What the future of newspapers looked like in 1981

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This delightful TV news clip from 1981 shows how people could access newspapers such as San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times on their computer using a dial-up line.

It took 2 hours to download the text of a newspaper, with a $5 cost per hour. One user marvelled at how you could not only read the newspaper online, but also copy it into a document and print it out. It’s particularly interesting to contrast the interface available in the day with, say, a contemporary iPad.

“We’re not in it to make money,” the newspaper people said of their experiments with online newspapers. Evidently.

Will the future of social networking be open and distributed? Here comes Plexus

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I just caught up with my neighbor and fellow futurist Mark Pesce, who over a coffee at our local briefed me on his new project Plexus, which he publicly announced at his recent keynote at Pycon Australia, for Python developers. His excellent speech, titled How Not to be Seen, is below, and the transcript on Mark’s blog.

In his presentation Mark starts with his long relationship with programming and finally moves on to describe his project Plexus, which will provide a new platform for social networks.

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Revisiting the Web 2.0 Framework for insights on the web landscape today

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I have just been requested permission by London School of Economics to use my Web 2.0 Framework in their Management and Innovation of eBusiness program for the next four years. The first part of the framework is below, and the industry landscape further down the page.

Web 2.0 Framework

Click on the image for the original description and full pdf

I’m delighted that the framework is still seen as relevant and useful over 3 years after it was created in May 2007. Certainly the original post continues to get plenty of traffic, not least because an image from the framework still appears on the front page of a Google search for ‘Web 2.0’. The phrase ‘Web 2.0’ has been largely replaced with ‘social media’, ‘cloud’ and similar terms, but the underlying concepts remain valid in understanding what is going on today.

I thought it would be worth reviewing the framework today to see what is still current and what I would change.

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Looking for a great blog writer for Crowdsourcing Results site

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Of the many initiatives we have on, one of the most exciting is rolling out a series of websites/ forums – we have a few up now and many more coming. As we do so, we are looking for outside writers to complement our own content.

One of our most popular new sites is CrowdsourcingResults.com, which showcases our Crowdsourcing Landscape and provides insights and discussion on how to use crowdsourcing effectively.

Below is the ad we are posting. Please apply if it’s of interest, or if not please pass it on to people who might be interested – probably mainly for interest in the topic and the visibility.

Also note that we will soon be creating a detailed report on crowdsourcing, so great writers/ researchers who want to get stuck into a bigger project should also get in touch – we can discuss terms.

Job title

Great blog writers with a deep understanding of crowdsourcing

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No more checking in: why public facial recognition may take off

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minority-report-ads.jpgWe all know that processing power has for many years increased exponentially and continues to do so. This essentially means that any processing-intensive task you can imagine will eventually be possible.

Facial recognition happens to be a task that humans are hard-wired to be exceptionally good at. While computers struggled at this for a long time, it is now an entirely viable technology in controlled conditions, as when people are walking through turnstiles or gates.

The facial recognition used at the 2001 Super Bowl was successful enough to apparently nab 19 people with pending arrest warrants, while facial recognition is now commonly used in border security.

It becomes a lot harder when people’s faces are not viewed from the front, however to a large degree that’s where the increased processing power comes in handy.

Mark Cuban says that he has just invested in a company that uses video to identify how many people are in a given area, which can be useful for safety, security, and traffic control.

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Four awesome animations on YouTube

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My one-year old daughter Phoebe has woken up from her afternoon nap so I’m introducing her to YouTube. I spent a lot of time with her older sister Leda on my knee watching YouTube videos a couple of years ago – it’s time for Phoebe to explore the world of online video.

I have a number of favorites that I’ve watched many times, quite often as much for me as for the children. In case you haven’t seen them before, here are these choice morsels – hope you enjoy them!

1. Big Buck Bunny

A collaborative effort to promote the (awesome) open source 3D platform Blender – outstanding!

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Is our propensity for social media part of our design – so humans are stepping stones to the creation of a global brain?

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Back when I wrote Living Networks in 2002 the idea that we were all part of a global brain was hardly mainstream, though a community of people were actively engaged with the idea.

Today the idea of the global brain seems to be very much alive. I received a tremendous response when I recently resurrected the buried introduction to Living Networks in which I described how connectivity was literally creating a new lifeform. That helped me discover Tiffany Shlain’s forthcoming film Connected which describes the implications of a nascent global brain.

Now Robert Wright, to me best known as author of the fabulous book Nonzero, has written a couple of articles on the global brain in the New York Times – the public response to the first one meriting another column. These are rich philosophical discussions, delving into some of the many issues that we are in fact all beginning to engage with.

In the first column titled Building One Big Brain, beginning by commenting on Kevin Kelly’s forthcoming book What Technology Wants, Wright writes:

I personally don’t think it’s outlandish to talk about us being, increasingly, neurons in a giant superorganism; certainly an observer from outer space, watching the emergence of the Internet, could be excused for looking at us that way.

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Atlassian makes its Enterprise 2.0 ambitions clear – raises $60 million in first ever external funding

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Big news: Australian enterprise software company Atlassian, creators of popular wiki Confluence, project tracking platform Jira and other innovative software, has just raised $60 million from Accel Partners in what Wall Street Journal reports as a ‘growth equity’ round.

Atlassian has been entirely bootstrapped with no external funding to date, making it one of the larger companies in that situation, given its $59 million revenue in the last financial year. The reasons given for the funding round are to fund expansion in Europe and Asia, acquisitions, and to give liquidity to its employees, who all have stock options. Similarly, Microsoft’s CFO at the time of their IPO said that they didn’t need the money but mainly wanted to give their employees a way to participate easily in the company’s success.

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Word of mouth in Australia vs US – Apple is a stronger brand Down Under

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At our Future of Influence Summit conference last year Sharyn Smith of Australian word of mouth agency Soup was one of the key local experts to speak. Given that Australian companies have been a fair bit slower than the US to take up broad word of mouth initiatives, it’s good to see what Soup are doing.

Soup has just released research on word of mouth in Australia they commissioned from the dominant US firm researching the space, Keller Fay.

Apparently Australians have 67.8 branded conversations each week, of which almost two-thirds are positive. Below are the headline results with a few quick comments

Top brand for overall word of mouth (both positive and negative)

WOM_Aust1.jpg

Source: Soup

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Five frameworks to build strategies for the future of media

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We are big believers in the power of visual frameworks to help people understand complex landscapes and build effective strategies. One of the domains we have been applying these frameworks to is the future of media.

For those who haven’t been following our work through the years, here is a collection of five frameworks we’ve created to help companies understand and act on the future of media. These are frequently used in strategy workshops, and also in more structured strategy development processes.

We have also created a number of custom future of media frameworks in the course of strategy consulting projects for clients, to address the particular issues they are facing, however unfortunately we cannot share these publicly.

Click on the title or images for links to the original posts, which contain full explanations as well as large versions of the frameworks.

Future of Media Strategic Framework

Future_of_Media_Strategic_Framework.jpg

Released ahead of our Future of Media Summit 2006, this has been one of our most popular frameworks with over 500,000 downloads and extensive use by media organizations and governments in forming strategy. It is still as relevant today as when it was created over four years ago, and its perspectives such as the symbiosis of social media and mainstream media have certainly borne out.

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