Facing a takeover bid from Microsoft, Yahoo has pinned its hopes on new product launches from its best and brightest. In less than 11 hours, one of them, developer Tom Coates, will take the stage at ETech, Tim O'Reilly's conference outside San Diego. His mission: to roll out the long-delayed Fire Eagle, a system for announcing your physical location to other websites. Possibly. This evening, Coates has been announcing his location, and his situation, via Twitter. He's in Carlsbad, the site of the conference. Things are not going well: "Listening to Chopin. It is not calming me the fuck down. Grr!" In other Twitters, Coates moans about the number of tasks left to do. While he doesn't specify, it's hard to imagine he's doing anything but fixing bugs

Everyone's famous on the Internet! And the webstars really shine in Scott Beale's Wednesday photos from O'Reilly ETech 2006. In this edition, Ted Rheingold of Dogster, 3/4 of the Boing Boing crew, and an episode of escalating violence.

Deep into the quest to make actually attending the ETech conference unnecessary, attendees recap everything for the rest of us:

Backchannel backlash is swift and merciless. When Plum.com's Hans Peter played a loud REM track behind his ETech 2006 presentation, the IRC peanut gallery roasted him as he spoke.

Every good conference (or every terribly boring one) has its IRC channel, a chat room where attendees can trade notes or, more often, snark about the speaker. ETech 2006 attendees and non-attendees can access #etech on irc.freenode.net, but the conference is just winding down.

ETech 2006 rolls on, and Scott Beale keeps photographing the folks who make the Internet. Tuesday's highlights include Tim Bray's Indy outfit, Esther Dyson's spelling, and Jen King's primal scream.

In case you're missing the scintillating intellectual discourse of the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Kevin Burton kindly provides some news. Apparently Flickr developer Cal Henderson has his own classic Geeks Gone Wild pic:

Whoa, when did friendly ol' tech publisher Tim O'Reilly, of the grandfatherly beard:

The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference (or ETech for the impatient) is in full swing today, after a rousing start on Monday. The event sold out ages ago, but through the magic of Scott Beale's photography, we can pretend we made it in. (If you want to pretend you met Cory Doctorow and he loved your sci-fi story idea, have that fantasy on your own.) Here are highlights from Scott's meticulous Monday photojournalism.