In about two hours, I’ll be talking at ETech 2006 – presenting a slightly adapted version of my Native to a Web of Data talk. If any of you are at ETech and have seen the presentation before (or listened to it online) – please don’t come! I’m hoping to rehash most of the decent jokes, and you’d completely throw me off my stride. To be honest, I’m only really even writing this post because I want to have a self-referential slide in my presentation near the end indicating that I’m writing stuff live from the conference, so I’ll need a screen-cap.
The conference this year has been pretty good so far, all told – not least for setting up a number of opportunities to collide with my disparate groups of nerds – the British contingent (mostly ex-BBC who I can’t see enough of: Webb, Biddulph, Alice et al), the Yahoo! contingent (Chad, Karon, Simon, Leonard, Danah, Jeffrey and others) and all the wonderful extended networks that I don’t get to connect with so often – people like Ben and Cory and Ben and Derek and Veen. I could go on pretty much ad infinitum, but I can’t imagine it’s a fascinating read for you guys.
In terms of sessions, I’ve been to many. The Multi-touch interface high-order bit kind of rocked, Ray Ozzie’s session on cut and paste of microformats in the wild almost changed my mind about embedding data directly into pages (but not quite) and the session from the last.fm guys was solid enough – although it didn’t really sell the wonder of it to people around the room as much as I might have liked. I wasn’t enormously impressed by the Eric Bonabeau session – the only thing that really got me excited about it was the idea of creating a recipe space within which you could apply evolutionary principles to find varied and interesting ways of cooking limited amounts of ingredients onboard space missions. That kind of rocked, but was a twenty second throwaway at the end of a talk that otherwise didn’t seem to me to say anything enormously new. It’s easy to get blasé about innovation at ETech though, so perhaps that’s unfair.
I didn’t learn an enormous amount from Peter Morville’s talk but that’s probably because I’ve read most of his recent major work. The Microformats session was also pretty solid, but I didn’t get much new from it that I hadn’t gleaned from a systematic interrogation of their site. I’m still thinking about Clay’s talk on moderation strategies. It’s a noble goal, and one that I’ve been interested in for a while (I even proposed a talk to ETech around a similar area a few years ago), but I’m not convinced that it really got into the meat of the territory. That’s probably also unfair, given the shortness of his slot.
The three highlights for me so far have been Linda Stone on Attention (I saw her at Supernova last year, and this was a cut-down version of that talk, but still just as urgent and prescient), Webb and Cerveny on playsh which just seemed to be endlessly entertaining and inventive code-play, and Bruce Sterling’s piece on Spimes and design and innovation and language. I’m in the process of digesting his book at the moment, so that was all pretty rewarding.
I have to head off now to put the finishing touches to my slides, but I’ll try and write up some more of my thoughts over the next couple of days. These events are all about refilling the cup of creativity when you get tired and jaded by your immediate missions, and as usual ETech fills me up to and sometimes over the brim. Too much to think about, too little time. I’m looking forwad to the couple of weeks afterwards where I can finally digest everything.
I’m in my first session for ETech 2006 – watching Jeff Veen and Jesse James Garrett talking about Designing the next generation of Web Apps:
An insight that I’ve gained from the session so far – that there have been two kinds of people in the world – people who think of the web as a browsable information resource and those that have tended to view the web as analogous to a desktop application. Jesse made a point that really reminded me of something dumb I wrote about weblogs a while back – that the web is being framed in terms of things that people have known before and that we’re still determining what the web actually is. And what it’s gradually revealing itself to be is neither (information resource / application) and yet both. It’s something new which we have to craft for in a new way. Very much liking that – it’s like the distinction between document and application has collapsed and is now being rebuilt and reconfigured from the ground up. Very nice indeed. Lots of nice thoughts coming out of that…
Watching the Oscars in the Manchester Grand Hyatt with assorted fun people is a very different experience from trying to stay awake in the UK as it stretches into the wee hours. It’s actually fun for a start. And Jon Stewart is really funny. So far we’ve had a couple of neat skits, a full on Clooney charismathon (plus Supporting Actor win) and Kong‘s got Best Special Effects. Wallace & Gromit have got best Animated Feature, which doesn’t suck too much. I was a bit disappointed about Jake not getting Best Supporting Actor – apparently the rumours are that Crash is building up a head of steam and may depose Brokeback, and this could be the first sign of that collapse. But I’ve watched enough episodes of the West Wing to know a bit about expectations management, and I’m trying to work out if the Crash rumours are part of a campaign to remind the Academy that Brokeback is not a done-deal. Get the vote out, if you know what I mean…
A little bit later and we’ve had a couple of shorts, a few really creepy adverts, a great Scientology line from Stewart that won’t win him any favours in his later career and ooh… ooh… Jennifer Aniston. Wow. She looked really grouchy. Almost as grouchy as she looked in the pre-Oscar show when you could tell that in the back of her mind she was reciting to herself, “never gonna get an Oscar, never gonna get an Oscar”.
Hm. Rachel Weisz won Best Supporting Actress for the Constant Gardener which is a bit of a funny thing to happen. I mean I watched the film and she was okay in it, but there were a great many times when I couldn’t decide whether the character was just really objectionable or whether it was the actress. Seeing her on stage makes me think it’s more likely that I just don’t like her very much. On the basis of the clip alone, I think I’d have gone for Amy Adams. In other news, what the fuck is up with Narnia?! It was a bloody terrible movie and the effects were a complete rip-off of Lord of the Rings – visually there was no creativity there whatsoever. What is wrong with people that it wins anything!? More troubling even than Narnia was Lauren Bacall, who looked far from well when she came on-stage, and then proceeded to stumble over most of her introduction to her section on Film Noir.
First notable comedy moment – the awesome Best Actress campaign skits, as voiced by Rob Cordry from the Daily Show including those that declared Judy Dench to be a bad Dame and Reese Witherspoon to have a good proper American name. Second notable comedy moment – the unintentional WTF interpretive dance thing with the burned out car and the mist and the racial tensions represented by people moving. really. slowly that accompanied the best song nomination from Crash. Jon Stewart on the latter, “My suggestion if you’re trying to escape from a burning car… Don’t move in slow motion…”
Only an hour and a bit to go and… well… wow, this is long. Every year you forget. So some guys have won sound design for King Kong, Jennifer Garner nearly fell over, there was some stuff that happened. The best song went to a song about a pimp which was interesting. Lots of people died. They used that terrible font from Keynote for the ‘In Memoriam’ slide. Jon Stewart is uniformly a good host so far, mainly because he’s been quite understated. Some highlights – Robert Altman’s honorary Oscar and tremendous speech and Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep’s performative introduction. We’re nearly out of snacks but SMS’s are coming in from various other nerds who are gradually arriving at the hotel, so there’s a concern that we might not have enough to eat. Simon’s sitting in the corner of the room by the loo working on his presentation because he thinks that’s the only place he can get a good wifi signal. Even though I’ve got a perfectly good one and I’m sitting on the comfy comfy bed. Silly boy.
Best Actor has gone to Philip Seymour Hoffman, which is not a shock and probably isn’t even a disappointment given how great an actor he is and what an extraordinary performance he gives in Capote, but godammit Heath Ledger did an astonishing job and it was a destroying film and Brokeback has to win something substantial. It’s hard to begrudge Hoffman though, particularly after his wonderful and affecting speech to his mother. And Ledger reacted really well to the whole thing. But I need some Brokeback action. Crash simply doesn’t deserve the recognition it’s got, and Brokeback is … astonishing.
This is a seriously weird ceremony – Reese Witherspoon’s got Best Actress? Wow, that’s a bit random and unexpected. Most embarrassing moment – her speech, “I’m just trying to matter”?! References to every major relative on the matrilineal line since Eve?! I rather think that one’s going to stick in her memory for the wrong reasons. Twenty pence on that being significantly mocked across the media over the next twenty-four hours…
Crap! We’re up to Best Adapted Screenplay and yes! Brokeback Mountain has won something decent at last! Yes! About bloody time and it’s a bloody great one! I’m pretty delighted about that one, although can I just say at this point that Simon and Yoz are being really annoying and talking to each other too loudly about Django and I might have to kill em! Ack! Now Crash has won Best Original Screenplay. It’s all going to come to the wire on this one. Fingers crossed. Crash sucks!
Ang Lee wins Best Director and that bodes really really really well. Apparently Director and Film tend to go together. I’m so happy about this one. Come on you bastards!
FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! Right. You fucks! Fucking hell! Fucking Crash wins?! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK! Right. I’m done. Screw you, Oscar! I’m going home.