Tele-commuting has shifted from something that prognosticators talk about to an everyday work practice for many. More and more companies are happy for their staff to spend some or all of their time working from home, facilitated by a profusion of cloud software as well as familiarity with collaboration tools such as instant messaging, screen sharing, and video chat.
At IBM, for example, 46,000 out of its 115,000 workers in the US were reported to be working at “alternative workplaces” including home. Many companies large and small are following this lead. Moreover, in the free agent economy a rising proportion people global headquarters IS their home office.
There are of course pointed upsides to working from home, not least forgoing frustrating commutes, as well as greater personal flexibility. But some people find it hard to get themselves motivated, and many miss the daily banter and social interactions of the office. This is not a trivial issue – the vagaries of working from home will be a shaping force on society and how companies operate.
One of the approaches more and more freelancers and home workers are taking is to regularly meet locally to work together, creating a pleasant, sociable, collaborative work environment.
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The rise of the cloud workplace: co-working facilities
By Ross DawsonTele-commuting has shifted from something that prognosticators talk about to an everyday work practice for many. More and more companies are happy for their staff to spend some or all of their time working from home, facilitated by a profusion of cloud software as well as familiarity with collaboration tools such as instant messaging, screen sharing, and video chat.
At IBM, for example, 46,000 out of its 115,000 workers in the US were reported to be working at “alternative workplaces” including home. Many companies large and small are following this lead. Moreover, in the free agent economy a rising proportion people global headquarters IS their home office.
There are of course pointed upsides to working from home, not least forgoing frustrating commutes, as well as greater personal flexibility. But some people find it hard to get themselves motivated, and many miss the daily banter and social interactions of the office. This is not a trivial issue – the vagaries of working from home will be a shaping force on society and how companies operate.
One of the approaches more and more freelancers and home workers are taking is to regularly meet locally to work together, creating a pleasant, sociable, collaborative work environment.
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We are as gods – the cycle swings back to techno-optimism and neo-psychedelia
By Ross DawsonThe opening words of Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 were: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
Indeed, the late 1960s were a time of vast optimism for many, based not just on the belief that ancient social strictures could be thrown off, but also that by use of new technologies we could liberate ourselves. The 1970s and then 1980s disabused people of the notion that revolution had truly arrived, as so little of the potential seen in the full flowering of new ideas seemed to have come to pass.
Then in the 1990s there was a smaller renaissance of techno-optimism, I think best captured in Douglas Rushkoff’s book Cyberia (now fully downloadable), which talked of designer reality and technoshamanism. By then Timothy Leary had reinvented himself as a digital apostle, in Chaos and Cyberculture (the full text is here though it doesn’t do justice to what is a highly visual book) describing how computers and connectivity were now the tools of enlightenment.
Today, after a decade of financial greed and excesses analogous to the 1980s, techno-optimism and neo-psychedelia are coming back with a vengeance. A strong indicator is the forthcoming documentary Turning into Gods by Jason Silva – the trailer is below.
TURNING INTO GODS – ‘Concept Teaser’ from jason silva on Vimeo.
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Better ways to help readers filter and edit the news
By Ross DawsonUser filtered content, which I’ve talked about for many years now as an alternative to human editors, has recently progressed primarily through tools that aggregate the links shared on Twitter, such as Tweetmeme and Topsy. This is because Twitter (and Facebook, though the data is not readily available to third-parties to use) has become the dominant platform in how people share links and content of interest.
These Twitter-based content filters are very crude, not least having no good way of sorting by interest profile. As such they are filled with the trivial rather than what would be interesting to any one person.
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Facebook’s Nipplegate hits the front page
By Ross DawsonHey, I was there first! :-) On Saturday I wrote Breaking: Facebook bans doll nipples on profile images, about how my wife Victoria Buckley was told by Facebook she couldn’t show nude dolls on her Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page.
Today the Sydney Morning Herald has featured this as its top story, with a headline Facebook nipplegate row and story by Asher Moses titled Now Facebook bans doll nipples. It says:
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Breaking: Facebook bans doll nipples on profile images
By Ross DawsonMy wife Victoria Buckley just received a message from Facebook asking her to change the profile image on the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page, threatening to close the page as it did not conform to its ‘terms and conditions’.
Presumably the were referring to condition3. 7. You will not post content that…contains nudity…. referring to the profile image of a beautiful doll touching one of Victoria’s rings.
Above is the offensive image. If you go to the Victoria Buckley Jewellery Facebook page you will now see a censored image so she doesn’t get banned, along with her close to 1,000 fans. (Though if you click through to the Photos page and the Ophelia Enchanted Doll collection you can see more stunning images of the doll).
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Asia is now the #1 and fastest growing region for Twitter; US down to just 25% of total tweets
By Ross DawsonMicro-messaging processing company Semiocast has just released research showing that Asia has overtaken North America as the biggest user of Twitter, with 37% of total tweets.
Source: Semiocast
In June 2009 the US still accounted for 55% of tweets, in February 2010 statistics showed that half of tweets were in languages other than English, and by April 2010 US tweets accounted for 37% of tweets. The rise of “international” (as Americans describe the planet excluding USA) and corresponding decline of the US share is shown in the chart below. Today’s study shows that US tweets have in the three months since then fallen to just 25% of the total. This is not because the US is slowing, it is because the rest of the world and particularly Asia is taking up Twitter at an enormous pace.
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Six platforms to get results from crowdsourcing
By Ross DawsonMyCustomer.com has just published a nice article based on an interview with me, titled Ross Dawson: Six tools to kickstart your crowdsourcing strategy.
After beginning with some background on the topicality of crowdsourcing, the article goes on:
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Trend Blend: 4 Infographics showing the major global trends
By Ross DawsonAt the end of every year media call on futurists to ask them what to expect in coming years, reflecting the appetite from their audiences for future thinking. One of the best ways to feed this desire is with infographics, distilling ideas into an accessible visual representation.
For the last four years a Trend Blend has been produced to close out the year. Each year this has been driven by Richard Watson of NowandNext, with myself and Future Exploration Network participating in the creation of the first three of these.
Below is a compilation of the four Trend Blends. You will see some themes recurring, and other fresh trends emerging over the years. All are intended to be fun and provocative, used both for general entertainment and sometimes for stimulating new thinking in the course of more serious futures and strategy work.
Click on the maps to see the detailed versions.
Trend Blend 2007+ map
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The sexual life of ideas: flirtation, promiscuity, procreation, and seminal creativity but no virgin births
By Ross DawsonHere’s a brief excerpt from Chapter 1 of Living Networks on the sexual life of ideas – I’ve always had a good response to this and it remains a relevant metaphor :-)
Ideas don’t like being alone. In fact they like copulating promiscuously with any other idea in sight. There is no such thing as a virgin birth in the world of ideas. Ideas are always born from other ideas: interacting, mating, and procreating. This often orgiastic coupling takes place in the fertile substrate which is the human mind. Our minds are hotbeds of unspeakable activities—ideas have a life of their own, but they need somewhere to carry on their flirtations and breeding.
In her book The Meme Machine, Susan Blackmore suggested that humans are purely and simply carriers for memes, which means ideas or behaviors that can be passed on to others. Our species has evolved to become a more refined vehicle for propagating ideas. One result is the desire to produce and consume mass media that seems so intrinsic to our race. Another is our drive to implement communication technologies, to engage more richly with others, and to publish on the Internet.
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The Social Internet: findings on how countries and regions engage differently with the web
By Ross DawsonOne of the topics that interests me the most is the variety with how different countries and cultures engage with social media, so I was very please to see in the current issue of Harvard Business Review a great spread on Mapping the Social Internet. Click on the image below to see the central visualization of how countries engage differently on the web.
Source: Harvard Business Review
The axes of the chart are the portion of internet users who manage a social-network profile, and the portion of internet users who write a blog, a choice of dimensions which yields a few very interesting perspectives:
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