Well it’s been an interesting week at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. And now it’s time to wrap things up.

My summary of the experience is that I’m glad that I got to be around people as excited and curious as I am about the development of technology, accessibility of information, and usability of interfaces. The theme was the Attention Economy, and while some of the presentations didn’t really fit, most of them had good insights that I will be taking with me.

I think the real theme was about how to deal with the information overload most of us are experiencing now, especially since RSS feeds came on the scene and exponentially widened the river of information we swim against every day. Attention is definitely the most valuable resource we have. Focusing it by removing the noise from the information stream is the next immediate task. As Linda Stone said, we need to develop applications that are designed to improve the quality of our life, not just make it easier for us to do more.

I took a lot of notes this week, many of which will never be polished enough to make it to this blog, but here are some thoughts from various speakers that I jotted down during the seminar that resonated with me for some reason or another. For the things that I managed to write down exactly as I heard them, I’ll enclose in quotes, otherwise they’re paraphrased ideas from the speakers I attributed.

“What our job is, fundamentally, is getting into the heads of strangers.”

Jesse James Garrett

“Being digital is more important than being electronic.”

Alan Turing, 1947 - quoted by George Dyson

“The item is the thing, not the feed.”
“Complexity breeds consolidation; simplicity doesn’t.”

Eric Lunt

“No moment offline ever goes unpunished.”

Rael Dornfest

If the software doesn’t make it possible for users to defend themselves from the moderators then something is wrong.
We are encoding the ability for freedom of speech and freedom of expression in our tools.

Clay Shirky

“A URL is a promise to update itself in the future.”

Jon Udell

“We are motivated by a desire to be a live node on the network.”

Linda Stone

How to become an expert:

1. Write code
2. Make mistakes
3. Get yelled at
4. Fix code
5. Write about what you fixed

“Write when you’re filled with wonder; waiting till you’re an expert is too late.”
“Burnout is what happens to people who don’t know when to quit.”

Mark Pilgrim

FUSE stands for Find, Use, Share, Expand… Good thing we didn’t go with Find, Use and Connect with Knowledge.

Bradley Horowitz | on Social Media @ Yahoo!

Lists are the cockroaches of design… they’ve been around forever and they’ll never go away.
“Gray on gray is a really bad idea.”
Cool is always easier than good.

Scott Burkun