Only Dead Fish

Exhaust Data

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There was something about Adrian's thought-provoking post on the digital blurring between objects and people that reminded me of reading Grant McCracken's thoughts a couple of years ago on 'Phatic Communication' - the kind of communication that is all about sharing feelings or sociability as opposed to hard information or ideas. Says Adrian:

"things like Twitter and Facebook, flatten out the distinctions between people, objects, companies and ideas as all of these things (and more) now have the ability to create a profile, collect friends/followers, describe their tastes, preferences and affiliations and generally build data that describes them and their social graph"

As we make our way around the web, we leave vapour trails of data that define us. And not only the more tangible, obvious data like the profiles we create, the files we download, the websites we've visited, the searches we undertake, the videos we watch, the things we buy. But also the less tangible, 'phatic' data like the comments we leave, the interactions, the status updates, the tweets, the wall posts, the stuff we write.

Adrian makes the point that it is interesting to speculate about how language may hold us back from seeing the new possibilities that come from objects, ideas and people interacting at the same level. It's equally interesting to speculate about where an increasingly sophisticated understanding and application of this kind of 'exhaust data' might take us.

Data And Seduction

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Two posts in a row about data. I'm definitely finding my inner geek here ;-). As the sophistication of our use of data improves, so the interplay between the art and the science involved with the whole business of content production and consumption, advertising, marketing and design becomes more interesting. They seem to come from such different places. Analytics, algorythm and optimisation meets creativity, aesthetic and emotion.

This excellent presentation from Matt Jones of Dopplr about working with data in a 'designerly' way deals handsomely with this dynamic. As the flow of data escalates, and is increasingly derived from the things we own and use (I rather like the phrase "data shadows") we can apply data in ever more artful ways to enable better understanding and to see previously invisible behaviours from 'the real world' (and apply social tools to them), giving rise to a 'culture of visualisation'. Good stuff.

Data as Seductive Material, Spring Summit, Umeå March09

View more PDF documents from Matt Jones.

Mediocre Doesn't Cut It Anymore

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Some nice, succinct slides from Mike Arauz around 10 key digital principles which, sadly, are all too often missed. I'd like to add another, inspired by a thought from Hugh, that 'Boring is in a LOT of trouble'. The internet has made it exponentially easier to find stuff that really interests you. To secure a steady flow of inspiration. To discover the remarkable. The leverage it offers to individuals makes it far more possible that if you have a great idea, it will spread. And maybe go really big.

It calls to mind that Seth Godin quote about how being almost good enough gets you nowhere: 'The sad lie of mediocrity is the mistaken belief that partial effort yields partial results'. Outing mediocrity is easier than ever. Sustaining it is just about impossible.

100 Words About Digital Branding

View more presentations from Mike Arauz.

All About Google

At the end of December, Adam featured a list of his Top 10 presentations of 2008 and kindly included my presentation on What's Next In Media in the list, along with Paul's deck on Modern Brand Building (majoring on the 'stop campaigning, start committing' line which I love). Featured in the list is this useful presentation from Ouriel Ohayon on Google. Much is written about Google's model and approach but rarely is it gathered together so succintly but so comprehensively. So it's worth a look.
It reminded me of a Jeff Jarvis Guardian column (he also has a new WWGD book out) I read before christmas that suggested we are seeing the dawn of a new economy and that rather than 'defying' the current economy, Google was 'defining' it. In the new era, the mass market is replaced by a mass of niches, and companies will succeed by building networks and platforms, as Google does - in other words, being the enabler.

*UPDATE* Nicolas has kindly pointed out that this presentation is authored by Faber Novel rather than Ouriel (who was the link on Slideshare), so props to them. Thanks Nicolas.

All about Google

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: google strategy)

The Evolution Of The Internet

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Pew Research have surveyed over 500 leading internet experts, activists and commentators about the impact of networked technologies on society over the next decade or so. There's quite a bit you'd expect - mobile as the primary connection tool, improvements in the architecture of the internet, prevalence of voice recognition and touch interfaces, a continuing arms race around intellectual property and copyright, and even more blurring between personal and work, physical and virtual.

But the really interesting bit is what they describe as  "the strong undercurrent of anxiety" that runs through these experts' answers. The picture they paint is of a future where technology will empower people in political and economic society, "but that won't necessarily make it a kinder, gentler world."

Take these quotes:

"Sharing, interacting, and being exposed to ideas is great and all, but saying the internet will eventually make human beings more tolerant is like saying that the Prius will reverse global warming; a little too much of an idealistic leap in logic. People are people are people. And people are terrible."
- Matt Gallivan, senior research analyst for National Public Radio

"Tribes will be defined by social enclaves on the internet, rather than by geography or kinship, but the world will be more fragmented and less tolerant, since one's real-world surroundings will not have the homogeneity of one's online clan."
- Jim Horning, chief scientist for information security at SPARTA Inc. and a founder of InterTrust's Strategic Technologies and Architectural Research Laboratory

"Viciousness will prevail over civility, fraternity, and tolerance as a general rule, despite the build-up of pockets or groups ruled by these virtues. Software will be unable to stop deeper and more hard-hitting intrusions into intimacy and privacy, and these will continue to happen."
- Alejandro Pisanty, ICANN and Internet Society leader and director of computer services at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico

"By 2020, the internet will have enabled the monitoring and manipulation of people by businesses and governments on a scale never before imaginable. Most people will have happily traded their privacy -- consciously or unconsciously -- for consumer benefits such as increased convenience and lower prices. As a result, the line between marketing and manipulation will have largely disappeared."
- Nicholas Carr, author of the Rough Type blog and "The Big Switch"

I couldn't quite believe what I was reading. Do these 'experts' not have more faith in humanity than this? Is not the internet a reflection of all human life, good and bad? Surely greater transparency will be positive for tolerance and understanding? Personally, I prefer this prognosis:

"The Web must still be a messy, fabulous, exciting, dangerous, poetic, depressing, elating place .. akin to life; which is not a bad thing."
- Luis Santos, Universidade do Minho-Braga, Portugal

Shared Culture

Nicely produced video explaining the principles behind creative commons, which is of-course the great enabler behind the new participative culture and communications infrastructure. There's some great quotes in here about how the commons framework is "the bridge" to a future (many would say a present) that moves away from thinking purely about content to thinking about communities, and the communities that develop around that content. After all, "what is a shared culture, if you can't share it?". Couldn't have said it better.

Via

The Knowledge Revolution

I've seen a couple of things recently that have suggested that the "internet revolution" is over. That 2.0 has been with us for long enough now that we all know what to do - it's now just a matter of getting on with it.

For me, this just doesn't ring true. As the connectedness of our world increases exponentially, so do the questions around what this could mean. The reality, is that we still know very little about how a hyper-connected world really works. In the same way, as the amount of available information grows exponentially, our knowledge also grows, but we still know so little about the world (and the universe) in which we live.

The simple truth is that every question we answer leads to more questions. As usual, the exceedingly bright Kevin Kelly has summed up this phenomenon far better than I can over here:

"...even though our knowledge is expanding exponentially, our questions are expanding exponentially faster. And as mathematicians will tell you, the widening gap between two exponential curves is itself an exponential curve. That gap between questions and answers is our ignorance, and it is growing exponentially.  In other words, science is a method that chiefly expands our ignorance rather than our knowledge...we have not yet reached our maximum ignorance."

Culture, Communication And Impermanence

 

Image courtesy. A piece by Scott King outside the Tate Modern, and across from where I work

One of the things I like about this blog is that it captures my thinking as a snapshot in time and if were to look back, I can see how it has moved on, changed, evolved. In reality, I rarely go back over old posts in any kind of systematic way, but it's kind of comforting to know that they're there. But will they always be?

Perhaps it's not such a dumb question ( I happen to be seeing the guy that runs Sixapart this week so maybe I'll ask him ;)). In this piece for WORD, Steve Bowbrick talks about the relative fragility of digital storage pointing out that in the 50 years or so since computers have been around we already have whole streams of data sat on floppy discs, magnetic tapes or wheelie-bin size hard drives, which are rapidly becoming innaccessible or are already lost forever. Quite a thought when you think how much of our lives are distributed around the web sat on somebody else's servers. What happens if Flickr is shut down? What will today look like to tommorrow's information archaeologists?

Contrast this relatively casual approach to data storage with the British Library whose collection of every item published in the UK grows by some 12.5Km of shelf space every year. So fast in fact that they're now building a huge new warehouse to handle the overflow, capable of storing another 7 million items in 262 linear kilometres of automated, low-oxygen, high-density storage.

OK. So maybe we don't need to store everything. But who gets to decide what we keep and what we lose? And how do we decide what forms of data are the most important for future generations to understand how we live our lives today? As we all become more connected, more and more of our modern culture is wrapped up in communications that rapidly become innaccessible - the kind of narrative that is of-the-moment, at one time there and the next gone forever (what I think Grant called 'phatic communication'). Think of all the old tweets, the IM messages, the Blips, the text messages. Think about the picture that they could paint of how we live.

 

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Which makes projects like this one, rather interesting. Photographer Kelly Shimoda has photographed illuminated text messages over a couple of years and posted them online. Even without their situational context they seem to tell a story of sorts that is in turns funny, strange, cute, tragic. Unexpectedly good.

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Making Content Pay

I was asked to do a piece for this week's New Media Age which I thought it would be worth sticking up here. It combines some short responses to individual questions about ad targeting, content, ad-funded models and mobile (restricted length on some big subjects probably means it doesn't flow as it could but then I'm being picky).

It's probably worth mentioning that the common thread in this is that I do believe that there is a model for making content pay on the web - but it has something to do with how we define it, a lot to do with how we distribute it, and quite a bit to do with how people consume it. Which reminds me of that Clay Shirky quote about how: "Communication tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. The invention of a tool doesn't create change: it has to have been round long enough that most of society is using it." Social tools are becoming ubiquitous, but they will become invisible. Here's the piece:

"The main way consumer expectations of content are changing is that the relationship is no longer one way.  People want to participate, to engage, to have their say, so there should be no barriers to interaction.

I think paying for content is probably a question of how rather than when.  People will pay for services, content and applications if they're sufficiently useful to them at the right moment in time.  But people are used to accessing content for free online so this requires a greater level of sophistication.  I'm not convinced we've got there yet.

Publishers should also take mobile very seriously.  We haven't reached a content tipping point yet, mainly due to the difficulty in combining brilliant applications with a seamless user experience.  The content isn't an important enough part of people's lives yet.  But it will be.

There are clearly a lot of models out there that are heavily ad-funded, but it's worth remembering that in tough time digital has the potential to deliver unprecedented value.  Companies with the right approach will recognise that a low cost of entry plus a ubiquity of free online tools and services can lead to greater experimentation and innovation.  Network effects can mean more opportunities to share and the quick spreading of new ideas.  Digital and social media give you the opportunity to interact with and engage your audience across multiple touchpoints, and get valuable insights as you go.

One of the biggest challenges of introducing greater targeting in digital advertising is achieving the right balance between contextual, audience-driven and behavioural techniques.  Interesting things are happening in all three of these areas which will inevitably lead to better targeted, more useful and relevant advertising, but every brief is different and no one size fits all".

The Internet of Things

The internet is only around 5000 days old. I read something a few weeks back that suggested that the "internet revolution" is over. When I read it, it just didn't feel right. Sure, networks are changing everything. But what of the possibilities when the depth and breadth of connection is unlike anything that we can imagine now? Not just page to page, but specific piece of data to specific piece of data. Not just between us, but between everything. This is the central thought behind this fascinating 20 minute talk from Kevin Kelly predicting the next 5000 days of the web. A true union/convergence of the digital and the atomic that embeds the internet into the material world:

"There's only One machine
The web is its OS
All screens look into the One
No bits will live outside the web
To share is to gain
Let the One read it
The One is us."

Hat tip to