Posted on by lhl

Some ETCON wrapup:

Personal thoughts on tutorials/sessions/keynotes, plus a 1-5 star rating based on general feeling about the session/what I got out of it:

  • Reverse Engineering: Basic Hardware and Software Techniques – so, apparently it’s not as fun to watch some step-through debug a flip-flop as it is to actually do it; disappointed that this wasn’t very hands on, didn’t go through a real world example, or have any juicy tips n’ tricks. (*)
  • UI for Alien Cowboys – fairly entertaining run through of UI design; worked well adapting to the fact that most people in the group had some user-centered design background, had a fun little workshop session (designing a recipe app). (****)
  • O’Reilly Radar – someone mentioned in IRC that this could perhaps be termed “stuff Tim wants people to make for him.” True to a degree, but most of it’s good stuff, about merging locative/personalizing/community technologies. (***)
  • Robots . Saving Money, Time and Lives – iRobot CEO gives a presentation that starts off as a Roomba informercial, and quickly turns into a bizarre military presentation. Most disturbing perhaps is that the presenter didn’t seem to see any disconnect between the two topics. (0)
  • Technorati Hacks – great combination of showing off new features, talking shop, and figuring out what it all means (the Power Law charts were great). (****)
  • Finding the Right Moment – Fluidtime: Timing Tools for Social Networks – slightly dry/academic analysis/presentation about an extremely interesting problem/idea. Did I miss the announcement of fluidtime? Oh, for an example of said obliqueness, glance at the homepage and see if you can tell what the MIDlet actually does… (**)
  • Next Generation File Sharing With Social Software – OK, so Kaye starts off the talk admitting it’s sort of a lazyweb thing (he wants someone to build it), but as he goes on talking about various ways to avoid getting caught, the main thing that pops in mind is why bother? That is, if you just want collaboratively filtered recommendations, just exchange the music metadata, and then get the files however you would regularly. It may be interesting to write a bridging app that’ll join together various darknets, p2p file-spaces etc w/ those recommendations, but the fact of the matter is that your network will never be secure because users are dumb, and music taste vs tech savviness are completely orthogonal trust properties. (**)
  • !Echo wiki: Lessons Learned – Slides here. Basically, like a mailing list judo talk except w/o mjd’s flair. Sam talks about some of the interesting behaviors he encountered in the course of pie/echo/atom development; Some of my thoughts: definitely underestimated the amount of wiki gardening required, I think. Oftentimes, a minimum bar of requiring signing up can be a good idea. Try integrating mailing lists, blogs, wikis, weekly summaries, etc. (***)
  • The Future of Cyberspace Economies – an excellent overview presentation of the current state (and future implications) of online economies by Edward Castronova. Especially fascinating were slides w/ some mind-bending stats and the implications; thoughts: dialectic between fantasy and reality, resulting goals of economic models. Further reading: Terra Nova. (****)
  • Transcendent Interaction – Stewart et al (Ludicorp) makes some nice points, and then introduces flickr, which is lots of fun. At the em3rgingl0ft party, Stewart got me to project flickr on screen and started sending me photos. here’s a pic he took of me taking a pic on my Treo (which he’s since sent me in flickr). (****)
  • Catalyzing Collective Action on the Net – sorry to have missed the first few minutes of this keynote, it was quite interesting. Justin had introduced me to Marc the day before and he had pitched the borg barcode reader. The Usenet tree-map and bubble-mapping viz was very interesting (wished it was animated better). (****)
  • Enabling Life Goes Mobile – I left about 15min in, was just doing nothing for me. Apparently, the slide, as it came to be referred to on IRC continued on for most of the rest of the talk. (*)
  • Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks – in a tough tossup, probably the best session of the conference. Danny O’Brien‘s presentation killed, and I wouldn’t have minded sitting for another hour or two, especially since we zipped over some of the juicier bits. Only complaint: emacs not vim? 😉 (*****)
  • Revenge of the User: Lessons from Creator/User Battles – Danah Boyd (notes) gives a talk that’s much more interesting than the title suggests. Basically approaching the social network (problem/phenomena/space?) from a sociological perspective. Best points: social contexts, weak and strong ties, importance of ambiguity. (****)
  • “Y’know – For Kids!”: Social Software for Children – Fiona Romeo talks about how kids interact, and about the BBCi and others’ approaches in creating environments that are personalized but not invasive. This was pretty engaging, although what was sparking in my mind was about how the privacy issues carried over for adults as well (for many of the people, putting their information on Friendster was a first, also most had/have no idea how widely disseminated that information would be). (****)
  • Art-of-Logic, Experience Making, the Nokia Way – I started off the week tired as heck, and two days of late nights and early mornings hadn’t helped. Basically, I crashed for most of this presentation. The parts I did catch were fairly interesting, but not enough to keep me conscious. (**)
  • Fear of a FOAF Planet – Acronyms and Activism on the Semantic Web – It was pretty hard to hear, not much new. Probably the most ‘exciting’ thing in the session was when about half-way through things got pretty heated when people were arguing (and some were missing the point) on where/how authZ should happen – it’s just a data format people, arguably misnamed no less. (*)
  • People-to-People: From Close Friends to Strangers – Talk started out slow, but picked up quick after the first 10m. This is the first time I got to see Wallop in action, and well, it looks good. Flash MX client + email + IM integration, visibility scoping based on relationship distance. Would be interesting combined w/ the automatic clustering tool (extracted from email exchanges) they showed. These guys are in the Sociable Computing Group @ MSR, the same group I’m currently working on a design expo thing for. (****)
  • Emotional Design: The Principles – Donald A. Norman gives a summary of his latest book, Emotional Design. A few interesting insights along the way, some good slides. (***)
  • Alternative Models of the Venture Investing Process – I skipped out, on the William H. Janeway keynote, but heard one or two good things about it, may catch the MP3 sometime.
  • eBooks: neither e- nor books. Discuss. – Cory started out a bit stiff (reading verbatim from a sheet of paper can do that) but he got more animated as he got into it. I went into the session not expecting much but trusting in his Coryness to come through and deliver something entertaining and cogent and was not disappointed. Slides in the Lessig school of minimalism, but effective (like I mentioned, he definitely had the best slide title of the conference). Did anyone take notes on the questions? Cory drops more zingers/second than Sterling. (****)
  • Power to the People: Hardware Hacking for the Masses – started out in Bunny Huang’s session, but it looked like a bunch of it was a rehash from the tutorial so I left
  • Electric Sheep – and dropped into Scott Drave’s Electric Sheep session, which was definitely a good session to go to, where zoning out/decompressing is part of the point. A perfect combination of mesmerizing and intellectually stimulating, was fun seeing the improvements of Electric Sheep of the past couple years and hearing the details of the domain jacking bruhaha. (****)
  • Quantum Dots and Programmable Matter – I didn’t go to the presentation, but I did meet Wil McCarthy to explain at length the concept/details at the early end of the em3rgingl0ft party… Far out, but interesting; I’ll reserve judgement until I see it (I’m much less skeptical of say something like molecular nanotech if only because there’s so much more academic work published, where this is all skunkworks pretty much)
  • Personalized Services Using Location Based Services (LBS) – stayed for about half of this presentation and he was still covering basic RF methods for positioning… Not sure if he ever got to the personalized services part, took off. (**)

In the interest of (trying to) miss traffic going out and getting back in time for a 7:30 lecture on campus, I skipped out on the rest of the afternoon sessions. Networked Objects, Continuous Search, 35 Ways to Find Your Location, and Peace, Love, and XML seemed vaguely interesting.

Overall, pretty good sessions, lots of interesting in-hall, at lunch, and dinner conversations, good fun meeting lots of people, including all the across-the-pond folks the first night. …And that’s that. So, when did people stop calling it ETCON and start calling it ETECH?