Yesterday I was at a conference about Web 2.0, with speakers from MySpace, Yahoo and more. The gist is that the marketing industry is terrified that something is happening they haven't yet branded, and they are desparate to 'increase mind share' and 'leverage the values of traditional media into the new social networks'. I may have to write an article about it.

The most interesting argument was from the Yahoo! speaker, who had done years of research at MIT on computer vision. His epiphany came when he realised 'why create computer vision when there are millions of people out there with real eyes that you can put to work for you' (i'm paraphrasing). Well, that's the plan - corporations will spend money creating enticing environments where you are put to work (maybe unknowingly, but somehow willingly) categorising and tagging content for them, helping them refine their products, and all the rest of it.

"O brave new world, that has such people in't!"