The theme at etech was technology as magic, and many sessions took it head on. Seth Raphael‘s talk on Sufficiently advanced magic was my favorite session with the word magic in the title. He mixed up magic performance, entertainment and techno-philosophy and lived up to the conference theme.

Danah Boyd and Jane McGonigal asked the deepest questions at the conference, exploring the impact of technology on people but from two different perspectives (Danah explored the impact of social networking on people, especially less-technical people, and Jane challenged the audience to take responsibility for the things we make actually making people happier). I was happy these excellent sessions were about the impact of technology, rather than about technology itself (which often bores me to tears).

But some sessions went meta on the magic theme – They tried so hard to explain magic, offer philisophies on magic, or deconstruct how technology approximates magic, that there wasn’t much air left in the room – the sessions were decidedly unmagical and abstractly academic. I thought Seth did it right, but given how many smart people struggled to handle the topic he made it look easier than it was. David Brunton had it right in his talk on cellular automata, but the audience seemed stunned by what I thought was a very funny presentation.

And along the way, for some reason, the idea of UI metaphors got roughed up – in 3 of the sessions i saw they picked on the idea of metaphors – and I’ll offer a defense in a future blog post (hint: web pages, links and buttons are all metaphors).

Best demo: Paul and Lelia at Idee gave the best demo I saw: their image searching tool blew my mind. Otherwise I didn’t see much that stuck with me – there was commentary about emerging things, and talks on why X or Y should or shouldn’t emerge, but not that much in the memorable demo department. MSR had some great demos, including the children’s programming tool Boku (video) and a mobile web browser that doesn’t suck (no easy task).

I did a tutorial on How to innovate on time (Slides 4mb ppt) and a short talk on the myths of innovation – both were fun and had good crowds. Tom Coates was both bold and generous enough to correct my erroneous story of the origins of the word architect, but otherwise my tales of innovations past were well received.

Thanks to anyone who saw me speak and to Rael, Vee and the O’Reilly folks for having me there.

You can find Slides from other speakers can be found here plus coverage and photos.