ETech: Wrap up

Related link: http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2006/view/e_sess/8536

Alas, ETech is over. Fortunately I've had a chance to catch up on some much needed sleep and had a few moments to reflect on this year's conference. Even during the first day I noted the improved gender balance -- in computer science and its related fields males typically dominate the scene. Sadly this is also the case here at ETech, but over the last few years the balance has improved significantly. I think this year more women attended ETech than ever before and the gender balance is probably better at ETech than in the general computer science field. But, keep in mind that my observations are far from scientific -- you're only getting my off the cuff impressions of the general attendance.

Another impression of the conference is the use of the themes and a delayed response to them. This year's conference was titled the Attention Economy and many of the presentations featured the word attention in their titles. I was generally curious about the attention economy and what it all amounts to, so I attended a fair number of the attention themed presentations. However, many of the talks briefly tied their presentations to the attention economy before moving on to a their less related main focus. Consequently, I still feel a little shaky on the basics of the attention economy.

While, we're on the topic of the conference themes, I found it mildy amusing that a number of remix and mash-up themes were present in this conference. Remix was the theme for last year, yet this year Yahoo was passing out "Mash up or Shut-up" stickers and shirts. And a number of presenters talked about doing mash-up applications just prior to ETech. Ray Ozzie from Microsoft started it when he talked about how his team had two weeks to mash-up something cool with Windows Live. Other presenters followed suit and talked about how they mashed up or otherwise remixed their applications in 2 hours prior to the talk. Then someone else said they did a mash-up in 20 minutes. In a sense, I think that the theme from last year was better represented than this years theme. I guess I'll have a number of cool attention focused talks to look forward to next year. :-)

I also promised to touch on the attention economy in my wrap up, but I don't really have much more to present. I attended R0ml Lefkowitz's talk on Root Markets to find out more about the company and to further my understanding of the attention economy buzz. R0ml managed to outline a few more details about how they are approaching this new field, but that didn't really bring many of the issues that I am concerned with into focus. He didn't address the issues of privacy and only touched data ownership -- many of the people that I spoke to about the attention economy expressed concerns about their data getting used for negative purposes, rather than positive ones. We already have enough unresolved privacy issues even without the attention economy, and I fear that things will only get worse.

Now that Google has started censoring its search results in China and sits on the verge of becoming evil, who is left to trust? I personally do not feel comfortable with any corporation using my private data. We hear about data losses frequently, so why should I trust someone like Google, or even a small startup with my private data? I think there are a lot of people who share this view, so we'll really have to see where the attention economy is headed. Regardless, this should continue to bring privacy issues to the forefront -- I for one will appreciate more people talking about these issues.

Finally, I want to share one quote from the last session at ETech. Jason Schultz from the EFF was about to start talking about the lawsuits the EFF has cooking or anticipates in the next year. To introduce these, he said (roughly): "We'll present these in no particular order, just shot-gunning them Dick Cheney style". Giggle. Thanks Jason!

And thanks to O'Reilly for another great conference!

If you made it to ETech, what did you think of the conference?