Video interview on Enterprise 2.0 by Melcrum/ KM Review

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The other day Alex Manchester, Editor of the Melcrum publications KM Review and The Internal Comms Hub, did a video interview of me, covering a broad range of issues relating to Enterprise 2.0 and the application of social media inside organizations. The video is posted on the Melcrum Blog as well as below. Soon Melcrum will post a slightly longer version on their site – I’ll post the info on this when it’s available.

A brief summary of the questions and answers in the video are below.

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Hitting the front page of del.icio.us: Studying the power of influencers and amplifiers

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Last weekend my blog had the most hits ever in one day by a factor of seven, as my blog post on Eight steps to thriving on information overload was featured first on Lifehacker, and in turn appeared on a variety of prominent sites, including del.icio.us popular, popurls, and then the front page of del.icio.us. It also received a good number of diggs, though it didn’t hit the front page of Digg.com.

It’s instructive to unpack how this happened. The first element was clearly content that hit a hot button for people, and was useful. A large part of my job is throwing at executives wild, provocative, and instructive insights from across everything that’s happening in technology and business, and helping them to make sense of it and take useful action. One of the most common responses, especially recently, has been to ask how I manage to keep on top of so much in a world run amok. Everyone is experiencing increasing pressure to keep up, and feeling they are not succeeding. Interestingly, my blog post was a repost of a magazine article I wrote ten years ago on this topic, showing the issue is a perennial. It’s only going to become more acute as years go by.

After I posted the article on August 27, there were a few blog posts about it, most notably by Jack Vinson, who excerpted the article on his blog two days later, and then mentioned it again a week after that. Jack has good, influential readership, especially in the knowledge management community.

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Six Trends that are transforming Living Online: Presentation at Influence conference

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Tomorrow I’m going to the Influence conference organized by Phil Sim and Mediaconnect, an invitation-only event held in the heart of the Hunter Valley wine region. Originally the event was only for technology journalists and the tech companies that wanted to reach them, but it has now been extended to the all most powerful influencers in the technology community, whether they are journalists, analysts, or bloggers.

Last year I spoke on the Web 2.0 panel, where I described what User Filtered Content is, and why it is such an important foundation to Web 2.0. This year I will be speaking on the Living Online panel, which is devoted to looking at where life online is going for consumers. In my brief introductory talk I will touch on six trends that will transform living online over the next years.

1. Pervasive connectivity

The trend underlying all the others is that we will be far more connected, wherever we are. Broadband speeds, while still disappointing in most countries, will continue to increase. A good way to think about it is to consider when the majority of consumers will have 100Mbps in the home. In Australia, probably not by 2010, but I would certainly hope by 2014. Gradually WiFi will become pervasive – and hopefully free – in metropolitan areas. WiMax has the potential to offer high speed roaming Internet access over large areas. As importantly, 3G mobile technologies that require less power and thus can be used for extended periods by handheld devices will enable access to the Internet by anyone anywhere. The critical enabler here will be reasonable pricing of mobile data. In Australia it is in most cases obscenely expensive, so big price falls will be required to make access pervasive. A key indicator of pervasive access is when car radios become IP-based, as this will indicate there is always good access to the internet, and all radio stations simulcast over IP.

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Tapping the Zeitgeist: Powerful tools for spotting online trends

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One of the most fabulous aspects of the online world is that trends are visible as never before. Since people’s interests are visible in what they search for and where they go, the zeitgeist becomes visible. Here is a brief review of some of the tools that give us insights into up-to-the-minute views on what we are collectively thinking and following.

Google Trends

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Google’s original Google Zeitgeist was replaced in May by the current Google Trends, which allows you to compare searches made on terms, correlates these with news and events, and enables you to drill down to activities in regions, cities and specific languages. The Hot Trends feature shows the hottest searches (as in most increased relative to usual levels) of the day.

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Eight steps to thriving on information overload

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Many of my keynote speeches focus on the future of business and where technology is going. One of the most common responses, and one I’ve heard many times after my speeches over the last few weeks, is to be staggered by the implications of where this is all going, followed by the question, “So how do I keep on top of everything that’s happening?” In a world in which the pace of developments and amount of information available in any given domain is soaring out of sight, it’s a very valid question.

I intend to spend more of my time answering this question in a practical fashion, as this has become an absolutely vital issue in a world of information run amok. For now, I thought I’d post an article I originally published 10 years ago in the October 1997 issue of Company Director magazine. Everything I wrote is still completely valid. However now we have access to many technological tools, which if used well, can assist us in coping with information overload. More on that later, along with some of the tools and approaches I find effective. The original article is here:

Information Overload – Problem or Opportunity?

“We have for the first time an economy based on a key resource [information] that is not only renewable, but self-generating. Running out of it is not a problem, but drowning in it is.” John Naisbitt, author of Megatrends.

Information overload is a fact of life for company directors, senior managers, and all professionals. Information is coming in from all sides in the form of reports, memos, newspapers, journals, and letters, and now the advent of e-mail and Internet has turned the torrent into a flood.

How can directors cope with the onslaught? Or rather, since we are businesspeople, it seems the question should be how can we turn the reality of the new business environment into an opportunity and a competitive advantage?

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Marketers accepting loss of control is on the way to the mainstream

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A recent article in Smartcompany magazine titled Web 2.0: The risk, the reward, discussed the opportunities and risks of Web 2.0, focusing on the lack of control in marketing in the new online world. It quotes extensively from lawyers on some of the legal realities of dealing with negative commentary online, and then goes on to quote from me:

If you also prefer to avoid lawyers altogether, another option is to hop into the online debate yourself. Internet strategy consultant Ross Dawson says web 2.0 is really about participation – and any company that ignores this does so at their peril.

“It cuts both ways,” says Dawson, noting that companies can’t choose to be invisible online. Web 2.0 is not about companies deciding to be rated; consumers comment on whatever they like.

“It’s important to understand that web 2.0 is not just about technology. It relates to social trends, including the trend towards self-expression,” Dawson says. “We’re living in a world where people can express their opinions far more freely.”

At a minimum, Dawson sees web 2.0 as a great opportunity for companies to monitor – for free – what consumers think about them and their products, competitors and industry.

“This is an extraordinary tool that any business should tap,” says Dawson, describing web 2.0 sites as a “treasure trove” of customer feedback. “Corporate Australia has been a massive laggard – two or three years behind many countries – in terms of takeup of web 2.0.”

His advice, if people say bad things about your company online, is to avoid lawyers and old-fashioned press releases. “If you want to respond effectively you have to be part of the same conversation. This diffuses the negativity and creates a balance in the conversation.”

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The future of video search

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One of the transformative technologies over the next 5-10 years will be improved video search. With video becoming the majority of digital content on the web, the ability to find what is relevant and useful is a vital task. Imagine being able to find, in a world dominated by video content (accelerated by eventually most mobile phones including video capabilities), the video segments most relevant to what you. In an interview on Beet.TV, Google’s Gabriel Stricker talks about Google’s ambition to search all video on the web, including the content on YouTube and the dozens of other video hosting sites. As he mentions, only a tiny fraction of existing video is on the web, so part of the task is helping video to migrate or be accessible on the web. On one level, this is about making it easier and more compelling for video creators – professional and amateur – to post their content on the web. Another innovation that will advance this is when all video cameras and video processing software come with one-step functionality to get content on the web.

One thing that Gabriel didn’t mention in the interview was the mechanisms that Google intends to use for video search. At the moment most video search uses only the title, any tags given by the author or others, and potentially words used in links to the video. To be truly useful, video search needs to index both the words and images in the video in a meaningful way. The first phase of this is now possible, with fairly good voice recognition technologies allowing traditional text search capabilities to be overlaid on the video search. Examples include Blinkx and Nexidia, which allow video search using its voice recognition and text indexing capabilities. One of the applications is to have contextual ads next to the video changing depending on what people are speaking about as the video proceeds. However the next phase, of recognizing and indexing the images in video, is largely beyond current technologies. Image recognition of even simply objects has proven to be one of the most difficult tasks in artificial intelligence. Massively greater computing power than we currently have available, along with far better evolutionary algorithms, will be necessary to be able to reasonably accurately identify what is relevant in video content.

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Complete video of Web 2.0 in Australia event

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The recent Web 2.0 in Australia event was a fabulous success. However because it was an invitation only event with space for just 100 people, many who wanted to were unable to attend. Fortunately, the fine folk at Viocorp, one of Australia’s leading Internet broadcasting companies, very generously made a video of all key proceedings at Web 2.0 in Australia, including the panels and showcase presentations, so these are available to all!

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Click here for video of Web 2.0 in Australia, hosted by Viocorp.

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Launching the Web 2.0 Framework

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[UPDATE:] We have taken the Web 2.0 Framework and applied it to the enterprise in our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report – You can download Chapter 2 on Web 2.0 and the Enterprise here.

Alongside our corporate strategy consulting and research work in the media and technology space, Future Exploration Network has created a Web 2.0 Framework to share openly. Click here or on any of the images below to download the Framework as a pdf (713KB).

The intention of the Web 2.0 Framework is to provide a clear, concise view of the nature of Web 2.0, particularly for senior executives or other non-technical people who are trying to grasp the scope of Web 2.0, and the implications and opportunities for their organizations.

There are three key parts to the Web 2.0 Framework, as shown below:

Web 2.0 Framework

Web 2.0 Framework

* Web 2.0 is founded on seven key Characteristics: Participation, Standards, Decentralization, Openness, Modularity, User Control, and Identity.

* Web 2.0 is expressed in two key Domains: the Open web, and the Enterprise.

* The heart of Web 2.0 is how it converts Inputs (User Generated Content, Opinions, Applications), through a series of Mechanisms (Technologies, Recombination, Collaborative Filtering, Structures, Syndication) to Emergent Outcomes that are of value to the entire community.

Web 2.0 Definitions

Web 2.0 Definitions

* We define the Web 2.0 Characteristics, Domains, and Technologies referred to in the Framework.

* Ten definitions for Web 2.0 are provided, including the one I use to pull together the ideas in the Framework: “Distributed technologies built to integrate, that collectively transform mass participation into valuable emergent outcomes.”

Web 2.0 Landscape

Web 2.0 Landscape

* Sixty two prominent Web 2.0 companies and applications are mapped out across two major dimensions: Content Sharing to Recommendations/ Filtering; and Web Application to Social Network. The four spaces that emerge at the junctions of these dimensions are Widget/ component; Rating/ tagging; Aggregation/ Recombination; and Collaborative filtering. Collectively these cover the primary landscape of Web 2.0.

As with all our frameworks, the Web 2.0 Framework is released on a Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to use it and build on it as they please, as long as there is attribution with a link to this blog post and/ or Future Exploration Network. The framework is intended to be a stimulus to conversation and further thinking, so if you disagree on any aspect, or think you can improve on it, please take what is useful, leave the rest, and create something better.

In the Framework document we also mention our forthcoming Future of Media Summit 2007, which will be held simultaneously in Sydney and San Francisco this July 18/17. In the same spirit as this Web 2.0 Framework, we will be releasing substantial research, framework, and other content on the Future of Media in the lead-up to our event, continuing the tradition from the Future of Media Strategic Framework and Future of Media Report 2006 that we released last year. Hope this is all useful!

Robots, aged care, and emotional bonding with machines

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Newsday has an interesting article out titled Independent at any age, examining how the elderly now have increased options to lead independent lives rather than being shunted off into homes. While most of the article deals with the issues such as occupational therapy and visiting programs, the final section moves on to how robots can assist senior citizens to live independently. I was interviewed on how robots are being used in health care generally, particularly in Japan, and quoted in the last section of the article:

“Most of the seniors live alone or are lonely,” said Teruo Sasaki, director of the Chicago trade office of the city of Osaka, which is a robotics hub. “They start to not say anything. If robots can speak to them, they will start answering. ”

Sasaki watched a video of how one robot, stationed at hospital doors, caught a patient wandering out. When told by the robot that she wasn’t supposed the leave, the patient went back in.

Japan’s robotics investment has been driven in large part by the numbers of seniors. The 60-plus segment is projected to go from 26 percent of the population now to 33 percent by 2025. Compare this to the United States, with about 17 percent now and an estimated 24 percent in 2025.

Many Japanese feel that their nation should be self-sufficient in caring for the elderly.

“Rather than having a very large influx of immigrants, they prefer to have robots in their environment,” said Ross Dawson, chairman of Future Exploration Network, which follows the future of technology in society, from headquarters in Sydney, Australia, and San Francisco.

But Japan’s high-speed investment into made-for-seniors robots has raised some debates, including how much human-ness we can take from machines before it’s too creepy.

Dawson said, “You can hire some of these robots and put them in your stall or exhibition stand or something,” he said. “But in terms of looking at age care … to try to pretend that the robot is a person doesn’t help.”

I have written before about robots in aged care in Japan, therapeutic robots such as Paro the seal, Japanese robot otaku, and other similar examples. The point I was making in my interview for this article was that the primary role of robots in aged care – at this stage in any case – is practical, such as dispensing drugs, finding lost objects, calling for help, assisting people to move around, and so on. Many people think of robots as humanoid, but in fact most robots have no need to look like humans, and it is usually not functional to try to do so. There is an entirely distinct application for robots, which is emotional bonding. In this case again, trying to make robots look human makes the task far harder. We find it difficult to build emotional ties with something we can distinguish as a machine, which is trying to look and act human, and failing. However we can definitely build emotional bonds with furry toys, especially if they respond to our stroking and voices in ways similar to small animals. Many people love R2D2 from Star Wars, which is distinctly uncuddly, certainly not humanoid, but endearing in its behaviors and interaction. The whole space of emotional robotics will rapidly evolve, driven initially by the value for the elderly, and soon after in child care and the family home. Clearly robots are not substitutes for humans. Yet before long we will consider it commonplace for people to have emotional bonds with robots.