The O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference has consistently been the high-point of my tech year, ever since the days when it was the O'Reilly P2P conference. I like it so much that I've served on the advisory board since the second event. The next one has just been announced for March 6-9, 2006, in San Diego, and O'Reilly has posted its Call for Proposals for the show. This is one of the most provocative CFPs I've read — this year's con should be a(nother) doozy:
While typically (and ultimately) associated with economics, the concept of externalities applies rather well to technology: web services are a purposeful version of the scrapeability of web based services and applications; media in digital form is inherently hackable and repurposeable (just ask the music industry); Wifi base stations provide much more than Internet connectivity–they provide a sense of locality, group, and (through their limited reach) space; Bluetooth-enabled phones, PDAs, and computers broadcast globally unique identifiers.
Affordances, usually associated with human-computer interaction, industrial design, and environmental psychology, is here seen as the flipside of externalities: one person's externality is another's affordance. Web services provide an affordance for hooking in to Amazon's business process (not to mention Amazon being it's own biggest user); Ajax style interaction with a web application's data affords a peek at the underlying data structure and associated atomic actions; whether and how one exposes the internal workings of a piece of consumer hardware can mean the difference between a TiVo and a WebTV.
* How does one identify one's own externalities and turn them to one's own advantage? Open the door to customers and downstream developers and resellers?
* What has been noticable this last year is the unintentional affordances, the serendipitous design decisions that turn products into platforms. For example, Google Maps was quickly turned into a web component by a world of programmers hungry for a visual display of geographic information. Google went with it, and built the API into the second release of their Javascript maps system. What are some other examples?
* Where are the affordances guiding interaction of data and services between realms? For example, if you use Bloglines, del.icio.us, and have a Movable Type blog, you have separate systems to blog, tag, and email any page you find interesting. How do you tie these disparate fragments together? Despite their great potential, RSS, trackbacks, and permalinks haven't yielded much more than expected ties; where are the unintended (aside from spam, that is) uses?
* Wifi changes the usage of public and private spaces. Coffee shops aren't just throwing in free wifi, but are changing the very buildings (power, spaces, group areas, meeting spots, etc.). With these physical changes to provide computer affordances come changes in social affordances. Where are the next nexus points of the social and virtual?
(via O'Reilly Radar)
