Tim gave his now traditional etech keynote covering what’s on his “radar” at the moment, given his observations of “alpha geeks.”

The O’Reilly philosophy is to identify and amplify the work of people innovating from the edges. This isn’t new, nor is it limited to tech– pushing the envelope is fun, witness the evolution of skis to snowboards and extreme sports. This is the impulse he looks for, but in the virtual space.

The filters for identifying innovation include that it:

• is on track with long term trends
• is disruptive (yeah baby)
• is seeing accelerated uptake
• is receiving grassroots support, coming from the bottom up
• inspires passion
• has deeper social implications
• would benefit from better information facilitating its adoption and use

Pattern recognition is an important theme (note Jeff Veen’s identification of same in Web 2.0 UI design).

According to Tim, the key to competitive advantage is the “extent to which users add their own data to that provided by the companies.” He likens this to the Mechanical Turk which was technology with a real person inside. It’s the people inside the machine that count. The question is– how do we get them there?

Some examples: The Amazon Mechanical Turk, which is essentially an API that allows developers to directly work real human intelligence into applications. Also, look at CastingWords (the connection is clear enough, but just in case see http://turkers.castingwords.com/.

So we have the human experience shaping the app with tagging and folksonomy, and people literally in the app.

Bionic software is a new trend, enhancing our agency, taking empowerment to the next technological level. Witness Boxxet, kind of a multi-stream Digg. This is facilitated at a higher level by opening up the data pool, as Alexa has with Web Crawl. Tim shared that he had discussed this with Sergei Brin, who didn’t see the need when people had access to Google Alerts. Sergei asked: why open the database that way? Tim’s perspective: Google doesn’t get it.

The point here is that this is intelligence augmentation– IA, not AI.

Another huge trend that will upswell is hacking the physical world. Make Magazine has quickly become a top-seller– Martha Stewart for Geeks. It’s what Bruce Sterling has called “instrumenting the world”– the combination of ubiquitous sensors, instrumentation, and rfid. Documenting the process– and retaining history– need a lot of work. Instructables goes a little way towards addressing this (despite being run by Tim’s daughter’s boyfriend).

It should be fun– check out the movie of Blendie. Watch for the convergence of the ideas of Make, real-world hacking, fab labs, prototyping, virtual worlds.

The Internet as platform, of course, but combined with attention– watching what user’s do and consume and using that as filtering agents.

[ruminate etech etech06 make fab radar timoreilly attention ia turk innovation alphageek]