Besides Ray Ozzie’s Live Clipboard, here are some other things I found interesting at this morning’s presentations.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

Felipe Cabrara spoke about MT and some of the applications that it can be and is being used for. There is a programmatic API that developers can use to send out jobs to Mechanical Turk and collect the results.
Here’s the sample pseudo code:

read (photo);
photoContainsHuman = callMechanicalTurk(photo);
if (photoContainsHuman == TRUE){
    acceptPhoto;
}
else {
    rejectPhoto;
}

I hadn’t realized that it was that “simple” before.

The Nathan McFarland of CastingWords.com spoke about how their business was basically built around “outsourcing” to MT and gave the conference goers a url to try 30 minutes of transcription for free.

Previously I wasn’t sure how Mechancial Turk could be used for things that required specialized knowledge, but there is a way you can specify criteria for the people who will be performing your “HITs”. Nathan cited examples of college chemistry students working on a transcription of chemistry lectures for him and so earning money while also educating themselves.

Here’s a list of some of the types of tasks Mechanical Turk can be applied to according to Felipe:

• Identification/categorization
• Keyword generation
• Polling
• Transcription/Translation
• Spelling, grammar checks
• Market research
• Photo Editing/Retouching

Sxip and Sxore

Dick Hardt presented Sxip and the concept of “Identity 2.0″. Sxip is a major sponsor of Etech and I’ve seen the name all over the place here but I wasn’t really very interested until this session. Sxip provides a way for you to store your “persona” information, the various things that define you in your different roles (work, home, hobbies, etc), as well as credentials information on a “homesite”. The homesite can be a site that runs the Sxip software, or there’s a way to use a Firefox extension to make your PC your homesite (and therefore “own” your data). Authentication is done by sites that are Sxip membersites (have the Sxip software installed) and you control what of your personal data is shared. It’s an interesting concept that avoids some of the pitfalls of predecessors like Microsoft’s Passport.

Sxip has an implementation for bloggers in it’s sister site Sxore.com. Signing up and using Sxore is a way to control the quality of comments posted on your blog by both eliminating comment spam and allowing frequent commenters to build trusted identities. It’s an interesting concept and they offer a Wordpress plugin for the functionality (which I will be evaluating soon).

Second Life

A representative from Second Life (who’s name I believe is Cory Ondrejka) had 15 minutes to give us a tour but it was pretty fascinating. I wasn’t prepared to be impressed because TAD has taken a look at Second Life before and didn’t seem to find it very interesting. But after the demo today, I’m definitely curious to try it out myself.

Cory described the way that the users of the game have surprised the developers with the things that they have created (using the tools provided by the game) and also described the unique economy that has been created in both the virtual world of the game and the real world we live in. It’s not a typical MMORPG in that there are no levels, tasks, quests or goals. There’s no subscription model for paying to participate in the game. You pay to make the things you create and the property you aquire “permanent”.

Some facts he shared that I found interesting:

• 35% of adults (over the age of 18) spend more time in virtual worlds than working at a job
• Women and older users demonstrate greater creativity than 18 year old boys
• The median age of a user is 36
• There are more than 100 classes a week held in the game on how to participate in the game (how to craft, buy real estate, etc).
• 17 universities are teaching universitie classes in Second Life
• Tringo, a puzzle game along the lines of Bejeweled and Tetris, was developed by a user in the game and will soon be licensed to Sony as a game for the GameBoy. The Second Life user who created it will receive all royalties.
• A user has made more than 150K US dollars by buying and selling real estate in the game
• Make magazine will soon be creating interactive tutorials in the game so that you can see how projects should be built and interact with the steps

Overall, Second Life is something I think I’m going to have to take a second look at.

Root

The purpose behind Root was presented by Seth Goldstien. Unfortunately it was another 15 minute presentation that just scratched the surface so I am still not 100% convinced I want to track my attention data and store it somewhere, but he brought up some interesting concepts to think about by coining a new (to me) acronym:

PPA

Promise to Pay Attention

PPAs are valuable because if you default on them your reputation suffers. For example: if you don’t show up when you commiteed to watching your kid’s soccer game, you’ve lost some of your reputation as a good parent.

PPAs are a precious commodity because they involve the most scarce and perishable factor of all: your time. Since they are so valuable, according to Seth, they can also be “pooled, securitized and traded”, which means, in other words, you can make money off them if handled properly. Root is setting itself up to be a way to monetize your PPAs.

Linda Stone on Continuous Partial Attention

This speech was something that I (and pretty much everyone else in the room) identified with on a personal level. Linda talked about the information overload that we all experience and how we have tried to cope by trying to pay partial attention to everything but rarely manage to give our full attention to any one thing. We have embraced technologies that allow us to be constantly connected to an ever incoming stream of information and it is drowning us. We don’t feel in control of our lives because we must continually be scanning our information inputs so that we won’t miss any opportunities. And we are in a “constant state of artificial crisis” because of it.

Linda mentioned that in the mid 60s to mid 80s there was a cultural change to a focus from the group to the individual. It became all about “me, me, me” and what’s best for “me”. After that, and up to the current time, we’ve been going through another shift, into building a network, and becoming connected to other people through that network. Though Linda didn’t say it, it seems to me that these connections are all in the virtual space, and that, in the majority of cases, they’re relatively shallow. One example she mentioned was someone being proud of their 3000 friends on Frienster. She said that our current situation means that our actions are mainly “motivated by a desire to be a live node on the network”. The stress of maintaining your connection to the internet can be overwhelming, but cutting yourself off from it is equally as stressful because you might be missing something really or artificially important.

Linda said that the mantra of new software that came out used to be “ease of use”, but with today’s problems all new software should focus on how it “improves the quality of life”. I think on top of this is a need for us to connect in a deeper and more fundamental way with the people in our networks as well. Hopefully some relief is on the way.

More notes tomorrow!