I do not want to go to the O'Reilly ETech conference next week, because that involves leaving my comfortable desk chair. But those scoundrels at O'Reilly have thwarted me by putting on a conference with a mix of practical business advice and weird philosophical hocus-pocus that I find irresistible. I've been checking out the conference schedule and here's the programming that jumps out at me as most compelling.

The Practical
Amazon Web Services: Building a "Web-Scale Computing" Architecture to Meet the Variable Demands of Today's Business. Amazon.com describes how companies can build scalable Web infrastructures by leasing services from Amazon.com. An infomercial, but an informative one.

The Making of Virtual Earth Microsoft will describe how Live Search 3D Map works.

Incantations for Muggles: The Role of Ubiquitous Web 2.0 Technologies in Everyday Life. This one's about how ordinary people use the Internet. I'm going to this one mainly because of who the presenter is: danah boyd (yes, she spells her name that way). I've been reading her blog for a couple of months now, it's slow-moving and smart.

Irresistible Hocus-Pocus
Flickr for Office Docs - Content Syndication through ThinkFree Doc Exchange Says here: "Come see how ThinkFree Doc Exchange creates the Flickr equivalent for office documents." Because everybody wants to see your spreadsheets.

Collective Intelligence, Indeterminacy, and the Illusion of Control. I'm not entirely sure what this presentation is about, but it sounds intriguing enough that I have to go. Here's part of the description:

The controls on a word processor or spreadsheet are essentially deterministic. If you click "right align" you know the text is going to swing over to the right side of the page. The same user input always has the same output, barring bugs.

However, social (or rather "sociomimetic") technologies, which draw on intelligence from across a network to infer what information is relevant to each person, don't behave like this. They rely on increasingly complex algorithms which aren't directly comprehensible to the user and lack any direct link between cause and effect. A slight change in one parameter can lead to a radical and unpredictable change in output.

Apparently, the presentation will look at how you design satisfactory user interfaces when users don't really have any idea how the application works. Sounds intriguing.

The Magic Kingdom: Maximal Autonomy or Remote Control Creche? I can't figure out what this is about at all, but it's got a Microsoft guy going up against Cory Doctorow, co-author of the Boing Boing blog, Internet activist, science fiction writer, InformationWeek contributor, and smartest guy in the room. Any room. Sure to be an intellectual slugfest -- two men enter, one man leaves.

Somewhere In-Between
Creating Alternate Realities How gaming companies are solving problems that can be applied to other technology, signals and brands. Level up and kill ogres while doing online banking?

That's just the programming that jumps out at me at first glance at the schedule, I'm sure everything will change when I'm on the ground at the conference. It always does.

Are you going to ETech? What programming and events look most interesting to you? If you feel like getting together, send me an e-mail at mwagner@cmp.com or give me a call at (213) 514-5597.