The Macworld Podcast heads south toward the future this week. More specifically, I’m in San Diego for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference 2006, an annual event focusing on high-tech trends.
This year’s conference focuses on the Attention Economy, a phrase dealing with efforts to streamline information consumption. I sat in on a few sessions I’d like to call your attention to—everything from discussions of the Firefox extension Greasemonkey to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We’ll close out the show with a look at future of multi-touch user interfaces, including an interview with Jeff Han of New York University, talking about his research in this field.
Listen to episode 31
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Show notes
• The first excerpt in this podcast comes from Mark Pilgrim, author of Greasemonkey Hacks. He presented a session on Greasemonkey, a Firefox extension that allows you to remix the Web by adding your own JavaScripts to any Web page. You can install Greasemonkey as well as related scripts.
• The second excerpt from the O’Reilly conference features Felipe Cabrera of Amazon, who talks about Amazon’s new Mechanical Turk service, named for the 18th century hoax that purported to be a chess-playing mechanical device.
• In addition to Amazon’s Cabrera, we also hear from Nathan McFarland of CastingWords.com, a new startup that uses Mechanical Turk to create transcripts of podcasts.
• Finally, Jeff Han talks about his research on multi-touch user interfaces. (The embedded link will show the video I refer to during the podcast.)
Music credits
“Basic” by Epicte the Elemental. Want to hear more of his music? Need a DJ in the Washington, D.C. area? E-mail him at epicte [at] gmail [dot] com.