tantramar

Chosing A Model

Disclaimer: 90% of this post came of of a dream last night which involved models, Sony, free and sharing.

Being a teenager in the 90s meant I was at the right age to witness and appreciate the supermodel explosion. I thought (then) that supermodels were great. All beautiful and all slightly different. Whatever your preference (although I'm not sure teenage boys worry that much about preference) there was a style / look of girl to tick your appropriate box. More models = good. See where I'm going? Stay with me, this is where it gets weirder.

In my dream I was at some big awards ceremony about social hardware; social product innovation in particular, introducing a category and had prepared nothing. There was a thumb sized device with 4 cables attached to it that Sony was promoting and the tag line on the card said: 

it's not what you listen to, 

it's what you share. 

This captivated me and I gave a speech about freedom of expression, sharing, the nature of the self and why the current social music models are broken (probably another post in that one). I also talked about the new models of consumption and how great it is that we now had physical products as well as digital services that catered to all these new ways of thinking and acting. 

Then some models came onto the stage wearing only data (don't ask) and there was some neon saying it's not what you wear, it's what you share. Yeah I know, sorry.

So the thing that grabbed me and got me writing this at 6:02 this morning was the idea that all these new business models (created by digital) are not only creating new revenue streams for business (I'm reading Free currently) but also encouraging new ways of acting. So (in my dream) multiple new behaviours were being fostered and encouraged through physical products and product lines. Having music devices that didn't play music for example because some people wanted to express themselves with music but not through playing it.

In digital this is happening left right and centre. People are going crazy trying to find new ways to approach a subject. We normally only see this kind of mass innovation during wartime. Intriguing that greed via capitalism could be actually giving us something interesting and new due to such low barriers to entry (cost of creation).

I though that was a pretty interesting idea and of course social hardware.

thanks to Helena Christensen, Chris Anderson, Kevin Kelly, Lloyd Davis and mature Cheddar cheese, who all contributed to this post.

The Big Share

Back when this social web, social media sharing-circus started, I got quite excited - it was all a bit brave new worldly. I was writing a weekly digital music newsletter read by thousands, sticking it to the mainstream media and their pedestrian treatment of the future (present). All seems a bit silly now. 

Anyway, over time and working on lots of digital social applications and systems my viewpoint has shifted and I'm not so inspired by purely digital anymore. Digital should be part of the system, not the system. Part of the function if you like, not the form.

But now I'm starting to get excited by sharing again but for a different reason than before. Everyone was sharing content back then almost for the sake of it. We did it because we could, it was all a bit 'how many sweets can I hold in one hand' but really it didn't do much good or offer that much value, certainly nothing past the short term.

But now I feel we're on the edge of sharing, doing quite a lot of good. You know, digital systems facilitating real world actions and benefits. Free-cycle and The School of Everything are great examples of this. Russell calls this post digital, which is quite nice.

I know several other people (with funding) who are developing more ideas like this so clearly it's not just me that's excited about this. But yes, excited is the right word.

 

Everyone has so many things they could share (mental and physical) or skills they could teach. In the case of skills and knowledge it's worse than the cognitive surplus because that implies that people could learn things with their spare capacity. I'm saying people already have the skills (knowledge) and assets and they're wasting them. Matt Webb had a nice idea about wasteful time and talents, called 100 hours that he talked about at reboot which has inspired me into action somewhat.

I feel the tide is turning from utopian to useful. I guess we'll have to wait and see the score at half time to see if it's happening for real.

In a country like England where we can't afford to make much anymore, we need to get a lot better at managing waste and surplus or in a few years we'll be in big trouble.

Sputnik Observatory

Jonathan Harris has just released details of his latest project; Sptnk. As his previous work had been pretty impressive, such as Whale Hunt and We Feel Fine he's generally worth paying attention to.

Sputnik Observatory is a New York not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to the study of contemporary culture. We fulfill this mission by documenting, archiving, and disseminating ideas that are shaping modern thought by interviewing leading thinkers in the arts, sciences and technology from around the world.

There's some smart people who have talks on there. Worth exploring for sure.

Google's Big plan

So Google, what are they really doing?

They know everything about you, your friends, your interests, your problems, secret desires etc etc. So what could all this knowledge be good for? Specialist targeted advertising, maybe but I think there's something else.

We are a species. A species strives for ubiquity. Deep down the most important mission we have is to continue and evolve the species, not always on an individual level perhaps, but on a group level, for sure.

So how do we continue the species. Mating, pretty much nails it. And we mate by finding people we like and getting drunk with them, pretty much. So how on earth do we find the right people? Well... Google knows everybody right?

So naturally Google are going to start a dating service and it's gonna be the best damn dating service in the history of hooking up. Finding the best possible mate has got to be worth more to our species than knowing whether to push Flash bathroom cleaner ads at me on a blog I'm reading. Please tell me it is.

I may not be entirely serious.

Connected Cats

This is Gus and Penny. They are nice cats who are loved by their owners and as such they are given very nice food by their owners. Unfortunately for Gus and Penny the other cats in the neighbourhood know that Gus and Penny have much better food than everyone else, so they sneak in and steal it!

You may recall that the owners of Gus and Penny love them very much. Well, are they going to sit around and just take this? Certainly not! They created an RFID cat flap so only Gus and Penny can enter. The RFID chips in their collars alerting the cat flap to their presence.

Pretty good huh?

This is only half the story though. Gus and Penny's doting parents then set up a camera to take a picture whenever either cat when in or out of the cat flap and yes, connected this to a twitter stream. Possibly the best use of technology I've seen all year.

Wanna know how they did all this? Click here.

The Time For Self Analysis Is Here.

The process of mapping is broadly, comparing one set (or several sets) of data with another to create something new or understand something better. I've written a little about this within other topics but I feel one specific element of mapping is fast (well... fast-ish) becoming the one to watch. A trend even! This is the mapping of the self and its becoming it's own genre.

So how do you map yourself, certainly not with a surveyor and a yellow hat, that's for sure. This is about data, mapping of data and understanding data, essentially informatics. Personal Informatics (or P.I.) is the recording of data that applies to you personally. This could be data that you keep private (for various reasons) or also data that you might share with others to find your standing within a group or scenario.

The point of this data is to help the user understand themselves better. To be frank we spend bloody ages (as a species) trying to understand ourselves so I think there's plenty of room for the expansion of learning in this area.

I digress.

Personal Informatics can be seen in services like Nike+, Mint and Daytum. These services vary in how much a user has to compile this data themselves and how much it's automated. Ideas you can expect to see coming to the mainstream soon are such wonders as self-diagnosis kits and stress monitors. Could this be the end of the GP visit? Be good wouldn't it, so the NHS could focus on delivering the stuff we read about online but never see happening to each other, such as the re-growing of severed fingers.

As we advance in understanding what is useful there will be more and more of these services emerging to aid the masses in acute self-awareness. Potentially scary but with great data, comes greater understanding (or at least that's the theory). The technology is already here. The understanding and usability are not but the steps are being taken. That's how we learn right?

Wired magazine just recently called this life tracking. I prefer personal informatics, but you know, I think Life Tracking might catch on faster... as long as people don't confuse it with life caching!

Context Is King... As Always

A few days ago I saw Matt Jones give a good talk (at Conferences Redux) about the themes that arose at Etech. As I follow his Flickr and Twitter I had seen much of the content before but I had none of his perspective, none of the context behind his random thoughts and comments and reasons for photographs, I had ideas but not the reality. I obviously got this from his talk but this made me realise something.

I'd only seen part of the story. I had seen the bricks already and now his words were the mortar holding all these pieces of content together, giving it cohesion.

It occurred to me that this is what social media does extremely well - painting half a picture. You see your friends holidays snaps from Spain, so you know where he was, but not exactly where in Spain and not necessarily who he was with or why he was there. These things matter. The devil is in the details for a reason - it's where the value resides.

Many digital social services have been annoying me of late and much of the reason for this is that they are only giving me part of a picture, a half truth. I've written before about when I feel social media will become useful but before we get there I think it needs to have a better contextual delivery. Lord knows how it'll do that. Sorry, no solutions here, just fragmented ranting. Personal context can be extremely complicated, that's why so many recommendation algorithms are so poor.

Roll on progress...

picture stolen from Mr Jones, I'm guessing he won't mind.

Very Tourable Band

Kim Leigh Pontin, member of the band The Mentalists and sometime designer at Fjord got some attention the other day when her band performed a cover of Kids by MGMT on various iPhone music applications.

Don't need the tour bus no more. Pretty cute.

Attack Of The Drones

One of the ideas I've been excited about from the moment I saw it suggested is the idea of computers as drones. As cloud computing gets more recognition as the smarter way to work then the idea of computers as drones will really begin to take hold.

Drones will essentially be shells of computers with little software or hard disc space. They will connect purely to your personal online account, think Google accounts or .Mac accounts. This of course applies to mobile phones as well as desktop devices.

I read a couple of days ago about a Swedish company called Conveneer who are building a mobile platform called Mikz. This platform will essentially give your phone a unique URL and turn your mobile into a web server.

From Techcrunch:
Once your phone has a URL like http://joe.mikz.me, other Web applications and services can ingest the data that is locked in your phone, and also your phone can take advantage of common Web APIs. Mikz can pull information off your phone such as your contacts, GPS coordinates, photos, music, ringtones, and other files. It creates a Web interface for your phone.

Drones will encourage ubiquitous connections, faster devices with less or no storage and little or no software on them. Users simply accessing what they need from their cloud space. Every computer becomes your personal computer.
The brave new world.

It's hoped Mikz will launch later this year...

G.E. Try Some A.R.

This is one of the nicest examples I've seen of this augmented reality paper trickery. I can just taste how rad this is going to get.

William Gibson eat your heart out, the future is getting better distribution. The streets are going to be amazing.

Social Pages

Social networking has extended into almost every area of our digital and increasingly non-digital lives. Now it's in books too. Book Army recently went live. Book Army is a new venture of the UK publisher Harper Collins.

They have 6 million dedicated author and book pages, which'll keep you busy! Paulo Coelho is even a member. Paulo's parents gave him electro-shock therapy to try and stop him becoming a writer so maybe you should cut him a break!

The site has a bunch of smart agorythms which select titles that you may be interested in. I've only used it a little so don't yet feel entitled to review it, but if you get stuck for reading inspiration it's safe to say that there's something in here for you.

Go Explore...

Bendable, siftable...

Here's a nice little TED video showing some pretty slick interactive digital tiles. Built by MIT grad, David Merrill these things are quite impressive.

Locating A Niggle

I read a few of those 'what will be big in 2009' lists (back in January) or at least I started to before they annoyed me too much to continue. Many of them stated that the start of mass adoption for location-based services would be in 2009.

This has been annoying me for a while. Not that people might eventually realise that the mobile could do for their personal (foot-based) context, what Sat Nav has done for the car but that they call this location-based service.

This term has been around for a while and has a Wikipedia page and everything but I think it's fundamentally misleading. Yeah I know I'm being a bit pedantic but working on a recent proposal it made a huge difference to what we were actually offering in the suite of services.

A location-based service could be perceived as a service based in a location and really, in terms of mobile (which is generally when we refer to this genre of service) it's about being mobile. Really we're talking about location-aware service connecting to location-based data.

For example a TOM-TOM is location-aware, sucking location-based data to provide you with the nearest petrol station.

Lots of industry folk are starting to use location-aware, sadly I don't think I could have coined this as late as July last year...

Maybe this won't always apply but essentially all I'm asking is don't use industry jargon without thinking what it means...

Rant over.

The Social Media Mainstream Invasion

Things on the social media front seem to be going a lot more mainstream of late. The world has been in love with Facebook for some time but Twitter it seems can do no wrong currently in the press. As a result everyone I've ever met is now trying to be my friend on there which presents numerous problems, such as me not wanting to follow that many more people but sort of being forced to by being polite. I'm feeling slightly invaded, which is of course ridiculous as I'm not exactly entitled to be left alone in a socially interactive, open sharing environment... I'm clearly confused.

Then a few days ago somehow one of the pictures on my Flickr went top ten on Digg (oh joy). Anyway, then 175,000 people came to have a look and lots of them decided they wanted to be my friend, simply because the picture was on Digg! It's like being made captain of the football team when you were happy just carrying the oranges.

I hope this kind of thing can settle down a touch. Clearly people who use digital services all vary according to how social they all want to be. This is only going to get more complicated for everyone as all this stuff becomes used by one and all. I hope the filters get better, they're going to need to.

A Pirate's Life For Me

For me, Pirate Bay is one of those bastions of absolute pure genius. Right or wrong, it's a great idea, executed amazingly well and they make a ton of pirate treasure out of it to boot.

If you thought piracy was decreasing then just have a play with this map. When I took this screenshot yesterday, in China there were 218,611 users using Pirate Bay per minute. Globally there were 1,354 703 unique users per minute.

Quite amazing.