Etech Audience, originally uploaded by x180.

First Carsten Bormann on ‘A Disconnection-tolerant AJAX library’ followed by Steve Yan on ‘Web Apps without the Web’.
Carsten demonstrated his work so far on ‘Panic-mode’, his library for dealing with frequently connected computing and AJAX on the Web. As part of his presentation he walked through best practices for AJAX development. A few elements I took note of – updating location.hash to support bookmarking, keeping cookies below 4kb for best results and using cookies or flash 8 local storage to deal with browser crashes.

Steve Yan demonstrated his latest work on Num Sum and TrimJunction. Num Sum is a Web based spreadsheet application and TrimJunction is a port of RoR into Javascript. In terms of pushing technical boundaries, I think Steve might have my vote for tops of Etech 2006. The way he’s created an implementation of SQL using Javascript (and that’s just the start) blew my mind. Steve’s work was a great follow up to Carsten’s in that he demonstrated how a user could ‘Save As’ (using normal browser file menu) the Web spreadsheet to the local filesystem, work on it offline, then resync it later when reconnected to the network. Very powerful and user friendly stuff. By writing your Web app using TrimJunction, the promise is that you get write once, run everywhere (client or server).

Julian Bleeker was next – speaking on ‘Pervasive Electronic Games’. I’ve often wished I had more time to spend hacking on next gen mobile games, so it was great to get an overview of what has been going on in this space over the past year. Given that everyone seems to have a camera phone these days I’ve got to think if there is any low hanging fruit to trial in Toronto. Julian mentioned a few interesting games using photo capabilities – one whereby users power up by scanning bar codes, another whereby users gain points by scanning others photos and having others scan theirs (pyramid scheme). Lots of examples of ‘hide and seek’ – especially under the geocaching banner. The whole audience then got to participate in a trial – everyone dialed in and using their keypads controlled their own character (shape) on screen. Julian’s push is to get people engaged in way that doesn’t leave them staring at their tiny mobile screen but rather up and connecting with others. I scribbled down a quote from Julian today that I thought was great – “In my world nothing is ever done. Everything is an iteration.”

Yahoo presented later in the morning – showcasing their vision for the future of search (it’s social). “Better search through people”. Bradley Horowitz walked the crowd through the Yahoo acquisitions of recent – and in the process highlighted some of the special things that are changing the way content is created. As an example, instead of users explicitly ranking photos in flickr so that the system can determine interestingness, the ranking is created implicitly by storing details of regular usage and traffic patterns. While not entirely new, I don’t think this approach is ubiquitous yet. If I can take one idea away from the Yahoo presentation for implementation in my own group – that would be that of Yahoo’s ‘Hack Day’ where all staff are given a day to build on top of their existing products to spur innovation.

After Yahoo was Mark Hunt – debuting his new application gootodo. This might have been the ‘longest’ presentation I saw during the conference – why Mark ended up with almost an hour of time where we had other presenters being cut off after 15 minutes I don’t understand. As I’d already listened to the GTD audio book, it seemed like Mark was basically giving David Allen’s speech. And even though we were experiencing network difficulties (as we did all week – the capactiy just wasn’t adequate for the size of the group), when Mark did have connectivity he seemed hesitant to dive into the application. At certain points I wanted to run up to the front of the room and login him in myself so that we could finally get a look at what he’s come up with. To be fair, when Mark finally did show us the application – he had implemented some really great ideas. One such idea was the ability to add to-dos using email, including the ability to postdate to-dos into the future using different system email address (eg. tuesday@gootodo.com). Very clever and effective.

After lunch Scott Berkun was up – someone who I really wanted to see after I’d purchased his book on project management and started following his blog. His session was focused on user interface design (not project management) and elicited lots of debate. Some key ideas Scott presented – we are creating a mashup matrix on the Web right now but it is mostly data centric not user centric, human memory is expensive and we shouldn’t bloat up our requirements, and in many of the mapping mashups we are putting emphasis on the map for the cool factor even though the tabular data is more important to the user. Scott dissected a couple case studies as part of his presentation – one of Edward Tufte‘s diagrams (as the crowd contained lots of Web/HCI folk they were familiar with the work) and also the Tag Cloud from the O’Reilly Radar website. With each he dissected the implementation and recommended a course for analysis and improvement. For each case, at least a half dozen audience members took to defending the existing design and questioning Scott’s reasoning. Entertaining and very illustrative of the challenges that we face when doing interface design everyday.

Last up, and the end of my blogging for a few days at least ;>, was Jason and Danny from the EFF. They went over 10 possible cases we might see in the next couple years – ‘RIAA vs. ?’ was, as to be expected, one of them. The guys were really entertaining – I now understand just how important the work is that they are doing out there.

So that’s it. Stick a fork in Etech 2006. Probably the most interesting conference I’ve attended to date – I’ll really be trying to make it back for 2007.

Post Mapquest session I took a quick tour of the vendor booths and then headed back to the hotel (which I would more accurately describe as a hostel – thankfully its only a week). At the Attensa booth I chatted with a guy about their new product offering – all the time thinking ‘where do I know this guy from?’. This morning it came to me – it was Rich Rudolph who I’d worked with at webHancer. I’ve also noticed quite a few familiar faces from the w3c conference in Hawaii a few years ago – I really do need to get some device that helps me with names. Haven’t had a chance to play with the Attensa software yet but their messaging was bang on.

This morning started with Jon Udell – who within five minutes had me reaching for a scribble pad to make a note to self about correcting our site page titles. He showcased an interesting slider implementation on wikipedia allowing you to move through diffs quickly and effectively. I’m really going to have see if I can reproduce this for browsing VSS/CVS/SVN repositories. The other very interesting thing he showcased was a URL attention over time graph – showing raw # of social bookmarks over time and also when certain key influencer individuals took note of the URL in question. Think stock history graph but for a URL in the new ‘attention economy’.

Clay Shirky was next – reminding us how we are all political – by nature of us creating the applications being used to share information in the digital age. As software developers we are building the tools that ensure values such as freedom of expression are respected. Later he showcased Slashdot as an example of a site whereby select site members form a protective membrane over the site’s valuable content. A small group of volunteer moderators rank comments to provide filtration. This keeps the site managable and relevant.

Adobe launched a new javascript/flash (read flash/ajax) integration kit – reminder that flash has 98% penetration, more than any particular browser or browser version. It is easy to forget that on the client, flash is the most univeral sandbox one can leverage. One powerful demo illustrated push from server to the client page (via DOM) using a flash intermediary. Where flash by itself is undesirable for a number of reasons, and ajax alone can’t enable things like push – the combination of the two seems to have real potential.

Brian from eventdb/eventful was a particular draw for me – esp. given that we at Semaview had been focused on the open event space since before eventdb was formed. While we approached it from the thick client angle with the majority of development going into the construction of the eventSherpa Windows software (reminder you can still download a crippled version without the integrated web hosting), Brian and team went about it from the Web services model. Ah hindsight. I really like what they’ve come up with – the seperation of the commercial application (eventful) from the open and free web service (evdb) seems to balance nicely. Brian launced their ‘demand it’ functionality today – enabling users to harness their collective power to request events. Demand aggregation – a key component of the ‘attention economy’.

I was really looking forward to finally hearing Joel Spolsky speak – he ripped into some of the recently launched services/sites, including (very quickly) the new Windows Live service by Microsoft. His point was that everyone was copying the look n’ feel of google (fonts, colors etc.) and missing the boat. You can’t just slap lipstick on the pig. He stressed a few key points – obsess on aesthetics and always think about emotions. If you can evoke emotional responses – you’ve done it. (Everytime I login to Windows Live Mail, it definately evokes an emotional response from me when I have to navigate around that HUGE banner at the top of the screen. It just ain’t the emotion you’d be hoping for.)

As is appropriate, right after the break it was Microsoft up to present the new Windows Live service. First mistake IMO – the presenter comes up with a full suit and tie. I think he’s the only presenter here that I’ve seen do so. In a room full of alpha-geeks you don’t want to be the only guy in a suit. Immediately it had the feeling of a sales pitch – and my impression was that the crowd wasn’t buying, despite some pretty impressive new functionality. One thing that looked very cool was their 45 degree aerial photos and 360 degree street level photos for Seattle. Let’s get that up in Canada please.

So what is this ‘attention economy’ that the conference is themed on? Michael Goldhaber presented his take. His position was that beginning in the 80s, we’ve shifted to a new paradigm where attention is the new currency. Once a society reaches a certain plateau and money is no longer the most important issue we jump to the next stage where attention is most desired. Instead of workers/employers we are fans/stars. Meaning in life is derived from shared meaning with others which is in turn derived from attention. I can’t do the presentation justice here – but it definately tied the conference theme in and was ample food for thought.

Yahoo is building a ‘tribal platform’. Tribes pay attention. I think they’ve got the right idea. They moved through them quickly but I’m looking forward to the release of their full UI design pattern library.

Jen King gave an interesting presentation on RFID. Staggering costs involved in embedding RFID into US passports. Scary to see that one may be able to read someone’s passport data from as far away as 30 feet. I can just imagine the havoc that’s going to be created when US citizens travel abroad and have their personal details lifted in the town squares.

Aggregate Knowledge has an interesting new product that enabled any site to have a recommendation engine similar to some of what you see on amazon. ‘Users who buy this, also buy that’ – both on your site and across domains. Very powerful stuff – I latched on to their point about recommendation navigation becoming primary navigation over taxonomy/search, this does seem to hold true when we consider learnings from the social applications. Another plus of this product – no up front fees to try it and pay per conversion when implemented. Low barrier to entry.

Lastly (yes it was a full day), Lee Bryant presented on humanizing the enterprise. I found their approach interesting – in that they typically do not try and convince upper management to throw away cumbersome software already in place (think sharepoint) but rather keep the legacy applications for storage and simply build a new UI layer on top to enable social interactions. This allows management to ‘save face’ when confronted with the large implemenation costs they incurred in past but still allows the company to move foward with new ideas/learnings. Lee showcased Wikilaw as an example of new technologies taking hold in old businesses. One question that was raised for me – is their a commercial sharepoint webpart to enable social tagging within sharepoint? Another interesting thought Lee raised – that enterprises need the equivalent of the wikigardeners we see out on the Web.

All in all – another great day of sessions. Too bad we couldn’t extend it past tomorrow.

(Note: After losing half this post due to a browser hiccup, I realize just how much I rely on Gmail’s draft save feature. If I’m missing a WordPress plugin that enables this please let me know. If it hasn’t yet been created – someone really needs to get on that.)

Etech Audience, originally uploaded by x180.

Ray Ozzie demonstrated a prototype of copy n’ paste for the Web – showing how easy it should be (could be) for users to move data from one Web silo er site to another. Below it all though is common agreed upon, adhered to, data standards such as iCalendar or vCard etc. Given the slow uptake of formats other than RSS (iCalendar might be the next bright spot), I’m not sure we are all that close to this – but every year it gets a little more close to being realized. As always, amusing to see a MSFT demo using firefox. One thing that did really spark me from his presentation today was the idea of ‘everything is a feed’. Exposing as much data as possible via RSS really takes it to the next level when it comes to remixes/mashups.

Jeff Han presented next – looks like it might not be long until we all have our minority report drag n’ drop translucent interfaces. I was blown away at his photo, video, globe demos. Having something like this at home (imagining it on my coffee table or wall) could force me to start building desktop applications again – away from the Web Services model it seems most attention is on these days.

Dick Hardt, formerly of ActiveState and Canadian, gave what was one of the most entertaining presentations so far. He rattled off 1 slide per second – keeping everyone engaged and also getting across his key ideas around identity management. It is a tough space, hopefully they’ll succeed where so many others have failed.

Felix Miller from last.fm gave an overview of their service – not sure why I haven’t plugged into this one yet. He mentioned over 1 billion data points collected last year – with users doing the bulk of the work in terms of cleaning that data. Lots to learn here about harnessing the community and then rewarding them with collective intelligence.

Seth Goldstein unvieled the lastest skin to Root markets – possibly the only spyware I’ll install willingly ;> Think WebTrends for your personal internet usage (amongst other things). Being able to access a dashboard report indicating where I am wasting my time online would be very helpful indeed.

A presentation on Second Life blew my mind – the lines are getting fuzzy when users are creating games to be played inside a game (virtual world) and then selling that IP to market the game back in the physical world. Cory mentioned users generating 2.5 million lines of code per year. That’s one large, distributed, virtual development team.

Didn’t enjoy the presentation from David Sifry (Technorati) as much – didn’t find much meat. To be fair – it must be difficult to cram content into 15 minutes.

Disappointment of the day was a Greasemonkey presentation by Mark Pilgrim. He swaggered back and forth at the front of the room – seeming rather disinterested at times. At one point he put up a slide indicating he probably wouldn’t right another line of javascript again – certainly didn’t get me excited about the future of Greasemonkey. As Mark put it – the future holds, well, ‘more of the same’.

Cal mentioned a few things that surprised me about Flickr:

• No formal QA resources, the dev team performed testing. I’ll love to take this nugget back to my current dev team ;>
• Releases frequently throughout the day (every 30 minutes – now that’s Agile). Enabled by a fully automated deployment process – the one big button. Looks like they created something in house, similar to Rails Switchtower but for PHP.
• Non-federated databases up until the Yahoo acquisition. They pushed MySQL beyond what I thought it was capable of.
• Staffing remains below 15 even up to today.

On to the keynotes – I’d never heard Tim O’Reilly speak before – he was entertaining and charismatic, encouraging the audience to ‘keep hacking’. It’s too bad he ran short on time, I’d like to have heard more from him.

I found Bruce Sterling to be the most thought provoking of the day – his keynote on the ‘Internet of Things‘ left me pondering on how change and new thinking moves its way through our culture. He definately has given me a perspective I hadn’t had until today. I’ll have to grab a copy of his latest book when the conference is over.

Looks like it will be a very inspiring week.

On a completely unrelated note, I’ve never seen so many Apple notebooks – at first I thought it was a prerequisite to attendance that I missed ;> Early pet peeve is lack of seating in the conference foyers, people wanting to sit around and login are having to sprawl out on the floor.

Check out the Flickr event photo stream when you have a chance.