Month: July 2009

Five Eras of the social web

I caught this on the social web.tv today. Jeremiah Owyang talking about the Five eras of the social web. I missed this first time around but interesting to read about now.

Running List of the Five Eras of The Social Web
For details on this report, access the high level blog post, or if you’re a client, access the full report on the Forrester site.

Era of Social Relationships (started 1995, matured in 2003-2007)
This era is mature.

  • AOL, 1995
  • eCircles, 2001
  • MySpace, Facebook, Twitter

Era of Social Functionality (started 2007, matures in 2010-2012)
These are prelimnary examples, but are not examples of maturity, as we’ve not seen true useful utilities to improve business.

Era of Social Colonization (started 2009, matures in 2011)
These are prelimnary examples, but are not examples of maturity when your entire digital experience is social.

Era of Social Context (starts in 2010, matures in 2012)

This era is certainly not in maturity, but we can see some early examples of demographic scraping.

  • There are no current examples

Era of Social Commerce (starts in 2011, matures in 2013)
These are prelimnary examples, such as Techcrunch’s crunchpad, but it’s not a true example of a crowd created, spec’d product.

  • There are no current examples

For the Social Commerce era, you could also place Gdgt.com but more importantly everything the VRM (vendor relationship management) guys have been working on for a while. Also got to say social commerce starts to make sense of that reverse relationship of VRM.

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TEDx North

TEDx North has gone live, and if your playing catch up its a combination of 5 different TEDx (x being independently run) events.

Each event will have excellent live speakers and previous TEDtalks. They promise to bring you a taste of TED without the huge cost and long waiting list.

I’m happy to say the BBC’s famous Studio 7 will also host TEDxManchester on the 2nd October. We have room for 100’s of people, so it should be one of the biggest events and a great end to the series of collaborative events. We've teamed up with FutureEverything and

There are upcoming TEDx's in the south, midlands, scotland and of course the rest of the world too.

Unlike others I don't have a real relationship with TED, I actually experienced Pop!Tech before TED because they would put there shows on IT Conversations.com for anyone to download and listen to. Then Pop!Tech started streaming there conference to the world. I remember getting it working on my XBMC xbox at one point. Pop!tech never felt as elitist as TED and Thinking Digital was doing great things for the UK but none of them were of them quite moved into the exciting decentralised mode of barcamp. I had noticed a small break away conference called BIL which I had considered putting on in the UK, because it was more fitting with the barcamp philosophy. But Herb Kim asked me if I'd like to run TEDxManchester pretty soon after the recent Thinking Digital. So after a look into TEDx, I agreed and the rest is history as they say.

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App stores are not the future, the web has won

I have already given the Windows Mobile App Store the thumbs down and put the boot into the Apple App store. So its clear I believe there a fad and other factors will take over very soon.

What's reassuring is that Google also see the problems with App stores and in this interview with FT.com found via Jyri, they describe the problem. Boiled down to a sentence, the web is the platform.

Apple customers may have downloaded 1.5bn applications from its AppStore in the past year for their iPhones and iPod touches, but the service does not represent the future for the mobile industry, according to Google.

Vic Gundotra, Google Engineering vice president and developer evangelist, (pictured centre) told the Mobilebeat conference in San Francisco on Thursday that the web had won and users of mobile phones would get their information and entertainment from browsers in future.

“We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”

Mr Gundotra won some support from the rest of the panel. Michael Abbott, head of application software for Palm, said advances in the browser being introduced through HTML5 standards meant that web applications could tap features of particular phones such as their accelerometers.

Once again I need to give some credit to Chris Messina for waking me up to the fact that the web has won. Google and Palm have also put out products and services which operate on this fact. And today at a presentation from Aza Ruskin, I quized him about Ubiquity and the notion of browser vs the OS. I didn't push hard or even mention Google Chrome OS but he came back to me with a lot of interesting thoughts about barriers around personal content rather that a barrier between online and offline content. Would have liked to have explored but it was clear that Aza Ruskin was also talking like the web had won.

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In a world of abundance

Matt Mason gave pretty much the same talk at Thinking Digital and I've been wanting to link or post the video ever since. I love that classic quote, Pirates are the most innovate people.

Here's the main takeaway headlines from Matt's talk,

  1. If you want to beat pirates, copy them.

  2. Good business is the best art.

  3. Don't let legal ruin a good remix without talking to marketing first.

  4. Abudance is better that advertising

  5. Some good experiences will always be scarce.

  6. In an economy based on abundance, your business model needs to be a virtuous circle.

And I'd like to add I just paid for a digital download of Matt's book The Pirates Dilemma. I bought it for about 3 pounds which seems fair to me. About the same price as a expensive coffee or decent sandwich at lunch time. As Matt, Cory and Tim Oreilly has put it before, The problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. Well hopefully the video and this blog post might have helped Matt become less obscure.

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Persona Editor: Outlines+Xpointer

Marc Canter gets a lot of flack and I can't understand why. In the talk above he presents his vision for Persona Editor, something he's been working on for the last 5 years. While he talks about it I'm thinking its a outline with static data or dynamic data. The dynamic data is actually like a xpath or better still a xpointer to a node or collection of nodes. So for example Marc uses a example where he aggregates 3 of his blogs into one outline which he calls all his blogs. Where it gets confusing is once you create these outlines, they can feed and inform other structures such as widgets, dashboards, pages, etc which are static. But it can also inform dynamic structures such as open social and apis which allow writes (aka 2way api).

So in the blog example, you could define the blogs and then write them into something like Facebook or Blogger. The identity stuff is even more mind blowing and as the Q&A's point out there are some seriously scary privacy concerns to be worked out. So as a summary its a really good idea and I do wish someone would create it. I'm actually thinking Xpointer could actually really make this whole thing work too. It strikes me as something I could/would use and it would help me bring together abstract pieces of data around the web and locally. If it does what I'm thinking correctly, I could wire up Tomboy notes with Persona Editor and make it inform a Basecamp whiteboard or the same in reverse. Now that would be powerful.

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Media City UK? Its not about the buildings

Media City UK

The current state of Media City UK? Well its coming along very quickly and nicely. I had planned to take some photos myself but the day I went down there it was wet and not very nice. Obviously the buildings are nice, but its the change of culture which I'm doing my bit to change which interests me more. Unfortunately this is shared by everyone.

Ariel with TimB on the cover

Take the recent issue of Ariel (BBC's internal newspaper) Tim-Berners Lee on the front cover with a question will internet kill tv? First up should this even be a question at all? Secondly the article says goto page 7? and you get a little bit more and nothing much else. Greatly disappointing! I stand by the notion of broadcast being dead or at least on its last legs. How a public broadcaster can move beyond its broadcasting roots interests me and I think the result of that culture change could happen in Media City.

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The review of Marina Abramović

Eun-hye Hwang

So I spent most of the day at Marina Abramović presents which was part of the Manchester’s International Festival. And I can say it was an impressive day. I won’t go into much detail just incase Marina does decided to run the event again using the same artist.

So they were right, its challenging. for example at one point I was attempting to clean someones teeth with a toothbrush and at another point a naked lady shuffled up to me and stared me in the face from about half a meter away. Marina introduces the whole experience in a room full of people for the first hour. She runs a series of exercises to calm your breathing and get you use to understanding long duration art. One of those exercises is drinking a small cup of water but over a period of 10mins.
There’s also a period of staring a strangers face for up to 5mins.

After spending a hour with Marina your ready to make your own way through the rest of the experiences.

There were about 12 different artists performing through the day, some of my favourite included Nico Vascellari‘s songs which involved banging tin and rocks together in a basement with a additional sound track coming from the 2nd floor. Eunhye Hwang did some very interesting things with radios and the public. If you wait long enough, you will see Jelly and Radio, I’ll say no more. Nikhil Chopra spent hours drawing over the walls and floor using charcoal, according to others over time he sketched many pictures, which here would later scribled over it.

Really wrorth going and I’m glad I went along

 

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Marina Abramović Presents…

Following the iconoclastic Il Tempo del Postino in 2007, MIF returns to the crossroads of visual art and performance, inviting world-renowned artist Marina Abramović to curate an epic group show featuring some of the most innovative live artists working today.

For this groundbreaking event, the Whitworth has emptied every gallery space in order to create room for this unique work to develop and breathe. The show will begin with an hour-long performance initiation with Marina Abramović, leading up to a series of extraordinary encounters between artists and audience. Quite unlike anything staged before in the UK, this will be a provocative and visceral experience.

Everyone seems to be talking about this event/performance/experience, and I have the pleasure of going tomorrow. The Telegraph said it was shocking and bizarre and someone else told me they heard Mark Lawson had reviewed it on Radio 4 just recently. I’m starting to wonder if its so intense? And what is in store for me tomorrow? If all goes well I should try and get tickets for the Adam Curtis mixed media documentary, it felt like a kiss.

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