So the conference is over. Jason, Gordon and I spent the rest of the day at the Del Coronado Hotel where we had our last dinner in San Diego before heading to New York.

There will be a hiatus until next year but the content will definitely keep relevant as most of the subjects covered are now at the edge. Who knows what will be the hot topics next year? Those who read this blog during this week and specially those who attended the conference are welcome to write your predictions for 2006. Keep coming back or just grab our RSS feed for new follow-ups.

Matt Webb who's wrapping up his presentation here at ETech has been posting his personal notes for other sessions. You can find them here.

Evan Williams, founder of blogger, showed off Odeo. He says the software is ready for prime time. Joked that he made up Podcasting in 1996—big laugh. He showed the Audioblogger software which is Blogger's outsourced mp3 service provider. He joked how Eric Rice made the situation even clearer by starting Audioblog—big laugh.

Evan went back and forth as to if podcasting was a big or little industry. On one hand he said there is a lot of hype, on the other hand he said Adam Curry claimed 50,000 downloads a day. He said there were 4,000 podcasts in one of the podcast directories.

He said he thought the time people spend in the cars and walking in the streets are the reason this is going to be big. He said he would rather listen to a smart person then music—is he alone?

Evan said Chris Andersen said that MTV moved from music to TV shows because people stayed around longer and the rating were better with things other then music. He says there is also only two fomats right now: talk radio and audiobooks. He thinks there are other concepts that will emerge. He added that time shifting has not come to talk radio yet (he obviously doesn't know about Howard Stern on bit torrent—just kidding, he's right).

Clearly the biggest issue in this is the creating of the podcast… we're dealing with that. Evan pointed out that we are not trained to record audio, but we are trained at how to write at school. He's got that right.

Odeo has three big buttons Listen, Sync and Create. He is making a directory of shows, letting people create them, and letting people synch the feeds down to their iPod. You can play audio right on the home page.

Good, clean looking stuff. Odeo also has a top 10 and you can tag the audio. It also

You don't have to make your podcast on Odeo to be hosted on Odeo. For example, he had the Engadget podcast on the site. They also stream the show, but if you don't want your show hosted they will remove it.

You can add shows on Odeo to a personal queue if you don't want to subscribe to the RSS.

They have a web-based download tool that downloads files for you and creates an Odep playlist for you. They don't delete old files yet, or create playlists by show… i'm sure they will add that.

Odeo studio, in-browser recording studio built in Flash. You hit record and it records your audio. No big deal there, although people clapped for it. The cool part was you could add notes and sounds ("elements") to each segment. So, if you had stock audio of a footsteps or intro music you could drop that behind your talking. You can fad it in and out as well. Very simple to do and very good looking interface… very slick for sure.

You basically record everything live… so you don't put the background sounds in after the show—you have to do it live! So, that makes it a lot easier but if you screw up it's in there forever.

It doesn't let you interview someone unless they were right in the room with you right now, but Evan, Phillip Torronne and I discussed before the panel the Skype and iChat solutions.

I asked Evan about using Flash MX communications server to record conversations. He said that they were most excited about that ability to record conversations between folks.

Evan sees hosting fees paid by bloggers are the first revenue stream and selling audio as the second revenue stream—look out Audible! He talked about how much money Audible makes and his eyes were most opened when discussed that. Clearly that is the business here.

He also talked about letting advertisers come to the site and record commercials then pay to place them on shows. Neat idea, but that's not going to happen—advertisers are discerning and don't want sloppy ads. He also mentioned podcast hosts reading commercials on behalf of sponsors based on copy… that's possible. Getting advertisers for highly-branded content is hard enough but getting them to sponsors a large swath of random podcasts.

Seems the business is build this to a certain point and sell it to Google, Yahoo, etc. The hosting model is not great, that's a commodity business. The premium content is really the best play, but if you succeed at making it easy for folks to create content there might be less of a market for premium content (why pay).

He mentioned having a library of songs that you could legally pay for and play on your podcast some day.

He said an GMAIL invite style rollout shortly.

He talked about making walking tour MP3 files, or "the sound of the day." Comedy he sees as big. He like the odd stuff, the stuff that doesn't exist already. 

Google is just announcing Google Code. Google's place for Open Source software. More details in a session this afternoon. http://code.google.com/

Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig were on stage on a very interesting conversation that you can listen here.

[Via IRC back-channel, Thanks Matt Haughey]

CC launched The Code and Laws of Cyberspace wiki under the new CC-Wiki license.

Larry Lessig is on stage and unfortunately he won't be followed by Gilberto Gil this time around.

He starts telling the story of H.G. Wells' book " The Country of the Blind" passed on a village where everyone is blind and Nunez a non-blind visitor goes to a doctor that wants to remove his eyes.

Stop! Remix is nothing new. That's how cultures were created. Apple remixed, Bill Clinton remixed, we all do it. When we watch Michael Moore's film—for example—and thell our friends whether we loved it or hated it. That's remixing.

In world history remixing was never regulated. Remixing needs to be free; the ordinary ways of remixing. Ordinary ways are "word" and remixing text, writing is free.

What when the technology of remix changes? Do the freedoms change as well? He plays an audio snippet of the Grey Album. He mentions Tarnation, a film made with a budget of $218 that wowed Cannes. Follows some videos remixing Fox News and President Bush (liberal), John Kerry (conservative). The audience goes crazy with the video remix of Bush and Blair singing "My Endless Love". Always funny to watch it. "That's video creativity".

Not broadcast or NYT democracy but popular democracy. The question come back on screen: What when the technology of remix changes? Existing laws conflict with technology, laws need to be reformed (remixed?). Reform the law or reform the technology. Just like H.G. Wells story the powers to be want to reform technology, remove its  eyes.

1. Let's call "piracy" "piracy". Let's call "piracy" wrong. (Notice the quotes.)

2. Teach how powerful the technology is.

3. Demand changes in the law. Not a call for the end of intelectual property.

4. Punish. Defend and oppose the law because it will destroy our technology.

is Yahoo's resident MySQL Geek and he explains that the developer community requested Yahoo! to expose their search services. They saw it as a way to encourage 3rd party innovation. The initial goals were to keep it simple, collect feedback and create a low barrier to entry.

The Developer Community contains the SDK, a wiki, a blog, and general documentation of the API—which offers search on Web, News, Image, Video, Local plus a new feature of contextual search.

The architecture is based on backend clusters (for web, image, video, etc.) that are accessed by the application via a XML proxy developed in PHP. The proxy cleans up the XML results coming from the backend already existing internally to Yahoo! PHP is the de facto language of choice at Yahoo!

There's a restriction of 5,000 queries/day/service/IP - there's no developer token. So if you distribute your app each install wiill have its own limit.

The usual debate to decide for REST or SOAP also happened at Yahoo! "REST is 80% of the usage and SOAP is 80% of the support burden"—so REST was the choice. If there's community demand for SOAP they might consider implement it too.

Some cool apps were already created by 3rd parties and can be found here.

Clay Shirky's presentation is called Ontology is Overrated: Links, Tags, and Post-hoc Metadata.

He starts off by defining Ontology and tell us the parable of the travel agent. The periodic table of the elements is one the great examples of classification. The Library of Congress categorization contains an imbalance with very generic element representations like Asia and Africa because the criteria used was the number of books on the shelf.

Yahoo! was the first significant atempt to bring order (categorization) to the web. They hired ontologists to categorize the content. There were shortcuts to other categories if users tried to find a category in a wrong place (e.g. Books and Literature shortcut under Entertainment in case users went there to find Book and Literature). It was the change from Hierarchical categorization to Hierarchical categorization with links. The huge quantity of links made the hierarchy no longer necessary. That's when the search appeared. Even Google at some point adopted DMOZ but then discontinued as there was no one using.

So when does ontological organization work well? Only when the domain is restricted and the participants are experts. The web is not such case.

Voodoo categorization happens when one can force a categorization to users. This causes:
Signal loss. E.g. Mac, Apple and OSX; Movies, FIlm and Cinema, Queer, Gay and Homosexual.
Makes it hard to predict the future: E.g. "This book is about Dresden" vs.  "This book is about Dresden and goes in the category East Germany"

Merging ontologies is very difficult, Do we merge categories or GUIDs? In real life real minds don't think alike, that's when del.icio.us comes into scene. The distribution of tagging is a long tail—few users with lots of tag entries and lots with few. The distribution of tags for one individual user is also a long tail. Lots of tags about few subjects and lots of not so frequent tags. Modeling the distribution of how users tag one individual URL is also—you guessed right—a long tail. Lots of people tag the URL with one or two tags.

This is the called organic categorization—user and time are core attributes; one-off categories are lost in the rear end of the tail (the system is the editor); the semantics are in the users, not in the system; merges are probabilistic, not binary.

This is a fast paced panel discussion.  Just going to jot down some notes.  If you all have questions about the post's content, comment and I will fill in the detail later.

One distinction: del.icio.us vs wikipedia = indiv space vs shared space

Del.icio.us tags= a document description & associated behaviors or additional context around it

del.icio.us- why tag, what to tag, how to tag? Key idea- people tag for different reasons, some to help themselves find stuff again, sometimes to help other people find their stuff, sometimes to help organize groups, behaviours, or context around a given concept. 

tags on flickr to create groups of photos

Audience question: can we create meta- meta tags to share tag info acros across different services?  Response: the purpose of the tags is not always the same and therefore it is difficult to normalize tags across different services. 

how to give users feedback on how to effectively tag?  what feedback loops can be provided to boost learning?  Flickr- no such thing as a bad tag, Wikipedia- community polices innappropriate tags, Del- shows your tags, top/popular tags, intersection of tags w/others. Del.icio.us- don't interfere too much by imposing restrictions as users won't be able to find the stuff they tag.

Shirky- user/time are new axes for classification and this creates a need for tags and taggers to understand context. 

Del- expert-generated taxonomies don't pay attention to what people are trying to do.  Del tags are for people to help them find stuff, not to necessarily describe things in the abstracts

Jimmy Wales, the founder of wikipedia is up on stage talking about how wikipedia and how it fulfills the original promise of the Net

Problems w/Wikipedia's model

• Quality control

• Author fatigue

Solution to these problems: wikicities.com.  Solves author fatigue problem by creating a community that is topic-focused buyt not dependent on any one author.  Solves quality control thru the wiki peer-review process.

Organization by the Community: free form wiki software lets the community decide how to enforce community mores. 

Conclusion- wikis are a major "social innovation" according to Wales

Here's the transcript of Cory Doctorow's speech. I'm sure someone will soon create a wiki and/or translate to all possible languages. Link to Cory's website.

Justin Chapweske of Onion Networks starts by talking about the HTTP protocol how it has been used since the days of Netscape 1.0  and proposes a remix.  That protocol problems today are more evident as larger data files are being transmited over the Internet (e.g contents of a DVD).  The idea is to use a swarming technique, instead of just throwing more resources (read $$$) to solve the problem. Swarmstreaming is a concept is similar to BitTorrent that breaks up a file and transmits is to various clients that transmit their pieces to each other.

Today's first presentation was from Neil Gershenfeld, from the Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT which is a group of 20 scientists incuding biologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, various kinds of engineers.

The state-of-the-art fabrication is not at 10 billion chip plant but at the ribosome. That's the insight. The ribosome is the living proof for the digitization of fabrication. Computers not controlling tools but computers as tools.

He shows some of the students that first applied to attend the class on the subject of personal fabrication (How to Make Almost Anything). Their projects are fun stuff stuff like the Screambody, Interpet Explorer, Defensive Dressing and an alarm clock that you have to wrestle with to prove you're awake. Some practical examples are the personal fabrication labs created in places like Ghana, India.

His new book on the subject is  FAB The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop.

Here's a recent article about Neil's work: How to make (almost) anything

Werner Vogels, CTO—who just came back from India where he was at Amazon Development Center—starts with an interplanetary vision of happy flying people that buy books.

Massive is defined as billions (world population < neurons in a brain < stars in a galaxy < galaxies in the Universe < ants in  the world—one quadrillion!) He enlists various technologies that are enablers for large scale. There are also social enablers for scale (anything that gives people instant access to sex, food and money). Talking of scale current Amazon's scale is of 32 items ordered per second. And it works now through their implementation of solid and smart systems engineering.

Biological systems could be a model to use in order to achieve scale: redundancy, feedback loops, modularity, loose coupling, purging, apoptosis, spatial compartmentalization, distributed processing, extended phenotype. (After that slide I just started to imagine a meeting between Werner and Jeff Bezos, that should be interesting.)

He suggests Epidemic Theory of Infectuous Diseases (which by the way is nowhere to be found on Amazon) as late night reading. The power of epidemics can serve as a model for robust distributed systems. Epidemics turn scale into advantage. His point is that at algorithm and protocol levels epidemics are a good approach to manage state.

Conclusion slide

• The customer is the only thing that counts

• Question your assumptions

• Learn from Chaos

• Let go of control

• Turn scale into advantage