Archive for June, 2010
June 22nd, 2010 | 
Author: At the same time, there was strong dispute about those futuristic scenarios among notable numbers of 742 respondents to survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Elon University. Those who raised challenges believe that governments and corporations will not necessarily embrace policies that will allow the network to spread to under-served populations; and that serious social inequalities will persist.
The experts and analysts also split evenly on a central question of whether the world will be a better place in 2020 due to the greater transparency of people and institutions afforded by the internet: 46% agreed that the benefits of greater transparency of organizations and individuals would outweigh the privacy costs and 49% disagreed.
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The Pew report on the future internet surveyed 742 experts in the fields of computing, politics and business.
More than half of respondents had a positive vision of the net’s future but 46% had serious reservations.
Almost 60% said that a counter culture of Luddites would emerge, some resorting to violence.
The Pew Internet and American Life report canvassed opinions from the experts on seven broad scenarios about the future internet, based on developments in the technology in recent years.
Written responses
The correspondents were also able to qualify their answers with written responses giving more detail.
“Key builders of the next generation of internet often agree on the direction technology will change, but there is much less agreement about the social and political impact those changes will have,” said Janna Quitney Anderson, lead author of the report The Future of the Internet II.
She added: “One of their big concerns is: Who controls the internet architecture they have created?”
Bob Metcalfe, founder of 3Com and the inventor of ethernet, predicted the net would be a global connection of different devices.
“The internet will have gone beyond personal communications,” by 2020 he wrote.
Mobiles
“Many more of today’s 10 billion new embedded micros per year will be on the internet.”
Louis Nauges, president of Microcost, a French information technology firm, saw mobile devices at the forefront of the net.
“Mobile internet will be dominant,” he explained. “By 2020, most mobile networks will provide one-gigabit-per-second-minimum speed, anywhere, anytime.
“Dominant access tools will be mobile, with powerful infrastructure characteristics. All applications will come from the net.”
But not everyone felt a “networked nirvana” would be possible by 2020.
Concerns over interoperability (different formats working together), government regulation and commercial interests were seen as key barriers to a universal internet.
Ian Peter, Australian leader of the Internet Mark II Project, wrote: “The problem of the digital divide is too complex and the power of legacy telco regulatory regimes too powerful to achieve this utopian dream globally within 15 years.”
‘Real interoperability’
Author and social commentator Douglas Rushkoff agreed with Mr Peter.
He wrote: “Real interoperability will be contingent on replacing our bias for competition with one for collaboration.
“Until then, economics do not permit universal networking capability.”
Many of the surveyed experts predicted isolated and small-scale violent attacks to try and thwart technology’s march.
“Today’s eco-terrorists are the harbingers of this likely trend,” wrote Ed Lyell, an expert on the internet and education.
“Every age has a small percentage that cling to an overrated past of low technology, low energy, lifestyle.”
“Of course there will be more Unabombers,” wrote Cory Doctorow of blog BoingBoing.
Some commentators felt that the violence would either be tied to the effects of technology, rather than the technology itself, or possibly civil action around issues such as privacy.
“The interesting question is whether these acts will be considered terrorism or civil disobedience,” wrote Marc Rotenberg or the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
More than half of respondents disagreed that English would become the lingua franca of the internet by 2020 and that there would be dangers associated with letting machines take over some net tasks such as surveillance and security.
Internet Society Board chairman Fred Baker wrote: “We will certainly have some interesting technologies.
He added: “Until someone finds a way for a computer to prevent anyone from pulling its power plug, however, it will never be completely out of control.”
The repondents were split over the whether the impact of people’s lives becoming increasingly online, resulting in both less privacy but more transparency, would be a positive outcome.
‘Access information’
Tiffany Shlain, founder of the Webby awards, said such transparancy would be a benefit to society.
“Giving all people access to our information and a context to understand it will lead to an advancement in our civilisation.” But NetLab founder Barry Wellman disagreed: “The less one is powerful, the more transparent his or her life. The powerful will remain much less transparent.”
Mr Doctorow wrote: “Transparency and privacy aren’t antithetical.
“We’re perfectly capable of formulating widely honored social contracts that prohibit pointing telescopes through your neighbours’ windows.
“We can likewise have social contracts about sniffing your neighbours’ network traffic.”
By 2020 an increasing number of people will be living and working within “virtual worlds” being more productive online than offline, the majority of the respondents said.
Ben Detenber, an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University, responded: “Virtual reality (VR) will only increase productivity for some people. For most, it will make no difference in productivity (i.e., how much output); VR will only change what type of work people do and how it is done.”
Glenn Ricart, a board member at the Internet Society, warned also of potential dangers.
He envisaged “an entire generation opting-out of the real world and a paradoxical decrease in productivity as the people who provide the motive economic power no longer are in touch with the realities of the real world”.
Cloud computing and virtualization reflect a general movement driven by the Web: a shift towards a more service-driven economy.
There are two major trends that are now coming together to reshape our economies and societies. One is the continuing replacement of humans by computers in the workplace. Computers are essential in manufacturing and in the office. They continuously replace human effort and boost productivity.
Consider this: most of the products we design today could not be designed without computers. A new computer from Dell, for example, can only be designed by using computers from a previous generation. In other words, an older model of a computer is helping in the creation of a newer one.
So in which areas are computers not likely to replace humans (at least in the short term)? Service. The caring industries. People like being cared for by other people. A genuine smile and a friendly voice have a powerful affect on us. The computers will look after the hard space, humans will look after the soft space.
The Web thrives on interconnections; cloud computing and virtualization live on the Web. If you are not connected-if you live on a remote island with no outside connections-then to live you must physically have everything you need beside you. But if you live on the Web, it doesn’t matter where what you need resides, once you can make use of it. It’s not the owning or the physical proximity that matters-it’s the use. And what are the implications of all this? Service.
Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, said in March 2010 that Microsoft was “betting our company” on the cloud. I hear the same sort of statements in other big companies I deal with. There’s a shift to the cloud; a shift to service.
Part of this shift is of course technical. But there’s an equally large cultural part . A service-driven economy will be different from a product-driven economy. Why? Because the most important thing will be the service. You pay 10 dollars a month, not 400 dollars as a once-off payment. That changes how you think about what you’re getting.
Most organizations are structured around a launch and leave project-based culture of products, marketing and communication campaigns. The reward is for producing things (products, websites, brochures, videos, advertising campaigns). In a service-driven economy, the reward-structure will be based on how happy the customer is with your service.
How does a service-based brand thrive? By showing customers that you care about meeting their needs, month-in, month-out. These customers have not bought your product; they’ve bought your service. And that means they judge you on your service and can leave you more easily if your service declines. In service-driven economies people are locked in by trust and satisfaction, not by the fact that they have made a major investment in a product and must stick with it.
Are you ready for service? Because that’s where the Web is at. Great websites are run by service professionals. People who want to help their customers succeed. People who care more about whether the customers are happy than whether the organization is. If you focus too much on the organization — the internal politics — you invariably lose focus on the customer.
The link journalism meme seems to have legs, based on the number of smart people who picked it up. Now it’s time to kick it up a notch, with the concept of NETWORKED link journalism, which can give journalists, collectively, the power of Digg and Google to direct huge amounts of traffic on the web.
But first lets look at how the concept of link journalism has been refined and supported:
From Josh Cantone at ReadWriteWeb:
The Drudge Report and other so-called link blogs, are really a subset of edited news aggregation, which has a great signal to noise ratio. Because the content is being vetted by an editor, readers can assume that they’re being directed only to relevant, non-redundant reporting (assuming they trust the editor). Link journalism is also something citizen journalists do a lot of, as when we share links via Google Reader like Robert Scoble, or via del.icio.us like Jemima Kiss. Bloggers and citizen journalists have long recognized the value of the link as a way to add context for readers and reinforce the points we make in our posts.
Mindy McAdams points to the example of Joshua Micah Marshall’s link journalism on Talking Points Memo, which recently receive a George Polk Award in journalism:
In providing links to diverse reports appearing in many different locations, TPM’s Marshall and his colleagues demonstrated the authority of their analysis that particular U.S. attorneys had been dismissed for political reasons.
Rather than relying on what Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel have famously criticized as the “journalism of assertion,” the new link journalism supplies evidence by backing up statements. Rather than making a phone call to a favorite and easy-to-reach expert or pundit, the journalist conducts research (imagine that!) and sources the facts by linking directly to them.
Jack Lail shares his own experience with link journalism:
I’ve been posting content that consisted of links to blogs for about a year and have for a long time included outbound links in stories. But those efforts are accelerating. I recently began experimenting with Karp on creating sets of links as content, some created by one person bookmaking relevant content and some as collaborative efforts of multiple bookmarkers.
The results are impressive. These outbound linking articles are strong traffic drivers because, I believe, they are providing a valuable, time-saving service to readers. On more than one day in the past week, a link “article” was the No. 1 “story” on the combined knoxnews/govolsxtra sites. And in the context of stories, they provide an additional rich layering of information.
All of these observations support the substantive journalistic value — and content value — of links in the context of a specific reporting effort, i.e. the link journalism equivalent of a news article.
But what’s the link journalism equivalent of the entire newspaper?
That’s were networked link journalism comes into play.
Networked link journalism is combining all the links created by journalists practicing link journalism to determine that most important, interesting, and newsworthy content that journalists are linking to.
In the simplest form of networked link journalism, one link = one vote. The stories with the most votes rise to the top.
This is the newspaper of the future — or rather the newspaper of today. This is how Google works, and how Digg works, by combining the power of many links.
What’s on a Google search results page? Or Digg’s homepage? A bunch of links.
But not just any links — the “best” links.
Why do some many people go to Google and Digg to click on those links? Why do they drive so much traffic on the web?
Because those links are determined by networks, not individuals — and networks are the most powerful force on the web.
An individual practicing link journalism can drive tens or, in the case of top link blogger/journalists, hundreds of visits for each link. The uber link journalists like Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan can drive a few thousand. Matt Drudge, the exception that proves the rule, can drive many thousands.
It’s all a matter of scale.
Journalists practicing link journalism in isolation can influence content distribution on the web (which most journalists are not doing at all), but only to a limited degree.
Journalists practicing networked link journalism, on the other hand, could have a huge influence over content distribution on the web — if enough journalists participated, they could drive enough traffic to crash servers.
We created Publish2 as a platform for networked link journalism, to give journalists and news organizations the power online that they once had offline — the power of distribution, the power of Google and Digg on the web — a power that, completely counter to the monopoly distribution model, journalism can only have collectively.
Remember the rule of networks on the web — the bigger the network, the more powerful it is.
Google knows a lot about the future of news — more than many publishers. It’s evident in Google’s new product, Fast Flip, which allows news consumers to “flip” through news stories. What’s striking about Fast Flip is that Google is innovating precisely where publishers used to lead innovation.
Fast Flip is a new package for news.
The publishing business has always been about packaging content. Newspapers. Magazines. Newsletters
In digital media, on the web, the news package is now a function of software — which is why Google is innovating precisely where publishers are not.
Fast Flip is, more accurately, an attempt to create a new UI for news — a better way to consume publishers’ content than publishers provide on their own sites.
Most publishers are focused on how to charge for news. But there’s very little talk about how to innovate the packaging of news, much less a new UI for news. There’s very little talk about how people consume news on the web, about the value of aggregating articles from multiple sources, about solving consumers’ problems rather than publishers’ problems.
That’s why Google is taking the lead on figuring out how to create the new news package, and why they will continue to control the lucrative front end of distribution, while publishers are left with far less profitable back end of content creation.
Google is sharing revenue with publishers because Fast Flip goes way beyond linking to actually partially reproducing entire web pages. And publishers will have to be content with the revenue that Google shares.
Unless they finally decide to compete on the real playing field that will determine the future of news and publishing.