ETech Keynote: Rael Dornfest
O’Reilly’s Emerging Technologies conference kicked off today with a handful of intensive tutorials covering in-depth technical topics, ranging from AJAX to the ins and outs of building PHP applications to scale. With a day’s worth of hard work done, the crowd seems ready to kick back and be entertained. On the bill: keynotes from O’Reilly uber-geek Rael Dornfest, O’Reilly founder/namesake Tim O’Reilly, and science fiction author / visionary Bruce Sterling. Followed, of course, by a party.
We’ll liveblog the keynotes as they happen. Stay tuned for Rael’s speech first, appearing here in just a moment.
7:41 Rael has just taken the stage.
He’s taking a straw poll to find out how many people have attended previous ETech conference–quite a few, it seems, from the show of hands and the hollers.
“ETech is our radar conference. It’s really focused on amplifying the week signals? looking around and seeing what the alpha geeks are up to, and extrapolating from that.
It’s about identifying the small pieces yet to be loosely joined.”
It’s also about identifying externalities, Rael is saying — for instance, that music can be transformed into bits. Or: How Gmail can expose its API and let people make use of it.
“The data web” - “There’s an incredible amount there to mine.”
Flickr, del.icio.us born at ETech — as well as the whole Web 2.0 concept, Rael claims.
This year’s theme: The attention economy: Network effects, “wisdom of crowds.”
7:51 Rael’s talking about the difficulty of managing excessive info: RSS feed readers, “Tivo is downloading shows that it just wishes we’d get around to watching.”
“No moment spent offline ever goes unpunished.”
7:56 There are technological issues in dealing with this overload:
Aggregation of information doesn’t necessarily solve the info problem.
Context is irreplaceable - to understand information properly, you need its context. This often requires being online.
8:00 “It’s time that we started thinking about less. There are going to be great businesses built on giving you less.”
