IFTF's Future Now

Shifting platforms in the near future

The first of many notes on this, no doubt. The Institute recently updated its Web site, and as part of this effort we're going to be moving our blogging activities to a new site.

This version of Future Now will remain up for some time, but you should visit the new location (http://www.iftf.org/futurenow) or redirect your RSS readers to the new feed.

More on global trends in universities

A promising-looking source on globalization and higher education: GlobalHigherEd, a blog started by University of Wisconsin geographer Kris Olds, and Bristol professor Susan Robertson. They explain:

We are interested in how and why new knowledge and new spaces (including socio-technical networks) are being developed in association with the emergence of the ‘knowledge economy’, and what the implications of this complex development process are. Three examples of relatively territorialized knowledge spaces are Qatar Education City, Singapore’s ‘Global Schoolhouse’, and the European Higher Education Area, though even in these cases they are fundamentally dependent upon extra-territorial relations and linkages (e.g., see the Singapore-MIT Alliance). Examples of relatively more networked spaces of knowledge production include the Erasmus Mundus programme, and university consortia like the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN) or the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU). There are also a myriad of fascinating and rarely examined spaces of knowledge production (e.g., non-profit think tanks, private research centres and universities).

A bit on the academic side, but that's perfectly appropriate for a blog about... academia.

Technorati Tags: blogging, business, education, university

On the cover of the Rolling Stone

Okay, not the cover, but we've got a nice paragraph in David Kushner's "Futurama." It's not online, but here's a bit of the piece:

Thirty-nine years ago, maverick researchers at the RAND Corporation broke off to found an independent, nonprofit group called the Institute for the Future. Today, the Silicon Valley-based think tank studies the impact of emerging technologies and chronicles its findings on the Future Now blog.... The stuff they're thinking about and linking to is wild-- a smog-eating building in Rome, retinal-cell replacement to cure blindness. Plus, you get insider analysis on key events, like the recent University of Michigan conference on how cities can survive a global warming crisis.

One small correction: Virtual China isn't a section of Future Now, but another member of the IFTF Blog Media Empire. Still....

Web 2.0 for Day Traders

Inkling, one of the Institute's technology partners, just launched Worthio - an sort of prediction market meets social site for stock market speculators. The site lets you rate stocks quickly on whether you're bullish or bearish, and presents the aggregate group opinion. You can also add people to your network and watch what they think. There are also discussion around stocks.

Interesting twist - will the "wisdom of crowds" devolve into "herd mentality" on the trading room floor?

Few design tweaks

There may be a hiccup or two as I play around with the templates. Please excuse any service interruptions, weird color combinations, etc.

Update: New design is now stable. If you're seeing all the content in one long, ugly column, you'll need to at least hit the refresh button on your browser, and possibly empty your cache (I think the old style sheet and new style have trouble getting along).

New blog: Law and Technology Theory

Somehow I stumbled on the new Law and Technology Blog this afternoon. It looks very promising:

Creators of new technologies seek to signal a message of novelty and improvement. Instinctively, many of us want to endorse the message and believe that this new technology will make our lives better. We want to believe that the new technology is special and unique. This causes us to look at each new technology in isolation. For example, scholars tend to specialize in the study of Cyberlaw or Law & Genetics or Law and the Neurosciences. Similarly, legislatures often formulate special legislation to deal with specific privacy threats. An example of a recent trend is legislation targeting privacy threats imposed by cell-phone cameras.

The goal of this symposium is to inquire whether we should continue to assess and react to each new technology in isolation or whether we could also implement a broader approach. In other words, should we have a general theory of law and technology that will formulate principles of how the law should react to technological change? Particularly, we would like to focus on whether it is possible to formulate a generalized legal approach to the use and adoption of new technologies. Is it possible to formulate a uniform approach to these instances where new technologies threaten existing social institutes and social values?

I'd recommend them, but because of one of their early posts, I've blown about two hours tonight listening to (and blogging about) Ms. Dewey.

Technorati Tags: law, technology

Peder goes to the Big Show

Peder Burgaard, who's been seconded to us from the Innovation Lab for the last several months-- he's too smart and productive to be called an intern-- is joining We Make Money Not Art. Way to go!

Technorati Tags: blogging, future

Blogging Around the World

Global Voices is a fascinating site that aggregates RSS feeds from what they call "bridge bloggers" - people who are blogging about their country to a global audience (and conveniently enough, that often as not means "in English"). It's run by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

Blogging and careers

Microsofter (Microsoftie? that doesn't sound right) Don Dodge, inspired by a Boston Globe article, talks (on his blog, of course) about whether blogs can be good for your career. My sense is that, MySpace panic aside (a phenomenon that danah boyd comments on), the conventional wisdom regarding blogging and work may be shifting decisively away from the "blogging will get you fired" narrative line, to a new "blogging is essential to getting hired" one. (We already went through a "some crazy companies have blogs!" and "businesses have to blog" phase, and some executives have been doing it for a while.)

It strikes me that the CW is shifting just in time for blogs to morph into something else. There are, I think, two big things going on.

The first is a growing sophistication regarding the remixing of content. Corante's hubs are a good example of this: they mix feed from a whole bunch of blogs, layer some editorial content on top of it, and create something new. On the user side, RSS readers give readers a greater degree of control over how they approach their own universe of blogs, and what material they see (e.g., posts yes; comments no; that weird design, definitely not). As time goes on, those readers will doubtless get more powerful and smarter, and start to do smart things with folksonomies, natural language searching, and the like.

Second, there are self-conscious experiments with the medium of blogs, that challenge conventions about what blogs are. For example, we're starting to see blogs that are designed to be temporary. Amazon's new experiment in author blogs seems to assume that authors will talk about their books during the hype phase, but stop posting when the PR campaign is over; and of course there's the case of the Financial Times article on blogging that spun off a short-lived blog.

Further, the amount of automated content on blogs, displaying everything from where you are to what music you've been listening to to what you've bookmarked on del.icio.us, is rising: the more hot-wired ones are little Times Squares of automatically-generated, self-promotional, real-time author metadata. Eventually, the time may come when some people won't have to write anything: they'll just be, and information about themselves will show up on their blogs. (Nicolas Nova and Julian Bleecker even imagine a world in which things will blog.)

So yes, blogging as we understand it now may have virtues for the career-minded; but the nature of blogging is likely to change in the next few years.

Technorati Tags: blogging, business

Blogs as exotic particles

Via The Publishing Spot, I came across FTMAGBLOG, a blog devoted to a recent Financial Times article on blogging. As someone who started a blog on the end of cyberspace after co-authoring a short piece on the subject, I was interested to find another example of an article-inspired blog.

The two most interesting things about the FTMAGBLOG are 1) it's got a lot of comments from readers, and 2) it consists of two posts from the authors: one announcing the opening of the blog, the other its closing. That's it.

Most blogs are like black holes: stable, strangely irresistible, and capable of absorbing all our time (even more so as writers than readers). Within the Institute, we've created various project-specific blogs (most recently Virtual China) that may have lifespans of months or years-- however long the project lasts. Perhaps FTMAGBLOG is a sign of something new and even more short-lived: the blog as exotic particle. It appears after some high-energy collision (the publication of a controversial article, or protests against a controversial piece of legislation, or March Madness), captures lots of interesting interactions for a very short time (say, a few weeks), then decays into nothing, leaving behind just tracks and traces for people to analyze.

Technorati Tags: blogging, business