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Robert blogs at:
http://www.oreillynet.com/conferences/blog/
http://radar.oreilly.com
Session: Lessons Learned in Scaling and Building Social Systems
Joshua Schachter just finished peppering us with little nuggets of wisdom in his "Lessons Learned in Scaling and Building Social Systems" session. His talk was not focused on the technical aspects of scaling social systems, but on the human/social aspects. He focused on the little bits of knowledge that are… read more
Ewan Spence points us to the latest ETech Podcasts: Our second show from O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference 2007 and the good and the bad of the future are here. The dangers of RFID, the progressive carbon offsetting of Java libraries, and the wonder of Heirarchial Brain functions. It's all here… read more
More thoughts on Amazon Web Services EC2 and S3
Today I attended two more presentations that focused on Amazon's EC2 and S3 services. I also spoke with the Amazon Web services team at length yesterday to find out more about their offering and how I might be able to use it. After asking many more questions and sleeping on… read more
I really enjoy going to O'Reilly conferences -- you always meet new and interesting people, while at the same time catching up with cool people you met in the years prior. And this ETech promises to be no different -- I'm excited to see that Jeff Hawkins from Numenta is… read more
Keynote: Big Company Hacks at Yahoo!
Chad Dickerson's keynote speech this morning talked about how he hacked Yahoo!. Hacked Yahoo! the company itself and not code, mind you. In his speech, "Big Company Hacks at Yahoo!, Chad talked about the Hack Day that Yahoo! hosted last year. read more
ETech podcasts from the Podcast Network
Ewan Spence from the Podcast Network pointed me to the his first podcast covering ETech 2007: ------- The first ETech podcast is up. Our opening show sees Tim O'Reilly talk about the themes of the 2007 Conference, along with a great start up blogsearch company, a mathemagician (just listen...) and… read more
Amazon.com has a history of making good presentations at O'Reilly Conferences. Today's "Amazon Web Services: Building a "Web-Scale Computing" Architecture to Meet the Variable Demands of Today's Business" keynote by Werner Vogels from Amazon was another eye opening keynote speech. In the last few years Amazon has created some of… read more
July 28 2011
We're at the beginning of a community renaissance, says Jono Bacon, and we're soon going to see a repeatable body of knowledge that will allow us to push communities forward. read moreOSCON: Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth
July 27 2009
Two of my favorite presenters, Ben Collins-Sussman and Brad Fitzpatrick, did an OSCON session on "Programmer Insecurity and the Genius Myth." Brad and Ben talked about how programmers' insecurities cause all manner of troubles in programming projects, and then presented a number of tips for how to avoid these problems.… read moreJuly 24 2009
At OSCON in 2006, I followed sessions that discussed how open source companies would fare when big corporations come in. Back then there were only a handful of examples of big companies purchasing small open source companies. Three years later, we've witnessed MySQL AB get swallowed by Sun, only to… read moreOSCON: Standing Out in the Crowd
July 24 2009
Kirrily Robert gave the first keynote speech this morning, entitled "Standing Out in the Crowd." She spoke about the gender imbalance in open source and shared her experiences working on open source projects that have a higher-than-average percentage of women participants. She laid out statistics about the current gender balance… read moreOSCON: Building Belonging (in communities)
July 23 2009
I dove right in to OSCON by attending Jono Bacon's "Building Belonging" community talk. Jono, who is the community manager for Ubuntu, started out his presentation by asking what communities can do to build and improve the sense of belonging that people have in their community. After talking a little… read moreMarch 13 2009
I've been attending ETech and the P2P conference that preceded ETech and this conference, and this year I've noticed the best gender balance ever. Granted this conference's focus has changed from the very geeky P2P and Web Services focus it started with and meandered through a host of topics to… read moreETech: Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People
March 13 2009
[Quinn managed to scoop me blogging about Tony Jebara's presentation! But after I chatted with her, we both agreed that I should continue with my blog post and see if I can augment her post a little.] Tony Jebara's presentation "Mobile Phones Reveal the Behaviors of Places and People" really… read moreUncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons
March 12 2009
The first session I attended today was John Wilbanks' "Uncommon Knowledge and Open Innovation: Building a Science Commons" presentation. John talked about the process of establishing the Science Commons and how creating a science oriented commons presented unique challenges. John first pointed out that Metcalfe's Law works for both networked… read moreETech: Priorities for a Greener World: If You Could Design Anything, What Should You Do?
March 11 2009
The second session today I'd like to share with you was presented by a personal friend of mine, Jeremy Faludi. Jer started his session entitled "Priorities for a Greener World: If You Could Design Anything, What Should You Do?" by pointing out that if we want to change the world,… read moreETech: I Just Don't Trust You: How the Tech Community Can Reinvent Risk Ratings
March 11 2009
The "I Just Don't Trust You: How the Tech Community Can Reinvent Risk Ratings" presentation posited that the system for rating credit instruments is horribly broken. Right before Lehman Brothers crashed, Moody's credit rating agency gave Lehman Brothers a AAA credit rating. Moodys immediately down-rated Lehman Brothers after they crashed… read moreOSCON day 3: Reflections on OSCON 2008
July 26 2008
Today was the last day of OSCON and I'm in the mood to think about the conference and share some of my random observations that didn't make it into any of my other blog posts. First up is a comment that Brian Aker of MySQL fame made during the "Tim… read moreOSCON day 2: Do You Believe in the Users?
July 26 2008
After enjoying Ben Collins-Sussman and Brian Fitzpatrick's comments on the anti-patterns panel yesterday, I decided to peek into their "Do You Believe in the Users?" presentation. Ben and Fitz started the presentation with "Successful software requires more than just technical effort." as their premise and then went on to build… read moreOSCON day 2: Prophet, your path out of the cloud
July 25 2008
Some of you may know Jesse Vincent as the guy who hands out snarky t-shirts like last year's "My free software runs your business" shirt. But today I got to see Jesse's more serious side when I attended his "Prophet, your path out of the cloud" presentation. He started his… read moreOSCON day 1: An Open Source Project Called "Failure:" Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid
July 24 2008
The second session of the day that really appealed to me was "An Open Source Project Called "Failure:" Community Antipatterns to Know and Avoid". When I saw that Ben and Fitz of subversion fame were joined by other open source heavy weights, I was sold on this panel. In this… read moreOSCON day 1: Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub
July 24 2008
Its good to be back in Portland for my favorite geek convention: O'Reilly's Open Source Conference. The overcast sky in Portland is making it a little easier this year to focus on the plethora of excellent speakers and sessions. The first session to really grip and and speak to me… read moreOSCON day 1: Beyond REST? Building Data Services with XMPP PubSub
July 23 2008
Its good to be back in Portland for my favorite geek convention: O'Reilly's Open Source Conference. The overcast sky in Portland is making it a little easier this year to focus on the plethora of excellent speakers and sessions. The first session to really grip and and speak to me… read moreReally, Really, Really Intimate Interfaces
March 06 2008
This afternoon I had the pleasure to listen to Kyle Machulis' talk about teledildonics in his "Really, Really, Really Intimate Interfaces" talk. I've been joking about teledildonics to my friends for many moons, only to be met with incredulous looks of "Really?". Little did I know that teledildonics is real… read moreFuturetainment: The Asian Media Revolution
March 05 2008
My second day of ETech started off with Mike Walsh's "Futuretainment: The Asian Media Revolution" presentation. Mike presented a view of how young people in Asia consume media and how their experiences differ vastly from what kids in America and western Europe experience. read moreCute Cat Theory of Web Activism
March 05 2008
This afternoon I had the pleasure to listen to Ethan Zuckermann's presentation on the "Cute Cat Theory of Web Activism", which opened my eyes to a side of Web 2.0 technologies I'd never seen before. Ethan started his presentation with this thesis: Sufficiently usable read/write platforms will attract porn and… read moreHow billions of examples lead to better models of images and text
March 04 2008
Its time for my favorite conference of the year! ETech kicked off this morning to some awesome keynotes and moved straight into some killer sessions. The first session I attended was Peter Norvig's "How billions of examples lead to better models of images and text" presentation. Before I tell you… read moreJuly 27 2007
My last session of OSCON yesterday was Danese Cooper's "The Art of Community" panel talk with Karl Fogel, Jimmy Wales, Dawn Foster, Sulamita Garcia, Whurley, and Brian Behlendorf. This year Danese asked community oriented questions and let the various panel members jump in to answer the questions. Blogging panel presentations… read moreJuly 26 2007
After today's excellent OSCON keynote speeches I attended Adam Keys "People Hacks" presentation. Adam started with the disclaimer that the goal of this talk was not to manipulate people, but rather how you can change your behavior to foster improved communication when working with groups of people. Adam suggests using… read moreOSCON: Mozilla Firefox and the Internet as an Open Platform
July 26 2007
Yesterday at OSCON I attended Mitchell Baker's "Mozilla Firefox and the Internet as an Open Platform" presentation in which she talked about Mozilla's mission to ensure that the Internet stays open and healthy. She outlined the two ends of the spectrum of what the Internet could turn into in the… read moreOSCON: Performance Whack-a-mole
July 25 2007
Today, the main sessions of OSCON kicked off and after the keynotes I attended Josh Berkus' talk entitled "Performance Whack-a-mole". Since MusicBrainz relies on Postgres for its database back-end and I've had to deal with database performance issues, I'm keenly interested to learn the tricks of the trade. And since… read moreO'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing: Why Free Software Values Work for Business
July 25 2007
In the afternoon at the Executive Briefing Tim O'Reilly spoke with Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu/Canonical, in the "Why Free Software Values Work for Business" session. Like many conversations, this conversation veered off the main topic pretty quickly and started focusing on collaboration in the open source space. Mark… read moreO'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing: Eben Moglen berates Open Source
July 24 2007
Today I'm covering the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing at OSCON where Eben Moglen and Tim O'Reilly just finished their "Licensing in the Web 2.0 Era" interview. Unfortunately the interview veered off topic quickly when Eben started berating Tim O'Reilly for wasting 10 years with "Open Source". Eben believes that… read moreIntel releases the Threading Building Blocks Toolkit as Open Source
July 24 2007
Intel invited me to attend their super seekrit media event (read: booze & food) this evening. They didn't tell us anything about the topic of the event, so I decided to go check it out and see what sorts of food/drinks Intel had to offer. I wasn't thinking that their… read moreUbuntu Live: Exploiting Parallelism with Multicore
July 23 2007
I'm excited to be back in Portland for O'Reilly's Ubuntu Live and OSCON conferences! Today I'm covering the Ubuntu Live conference that focuses on the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Ubuntu has clearly taken the Linux world by storm and having a conference dedicated to Ubuntu sounds like a great idea. O'Reilly… read moreRecent Posts | All O'Reilly Posts
