Some times I am very lazy in Second Life, and do not change my clothes more than 3-6 times a year, but there are things that I really like in Second Life.

It is the possibility of having an up-do hair, and wearing high heel shoes. Those two things together, really is nice. I think there is a good reason to that, and I will try to describe why I think so.

There was a blogpost back in 2008 about “Maslow’s hierachy of needs”  where somebody created a computer science version of this. Unfortunately that post is now gone, but to describe in short on the lowest level WEB 1.0 was placed, at the middle level WEB 2.0 was placed, and on the top level it showed Virtual Worlds and WEB 3.0

I have thought about that,and for me using WEB 1.0, WEB 2.0 and virtual worlds, the major attraction seen from my point of view. is that in a virtual world it is possible to create ‘me’,  to change clothes, to talk about private stuff, to have up-do’es, high heels, galla dresses, look slim and fit, never look tired, meet up with one or more friends for 1 minutes, 10 minutes, several hours.

Couldn’t it be that the need on the web now is  in the upper part of “Maslows hierachy of needs pyramid”. The need for self expression and realization using Virtual Worlds?

“The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.”

What is the next step for web? Where will we be in 3 to 5 years time? What will the new web look like? Let me share a theory with you.

The semantic web is often talked about as the next big shift online. Information marked in smarter ways so things will be infinitely easier to search for. Will the next step for web be the semantic web? Probably not since there is no real technical platform for this. Nothing that has been widely accepted by developers at least. And in web that is really what matters.

No instead we’re already seeing the next step in web but only through the corner of our eye.

The next step in web will be the Aggregated web. Yes, that simple. While we are seeing more and more sites that aggregate feeds about the site or news about the common topic on the site these are really only precursors for the aggregated web. As mobile devices improve and more and more services offer APIs we’ll see a shift from surfing the web to using services and information in real-time in the real world. A huge leap in integration between the real world and the web. In fact, we’re already seeing this trend with the iPhone and stream of Android phones on the market.

Information is simple to find through search today. As more and more services offer open APIs to support different interfaces and devices we’ll see a trend for information to become less tied to design also. Eventually most services and information on the web will be data streams with replaceable layers of interfaces.

So finding information about a topic on your cellphone, tv or laptop will be equally simple and fast. But the visual display of that information will probably differ, both in complexity and according to the users taste.

This will eventually spawn the trend for interesting interfaces aggregating the information you’re looking for, real-time or otherwise, wherever you are. This is why I think the next step for web is the Aggregated web. Services are already popping up in a wide variety of styles and devices, just look at Twitter. When enough interesting services, and enough interesting information, has migrated to this sort of technology the interfaces on the web today will just not matter.

To finish with a situated example; your pen might feed information regarding grammar as you write while your fridge might aggregate special offers from stores near you. Sound like a poor 1950’s vision of the future? Wait, I just got an offer from my local store via Twitter on my iPhone. All these devices really need is upgrade to Android and these examples can be used today.

Welcome to the aggregated web, you heard it here first.

L’Internet des Objets nous promet de pouvoir accéder aux données liées à un objet. L’idée de ce billet est d’envisager comment utiliser ce nouveau lien entre le réel et les données pour susciter une découverte des technologies et des sciences.

Ou comment Redonner le goût aux sciences…

Bruce Sterling nous parle de l’Internet des Objets comme d’un moyen de repenser le monde. L’accès aux informations permet d’accéder à la conception d’un objet, de connaître sa vie. Il en déduit une foule de comportements qui deviennent possible : changer son usage, le faire évoluer, améliorer son empreinte, être au courant de son impact environnemental. Il reste à envisager cet objet comme moyen, ou au moins comme prétexte à apprendre.

Si l’on se place du goût de la découverte des technologies et des sciences, l’idée est que l’on peut via un objet chercher à comprendre comment il est fait, et aussi comment il s’intègre dans son environnement physique et technologique.

Si l’on considère que les plans qui ont conduit à sa conception sont disponibles, il devient possible de proposer ces informations à quelqu’un qui veut comprendre comment l’objet a été conçu ou fabriqué. Il est alors possible de parcourir ces plans pour comprendre quels sont ces composants, qu’ils soient physiques, intégrés ou logiciels. Sa construction redevient lisible !

Ainsi quand je suis face à un objet et que je me demande comment il fonctionne, il suffit de l’interroger pour pouvoir accéder à son fonctionnement interne. Il est ainsi possible de commencer à susciter ma curiosité au moment où je suis prêt à être intéressé.

Ce parcours peut évidemment s’adapter à différents critères : mon âge, mon niveau de connaissances, mon envie d’approfondissement, mes intérêts actuels (je peux m’intéresser actuellement à la découverte de l’électronique, à l’impact environnemental des objets, à l’histoire des sciences …). Il y a là de la matière pour tous les niveaux d’apprentissage. Pour faire une analogie avec le travail d’un collègue : chaque objet devient un musée virtuel dont il est possible de choisir un parcours.

Pour prendre une autre analogie, un certain nombre d’ingénieurs avouent en privé être venus à ce métier par un goût du démontage des objets qui les entouraient du temps de leur enfance. Qui de se souvenir d’une boite de vitesse, de son solex, d’une radio … Les avancées technologiques ont été suffisamment importantes pour que la technologie deviennent invisibles, et tous les objets qui nous entourent indémontables. De la à expliquer le moindre intérêt des jeunes pour la technologie, il n’y a qu’un pas. Cet accès aux plans de l’objet peut le rendre à nouveau « démontable », au moins virtuellement.

Dans cette perspective, l’Internet des objets peut devenir un moyen de comprendre le monde.

Moi cette perspective me branche assez, et vous, qu’en pensez-vous ?

53 Useful things you can do with wikis in large class teaching.Richard Buckland has been using Wikis in his large class (100-500 students) teaching in Engineering and Computer Science since 2000….

My public links in delicious.com have become 6000, today:

• http://delicious.com/omadeon

I’ve been collecting links since the beginning of 2007 and regularly use my account in  delicious.com for bookmarking any web-page, pdf, youtube video, or other URL that I find significant, coming across it, while surfing or searching. My total number of delicious links exceeds 10000, but I usually don’t make a link public unless I read it (or at least read a substantial part of it) to believe that it can be useful to others, too…

The problem is INFORMATION OVERLOAD. It’s perhaps the most important knowledge-management problem of our time: -We can not make sense of so much information, at least at the current… complexity level of our (undoubtedly still very primitive) Homo Sapiens brain!

Our current, extremely primitive level of evolution, viewed in the future, after certain… deliberately engineered human DNA species-enhancements, after only a few decades, may indeed look (to future generations) a bit like… this (looks to us) :

So, perhaps the only other way to understand so much data, is to use better forms of data organisation, based on meta-data (or information about information): This can consist of very simple enhancements like tagging, or more sophisticated ones like full-blown Semantic Web technology. If the latter is used to extract tags, if it succeeds it usually does a lot more: -The ultimate goal is semantic tagging and the automatic creation of Semantic (meta-)Structures of information, associated with any specific (human) text or web-page, anywhere…

Despite Semantic Web technology’s advances (and sites like OpenCalais that provide free API’s for programmers) real practical progress in facilities available for ordinary internet users, as regards automatic text-tagging has been very poor and too slow, perhaps because of the generally poor knowledge of NLP techniques by most programmers. In theory, automatic tagging has progressed a lot, with research links here , but in practice there are many problems, while an increasing number of people ask questions about (how to do)  it, e.g. in this post.

You can now try out two free on-line automatic text-tagging services:

• TagThe.net – Webservice that tags your resources

• TagCrowd – make your own tag cloud from any text

As an example, here are some experimental tags extracted automatically out of my recent blog-post “Intellectual Dishonesty as defensiveness against Cognitive Dissonance (a Research Proposal for Gestalt Psychology)” by

(and  subsequently corrected by hand to remove some invalid entries):

beliefs brain cognitive contradictory defensiveness discomfort dishonesty dissonance form function fundamental gestalt human incomplete inconsistent information inner intellectual intelligent mind pattern pattern-completion people perception phenomenon positive psyche psychology sense swan

The same text tagged automatically by another automatic tagging service,

generated the following tags:

topic

Gestalts    mind    Dissonance    Cognitive    defensiveness    perception    pattern    Gestalt    discomfort    information

language

english

Last, but not least, I should mention the excellent free automatic tagging service offered by Zemanta, as a firefox plugin for bloggers (hat I’ve used already to… generate automatically most tags for THIS post):

• http://www.zemanta.com

Among my programming  interests is to develop automatic text-tagging software in Prolog (with Assembly language for speed). However, other obligations (in a scheduling project) as well as the absence of anyone’s… willingness to finance a project in tagging, not to mention… (admittedly) too much blogging (!)   have delayed this goal, for a long time; even though a lot of work has already been done, e.g. in the creation of merged semantic dictionaries and optimised  parsing.

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I am one of the lucky twenty ‘guinea pigs’ accepted to try out a new Rapid eLearning Development Course.

http://ministryofid.org/MID/Home.html

“Part 3D computer game, part social network, part collaborative learning, the ReD course will teach you how to build effective elearning and informal media using leading elearning author tools.

Designed by Rob Hubbard of LearningAge Solutions with input from some of the smartest people in the elearning industry including Clive Shepherd, Jane Hart and Patrick Dunn. This is a course unlike any other, designed to show how great elearning can be and built using tools that you too can master. We want the ReD course to inspire as well as train.”

Just my luck. Right when I start to push out the pithy quotes, Reader’s Digest announces that it is filing for bankruptcy. I remember the days when everyone would recite the newest pearls from their “Quotable Quotes” column.

My little gems, such as they are, came in two recent interviews, both on the subject of semantic computing and the semantic web. The subject matter in each is somewhat similar – I wasn’t asked so much about future work that Microsoft is doing, but for assessments of different approaches in semantic computing past and present, and where the field is heading.

In the lead article in this week’s FedInsider newsletter, “Semantic Search Gains Ground on Traditional Keyword,” I focused on tagging – both automated and crowdsourced. My little bon mot in that article was about the promise of semantic search:

Semantic technology, according to Lewis Shepherd, can in the long run add much more to people’s ability to make sense of large volumes of unstructured data by freeing searchers from what he calls the “tyranny of the 10-word search window.”

Now if that doesn’t grab you, the other article ran just a couple of weeks ago in Security Watch, “Web 3.0: Installing the Plumbing,” drawn from an interview I gave to the Zurich-based International Relations and Security Network. That article focused more on the technical aspects of how the semantic web will or won’t be constructed. My quotable-quote was meant to salute the promise of semantic computing without adding to the hype that surrounds any discussion of the semantic web:

The semantic web will be a complex, boring, but very empowering set of capabilities,” Shepherd told Security Watch. “It will provide people with a rich networked and hyperlinked dense array of semantically enabled text. It will change the way people collaborate and encounter information on the web.”

Feel free to read the full articles if you’re into semantic computing, or just battling insomnia.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what kind of content is bringing down the readership of Reader’s Digest?  Their upcoming September edition (available online) features their list of the “Ten Funniest Jokes in America” contest – and the winner is titled, “A Priest, A Minister, and a Rabbi.”  Oy vey!

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Anyone who uses Twitter and has to cram thoughts in to 140 characters knows that technology doesn’t always mix well with “semantic meaning.” That reminds me of an old Hollywood story (here’s a version from Wikipedia):

Cary Grant is said to have been reluctant to reveal his age to the public, having played the youthful lover for more years than would have been appropriate. One day, while he was sorting out some business with his agent, a telegram arrived from a journalist who was desperate to learn how old the actor was. It read: HOW OLD CARY GRANT?

Grant, who happened to open it himself, immediately cabled back: OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?

Washington Technology magazine has a long (overly long) feature today about semantic computing, entitled “Open Government Looks for New Technologies.”  It has nothing to do with Cary Grant, but I have a few minor quibbles with the article (written by a freelancer from New York).

The premise is in the subhead: “Web 3.0 could help make Obama’s dream of government transparency a reality.”  The article goes on to give a basic – very basic – primer on semantic tagging and its potential application in government uses. Underline that word, “potential.”

Aside from the new Data.gov website’s use of minimal Dublin-Core metadata, there’s no actual government use cited. In fact, despite the premise, the article actually contains more evidence that government agencies are actively shying away from adopting semantic approaches. A spokesperson for GSA is typical, saying only that ““We are monitoring the situation as the technology matures; it is not factoring into our business requirements at this point.”  And a spokesperson for the site at www.Recovery.gov, now controversial for the manner in which it was contracted out, says they are “focusing on other priorities.” 

In fact the article entirely omits those few sections of government which to my knowledge are actually making good early-adopter use of semantic approaches: the intelligence community!  There are other efforts as well sprinkled across civilian agencies; the article’s author would have done well to quote one of the active semanticists in Washington itself (see here and here for some resources).

The real advances in semantic technologies are coming not in government, but in the commercial sector – of course.  (The article makes no nod to efforts like Twine or Bing’s use of semantic search from Powerset and other research.)  We can all agree that it is early days yet for semantic technologies in government use. Articles like this one pop up periodically promising great things; here’s one from back in 2006 with the same basic message: “Semantic Web Ready for Prime Time.”

Perhaps it’s too much to hope that tech-publication editors maintain a bit of historical context the next time someone pitches a breathless article hyping “new technologies.”

In fact, the editor might have noticed that, directly contradicting the entire premise of the headline and intro paragraphs, the money quote comes right at the tail end of the article, with one of Washington’s most prominent open-government advocates poohpoohing any near-term semantic focus entirely:

The time and effort required to tag and describe the government’s vast data holdings represent another adoption challenge. Clay Johnson, director of Sunlight Labs, expressed concern that the government might become preoccupied with formatting data rather than releasing it. Sunlight Labs is an open-source development team that launched as a project of the Sunlight Foundation, an open-government advocacy group in Washington. “I would hate to see them get bogged down in trying to make their data Semantic Web compatible before it even sees the light of day,” he said.

Oh, and one more minor quibble: the full subhead of the article reads: ”Web 3.0 could help make Obama’s dream of government transparency a reality, but he’ll need a second term to see it happen.”  As of today, President Obama is beginning only the second six-months of his first year of his first term. An increasing proportion of the country appears already to believe he’s not doing too well. 

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves with planning for the second term’s agenda, before making progress on the first.

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Escolas matam a criatividade? Ken Robinson acha que sim

Parte 1/2:

Parte 2/2:

www.sirkenrobinson.com

Ken Robinson is an internationally-renowned expert in the field of creativity and innovation in business and education, his visionary consultancy skills employed by governments, major corporations and cultural organizations worldwide.

Born in Liverpool in 1950, he gained a Ph.D. in 1981 from the University of London for research into drama and theatre in education. He was the principal author of “The Arts in Schools: Principles, Practice and Provision”, a standard text in the UK and around the world.

TEDTalks

*** Mais TEDTalks em Português:

http://www.youtube.com/TedTalksPortugues

O Tedtalks portugues parou de ser atualizado mas ainda existe lá, vale visitar.

O projeto teve início em 2005 com um blog onde eram disponibilizados podcasts utilizados no The Museum of Modern Art e no The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Diante da boa aceitação do material disponibilizado no blog, foi criado esse “web-book” ou um “multimídia web-book”.  Nele há textos, vídeos, podcasts e imagens de obras de arte importantes de cada período histórico: desde a Grécia e Roma Antiga até os nossos dias. E o web-book pode ser explorado estilo, artista, tema ou período histórico.

Recursos da web 2.0 como o Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo e Dipty foram utilizados no projeto e os autores podem ser acompanhados no Twitter.

Veja aqui a capela Sistina

smARThistory visits the Sistine Chapel in Second Life from Beth Harris on Vimeo.

GovFresh is a great new web service which aggregates live feeds of official news from U.S. Government Twitter accounts, YouTube channels, RSS feeds, Facebook pages, Flickr photostreams and more, all in one place. It is one of a new class of interactive Government 2.0 services, portals, and tools – many of them just launching in 2009 – which have the potential of revolutionizing the way citizens get and share information about their government.  (I mention several others below.)

At a time when the Iranian people are battling to keep their access open to Twitter, Facebook, and even phone lines in order to mobilize their anti-dictatorial protests, it is heartening that individuals in the United States and many other corners of the world find their governments increasingly willing to share information widely.

Luke Fretwell is GovFresh’s founder, and he’s becoming a welcome new voice in the debates around government technology policy. Luke recently wrote a blog post arguing “Why Gov 2.0 means the U.S. Government must centralize its Web operations.” A heated debate arose in the comments, including my own strenuous disagreement, and yet I became a fast admirer of Luke, his entrepreneurial energy, and the site’s information value.

GovFresh has been running a great series of profile-interviews in its blog section of leading individuals in the “Gov 2.0″ movement, and today I was the chosen subject. The article has the unfortunately exaggerated title (in my case): “Gov 2.0 Hero Lewis Shepherd.”  Here’s an excerpt:

What’s the killer app that will make Gov 2.0 the norm instead of the exception?

Can’t tell you because we’re building it in the lab right now, ha! Seriously, the killer app may be something big and powerful, from an enterprise perspective, though I’d put the odds on something less obvious, but more pervasive. Here’s what I mean. I think often about the roots of the original Progressive movement at the dawn of the 20^th Century, and their advocacy of direct-vote referendums, championed by Hiram Johnson and the like. Those give the people a direct say over particular issues, but the downside is that “the people” don’t always exercise informed judgment, and popular opinion can be manipulated and swayed by malevolent interests. So I’m looking to Gov 2.0 capabilities that maintain the representative aspect (the elected official, exercising his or her judgment) while incorporating real-time, structured, unfiltered but managed visualizations of popular opinion and advice. I’m intrigued by new services along these lines like www.you2gov.com, www.govfresh.com, www.govtwit.com, and the like, but I’m also a big proponent of semantic computing – called Web 3.0 by some – and that should lead the worlds of crowdsourcing, prediction markets, and open government data movements to unfold in dramatic, previously unexpected ways. We’re working on cool stuff like that.

At the end of the full interview, I observed that “You can’t watch what’s gone on with social software use in Egypt’s Facebook Revolution, our own 2008 campaign, or Iran’s election protests, without feeling that Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson would have been prolific twitterers with awesome blogs.”

In the spirit of empowering the people, instead of lauding one person, I’d like to thank GovFresh for the Hero honor but share the title with those I have worked with in the past few years, and with everyone else around the world engaged in the Gov 2.0 movement – whether they realize that’s what they’re doing or not.

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Dans le cadre d’une réflexion sur l’Internet du futur proposée par le gouvernement, mon laboratoire se penchera sur le sujet au cours de son prochain séminaire. Cette réflexion semble déjà bien engagée si l’on consulte un peu le questionnaire et son document d’accompagnement. On peut d’ailleurs légitimement se demander à qui s’adresse la consultation publique vu le genre de questions posées (Présentez les équipes et moyens que vous dédiez (ou pensez dédier à court et moyen terme) à chacun des thèmes liés à l’Internet du Futur et compléter autant que de besoin le tableau présent à l’Annexe 1. Quels sont, pour votre entité, les thèmes prioritaires ? ou Quelle part consacrez-vous à la recherche incrémentale et à la recherche disruptive sur ce sujet ?). Il serait sympathique de le préciser …. en tout cas ce ne semble pas être dédié au citoyen de base, ni même au chercheur de base.

Bon, malgré tout je peux répondre à la question 1. La suite se fera à un niveau plus haut que le mien. Allons-y en vue de ce prochain séminaire :

A l’horizon 2015-2020, quels sont les principaux nouveaux services, usages et applications qui viendront redéfinir le fonctionnement et l’utilisation de l’Internet dans vos domaines d’activité ?

Une intégration de la dimension numérique (données actuelles et du cycle de vie) dans les objets du quotidien (internet des objets) couplée avec une généralisation de la gestion des liens entre entités et information (web sémantique) introduit une version intégralement distribué des l’information (pair à pair). Une généralisation de l’accès et de la production d’information

Cette extension va amplifier la possibilité de mieux comprendre notre environnement et comment développer de nouveaux systèmes, de collaborer et d’apprendre !

en tant qu’enseignant en école d’ingénieurs, cela va changer notre manière d’aborder le monde et la formation.

Quel peut-être l’impact économique de ces évolutions ?

Comme le souligne le site de préparation d’Autrans 2010, entre autres : il va être nécessaire de redéfinir totalement les modèles économiques. Cela est par ailleurs indispensable pour pouvoir repenser notre rapport au monde et donc pouvoir répondre aux défis du développement durable.

Quelles opportunités et quels risques anticipez-vous dans le cadre de vos activités ?

Opportunités : pouvoir permettre une meilleure appropriation de notre environnement qui permette une revalorisation intellectuelle du métier d’ingénieur. Permettre un engagement de nos élèves dans leur formation et dans leur compréhension des problèmes.

Risques : un éclatement des institutions d’enseignement et du rôle de l’enseignant, diluant et réduisant l’accompagnement à la maturité intellectuelle des jeunes. Ce risque est d’autant plus important que l’éducation nationale (dont je ne fais pas partie) ne s’approprie que trop peu Internet et qu’au contraire elle se sanctuarise.

Dans ce contexte, quels facteurs auront le plus d’impact dans la redéfinition de l’Internet et de son architecture ?

L’important est de permettre un accès le plus libre et le plus transparent possible aux données pour permettre la formation, l’appropriation et l’amélioration de tous les champs de connaissance.

Quelles éventuelles nouvelles formes celle-ci peut-elle prendre ? Quels sont les verrous à lever ?

Celle-ci se rapporte à quoi : architecture ? Les 2 extrèmes sont Pair à pair ou centralisée.  Le risque est de tendre vers le pôle centralisé, l’opportunité est de tendre vers la plus grande répartition possible

Verrous à lever :

• la confusion entre pirate (usage) et technique (partage et lien entre ordinateurs) : cela au niveau juridique et par ricochet au niveau opérateur
• l’autonomie des équipements (adaptation dynamique, reconfiguration ,évolution …)
• la rapidité d’accès à l’information
• la gestion de la redondance et la synchronisation
• l’interopérabilité

This in reference to the accusations (1, 2) that Techcrunch made towards Last.fm, which have been criticised by many, not least by Last.fm and CBS itself. For those that haven’t been following it, accusations were raised at Last.fm for sharing (private) user-data with the RIAA, the US institution best known for suing old ladies for sharing music on their PCs. Recently, CBS/Last.fm issued another statement that these accusation are completely false. More recently, today in fact, news was released that the Last.fm founders quit. Now, I, as a blogger and not a media-person (there is a difference), don’t think that this last piece of circumstantial evidence bodes well for CBS/Last.fm.

Let’s first define media and truth as I think its relevant to the discussion. By media, I mean any publication that has it in their core-statutes (or whatever they are called) to inform the public as accurately and honestly as possible. This excludes blogs, in my opinion, as most of us have made no such agreements with our readers (sorry, guys!). Instead, some of us use it as a diary, others as a commentary, and others as a pseudo reporting service (on Tech IT Easy, we try to restrict ourselves to two and three). Techcrunch, on the other hand, while having started as a blog, can now easily be called an organisation reporting the news, with all the conditions that come with it.

Truth: in the media, truths are verifiable facts. You can verify facts in two ways. One, by quoting your source, preferably primary, short and simple. Two, by being a reputable source yourself. In other words, the Financial Times can tell us that an anonymous source has told them that Martians have visited the president and that statement will hold more value than if I told you that Martians have visited the president. Why? Because the Financial Times has more to lose than me (perhaps).

While Techcrunch is obviously not the 121-year old institution that is the Financial Times, it is in many ways it’s equivalent in this time of new online-focussed media. It has a lot to lose by giving out the wrong information. Techcrunch repeated its allegations several times even, without quoting sources I should mention, which leads me to believe them.

So why not trust CBS/Last.fm over Techcrunch? One, a corporation stating that it hasn’t done harm to its customers is simple self-preservation. Two, while I have been following Last.fm even before it was Last.fm, and while I actually find its founders very sympathetic, I think that they experienced the hypocrisy that corporations sometimes live by (it may be in their statutes even), and decided to quit. If this happened to my baby, I would quit too.

I am not saying that everything Techcrunch writes should be taken at their word (nor even the Financial Times), but as recent history has shown us, there is something wrong in the world of the music- and video-industry (you know, that other media-industry), and the only protection we regular people seem to have, is the media calling them out on the sometimes very nasty things they do. And while we should keep double- and tripple-checking the facts, if only to keep the Techcrunches et al. on their toes, if the RIAA is involved and a big company like CBS, I think I’ll side with public media.

End blog post.

Vincent

P.S. the irony: I think that CBS is also a news reporting organisation. However, in the case of the Last.fm “business unit,” it is not!

Tired of the gazillionth post about 10 marketing tips for social marketeers? Tired of marketing all together? I think there’s a reason for that, it’s because marketing should be invisible!

Let me give you a brief example and then I will stfu. For my high school, I’m organising a reunion together with a team of 2-3 people. We started a Facebook group, ca. 140 people from all over the world have signed up. We hold mass-mailing campaigns only to find out what people’s preferences are. We use that data, derived from poll-answers mostly, and design, hopefully, the perfect reunion event.

When the day comes, this September, I’m sure someone is going to say: “thank you for all the work you did.” But that’s b#llsh#t! Because it wasn’t us doing the work, it was everyone filling in what they wanted and everyone designing their own event. All we did was mediate, using the free tools that are available to anyone at zero effort.

That’s the way all marketing should be. Because if you think about it, marketing is about giving customers they want. And how do you do that? You listen to customers, stfu, and deliver.

Vincent

If you think about how the iPhone was launched so many months ago, or rather at what stage the iPods were at, you know that apps were always on the horizon. The iPod G5 introduced a wider range of games that you could buy through the iTunes store, which already introduced us to the idea of buying apps, well games really, through that venue.

When the iPhone arrived, there were NO apps; App-support was basically web-coded widgets with limited functionality. The reason for this was, I believe, that there was no competition to speak of + perhaps the complexity of setting up such a venture. Apps for other phones existed, ok, but it was either in a decentralised fashion (Java for instance), or very centralised and very limited in its offering (e.g. Blackberry & Palm), at least compared to the current iTunes store.

It took pressure from the market [jail-breaking & media] and perhaps already the idea in the back of Apple’s heads to release the app-store a little over a year after the initial device was launched. When it did launch, there was lot’s of hype, lot’s of love, and good news for Apple iPhone numbers both on the device-sales side and that of app-sales.

How the other device makers reacted was two-fold and really quite half-heartedly. Most hardware makers focussed on what they did best: hardware. Touch-screen after touch-screen device entered the market. The most interesting software-based strategy came from Google, which, I guess, realised the potential of mobiles as computing platforms and, more importantly, as search/internet/”revenue for Google” enabled devices in everyone’s pocket.

The current app-store offerings are still lacking with many big parties attempting to launch one for their platforms. The key-factors in terms of adoption seem to be having a critical mass of both users and developers, both of which represent a chicken & egg problem for many, something that the initial iPhone circumvented quite elegantly.

The most promising devices today are Google-/Android-powered phones and the, still somewhat vapoury Palm Pre. The latter seems to be the most competitive, hardware-wise, with much ex-Apple talent having contributed to the Pre’s development. On the App-store front, it’s still very early days, but reports are disappointing.

So, the question is, what can phone-makers and software-makers do to compete with the new “Microsoft” (=Apple) of the mobile space? The choice, to me, appears two-fold:

1. Emulate Apple in whatever way possible: create a great device and create an app-store with a sufficient supply of apps.
2. Or, create a great device and find a way to elegantly get apps onto it, without all this centralising nonsense.

By the wording, it’s obvious that I prefer the second option. As good as the iTunes store is, it isn’t amazing for developers and it isn’t as profitable for Apple as one would think either. The biggest problem for competitors is similar to the music-situation, that Apple has critical mass, which attracts the greatest amounts of customers and is a nearly insurmountable challenge for new entrants.

Where Apple clearly leads is in its developer-support, which isn’t quite as apparent from other software/hardware makers, except perhaps Microsoft (but mainly on the PC-side) and perhaps Google. Palm, as yet, does not offer a comparable service to developers, or to put it in another way, Palm developer conferences are not yet sold out in the way Apple’s WWDC is each year.

Final thoughts:

• I think that developer support is key in any smart phone strategy these days, as mobile devices continue to become computers in your pocket.
• I don’t think that centralised app stores are necessarily the way to go, except (and I suspect this) if the mobile carriers are demanding it.
• The simplest thing would be to create a web-based categorised list of a apps that developers can add to;
• implement mechanisms that vote and demote apps according to their usefulness and other attributes;
• and create / implement mechanisms that prevent abuse (e.g. P2P apps or VOIP apps, though I think the latter can no longer be considered this)
• And continue to innovate on the hardware, because I think there is plenty of innovation left. What makes the iPhone so desirable is the app-support, but the hardware is really nothing to write home about.

Note: I purposefully left the links towards the end, because it allows for a more time-efficient, easier to write (and, maybe, read) article. Links with additional info are included in below list:

• Mossberg on Palm Pre
• Apple App store numbers
• The incredible app store hype (one of many developer complaints)
• Palm developer network

In this article I will describe a new way of understanding Artificial Intelligence 2.0  as a social platform where simple global human interactions allow the emergence of greater forms of Intelligence.  I will explain the basic principles of what I consider the foundations of AI 2.0 and finally, I will present a concrete example of what a real social expert system would be like.

It has been long mentioned that Web 2.0 services “harness collective intelligence” but what’s most interesting is the higher forms of intelligence that emerge when people interact with these services:

Web 2.0 has brought us a great collection of principles and patterns (tags, wikis, social ranking systems, etc) that allow us to build richer cloud-based services that extract the whole potential of crowds. Wikipedia, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube are just the first generation of Web 2.0 applications that we can build with these new patterns but the possibilities of combining them are endless.  

Networks that look too much like neural networks

Web 2.0 social networks have grown a lot in past 3 years. Currently there’s over 60 million users registered in Facebook and 200 million users on MySpace. Millions of people around the world are getting virtually interconnected. Millions of links between people are created and destroyed every day. Links get stronger and weaker (through favorite lists, comments, rankings, etc) among the virtual entities. Huge and complex networks have been created out of the simple of interactions of people.

It is inevitable to compare the structure and behavior of social networks with our biological neural networks and not realize the similarities that they both share:

• They are both made of a huge amount of relatively “simple” interconnected entities
• They both evolve over time without any central point of control
• They both connect their entities with “dynamically weighted” links
• They both have entities with a “LIFE” of their own
• Higher levels of “intelligence” emerge out of the “simple” interaction of their entities

What is Artificial Intelligence 2.0?

In traditional AI (1.0) systems, a human employs a computer to solve a problem: a human provides a formalized problem description to a computer, and receives an (intelligent) solution to interpret. In AI 2.0, the roles are often reversed: the system collaborates with a large number of people to solve a problem, then collects, interprets, ranks and integrates their solutions.

One of highest expressions of Web 2.0 services are Social Networks. These networks basically interconnect people, but, what if instead of interconnecting people we interconnected (live) ideas? Ideas that link to other ideas with “dynamically weighted” links. Ideas that have a life of their own.

An example: Social Troubleshooting

Whenever we face any type of issue that requires “troubleshooting”, we mainly work with 3 different types of independent knowledge:

• SYMPTOMS: Signs of a possible error in our system.
• CAUSES: Possible root cause(s) for a SYMPTOM(S).
• ACTIONS: Steps that solve a specific CAUSE of an error or just extra troubleshooting steps that will generate more SYMPTOMS.

In Social Troubleshooting we would use 3 independent and linked databases: SYMPTOMS, CAUSES and ACTIONS (instead of just one huge unstructured text-based database as we store knowledge nowadays). Items from the SYMPTOMS database will be linked to one or more CAUSES, which, at the same time, will be linked to one or more ACTIONS, which may generate even more SYMPTOMS. The more links we have among these items, the greater the weight will be for these links, just like we see in neural networks. Users can choose among many possible paths to solve their issue but the system:

Principles of Artificial Intelligence 2.0

AI 2.0 is based on 4 core principles:

#1 – Social classification

“The only group that can cateorize everything is everybody“

Through the use of tagging users should be able to classify content and obtain many benefits from doing so:

• Tagging associates keywords or terms with content in an attempt to describe or classify it for an increase of usability.
• Creating a solid taxonomy can define a structure that helps users find what they need and allows them to easily classify new content, instead of fitting content in a fixed hierarchical classification.
• Creates a more flexible structure that allows the classification to adapt to the content and to be scaled more easily.
• When users classify content they are actually also classify themselves.
• Massive amounts of intelligence can be extracted from tag-based systems.
• More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags

#2 – Social ranking

Users know what is best when they see it. Social ranking allows AI2.0 to boost to the top the good ideas and bury of bad ones. This can be done via a simple voting mechanism. Each idea can be voted up or down.

#3 – Social linking

This is one the most revolutionary component of AI2.0. In traditional Semantic Web or Web 3.0 systems pieces of knowledge were linked but the social component was completely ignored. If we take into consideration the frequency of the social linking between pieces of knowledge we would immediately obtain a neural system capable to learning and evolving in real-time with no supervision. The possibilities are endless and can be applied to any environment that could take benefit of social collaboration to solve problems: science, medicine, software troubleshooting, government, etc.

#4 – Social reputation

One of the lessons learned from the Web 2.0 is that users should be recognized if you want to keep their engagement in the system. Social reputation has demonstrated to be a huge incentive for individual contributors and it is a core component to keep the quality of the content and links. A good example is http://www.stackoverflow.com

What is the benefit for users?

• Receiving a fair share of the result
• Direct compensation
• Desire to diversify their activity (e.g. “people aren’t asked in their daily lives to be creative”)
• Esthetic satisfaction
• Curiosity, desire to test if it works
• Volunteerism, desire to support a cause of the project
• Reciprocity, exchange, mutual help
• Competitive spirit of a game
• Desire to communicate and share knowledge
• Desire to share a user innovation to see if someone else can improve on it
• Desire to game the system and influence the final result

Conclusion

“This is more than open source, social networking, so called crowdsourcing, smart mobs, crowd wisdom, or other ideas that touch upon the subject. Rather, we are talking about deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and our economy, based on new competitive principles such as openness, peering, sharing and acting globally.”

WIKINOMICS, How mass Collaboration Changes Everything
…from Don Tapscott