And so, with the initial program online, registration open, and seats filling up fast, I thought I’d start writing up some regular release notes. I’ll be pointing out what’s new and notable, who has been added to the mix, and how they fit into this year’s story.

ETech kicks off this year as it did last with opening night salvos. I’ll be introducing the conference, talking about this year’s theme, and highlighting some of what you’ll be seeing as the week rolls on. Tim’s O’Reilly Radar, a mainstay of our conference, is an always-inspiring tour of the themes, memes, technologies, and people Tim is connecting in surprising new ways.

This year Tim and I will be joined by “mathemagician” Arthur Benjamin, professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. Arthur is known for his ability to perform calculations in his head before you can even remember which button on your calculator watch actually brings up the calculator.

In addition, some of the people and sessions we’ve just added to the program include: Jane McGonigal known for research and development in collaborative reality-based gaming, David Hornik and posse running “1/2 Baked”, a “participatory exercise in entrepreneurial improv theatre,” another edition of the Make Fest by our very own makers of Make magazine, and a plenary by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels on some of the amazing applications being run on Amazon’s EC2 and S3 platforms.

I’ll be blogging more about some of the many additions and alterations to the program we are making to keep the content emerging and interesting. In the meantime, I do encourage you to check out the amazing lineup thus far and get yourself registered. We had to close down registration last year, being completely full up; and it looks to be much the same situation this year.

Early registration ends this coming Monday, February 5th!

I’m thrilled to announce that registration is now open for the 2007 edition of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. ETech is being held once again in beautiful San Diego, California on March 26-29, 2007.

This year’s theme is “Sufficiently advanced technology”, in reference of course to Arthur C. Clarke’s third law of prediction: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

In 2007, we expect Internet access to be instant, music collections to fit into our pockets, and communication to be constant no matter where we are. Technology is tightly woven into our lives; so well-integrated at times we scarcely notice it. And yet, there are innovators, hackers, and thinkers in our midst plotting revolutions — in some cases, simply by reexamining the assumptions underlying the technology we take for granted today. We’ll be examining those technologies that have silently slipped into the realm of magic (Did anyone notice that the dream of ubiquitous wifi access actually happened?) as well as those on the verge of doing so (Wii, anyone?).

We’ve already lined up an exceptional set of tutorials including a Community Marketing workshop with Tara Hunt; MMO game-building with the creators of Puzzle Pirates; Applied Web Heresies with my favorite heretic, Avi Bryant; Scott Berkin’s Innovating on Time; Amy Jo Kim’s application of gaming mechanics to social software (a stellar session last year, now a tutorial); and the return of Kathy Sierra with more on creating passionate users and Marc Hedlund on entrepreneuring for geeks.

And our speaker’s list ranges from Mental Math (just because it’s solvable doesn’t mean it isn’t any less magical) with mathemagician Arthur Benjamin to the coming age of magic with user-experience expert Mike Kuniavsky; Lee Felsenstein’s talking paper to BBC New Media’s Tom Loosemore’s work on a 7-day record-everything DVR.

We’re still building the program — and will be until the last possible moment to bring you the freshest, most up-to-date and interesting people, projects, and technologies we can — so please do drop me a line with any suggestions you might have about what you’d like to see in the program.

Upload par-baked application… Amazon will bake (S3) and serve (EC2).

A corollary to ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’ is that sometimes users have to resort to what I call ‘computer voodoo.’ You don’t know why it works, you barely care how it works, but you find yourself doing the strangest things because it just seems to work. I’m talking about things like: smacking a PC every 5 seconds for an hour to keep it from stalling on a hard drive reformat (with nary a problem after the reformat); or figuring out the only way to get a PC partially fried by lightning to recognize an ethernet card, after booting into Windows, is to start the computer by yanking the card out and shoving it back in (thereby starting the boot processes). What wacky stuff have you done that makes no obvious sense, but just works?

This puts me in mind of the wifi-dowsing performed by attendees at conferences who wander about, open laptop in hand, trying desperately to get a better signal and faster throughput.

And as a further warm-up to this year’s focus on technology that’s “indistinguishable from magic,” I point you at a wonderful bibliography of magic in UI design assembled by Mike Kuniavsky, most recently known for his well-dugg magic wand prototype.

Leaving O’Reilly the company, however, doesn’t mean leaving the O’Reilly family. I’ve always said that if I wandered off at some point I’d still do ETech; and that’s precisely what I’ll be doing. I will be chairing the program of the 2007 edition of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, as well as continuing to be part of the O’Reilly Radar. (I’ll blog more about the conference shortly; the ink on the call for participation just now drying.)

As I’m now spending the lion’s share of my time on my new company, we’ve added Brady Forrest and more recently Allison Randal to the Radar team to continue exploring new technologies and reaching out to interesting people and companies to bring them more clearly onto the O’Reilly Radar.

When I think of just what to say at this point, only one word comes to mind: Thanks. Thank you O’Reilly for making me feel at home from the moment I walked in. Thanks to all the O’Reillians who made me all the better for my stay, in particular my mentors Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty and O’Reilly Radar co-conspirators. And thanks to all of you in the noosphere who’ve built and thought so much for me to explore and and learn.

Entrepreneurially yours, Rael

This brings to mind the original “build your own schedule” system of the original Perl conference (if memory serves). It was heavy, required a lot of effort to maintain, and quickly fell by the wayside. Compare that with the confluence of Ruby on Rails-style (or your preferred brand of) agile development and the ubiquity of iCal (.ics), RSS, and a plethora of other microformats that make this sort of afternoon hack not only possible, but relatively simple to pull off.

Update: Here’s my schedule. You’ll notice OSCAL can’t actually solve conflicts in your own schedule ;-)

Congrats to Jeff, the MM and AP teams, and Google.

Enter your innovative application in the eBay Developer Challenge 2006 to show off your skills. You could win $5,000, or many other great prizes. Or gather a team together of up to three other developers to compete for a set of matching Xbox 360™ game consoles. Either way, if you’re a Grand Prize winner, your application will be featured at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, California, March 6-9, 2006.

Tuck into eBay’s web services and build your own vertical search (think Rollyo for stuff), mash eBay up with Yahoo! Maps, Google Talk or any another web service(s), hack eBay alerts into your TiVo, …

Here’s a chance to turn that late-night hacking you’re doing anyway into cash, brill prizes, possibly a trip to ETech–not to mention the props you’ll garner. The contest ends two weeks from now (at the end of January), so crack those knuckles, grab a soda or three (not to be considered any form of professional medical advice), and dive in!

(Aside: If you’re using Ruby on Rails for anything approaching deployment, be sure to read the writings of Mike and my friend James Duncan Davidson on the subject: I couldn’t have made it through the past few days without their insights.)

Each new product added becomes a “stock”.
Chart_pie If a product’s Amazon’s sales rank improves, its stock price goes up. And vice-versa.
Chart_pie Traders buy, sell, short, and cover.

Here’s this month’s Oprah’s Book Club choice: “A Million Little Pieces”. Very nice!

Oh, and it’s YARoR (Yet Another Ruby on Rails) site… who’d have thunk it.