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Wish I was There: ETech 2005

The ETech Butterfly (Moth?).Just as I was about to cut the Future Tense blog (from the Public Radio show of the same name) from my list, Jon Gordon steps up with a few good stories. Of course, he had good material to start with. He’d been at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and it looks like it was quite a show.

Many2Many has a couple notable stories about Etech events, including Wikipedia and the Future of Social Computing and Folksonomy, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Mess. (Yes, Many2Many is all about social computing).

Folks from Flickr were there presenting on web services (open up and let go!) and participating in the folksonomy presentation.

The geeks from labs at Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were there talking up their recent work. Yahoo recently jumped deep into the social software mix with Yahoo 360. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos showed up to talk up “open source searching.” From Future Tense:

It’s designed to do for Web searching what RSS has done for Web content. From the A9 Web site:

[quote] “OpenSearch is a collection of technologies, all built on top of popular open standards, to allow content providers to publish their search results in a format suitable for syndication.”

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I haven’t been paying much attention to A9, but this notion of “search aggregation” via open standards is really exciting to me. My question? Where are libraries in all this? This is exciting, challenging.

Also related: Gizmodo reports the Ambient Office Dashboard is available at ThinkGeek.