onfocus

According to TVEyes, today's NewsHour on PBS has a story about weblogs. And here's the RealAudio of the story.

I can't wait to see Winged Migration, it looks fun. I hope it hits a theater nearby. Here's a trailer.

I'm glad I can finally talk about Amazon Hacks. I've received several great hacks via email already. (Thanks everyone who sent something in. I'm still checking all of them out. Keep them coming!) And it's great to hear general excitement about the book. This email made me laugh out loud:

...That machete makes your Amazon Hacks cover the most TERRIFYING COMPUTER BOOK COVER I'VE EVER SEEN...

Maybe O'Reilly is trying to scare people into buying it. ;) Though I do think it's one of the best tools you can literally "hack" with; out of all the hacks covers so far. How else would you get through the Amazon jungle?

Some things I learned at eTech:

• FOAF is on everyone's mind. It came up in just about every session I attended.
• Latent Semantic Indexing could improve information retrieval (and information context) with a bit more development.
• Alan Kay and Clay Shirky both showed that it's important to study the history of your industry. "Learning from experience is one [step] up from remembering." - Shirky
• Small, simple bits of software working together can be more powerful than a top-down, engineered solution.
• People use social software to connect with each other, not with the space in which they're gathering.
• Technology has a strong emotional component. "I'd like my work to touch people."
• Social rules can't be baked entirely into the software.
• Geography is finally starting to be mapped virtually, with an emerging ability to "annotate space".
• If RDF could be made a bit easier to work with, great things could happen.
• There are great tools that help publish more to the Web; no great tools to help us consume more of the Web.
• Hacking hardware is an accessible art.
• DRM (Digital "Restrictions" Management) software in conjunction with the DMCA circumvents current copyright laws. (Goes far beyond copyright's intended restrictions.)

It was a fantastic conference.

I added a few more photos to my eTech gallery. (I'm back in Oregon now. Luckily the drive up was uneventful!)

Here are some photos from eTech so far.

Battle of the Blog Builders: "The company behind one of the weblog world's most popular tools is preparing to launch a new service which will attack market leaders Blogger.com head on." The new tool will be called TypePad. Congrats Ben, Mena, and (now!) Anil!

So the cat was let out of the bag today at the eTech Amazon Workshop. I'm working on a book for O'Reilly called Amazon Hacks. They distributed a confidential draft (actually printed in block letters across the top!) printing of a chapter from the book to everyone, and I attempted to talk to everyone about a couple of cool hacks that are in the book already. (I'm not so great at public speaking...but I hope I got something across beyond the fact that I was nervous.) They didn't have enough copies of the sample chapter to go around, and I even gave up my copy to someone who didn't get one the first time around.

Now that the project is public, I'm going to step up my efforts at finding code for the book. If you have a bit of cool Amazon hackery, let me know. It doesn't have to be anything formal, hence the word Hacks in the title. If you've written some unusual way to work with Amazon, let me know! (Or let me know if you just have a dream Amazon feature...maybe it could evolve into a code hack.) You can submit a hack at the O'Reilly site if you want to go the official route. Or just send me an email directly. Like the other Hacks books, contributors are fully credited and have a bio in the book.