eTech

Larry Lessig starts the day at eTech by relating the H.G. Wells story, “The Country of the Blind”. The cure: remove the eyes … A comment on current affairs? He says: Stop! With the obsessions about how new and wonderful everything is that we do; in many ways, we are doing what we’ve always done, … Read more

I was going to attend Zawodny’s Yahoo talk, but as it’s mainly an API overview I figured I’d get more out of this etech session. The Creative Commons license is a fairly new license that many web sites (including this one) use to indicate acceptable re-use of their content. The CC license contains a good … Read more

Continuing a theme, Clay Shirky’s eTech presentation focused on categorization, tagging and labeling. Deep or wide or ? I know I face these issues in dealing with my image and music library. We start by looking at the meaning of ontology: (Depends on what meaning of “Is” Is.) * Entities and their relations. Clay plans … Read more

An interesting eTech session was a panel discussion on the topic of user defined categorization, known as folksonomy. Contrary to common wisdom, which indicates that only “trained professionals” can correctly choose keywords, folksonomies are user driven, have no real rules, and, to the point, appear to work in practice! Visit del.icio.us, Flickr, and Wikipedia to … Read more

Jimmy Wales, founder of wikipedia, gave an interesting talk at eTech this morning. Freely licensed encyclopedia, created and managed by thousands of volunteers. It was created in 2001. There are close to 500,000 articles in english, and over 1.5 million articles spanning dozens of languages. Wikipedia has 350,000+ categories, based on a hierarchical tree structure. … Read more

Justin F. Chapweske, CEO of Onion Networks gave a presentation at eTech to motivate the need for a better way to transfer very large files across the internet. More than bittorrent or other P2P applications, his proposed swarmstreaming technology promises to greatly reduce the costs and increase the throughput when transferring large amounts of data … Read more

Spam sucks. Of course, we know this. The point is that spam could be stopped, but the result would no longer be email as we know it today. Corey Doctorow gave a brief presentation at eTech on the topic of complex systems and parasites; some brief notes follow: Complex ecosystems are influenced, not controlled. Continuation … Read more

Neil Gershenfeld, from The Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT, opened today’s eTech session. His wide-ranging talk mainly focused on “making things” and the challenges and rewards that come from actually building real objects in the physical world. His group has created a traveling fabrication facility and have taken it around the world, to … Read more

Sam Ruby talks about why we can’t “just use http”. Ouch. My head hurts. This is important stuff, and I do mostly understand it, but I’m not gonna do it justice by trying to blog about it in real-time. I’ll just listen and you can … View the slides for yourself. Summary: Comparing characters and … Read more

Random short notes … here’s a link to the reinventing radio presentation. 10 hours of listener’s choice radio broadcast by the BBC: Suggestions came in via SMS: 150K txt msgs, from over 100K users, resulting in 131 songs played over 10 hours. Tom Coates: his area of BBC R&D looks out ~18 months … the … Read more