Breaking: Details of News Limited’s digital subscription plans

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I am at what would not long ago have been unimaginable for News Limited: a briefing by senior executives for bloggers and social media. What is even more surprising is that social media are getting the scoop on mainstream media in being briefed first.

The executives present include Richard Freudenstein, CEO of The Australian and News Digital Media, Ed Smith, Chief Marketing Officer of New Ltd, and Clive Mathieson, editor of The Australian. Many of the most visible people in social media in Australia are here, including @servantofchaos, @silkcharm, @GaryPHayes, @mediahunter, @tiphereth, and @katydaniells, with @bhowarth and @mumbrella crossing the chasm as both social and mainstream media protagonists.

Here are some notes live at the briefing.
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Using social media to track and drive organizational success metrics

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This week I was MC for the AHRI HR Technology conference, and ran one of the workshops on the following day, on Creating Results Using Social Media.

A real highlight of the conference was the Social Media: Risks and Rewards panel, which I chaired, with the participation of a fantastic cast of Peter Williams of Deloitte, Steve Barham of LinkedIn, Laurel Papworth of The Community Crew, and Sam Mutimer of ThinkTank Media.

It was a fabulous discussion, and we covered a lot of territory in the conversation.

One of the many topics discussed was the use of social media to track metrics and correlate these with organizational success metrics.
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The future of cars: Why car exhaust will be as anti-social as cigarette smoke is today

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Earlier this week I was interviewed on ABC TV about the future of cars, in a program to coincide with the start of World Solar Challenge, the annual solar car race covering the 3,021 km from Darwin to Adelaide.

I talked about several facets of the future of cars, including changing energy sources and their implications, new car materials and structures, and the rise of self-driving automobiles.

It is important to understand that while zero emission vehicles, usually electric, are a key objective in moving beyond petrol-driven cars, that electric cars usually still pollute. In most countries electricity is generated primarily by a variety of dirty fossil fuels. Refueling your car by plugging it into the mains doesn’t mean it isn’t polluting, simply that the pollution happens elsewhere.
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Workshop content: Creating results using social media – the HR perspective

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Tomorrow is the Australian Human Resources Institute HR Technology conference. I will be MC for the conference day, and will also run a half-day workshop on Creating Results Using Social Media on the following day.

I thought I would share the visual content we will be using during the workshop. As usual, the slides are not intended to be useful by themselves, but to provide supporting content for the activities and discussions of the session.

Workshop: Creating Results With Social Media in HR

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How is the culture of luxury changing?

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Luxury is “the opposite of vulgarity” said Coco Chanel. It is also in many ways the opposite of poverty. As people in developed countries – and increasing number in developing countries – grow more affluent, luxury defines what their wealth can be spent on once theirbasic needs are assuaged.

In a positive sense, this is about sensory refinement and human taste at its most discerning. Sensory Indulgence is in fact one of my chosen themes of the Zeitgeist 2011. However it can sometimes be a simple expression of an excess of money.

Tim Stock of scenarioDNA has created an excellent presentation on the Culture of Luxury, shown here. It is a beautiful deck with many provocative ideas – well worth seeing.

The Culture of Luxury 2011 (Brand Packaging)

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[VIDEO] In 1987 Apple predicted it would launch Siri in 2011

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This is very, very good.

This video created by Apple in 1987 shows how a ‘Knowledge Navigator’ would work, depicting a university professor interacting with a tablet computer through voice. The system’s animated avatar summarizes emails, responds to voice commands, extracts and displays data, provides intelligent information retrieval, and provides message filtering.

This video was posted on Waxy, where they calculate the date of the video as September 16, 2011, based on the calendar on the desk, and the request for a five-year old research paper from 2006.


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Watch a robot surgeon peel a grape: the extension of human powers

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This awesome video from New Scientist TV shows a surgical robot with a human operator peeling a grape. This technology greatly augments what human surgeons can do, and also provides a platform for telesurgery.

The New Scientist article Watch a surgical robot peel a grape, says:
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Animated excursions into the future: the extraordinary implications of utility fog

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I caught up with fellow futurist Kristin Alford last week, yet another first time face-to-face meeting after a long time interacting online. It seems most of the people I meet these days are people I know from Twitter.

Kristin pointed me to some of what her company Bridge8 is doing in creating animated videos about the future. I believe the primary intended audience is secondary school students, but they are excellent videos, well-paced, well-thought-out, educational, all in all very nicely done.

Here is their video on the implications of Utility Fog, starting with a segment on how to think about the future, introducing the idea of utility fog, and running through some of the possible implications. It’s a great study in futures thinking, and well worth watching.


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The Question: What is the most interesting thing you came across today?

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Twitter has moved from asking ‘what are you doing now?’ to ‘what’s happening?’, and now describes itself as an ‘information network‘.

The Twitter News Network is a manifestation of the global brain, in which we create value for others by contributing to the visibility and availability of high-value information.

While many contribute nothing of value to Twitter, many extraordinarily talented and interesting contributors are doing what they can to add value to others. It is a choice we make, by how we engage in our social networks.

If we consider what we can best contrbute to global consciousness, it is very likely the most interesting things we come across. The most intriguing, through-provoking, stimulating ideas, whether they be in the form of an article, a video, a conversation, or anything else from the vastness of media and ideas we encounter each day.
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Creating the future of local government

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I recently gave the opening keynote at Local Government Association of Tasmania‘s annual conference. On the occasion of their 100th anniversary, they wanted to look forward to the future as well as to their past.

Incidentally, the event was just two days after I gave the opening keynote at the Institute of Public Administration NSW’s annual conference on the Transformation of Government. My presentations at the two events were reasonably similar, but many issues differ across state and local government. One of the key issues is that in a world driven by community, local government is (or at least should be) closer to the community than any other level of government.

For the local government conference my topic was Creating the Future of Local Government. The current issue of the association’s magazine, LGAT News, contains a write-up of my keynote:

In a defining era for government globally, councils are in the front-line of changes and challenges and are best placed to take the lead in turning these challenges into opportunities. This was the message to Tasmanian councils from leading business futurist, Ross Dawson, in his keynote address to conference delegates.

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