The Call for Participation for the 2006 edition of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference [aka ETech] is open. I’ll be blogging more about and around the conference as we build it over the coming months.
We’re five years into the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, covering peer-to-peer networks to person-to-person mobile messaging, web services to weblogs, big screen digital media to small screen mobile gaming, hardware hacking to content remixing. We’ve hacked, blogged, ripped, remixed, tracked back, and tagged to the nth. And as ETech marches on, the stuff of which it is made shows no sign of abating: bandwidth continues to broaden, cycles are going spare, storage grows ever larger and cheaper, and content keeps pouring from the firehose.
This year’s challenge is not about generating digital data–we have more than enough already. It’s time to do something with that data. As organic creatures with fallible and finite perception systems, complex desires, and an ever-decreasing amount of time, how do we visualize the data, filter it, remix it, and access it in ways meaningful to us? The opportunity created by the massive data web is one of social good, of personal benefit, and of business advantage.