Geekette asked me to take a look at this session, and I’m glad I did. Danah Boyd is a very intelligent woman and gave one of the best presentations so far at ETech 2006. Now, G/localization is an abhorrant word and I apologize for having to introduce it to you. Danah summarized the term best saying, “The ugliness that ensues when you shove the global and local together”.

The presentation was on how you create social communities online. One point, that I thought particularly interesting, was that though we can contact and speak with anyone in the world, that we end up getting online and wanting to engage with people we know or people that are like us.

Anyway, here are all my notes as a Word document (be warned, I was typing very fast so errors abound).

Also, I was sitting next to a very nice guy called djlotu5 who took an audio feed of the whole session and allowed me to link to it.

ETech is great, talk about some very very cool technology. Some of the smartest developers and minds of the web are right here trying to figure out problems and predict the way technology will be taking us in the years ahead. I mean, where else can you sit down for brunch and talk to gurus like Joel Spolsky, Doc Searls and David Sifry?

So there’s basically two things going on here: the philosophy and trending of web software, and then the actual applications. I’m really enjoying the philosphy part; talking about how technologies of tomorrow and the way we develop them actually have an impact on real-life social structures for instance.

However, when I see the applications – the great mashups, aggregators, tagging and bookmarking tools – I can’t help but say, “so what?”. It makes me ask the question, are the developers of these new applications really looking to solve a problem for people, or are they just trying to find a use for some new, cool technology?

Obviously, this means nothing without examples so here are a couple:

• Plum – a very cool aggregator with an open API. (to be fair, I should drill into this some more, but currently I just don’t see how it makes my life easier yet)
• Ma.gnolia – a bookmarking tool, a better looking Del.icio.us, but I already have Del.icio.us, so “so what?”

How about some apps that I think will really help people do things in a new way:

• Eventful (and EVDB) – for events and calendaring
• Edgeio – for sales from the long tail

Anyway, I’m really interested in finding more examples of technology created to solve real problems that people have. The technology is there, or is almost there, we just need the application of those ideas in the proper tools.

Tim O’Reilly is speaking right now and he just covered Amazon’s opening up of their A9 search engine to the public. A9 can be used by anyone to search the web. You now can spider the web yourself, figure out a cool way to mashup that into your application, whatever you want you can do. The power of a major search engine is at your fingertips.

Not really news though… that came out sometime in 2005 I think.

What is interesting is Tim discussing how he had a discussion with Sergey Brin (Google) about this. Sergey basically told him, “Why would people use this, they can just use Google Alerts”. Tim doesn’t think Sergei gets it. I agree.

What A9 is doing is democratizing search. It takes a lot of money to get your own search engine going. Not anymore.

I’m in San Diego, CA at the Emerging Technologies Conference (ETech). Currently, I’m in the “Designing the Next Generation of Web Applications” seminar put on by Jesse James Garrett and Jeffery Veen of Adaptive Path (well, Jeffery now works for Google since Measure Map was bought out a couple weeks ago).

So far they’ve discussed that viewing the web, and designing applications for it, you have to see through 2 sets of eyes:

• Those who see the web as a place to build software applications
• Those who see the web as hypertext – publishing online

There are also 5 levels to consider when designing an application:

• Strategy – who is it for, what it’s supposed to do
• Scope – functionality needed to make it work
• Structure – how do those features fit together, how does the user move through it?
• Skeleton – how do you make those relationships REAL on the page
• Surface – how do you make it not just pretty, but visually effective?

SIDENOTE: There are about a 50:1 ratio of men to women here.

NOTE #2: If you look at the schedule of speakers/sessions and are interested in one, let me know and I’ll try to attend it and give you feedback.