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I spoke at Ignite Seattle last night. As always Brady Forrest did a great job putting together a great line up. The quality of the presentations has definitely gone up, perhaps people are getting used to the format. Jordan Schwartz talk on beekeeping was a big hit, and Keith Schorsch (formerly of Amazon) talked about how he got into the health social networking space because of his own experience with Lyme disease. Keith’s project Peer Wisdom is one of the one’s we consult with at Waggle Labs, it’s a great project.

For my presentation I talked about some of the work we’re doing with Pathable. The core idea is to provide people with tools for figuring out whom they should meet at social events: enabling strategic social networking. If you have a limited amount of time available to you, how do you figure out whom you should try and meet? Ideally, you would be able to do a live search query on a room, with questions like “who’s most similar to me, who’s doing really cool things, who’s the most fun” and a bright shiny arrow would appear over their heads.

There have been a few projects that have tried to solve this problem with technological solutions such as badges with RFID chips and proactive displays (see interrelativity) and hand-help devices (see spotme). These technologies are challenging however because most event organizers do not have the time or resources to distribute them to their attendees, they require participants to be standing by a display, and/or people find them cumbersome/distracting to use. For Pathable we are exploring how to integrate some of the more promising social tagging and social networking technologies with lightweight, old school, paper badges. We’re going to do our first full Pathable deployment at BizJam 2007.

If you are interested in participating, fill out a profile on Pathable , we’ll send you updates as we roll out browsing and visualization features.

first pic from expressobuzz

Last night was Dorkbot , tonight is Ignite, tomorrow is Bill Beaty weird science night at Museum of Mysteries, and there’s a science fiction convention down by SeaTac NorWesCon . Last night, at Dorkbot, I heard Bre Pettis is heading out into the Eastern Washington this weekend to send a balloon very, very high into the sky. (They need a truck if anyone wants to tag along…)

It’s enough to make any one’s mind explode! I talked about my art meets geek meets psychology obsession with Oracles last night at Dorkbot (try the online version, here). Other hightlights from last night: Meghan Trainor gave us the update on her RFID meets clay meets performance art collective Accelerator, Michael Snyder told us how he’s been warcycling for wifi hotspots in seattle on his bicycle, and Joseph Gray showed us how you can create 3D light sculptures with a projector and clever masking. Joseph organizes Open Lab at 911 Media, which looks worth checking out.

Tonight I’ll be talking about how we are using social tagging in our Pathable project at Ignite. Too, too much fun. Looks like there’ll be a lot of great talks, not to mention a paper airplane contest.

From Meghan Trainor site

I gave a talk at Ignite (See below post) on Dorkbot, trying to inspire folks to innovate on the intersection between art and technology. Pic from bre.

My favorite talks were Scott Berkin’s, talking about the real nature of innovation as being more collaborative that folks like to admit, Jonah Burke talking about the darful wall, and Peter Brown, talking about Reality Allstarz, which was just made public as a beta last week. Of course, I’m biased toward Peter’s talk because not only is he my significant other but i’ve been helping him out on the project. How could i not ? He’s completely obsessed with it and it’s a very cool site, right up my alley as a social technology buff. It’s a game where you send your friends challenges and then document completing them with pictures, video, and stories. Be sure to check out the Reality Allstarz blog. Now that it’s public I’m excited to be able to talk about our experiences with it.