The O'Reilly Radar is an extended meditation on William Gibson's insight that "the future is here; it's just not evenly distributed yet." We look around us at things happening today that tell us something unique about the future we can expect. The first thread we're unraveling comes from threadless.com, in a continuation of our discussion from the first part of the morning. Threadless is a user-generated-design, on-demand manufacturing business. Users submit designs for t-shirts and other items, other users vote with their wallet, and when there's enough demand, the products are created. Threadless has sold out of every product they've ever created.

But there's a connection between threadless and our next presenter as well. Why would threadless users work so hard to create designs for a company they don't work for? Maybe for the same reason that bloggers are experimenting with atten.tv, a platform that lets others watch you surfing. We're all trying to make our mark in the world. Seth Goldstein, the founder of attentiontrust.org is fascinated with attention, and he's betting that others are too. How much would you pay to watch what celebrity bloggers are watching? Is atten.tv one more step towards David Brin's transparent society?

Jeff Jonas comes at privacy from the other side. He's a master at finding people who don't want to be found, including criminals and terrorists. His "Non Obvious Relationship Awareness" (NORA) technology finds hidden relationships in social networks and unmasks false identities through "entity resolution." He's also a master of what I believe is one of the essential twenty-first century skills: extracting meaning from very large databases.