ETech is over. It has been since last Thursday. I’m clearly past-due for a summary of the conference. ETech is always fun. This was my second and both times I felt like I could have gotten more from the event if only I wasn’t distracted with work related tasks and fatigue from the constant go, go, go of the event. I suppose this is a testament of how much ETech has to offer. There’s so much going on it’s hard not to feel like you missed out even if you were fully engaged the entire conference.

First, let’s start with my highlights. It was cool to meet Jay Goldman and David Crow. I virtually met Jay Goldman of Radiant Core a couple years ago by way of Geoff Norton > Mike Shaver. I noticed his name in IRC early into the conference and boy it’s a small world. Turns out he and David Crow, who claims to be a power bottom, were planning an event with Dan Grisby a guy I knew from when I helped Ben Edwards to organize a Bar Camp (MinneBar) in Minneapolis. Dan was the guy who branded all the Minnebar shirts with his name. How am I suppose to wear that? This year’s Minnebar tshirts kick ass and I’m hoping someone sends me one. I’ll plug the designer Bill Ferenc who I don’t think I know, but he deserves to be plugged because those shirts are very cool. Anyhow, strange how small the world is; especially in technology. I missed all of Thursday’s sessions. And I also missed the Make event, which I wish I could have made. So, the only other two highlights I want to point out are: 1). Amazon Web Services Party. This was held at some really funky bar and pizza joint called Basic. There were lots of tatoos, oil painters, chopped bicycles, gangster looking folks, a bunch of geeks, and Jeff Bezos. It was fun. I noticed Hober reviewed the place. 2). I thought Seth Raphael, MIT Media Lab, was really great. I enjoyed him and his session. He did some fun magic tricks for me in passing earlier than his session. I really enjoyed his connecting technology with magic. I never really thought about it. It also makes perfect sense that he’s studying the emotion of wonder. It’s been my experience we tend to lose this with age as well as our willingness to believe in the supernatural.

Now for some things that ETech can improve upon. Last year ETech was upstairs and I thought this was a lot better than where it was this year, downstairs of the Hyatt. I say this because this year there wasn’t a common area for folks to congregate as much as previously. Also, having sessions way out in different buildings kind of sucked. In general, stuff was just too spread out. Also, as previously mentioned, I could never find freakin’ coffee!! WTF! Every day I resorted to buying a cup of coffee from the bar at $4 a cup! That’s crazy. It would have been better if the Wifi reached the bar. And lastly, give us some chairs. Bring in the inflatable ones like you did in 2006 and you do at OSCON. Don’t get me wrong, I still love me some ETech.

I forgot to include one other highlight. The MindTouch Wii Scavenger hunt. The photos are hilarious. I should have had the participants post these to flickr though. Oh well, next time. Anyway, we’ll be doing these scavenger hunts regularly here in San Diego. Also, SteveB came up with a great idea of doing a WikiMe event. It will go something like this. We select a location, a block, a district, whatever. People come out and go mad in documenting the location for the San Diego wiki. Photos, bars, clubs, restaurants, history, whatever. We just go mad documenting it. MindTouch supplies beer and maybe tshirts or something. It will be a really cool way of developing an excellent online resource for San Diego. Also, for folks to meet one another. I’ll announce the first of these in the next week or so here and at OpenGarden.org.

I just posted the hints to the Wii scavenger hunt. Enjoy.

What is going on at this ETech? We’re in the Hyatt, but it’s downstairs this time. There is no shared space for people to mingle easily. There is a ton of traffic in the area from other conferences. And there are no chairs. Perhaps worse of all is the staff that is just blatantly snotty. Maybe they’re contractors and not O’Reilly staff. I’m not sure. The vibe is different from last year. Case in point: myself and another fellow walked up to a pair of chairs and asked a conference organizer if he minded if we sat in the chairs. His response was a terse: "actually I do mind".

There are dozens of us waiting for the keynote, which starts at 7:30PM (in 24 minutes) and they’ve barred us from the empty room the keynote is taking place. I feel like I’m back in high school and the O’Reilly staff (or contractors thereof) are the yard-nards with illogical rules about which side of the yard or parking lot you can be in. Maybe by tomorrow when the event is in full swing things will be a tad more friendly.

Creating Passionate Users

As I type this, I am supposed to be in San Diego, delivering a workshop at the ETech conference. But I’m not. I’m at home, with the doors locked, terrified. For the last four weeks, I’ve been getting death threat comments on this blog. But that’s not what pushed me over the edge. What finally did it was some disturbing threats of violence and sex posted on two other blogs… blogs authored and/or owned by a group that includes prominent bloggers. People you’ve probably heard of. People like respected Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Chris Locke (aka Rageboy).

I am shocked and disgusted. Kathy Sierra has been receiving death threats for weeks and as a result has backed out of speaking at Etech! This is sick shit! This kind of behavior is disgusting. I sincerely hope these people are revealed and their mums give them a good thrashing. I cannot imagine this is anyone other than a twisted adolescent. Nonetheless I understand her concern. I caught Kathy’s session last year. It was one of my highlights at ETech06. She is brilliant. Best wishes K I hope this is quickly resolved.

It’s that time again. Time for one of my all time favorite conferences: Etech. If you’re here, look me up. If you’re not, you can always sit in on the IRC channel at Freenode.net #etech, which often is more fun than meatspace.

MindTouch (OpenGarden.org) has organized a scavenger hunt I’m calling: MindTouch Scavenger Hunt, Wii!!. Yes, I know I’m not so good at naming things. Did you ever hear the story of how I was so fed up with arguing with SteveB about the name of DekiWiki that I asked the janitor in my office in MN what his name was and wanted to name DekiWiki after him. His name was Brown. In my defense, we had been arguing about the name for over a month.

The first two people to complete the MindTouch Scavenger Hunt, Wii!! will win, guess what: Nintendo Wiis. I’ll be posting the hints Tuesday, 3/27 probably around 5pm.

Right now I’m sitting in the bar at they Hyatt trying to play catch up on community related work at OpenGarden.org. Also, somehow this year I ended up with a totally lame pass. I came down for lunch today and the good folks standing guard informed me I was not allowed because my badge is lame. _sob_ I don’t belong again! _/sob_. Our previous admin who booked my ticket was…well…less than focused.

There is a APP BOF I’m looking forward to and a BlogBridge BOF tonight, but I think they conflict. I’ll probably have to go to the APP BOF. Anyway, expect some posts and photos.

Ross Mayfield’s Weblog

I have to learn to do trackbacks instead of leaving comments because so often people won’t accept my comments. _sniffle_People don’t like what I have to say_/sniffle_. Anyway, this is funny. I really shouldn’t poke fun, but it’s so easy.

Today we have more deployment options than any established or upstart vendor.

* Managed Service Appliance (SaaS behind the firewall)
* Dedicated Hosted Appliance (here is a good introduction to Appliances)
* Custom On-site
* Hosted Professional
* Hosted Personal (free)
* Open Source

Of course, MindTouch has all these (for longer in some cases) +1 more: software appliance (VM). It’s called MindTouch Deki. I especially enjoy the recent trumpeting of the managed service appliance. A concept MindTouch pioneered. We call it the DekiBox. Also, as I’ve spoken about previously, the claim that Socialtext is open source is dubious at best considering they’re not OSI-approved and it took them four years of claiming to be open source to release their source code. Strange, I know. Anyway, clearly Socialtext is not the most comprehensive provider. Of course, you don’t hear me saying: “Sorry, Charlie“. That would be totally lame.

SteveB recently installed a distributed computing client on his Playstation3 and earlier today shared this wonderful story with me:

The Folding@Home project…uses software programs to simulate the way proteins change shape – the way they fold – within the human body. Correct folding is necessary for proteins to perform their many functions, such as carrying oxygen from lungs, while misfolding can lead to conditions such as Alzheimer’s.

The complex software simulations… require so much computer time that some segments of research can’t be completed within a graduate student’s years at the university. But when the simulations can be downloaded to a PS3, the speed of the research will be multiplied, depending on how many people participate. Pande expects, for example, to shorten the time for some simulations from a year to two weeks.

“It’s a big deal,” said Pande. “Even starting small, the PS3 means a dramatic increase.”

Here’s one scenario: Sony says there are about 1 million PS3 owners in the United States and Canada. If just 10,000 of them (1 percent) download the simulations and run them to completion, the project estimates it will double the computing help it already gets from personal computers around the globe. – San Jose Mercury News

The client for running Folding@Home was released earlier this week and holy crap!

OS Type	Current TFLOPS*	Active CPUs	Total CPUs
Windows	151	159144	1624849
Mac OS X/PowerPC	7	8713	95337
Mac OS X/Intel	7	2716	7204
Linux	35	24959	215690
GPU	41	697	2185
PLAYSTATION®3	346	14138	15079
Total	587	210367	1960344

Folding@Home Client Stats

Yes, you heard me correctly. It was just released earlier this week! Already PS3’s are providing more than twice the processing power of Windows PCs. How is this possible, you might ask, when there are far less active Sony PS3 CPUs? I won’t claim to know a whole lot about the Cell’s CPU arch, which is what powers the Sony PS3. I haven’t taken the time to read up on it, but I have a basic understanding after a quick read. The Cell is really designed to allow CPUs to federate to work cooperatively and share processing, it’s all about distributing processing. Partially this is achieved by processing being sent to hardware cells in the form of software cells that consist of data and programs (known as jobs or apulets). The processing is completed without caching. In the case of the PS3 the Cell consists of a PowerPC chip, which plays the role of the Power Processor Element (PPE) a kind of master CPU and eight Synergistic Processor Elements (SPE) that act as slave processors. Each SPE has a 256 Kbyte “local stores”. These are like are like cache because they are on-chip memory, but behave more like CPU registers. The local stores access main memory in blocks of 1Kb minimum (16Kb maximum), but the SPEs can only operate on local stores and not directly on main memory. This approach is a means of minimizing contention and complexity in order to facilitate distribution of processing and scaling (adding more "cells"). As usual, everything old is new again. A similar architecture was employed with the Cray 2 in 1985, what’s new is 21 years of Moore’s law and how bloody cheap chips are now.

The Cell will almost certainly find its way into a variety of devices, such as PDAs and other consumer goods. Imagine for a moment what this means. We’ll be able to create very powerful distributed computing arrays. My PDA will be capable of supercomputing processing power by distributing. Also think about what the PS3 is going to do for number crunching with projects like Folding@Home. Very, very cool stuff. This is going to dramatically change things. It is important to note that programming to a system that employs an architecture like the Cell is pretty hard. We need an abstraction to improve this. This is actually what I was recruited to help work on at Microsoft back in 2003 when I met SteveB. I surely don’t claim to be an adept on this topic, but SteveB surely is.

The greatest thing in the world is snuggling up with my 15 month old daughter, Ashby, in the morning and watching TV. Unfortunately the only time she doesn’t mind snuggling is when we watch the ‘stupid box’. There is a new Mickey Mouse Clubhouse television show on the Disney channel. It’s awful. Neither Tara nor I can stand it, but Ashby loves it. It’s all computer graphics. At the end of every episode there is this insipid song they sing, which sticks to your brain like starch on rice. You can’t shake it! Allow me to share:

“We’re splitting the scene, we’re full of beans.” Huh?

I spent the first half of this week at the Dow Jones WebVentures conference in San Mateo. Ken Liu, the CEO Steve and I brought in November, presented in two sessions and I ran a booth. The booth was a good buy for us. The cost was very reasonable, there was a total of five exhibitors, and we were the only exhibitor worth talking to. No offense to the others, but they were just not interesting to the conference goers. There was an executive recruitment firm, a law firm, a financial services firm, and some booth that just had a TV playing. Seriously, someone setup a table, a tv, and hit play. Not one person even bothered looking at it. I have no idea what the company did, I can’t remember the name of the company, nor do I care to. Equally strange was the person manning the law firm’s booth. She literally barricaded herself behind with a large retractable upright banner, a table, and other things. You couldn’t even see her because she was behind the banner, behind the table, and her nose was buried in some reading material. Not exactly someone you would want to talk to even if you did see her. She may as well have setup a TV and hit play. It likely would have been more effective. Why even bother? Clearly we were a hit in this crowd.

There was a lot of interest in our newest product. With this we’re helping online publishers, media, newspapers to create and steer quality user generated content and weave it into their editorial content. In short we’re giving traditional online media companies the ability to have a social media initiative that they can have a reasonable level of control over. This provides stickiness, freshness of content, authenticity, and most importantly: inventory. It’s interesting stuff. The industry is desperate for this. We’ve began developing this product because we’ve been approached several times by media companies that have asked us for exactly this. We’re getting a lot of traction in the industry and we got a lot of traction at WebVentures.

While at WebVentures I met some interesting people and I learned about some interesting companies and lots of very uninteresting ones. The companies I found interesting included: BigTribe (which is begging for a wiki), Dapper, Mashery, and Multiply. Mashery was started by Oren who shared a table with me at DemoFall. He happened to be present when I made a total ass of myself. For the record, my nerves got the better of me when the panelist couldn’t hear me and I misunderstood this. No Marc Orchant 😉 I wasn’t being arrogant. To the contrary. Anyway, have you heard of Multiply? Neither had I. I ended up at the same table during the cocktail hour with Multiply’s Founder and CEO, Peter. He’s a really nice guy. Interesting fact about Peter: he was user #56 on Slashdot. Turns out Multiply has 4 Million registered users, 13 Million visitors monthly and 1 BILLION page views monthly! EGAD, And I’ve never heard of this company…odd. Peter was fun to chat with. We shared drinks and conversation for a couple hours. I pushed Peter on adopting OpenID and he had a very logical and disappointing response. His point was that OpenID, currently, is only interesting to smaller, up and coming, companies. For companies with medium to large sized communities there is a disincentive to consuming OpenID. Sure they’ll merrily be a provider, but why should they make it easy for their community to be mobile?

In many of the panels at this event there was much todo about many of the traditional walled garden social networking sites. I am convinced when identity becomes distributed and mobile these walled gardens will cease to exist. We the users will own the nexus of our relationships with others, the content we’ve created, the content we read regularly, and how we define ourselves. This nexus can also help us define how our content can be consumed and by whom. Will we need the old walled garden model? How will they adapt?

I ran into Dave Hersh from Jive again. I was on a panel with him at Community 2.0. He’s a bright guy and fun to speak with. I also met Isaac Garcia the CEO and Co-Founder of Central Desktop. He too seemed to be an intelligent and friendly fellow. I enjoyed speaking with him and we did so at length. He was as open about his business as I’ve always been with mine. The biggest surprise that came out of Isaac’s and my conversation was that he was as confused by the folks at Dynamo with respect to the Wiki.com domain as everyone else was. Wild stuff.

In conclusion, WebVentures was a successful and rewarding event. I even enjoyed it. I don’t know why this surprises me. Maybe I’ve just become accustomed to and fond of geeky events like the upcoming Etech that I’m attending.

OpenGarden

MindTouch has launched Wik.is, a community wiki site that simplifies collaboration and knowledge sharing for friends and family members, businesses, associations, students and educators.

The uses of wik.is are as broad as human knowledge and activity: Friends and family: family scrap book, travel log, event planning and celebration (graduation, wedding, anniversary) Personal interest,clubs and associations: sports, cars, games, Siamese cats, Persian rugs, combat airplanes, Mongolian throat singers, anything and everything. Schools and researchers: research papers, study plan, group project, school bulletins, and more.

We thought it would be a good idea to launch/re-launch http://www.Wik.is in connection with the Community2.0 conference. I want to highlight a few choice communities. These are in no particular order and are a few I noticed while watching sites scroll by:

• essentials.wik.is
• videogamebabes.wik.is
• neosocratics.wik.is
• mrcg.wik.is
• ladysenegal.wik.is
• ssis.wik.is
• futurama.wik.is
• wapathfinders.wik.is

Of course within the first few hours we had a big spike in traffic (see graphic below), it took us down for a few hours.

I have to say. I’m surprised. We didn’t really do much to build awareness. It’s not a ridiculous amount of traffic, but it did require RoyK and PeteE scramble to get us up and running again. Thanks guys.