Web innovators set groundwork for Net life of tomorrow

Traffic jams across Silicon Valley are fewer and farther between these days, with nearly 200,000 jobs lost at companies around town, and no hope of a technology spending pick-up anywhere in sight.

But for hundreds of do-it-yourself technology developers drawn to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference here during the past week, prospects have never seemed brighter.

"Everyone here is talking about how they can hook my doodly up to your what’s-it," said Rael Dornfest, a software hacker, author of technical manuals and conference organizer. "There is a sense of possibility here that I haven’t seen before."

The excitement springs from breakthroughs that have come from small-scale online collaborations between programmers outside the straightjacket of corporate software development.

Many of the attendees are programmers for whom building the next generation of Internet software is an avocation. An advance by one is seized on by others, then many more.

This crowd works nights and weekends, whatever their day job, building Web publishing systems or music file-sharing programs inspired by Napster. Neither browsers nor instant messaging would exist were it not for this spirit.

"I don’t think a lot of this stuff is going to be commercial in the way marketing people care about. A lot of this stuff is creating value for one another," Clay Shirky, a New York University new media studies professor and evangelist for grassroots software design, told conference attendees.

But this is no fringe-fest, judging from who attends.

Software architects from BEA Systems, IBM and Microsoft, as well as computer pioneers such as Alan Kay, who helped coin the term "personal computer," and Lotus founder Mitch Kapor came to prove they still have what it takes to be geeks.

Workshops discussed what it takes to build healthy groups online or how to hack programmable computer chips. There was talk of nano-scale "roboflies," the ant-like behavior of Internet users, and the need to make networks dumber so devices can act smarter.

"It’s interesting to hear about technology that may have been overlooked," Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder and chief executive, said in between banter about his company’s business strategy with other conference participants.

Focus on what works

Buzzwords fly freely where everyone is comfortable conversing in computer code. Hot topics go by names like RSS, social software and rich Internet applications.

RSS, or Rich Site Summary, is an embarrassingly simple technology that allows Web developers to feed headlines, links and article summaries from one Web site to another, opening up new realms of automated collaboration. Many serious programmers consider this child’s play, but find it hard to argue with the pace of innovations springing from four-year-old RSS.

Social software is the new catch-all phrase for simplified tools — some new, some old — that allow groups to collaborate online. Rich Internet applications translates into fancy Web browsers with zippy graphics and other multimedia features.

"It’s back to scratching your own itch again," said Dornfest, co-author of the recently published book Google Hacks, and developer of his own pet project, a content management system called Blosxom that, with just 135 lines of code, offers a simple way for people to maintain Web sites.

The latest buzzwords join the industry mantra of "Web services," a term that everyone from Bill Gates to the entry-level network administrator has a hard time defining.

Web services take advantage of software standards such as XML to allow Web sites to automatically share data and other content. The term covers everything from the simplest machine-to-machine conversations to elaborate plans to conduct big business operations online.

Amazon.com showcased how it now allows thousands of Web site developers to take pieces of Amazon’s technology and build it into their own sites. Such sites take care of their own customers, but have Amazon handle all the e-commerce behind the scenes in exchange for a small sales cut.

Amazon and search directory Google have taken an open Web services approach that is popular with independent-minded programmers that crowded the conference. By contrast, Microsoft and Macromedia argued the best way to wipe away complexity is to adopt their software as the centerpiece of Web services.

Paying their own way

Those looking for discussions of business models and return on investment took the wrong freeway off-ramp.

In a gloomy recent mediation that is representative, Pip Coburn, the global technology strategist at investment bank UBS Warburg, said that, "There appears to be no substantive emerging technology poised to lead us out of our struggles.

"We see nothing of major import that is poised for much of anything," he said of technologies ranging from Web services to wireless Internet phones to molecular-scale technology.

The BlackBerry set — a stray investment banker or venture capitalist or two — stops by the O’Reilly conference, but doesn’t stay long. Their e-mail pagers remind them of more pressing business elsewhere. Four years ago, these financial types scoured such events for signs of the new, new thing.

But few technology developers here are dependent on venture capitalists or a thriving stock market to carry out their designs. Many of the projects people are developing now started out three years ago, after the tech boom disintegrated and left more time for them to pursue their personal priorities.

Now they teach themselves, sharing pieces of software code over the Net, picking ideas up off Web sites like Slashdot, finding the training they need out of guides they pick up from publishers like O’Reilly — books that mix programming pep-talks with dense computer code lessons.

Kevin Burton of San Francisco is putting the finishing touches on software that ranks the most popular readings of friends and colleagues on the Web. He plans to finish what he’s calling NewsMonster (http://www.newsmonster.org) within weeks.

Greg Elin, of Montclair, N.J., has built an innovative method for annotating elements of photographs in Web databases, overcoming a fundamental difficulty digital camera users have looking for a way to catalog their pictures.

His project can be found on his Web site (http://www.fotonotes.net).

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2003-04-29-web-gathering_x.htm