IFTF's Future Now

IFTF and del.icio.us

For months I've been fascinated with del.icio.us, and the subjects of folksonomies and social software. One thing that impresses me about the service is the potential it holds for doing some really interesting data analysis about how people discover and share information, and the ways social software services can make that process faster and more efficient.

This afternoon I played around with IFTF's del.icio.us account, and gathered a few simple numbers on how "sociable" we are. A few minutes with Excel, and we've got a couple simple graphs-- and I do mean simple.

The first shows how many of the 368 bookmarks in our account are shared by anyone.

More than half our bookmarks aren't shared with any other user. Given our fairly specialized interests, and the fact that we often will bookmark pretty academic or obscure stuff, that's probably not a huge surprise.

If you look just at the shared bookmarks, the pattern becomes a little clearer.

At the far right, there are a few pages that a LOT of people have bookmarked. Not surprisingly, most of these are either blogs, or articles about social software or del.icio.us. At the other end of the graph, you see that nearly three-quarters of the bookmarks that we share with someone are shared with one to five other users.

You can see who else is bookmarking the same things you are, and when they bookmarked those pages. Choosing a few at random, I found that about half were pages that other people had marked first, and the other half were pages that we'd marked first.

There are two things I'd really love to know.

First, in some cases, each user who bookmarked a page found the it through Google, or a link from a news article, etc.-- i.e., it was serendipity, and del.icio.us played no role in the multiplication of bookmarks. In other case, it did (del.icio.us lets you copy other user's bookmarks). Unfortunately, it's impossible to tell which cases are which. It would be really interesting to know how many of these multiple bookmarks are independent discoveries, and how many are created within del.icio.us itself.

Second, I'd like to know who is most like IFTF. Who do we share the most del.icio.us links with? With whom do we overlap heavily in particular categories? I notice a few names turning up repeatedly, but I'd love to know whose collection of links looks the most like ours. Or shares a lot of our categories, but points to completely different things on the Web (in some ways, that would be even more interesting).

Best of times, worst of times in Silicon Valley

This weekend's San Jose Mercury News has a long article on the current state of the high-tech economy, and in particular argues for a growing gap between high-tech workers and everyone else.

By the numbers, the economy is getting better and worse -- depending on who you are. Silicon Valley has developed two separate economies that have drifted further apart ever since the dot-com bubble burst in 2000.

In the valley's technology economy, profits, revenues and average pay are up dramatically. But fewer people are sharing in the good fortune because tech companies are doing more with less -- they have cut tens of thousands of jobs and continue to do so, boosting the productivity of their remaining workers.

People like [tech worker-turned-teacher Steve] Clough are being pushed out of this first economy and falling into the second, non-tech economy, which includes health care, education, construction and tourism.

In that world, employers are beginning to add more jobs but pay and benefits are falling. With the ever-increasing cost of living here, workers in the second economy are increasingly being squeezed.

"The economy and businesses are doing well,'' said Doug Henton, president of Collaborative Economics, a Mountain View research firm. "But the people aren't benefiting as much. And as a result, more residents are under economic stress.''

A tale of two regions. But does it matter to the region that everyone talks about-- the high-tech one?

GM Executive Blog's Revealing Code of Ethics

Regarding the much-watched GM external-facing blog. Does GM understand the blog? .... An associate pointed me to the GM blog's code of ethics ... and based on this, they appear to understand what its all about:

Blogger Code Of Ethics
We will tell the truth. We will acknowledge and correct any mistakes promptly.
We will not delete comments unless they are spam, off-topic, or defamatory.
We will reply to comments when appropriate as promptly as possible.
We will link to online references and original source materials directly
We will disagree with other opinions respectfully.

Also linked to here, Charlene Li of Forrester's blog, which we have started to track and appears to be an excellent source of technology insight. Here is her post on blogging codes of ethics.

Genetic Blogging

The comments on my recent post on the Value of Genetic Design pointed me to an interesting blog on Genetic Methods, see: IlliGAL Blogging: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Genetic Algorithms. David Goldberg and others are contributing, contains useful technical details and excellent application examples. I see also that they are now pointing back to us as well, welcome.

Liquid Information vs Remembrance Augmentation

Consider the concept of Liquid Information. Its a very simple idea .... index all the words and phrases in a body of text, and then allows you to click through to other sources. Producing what they call deep legibility. Its something I do manually already, highlighting a word or phrase and searching with a bookmarklet. This takes that idea a step forward. In their CNN demo you hover over any word and are given a menu as to how to use it. It relates also to the broad Remembrance Augmentation concept, previously discussed, which seeks to automate the same kind of process by simply going ahead and searching for any non-noise thing on the screen. The latter is ideal in that you dont have to take the initiative, but it requires screen real estate and some intelligence to choose words and phrases.

Information Wants to be Liquid, Wired Jan/05
... Frode Hegland, a researcher at University College London, wants to change the basic structure of information on the net.

Hegland's project, Liquid Information, is kinda like Wikipedia meets hypertext. In Hegland's web, all documents are editable, and every word is a potential hyperlink. Hegland is based at University College London's Interaction Centre and collaborates with Doug Engelbart, inventor of the mouse. Engelbart refers to Hegland's project as "the next stage of the web." ...

Hegland's idea is simple -- he plans to move beyond the basic hypertext linking of the web, and change every word into a "hyperword." Instead of one or two links in a document, every single word becomes a link. Further, every link can point to more than one place, pulling up all kinds of background context from the web as a whole.

Click on a politician's name and find out who donated to his or her campaign.
Click on a town name in a news story and find out what else has happened there. "We feel that a large part of the history of technology, digital and otherwise, has been about the production of information," Hegland said. "It's time to focus on consumption, to help people navigate through information and get relevant information into their heads."...

Interactive Sims-like TV

The quote below begs the questions of how advertising might be included in such a medium ... I recall the 90s German venture called Blaxxsun .... which created multidimensional worlds, then sold advertising which could be affixed to the virtual background, such as murals, posters, etc. They hoped to create 3D shopping environments, and we talked to their development folks. They were successful in selling to some large companies, but the company is now apparently defunct. Does anyone know more of their history? Byron Reeves at Stanford is doing some interesting venture work on game interaction with consumers, and among employees, that I plan to report on later.

EA Mulls 'Sims'-Like Interactive TV Show, By Adam Pasick, LONDON (Reuters) - Reality TV, meet virtual reality.

Electronic Arts, the world's biggest video game publisher, is considering an interactive TV show that would let viewers control the actions of the characters as in its popular game "The Sims." "One idea could be that you're controlling a family, telling them when to go to the kitchen and when to go to the bedroom, and with this mechanism you have gamers all over the world 'playing the show'," said Jan Bolz, vice president of marketing and sales for EA Europe.

The proposed show, which might involve viewers voting on possible actions, is still in the early stages, but EA confirmed it is in talks with several TV production companies. Bolz declined to disclose any additional details ...

Fred Kaplan on NIC 2020

Fred Kaplan has a piece in Slate about the NIC's recently-released report, Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project. He points out the report's often-neglected "central conclusion," the possibility of the decline of American global power in the face of the rise of India, Brazil, Indonesia, and especially China. As the report's executive summary puts it,

The likely emergence of China and India ... as new major global players—similar to the advent of a united Germany in the 19th century and a powerful United States in the early 20th century—will transform the geopolitical landscape with impacts potentially as dramatic as those in the previous two centuries.

Kaplan adds,

In this new world, a mere 15 years away, the United States will remain "an important shaper of the international order"—probably the single most powerful country—but its "relative power position" will have "eroded." The new "arriviste powers"—not only China and India, but also Brazil, Indonesia, and perhaps others—will accelerate this erosion by pursuing "strategies designed to exclude or isolate the United States" in order to "force or cajole" us into playing by their rules.

I've been reading the report, and have found it exceeding my expectations. One of the perennial problems with forecasts, especially ones written by committee, is that they can end up taking a too-fuzzy, on one hand this, on the other hand that, tone. The future is no less the realm of passions and human actors than the present, but that's sometimes easy to forget, as David Brooks noted in an Atlantic Monthly article about the CIA's Global Trends 2015:

Using the CIA's methodology and analysis, you can neither anticipate the future nor explain the past.

There are no human beings in the world described by the CIA. There are no passions or religious ideals, no dreams or urges, no altruism or malevolence. Instead there are only impersonal forces: technological developments, economic trends, and demographic pressures. Global Trends 2015 is perpetually half right in a way that makes it completely wrong. Yes, technological and environmental trends are important. But if you try to describe them in a void uncomplicated by human volition, you end up in the realm of fantasy.

So far, the NIC report manages to avoid such problems, which is a hopeful sign.

Open Research

The term Open Innovation, coined by Henry William Chesbrough, has opened many an eye to the possibilities of opening up research and product development disivions. Less of the "colonel's secret recipe" and more knowledge sharing which builds more profitable products.

The Scandinavian region with its welfare state political model traditionally holds a vast public sector. This increases relatively open access to public services when it comes to areas like healthcare, education, care for the elderly, and research, but at the cost of relatively high progressive income taxes (up to 68% taxation in some cases). Scandinavian research has up until now been conducted with an eye towards publication rather than product making - which sets it aside from most research elsewhere in the world.

Recently, however, there has been an increased demand for publicly financed research to focus on products. This is an attempt to adopt to the rest of the world and to make product making - with its portfolio of patent spinning and non-disclosure - the end result of research, rather than the present Open (Innovation?) Research with publication and knowledge sharing as conclusion.

Being a Scandinavian national, my question is: According to the Open Innovation model of open knowledge sharing, Scandinavian research is apparently at a product developmental forefront. Nevertheless, in an attempt to seem less of an ostrich to the rest of the world, governments are trying to comply with international - and largely privately funded - research models. Is this a good idea? Is the Scandinavian research method hopelessly old fashioned, or is it a working example of research models of the future, only publicly funded? If so, is this attractive to international corporations and their R&D division, (free) knowledge pumping out of the Nordic bedrock...?

Target TV commercial on design

Mega retailer Target has been bringing high design to the lowest of products for years now, and it's been one of their key weapons in the Wal-Mart war. They've created TV commercials that tout this before without explicitly mentioning the concept of design, or even the word. No longer. This could be the widest mention yet of the abstract idea of design, and the benefits of considered design. This relates to an idea I'm stewing on about the potential impact of teaching design principles broadly in a society. Take the example of human-computer interaction design in Sweden or Denmark. With so many schools and institutes teaching and researching in the HCI domain, these countries arguably have the highest number of people thinking creatively about the relationship between people and technology per capita in the world. Will there be trickle-down effects? A global index of designers per capita could be a great tool for finding future hotspots of innovation. (via Josh Rubin Cool Hunting)

Future Now in Deep Blog

I note that Future Now, classified as a Science Blog, is included in the new 'quick access to quality blogs' repository called Deep Blog, in what is striving to be a 'whole blog catalog' for newcomers to the medium.