects that they work on.
It was a good session and Matt pulled it of well, keeping peoples attention focussed and in the end, everyone who stuck around was really taking it all seriously...
Photos on the moblog
Interesting conversation at dinner about all the blog and community stuff happening around the lead up to the election in the US at the moment....i wonder if it would be much different if they had the same setup we have in Austrlia where it is compulsory to vote....
I'll be keeping an eye out to see how much of the US style campaigning will happen at the next Australian election and how it will be utilised (if at all) by the advertising industry.....though i don't any of our politicians having the nerve to expose themselves to the public the way that Howard Dean has done in the US....i just can't imagine John Howard or Mark Latham running a blog or getting donations from a community based ground swell....
13 hour flight between Sydney and LA.....wait nearly two and a half hours at LA airport for a connecting flight, which only took 25 minutes to fly from LA to San Diego.....hmmm.. should have hired a car...
And after everyone had told me that it would take ages to get through customs with all the new security....it was no more difficult or lengthy then going through Sydney or Melbourne airport....then again.....maybe that's only the security measures I saw....probably a room full of secret squirrel type people keeping an eye on everything 24/7...;)
Anyhow....I'm here and I'm hungry...so I'm off to check out the shopping thing/place next door....may even come back with a SPOT watch.....
Oh yeah....photos starting to go up on my moblog....back soon....
In the words of Homer Simpson....woo hoo....
For the next three weeks i'll hopefully be keeping a pretty busy blogging schedule both here and on my moblog....
See you on the flip side...
I'm off to the Third Annual O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego between the 9-12 of February 2004....
In the US for 3 weeks all up so I am also spending time in San Fransisco and Redmond......lots of business and tech meetings as well as catching up with friends old and new (well....same thing actually)........
More to come when i gather myslef together......driving down to Melbourne tonight and tomorrow (around 900km) for xmas with the family, so will update the blog when i get time....the moblog is sure to be kept updated though...
merry xmas all....