Conferenza: ETech Wrap-up: The 3 Threes

ETech is already a fading memory, but on the plane jetting home on Friday, I tried to boil it down to the 3 Threes:

Three people
1. Kathy Sierra -- Kathy gave an incomparable tutorial on Creating Passionate Users (see her blog of the same name). I had not known of Kathy prior to ETech, but she is awesome. I suggested to several people at the show who missed her presentation that any product developers who were there would henceforth mark time as being before and after Kathy.
2. Jo-Ann Eisnor -- Her brief intro to Platial during the Where 2.0 press lunch was great, and the way she stared down certain rabid members of the fifth estate demostrated a personal gravitas that belies her years.
3. Linda Stone -- I have known about Linda Stone for years, and have written literally dozens of posts that deal with Continuous Partial Attention, a term that she coined some time ago. Seeing her speak was in fact one of the primary reasons that I attended Etech, and she did not let me down. I am also getting to interview her next week, as part of the 'on ramp' to the Collaborative Technology Conference 2006, where I am serving as a member of the advisory board and where Nancy will be speaking, in June.
Three themes
1. Doc Searls -- as an outgrowth of the Attention Economy theme driving the conference -- did one better with the Intention Economy. Although he didn't present that topic there, he wrote it while in attendence. See this for my thoughts.
2. Tagging continues to explode, as Dave Sifry stated, during his Data Dump presentation: 28% of blog posts have explicit rel="tag" microformatted tags, which is a leading indicator of where we migth be going.
3. The Unconference Meme -- immediately prior to ETech, a number of people -- including Dave Winer and others -- chimed in on the movement away from conventional formal conferences (which ETech in many ways epitomizes) toward 'lower podium' events, up to and including Camp-formatted get-togethers. I must have had some sort of discussion along those lines 20 times each day in San Diego. The culmination of that theme was the spontaneous, ad hoc Etech Bar Camp that just happened in the third floor foyer of the conference hotel on Thursday. People were tired of the session shuffle, even if you could get into the sessions: they were packed. So, wildflowers were sprouting right in the middle of the formal garden.
Three companies
1. Kathy Sierra's Wickedly Smart group is a fascinating label at OReilly, which has up-ended preconceptions about learning and book design. I am hoping to pull them into various product strategy engagements in the future.
2. I had dinner with Richard Lusk, the founder and CEO of Foldera (full disclosure: yes, he paid for the dinner. And the wine, too). I intend to do a full review of the product, next week. I was astonished by the level of buzz that was generated about the product, based on -- in his view -- the mentions of a few bloggers. (Of course, he might be practicing the Guy Kawasaki approach to blogger relations, and simply pouring on the praise.)
3. I had lunch with Nathan McFarland of Casting Words, one of the companies working with Yahoo's Mechanical Turk system. The company provides transcription services from audio sources, such as audio from podcasts. The mechanism is principally stay-at-home moms, and the fee structure is amazingly low. I am fascinated with creating a market like this.