Traditionally the opening keynotes at eTech have been first thing in the morning on Tuesday, like, 8am in the morning. This has been a good way to kick things off but a lot of people got there late and missed parts of them, but also required people to get into town the night before so people have always had something to say about it.

This year they tried something a little different and had the opening Keynotes on Monday night from about 7:30 - 10PM. All day I heard people talking about what a great idea this was and we actually rushed out of dinner in order to make the entire thing.

ETech chair Rael Dornfest started things by twisting the "small pieces loosely joined" slogan that we've heard countless times into something more representative of emerging by saying "small pieces that are yet to be loosely joined." He went on to explain that this conference is all about ideas colliding - it's as much about the conversations as the actual talks - what's happening in the lobby and as much as in the halls. Back in 2004 I pointed out that the lobby was as interesting, if not more so than the panels and it's cool to see that morphing into the actual programming.

Rael asks us to "look at the person to you left, then to your right, one of the people sitting next to you has a really great idea and you should get to know them, especially if you aren't one of those people with an idea!" He spends a little time on previous conference topics and how that comes back to attention - to topic of this year. Lots of talk about things fighting for our attention and how the quote "like butter, spread thin over too much bread" by Bilbo Baggins actually makes sense for a lot of us in this world right now.

He wraps things up and passes on to Tim O'Reilly for The O'Reilly Radar. Tim starts off noting that the "O'Reilly Radar" is the things he's interested in at the moment, and how many of the people here have heard these ideas before but they are things that I'm still interested in - Watching the Alpha Geeks tops out for those things. This really means finding interesting people and technologies, amplifying them, and putting them out there with publishing, online, and conferences. He says this isn't new and backs that up with a photo of Steve Jobs and wooden Apple I - skips through a few things and then to one of Phillip Torrone with his secondlife rig which Tim calls a "homebrew harness." Um, yeah. He says that "The future belongs to info businesses using the web as a platform" and shows a slide of top sites on the internet with # of employees. Most of them have several thousand except Craigslist which has 18. The web is driving Cragislist and that's important to note. Another example are tag clouds which are on sites everywhere now, these are driven by users and users create the value for the other users.

He points out that Alexa just opened up their crawl and Sergie Brin at Google didn't understand why anyone would want to do that. Intelligence Augmentation, not Artificial Intellegence. We're not making computers more intellegent, we're using them to make oursleves more intellegent.

He talks a bit about Make Magazine which he calls Martha Stewart for Geeks and talks about how people are using the physical world more and more for this kind of thing.(shows off the voice control blender ) and follows with some photos of crap people built at burning man and shows off images from a party that took place in Second Life and in the real world - that being in real life there was a large screen showing the party in Second Life, and in Second Life there was a panel showing a live video feed of the real party.

You know, it could just be me, but I'm so not into Second Life. Sorry Beth!

Cory Doctorow is up next just to introduce Bruce Sterling - "bruce sterling is a machine for apiring geeks" - he says while wearing a skirt (utilikilt) - blames Ben Hammersly for it. He talks about how "The Hacker Crackdown" which was about the founding of the EFF, and was available free online when it was printed and how many books have followed this idea. He mentions Bruce's new work "Shaping Things" and says it is a thin volume that "will make your head flip open and your brain jump out and do little dances of joy!"

Unfortunately Bruce's speech didn't quite live up to that as the back channel quickly pointed out. In fact, here's the complete IRC transcripts from the keynote and you can watch it go downhill. It's not that Bruce isn't an interesting speaker, far from it, it's a combination of the way we talks and the through flow we works with, that this talk included a lot of material from many of his recent talks, and that frankly, this was just too complex of a lecture for post 9PM on opening day. People were tired, hungry, and losing interest very quickly. I'm sure if he had given that same talk the next day just before lunch it would have been much better received so timing was really the biggest issue working against him.

He wraps things up and people flood out of the room for drinks and foodstuffs. Sessions begin again tomorrow at 8:30am - more news shortly there after.