fowa2007 - day #1
11.40 - Simon Wardley on commoditizing of IT: “there’s no sense whatsoever in setting up your own IT-infrastructure. maintaining your own web- or database-servers is what we call yak-shaving“. Zimki offers “pre-shaved yaks”, meaning a fully hosted, server-side javascript environment for rapid application development (not to forget Amazon S3 & EC2, which commoditizes web-infrastructure on a lower level).
13.45 - Matthew Ogle & Anil Bawa Cavia talk about attention data, tag cloud moderation and past, presence & future of Last.fm. they also shared some stunning usage numbers:
15mio tracks are scrobbled each day (that’s 1575 174 /sec or 6billion tracks since 2003). there are 190mio artists, 70 mio tracks, 700k tracks available for streaming, 145k artist wikis.
14.45 - CTO Amazon Werner Vogels sells us on S3, EC2 & SQS (Simple Queueing Service) and encourages companies to compete on ideas, not on technology. currently, the 30/70-switch rule demands 70% resources spent on the technological “heavy lifting”, while only 30% go into the product/idea. posterboy S3-implementations include SmugMug, SecondLife (just for client-downloads), YouOS; renderRocket (a virtual renderfarm) is one of few current EC2-users. interesting detail: Mechnical Turk’s not internationally available because of conflicts with labour-laws.
16.20 - according to this post, Kevin Rose is about to make an announcement regarding digg later today. stay tuned for real-time updates
17.20 - Rose enters the stage… his talks’ topic is “the future of crowd generated media”…talking about the Digg-ecosystems, motivations for users to digg & submit content - Digg trys to buid incentives for users on every level (frontpage-exposure, traffic, networks of friends etc). he’s mostly summarizing what Digg has been doing the past two years. enhancing Digg (stuff they’re working on): how to manage a user-community of 900k, how-to implement fact-checking on stories (Digg does community-based, since a paid employees a la netscape.com won’t scale). Digg wants to enable/create connections between users based on several numbers - Diggs, buries, comments, word-strength etc. showing some slides on development of Digg-usage since 2005 + summarizing their flash-tools + announcing a “Flash Toolkit” later that year, which should help publishers monitoring their stories. commitment on APIs & export of user attention-data. finally the announcement: Digg is going to support OpenID in the future (also see TechCrunch)
that’s it for today…Wifi didnt really work very well, plus it’s not free
maybe we’re more lucky tomorrow.