I'm in San Diego at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference and taking some notes through the sessions — unfortunately, tech difficulties meant that I didn't get great notes for a bunch of the sessions yesterday, but I did get two really interesting ones:
Musical Myware, Felix Miller, CEO Last.fm. Felix introduced me to the term "myware" — spyware that you run on your own activities, which helps you get a better handle on your needs and wants and helps your computer help you better.
I love this idea: people are good at making decisions and computers are good at counting them (and computers are bad at making decisions and people are bad at counting them). My computer should note, count and process every decision I make — it should notice that I never answer emials from certain people, it should notice that I never click through certain stories in my reader, that I load certain pages every day, that I often search my mailbox for certain kinds of messages and so on. That's stuff I'm totally unqualified to keep track of, and that computers are really good at:
Myware is like spyware, but it lets you spy on yourself.
Why would you spy on yourself? Why would you share the data with Last.fm?
Last.fm: Tell us what music you listen to, anytime, all the time, without even realizing it
Why?
Napster made all music ever recorded available — so how do you know what to listen to? Mission: "Harness the knowledge of the crowd." Someone out there knows what you should be listening to; no need to read tedious editorial.
Audioscrobbler installs in media-players like iTunes, etc and reports what you're listening to at any moment and updates your user-profile. Only records stuff you listen to, but not stuff you skip — just the stuff you pay attention to.
and Root Markets: Applications for the New Attention Economy, Seth Goldstein, ROOT Attention Exchange. Seth's idea is to give you tools that capture your decisions — say, your entire browser clickstream — and parse it to help you make better decisions about the future, and let you sell and trade that clickstream.
I'm not convinced about the latter, particularly all the Wall Street jargon and sensibility that made up much of his talk, but I was really taken with it nonetheless.
ROOT Vault: A place to send your attention data
* Send your clickstream to your Root Vault
* More to come
Store it
* Mine the data: when do I co online, what do I do, what are my trends?
* Charts help you visualize it
* You can do this with Firefox history and send around textfiles, but this is easier
Exchange attention:
* Clickstream Dating, or 2 APIs Fucking
* Two APIs bring data together and talk about which sites you visit that I don't, you visit that I don't, when we start browsing, what similarity we have
* Meet people with similar attention
Delete it:
* All important
* Also, you can move it
I really wish I had notes from Eric Bonabeau's talk on Hunch Engines that combine genetic algorithms with human judgement. I can ask a computer to sort a pool of pix by, say, "wisfulness." It will give me some photos, and ask me to pick the most "wistful" one. Then it tries to decompose that photo into all the things it can understand about it — the color histogram, and so on — and show me more photos that it thinks share those traits. I pick again, and it revises its understanding. The human and the computer cooperate to come up with a definition of "wistful" that the human being didn't know she was using!
Update: Leon Chism sent me a set of group notes taken with SubEthaEdit from this talk — thanks Leon!
I also really liked Dick Hardt's Who's that Dick on my Site (see this blog post about an earlier rendition of this) and Linda Stone's Attention: The *Real* Aphrodisiac.
