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Edelman's Six Digital Trends to Watch

From “marketing in the age of streams” to the “Googlization of media” to “situational awareness” to “location, location, locaton” to “business becomes social” to “private becomes public” – in their latest report, Edelman’s digital mavens Steve Rubel and David Armano provide a solid overview of the six key digital trends to watch.

Six Digital Trends To Watch by Steve Rubel and David Armano

 

Privacy Is Over. Here Comes Sociality.

As widely discussed by privacy advocates and blogs, Facebook recently changed some of its privacy settings. Users are no longer able to limit the viewing of their profile photos, home towns, and friends lists to only approved friends. Those are all public now by default. Moreover, Facebook’s new default settings “recommend” that dynamic content such as status messages and photos be made public. While the blogosphere still closely scrutinizes these changes and is aghast at Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘privacy is over’ claims made at the Crunchies awards (he didn’t actually say it verbatim but his statements more or less implied it), I have to admit I was surprised that all this stirred such an uproar. Facebook is only reacting to a larger social trend as it strives to become an asymmetrical and therefore more growth-enabled network (or communications platform) – like Twitter. Privacy, at least a more traditional notion thereof, is the collateral damage of this strategic agenda. With the value of reciprocity (narrowcasting) succumbing to the prospect of exponentiality (broadcasting), privacy is no longer commercially exploitable. “No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of ‘free,’” writes social networking researcher Danah Boyd in a blog post in which she otherwise harshly criticizes Facebook’s move. The age of privacy as we know it might be over indeed. Is it worth fighting for?

Privacy (from the Latin ‘privatus,’ according to Wikipedia: “separated from the rest, deprived of something, especially office, participation in the government”), the “right to be let alone,” is considered a human right in most parts of the world, in spite of all cultural relativism. Historically speaking, privacy has undergone a remarkable evolution. Aristotle distinguished between the public sphere of politics and political activity, the polis, and the private or domestic sphere of the family, the oaks. If a citizen of Athens was a private man, then it meant he was stripped of any political office and therefore considered “inferior.” Later, in the enlightened civil societies of Europe, however, privacy became a hallmark of the bourgeoisie, a hard-earned privilege that marked the delineation between upper and working classes. The latter had work – if they were fortunate – the former “had a life,” because they could afford it. This life tended to be private, by definition. In the emerging information economies of the 20th century, various theories described privacy as control over information about oneself (Parent, 1983), while others defended it as a broader concept crucial for human dignity (Bloustein, 1964), or emphasized the social aspect of it with regards to enabling intimacy (Gerstein, 1978; Inness, 1992).

Throughout their historical mutations, the public and private spheres needed one another like yin and yang. Having a life was a private act, but only if it was publicly earned and respected. This dialectic relationship will always remain. There is no privacy without publicy and vice versa. And yet, while privacy may never go away as a philosophical counterweight to publicy, today it is publicy that counts as the new privilege of the digital upper class. Privacy has been marginalized to the fringes of a society whose modus operandi is based on the very public mechanisms of social sharing. In the digital era, a private life does not exist. Google ergo sum.

The search engine’s recent public stance against the Chinese government, threatening to shut down all its China operations after Gmail accounts of Chinese activists had been hacked, highlights this new power structure and the evolving value of privacy in our ever-connected world. When the privacy of Google’s users was violated, the company decided to respond with a public statement, mounting public pressure to press on an essentially private matter. Good for a company that does not want be evil, many people applauded, but it bore a certain irony that Google acted as de facto digital state with its own foreign policy. Isn’t Google, after all, built on the very principle of making private data public? Isn’t it because of Google’s mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” that we have come to terms with the fact that our online lives and afterlives will never be private again and will be perpetually archived in the very public cloud?

In the case of Google vs. China, what was bemoaned as the loss of privacy was in fact the lack of publicy. Privacy is the most precious asset in more or less closed societies in which trust is a scarce resource and true publics don’t exist. But as we live our lives in the openness of the web, isn’t it publicy that we need to enable and protect? An ideal publicy that is so transparent and democratic that it doesn’t need privacy as refuge?

It’s complicated. Stowe Boyd has declared this to be the “Decade of Publicy,” in which he expects “the superimposition of publicy on top of, and partly obscuring, privacy:”

“Publicy says that each self exists in a particular social context, and all such contracts are independent. (…) It’s as if we are gaining the ability to see into the ultraviolet and infrared ends of the social spectrum when we are online, and in some contexts we are dropping out yellows or reds. To those tied to the visible color spectrum we are habituated to, this new sort of vision will be 'irreal.' But ultraviolet has always existed: we just couldn't see it before. (…) This will be a fracturing of the premises of privacy, and a slow rejection of the metaphors of shared space. The principles of publicy are derived from the intersection of infinite publics and our shared experience of time online, through media like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. The innate capability we have to shift in a heartbeat from a given public, and our corresponding persona, to another, is now being accelerated by streaming social tools. This will be the decade when publicy displaces privacy, online and off.”

As we struggle to maintain the traditional, monolithic privacy-publicy dichotomy, perhaps we must start using a different terminology altogether and embrace a new concept: sociality. In a hyper-individualized society, sociality is becoming the main object of desire for individuals. Or as Markus Albers puts it in his forthcoming book about what he coins the Meconomy:

“The Meconomy does not entail a purely egoistic philosophy. On the contrary, it promotes a new culture of empathy and social engagement. As we increasingly decide for ourselves how, where, and with whom we work, the search for meaning gains more importance. The trend to combine economical with social engagement grows stronger. We want to do good, be happy, and make money. In the old patriarchal, hierarchical, and inflexible working world, these aims were often mutually exclusive. In the Meconomy, their combination is almost a precondition for success.”

The semantic coincidence is telling. “Me” desires “Meaning.” As much as publicy needs privacy and vice versa, the “Meconomy” needs the “Meaning Economy” – as its co-evolutionary, symbiotic partner. With meaning emerging as the core currency of all market interactions (because it is ultimately what consumers buy; and friends, fans, and followers buy into), people, organizations, and brands that provide meaning will be the power players of the new Me(aning) Economy – brands like Apple, conferences like TED, contests like the Olympic Games, sport clubs like FC Barcelona, media organizations like NPR, non-profits like UNICEF, and, yes, politicians like Obama.

Sociality may succeed privacy because it is a critical precondition for meaning. To be meaningful, meaning needs to be shared, and sharing can only occur in open social settings. Open social settings, however, by definition, compromise privacy, in all its four textbook modes (solitude, intimacy, anonymity, and reserve). Meaning means giving things a name, making sense of “Black Swans,” unexpected events. In other words: Only an event that becomes a story (which still is the most powerful social media of all times, a true evergreen on the social web!) is meaningful.

Thus, it makes sense to replace the strict privacy-publicy opposition with a multi-layered continuum along progressive levels of sociality. Sociality may turn out to be a much better variable for describing and regulating our digital lives. The question then no longer is how private we can be, but how social we want to be. Instead of privacy seetings, we should speak of sociality settings: The maximum number of friends we want to have; and through which channels we want to ‘socialize’ our contents etc. Privacy understood as sociality (as an enabling and not a defensive right) grants us the ability to control who knows what about us and who has access to us, and thereby allows us to vary our social interactions with different people so that we can control our various social relationships at different levels of intimacy.

This new sociality is most visibly manifest in online social networks. It is worth noting that these not only mirror the mechanisms of offline social interactions but actually provide users with more control over their privacy (or sociality) than they would ever have in the physical world. On Facebook and other networks, you can pick and choose the people you want to meet and share ‘presence’ with; in a restaurant, bar, and other public spaces, you can’t. Exclusivity in the real world needs to be earned, whereas online it is a given.

Bill Thompson pledges we should embrace the new liberties that come with this new radical transparency:

“The enlightenment idea of privacy is breaking apart under the strain of new technologies, social tools and the emergence of the database state. We cannot hold back the tide, but we can use it as an opportunity to rethink what we understand by 'personality,’ how we engage and interact with others and where the boundaries can be put between the public and private. Those of us who are ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption and use of technologies that undermine the old model of privacy have much to teach those who will come after us, and can offer advice and support to those who might be unhappy to have their movements, eating habits, friendships and patterns of media consumption made available to all. But every Twitterer, Tumblr, Dopplr or Brightkite user is sharing more data with more people than even the FBI under Hoover or the Stasi at the height of its powers could have dreamed of. And we do so willingly, hoping to benefit in unquantifiable ways from this unwarranted – in all senses – disclosure. I'll argue that we are in the vanguard of creating not just new forms of social organisation but new ways of being human.”

All this openly shared user data represents not only an enourmous amount of social capital but also a huge collective leap of faith. Whether the big digital platforms and ecosystems will honor this trust to maintain civic publics or if they will choose to exploit it for (private) economic reasons, at any price, will be one of the defining moments of this young decade and the most impactful decision it will have to make. Control (as the catalyst of privacy) is good, but trust (as the catalyst of sociality) is better. We can afford to lose our privacy, but we will not survive the loss of sociality.

[image: Geekologie]

A New Way to See the Internet: Google Chrome Videos by BBH

Here's how you do product demos right: Advertising firm BBH has produced a series of videos for the Google Chrome browser, and you have to give them credit for creating such intuitive, almost naive metaphors for a very unemotional 'technocratic' brand. Since Peter Greenaway no one has married math and artistic expression more convincingly. It's truly "A New Way to See the Internet."

From the BBH labs site: "We took Google’s ingenuity & innovation as inspiration in developing the idea for seven short films (& an intro), demonstrating the benefits of Google Chrome. Every creation is built by hand, filmed in camera, with no special effects added. Even the music where Jacqui, the harpist, is playing is live on set. As it should always be with Google, the product is the hero. We celebrate the Chrome product, but we hope in a 'Googley' way." 

A look behind the scenes

next09: From Google Economy to Twitter Economy

I'm still processing the many great insights from the next09 conference in Hamburg, one of Europe's leading digital/creative/marketing forums and one that stands out from the conference circuit because of its unique German-international focus (bilingual program, 80% international participants, many international speakers). This year's theme was "Share Economy," and the 1,300 attendees consisted of European VCs and angel investors, web 2.0 entrepreneurs, media, creative agencies, and execs from German corporations (from BMW to Deutsche Bank to Deutsche Telekom).

Jeff Jarvis: "The Great Restructuring"

The first day, the keynote day, was a little disappointing, maybe because expectations were so high. Jeff Jarvis warmed up the crowd with his trademark "What Would Google Do?" Powerpoint deck. While a terrific thinker and speaker, for some reason he and the audience did not really click although he presented a lot of thought-provoking content. The rather stiff response may be attributed to the fact that the attendees were either too familiar with what they heard or felt slightly overwhelmed. Or maybe they were indeed excited - but too German to show it…

Umair Haque, who followed Jarvis, faced an even tougher, albeit partly self-inflicted challenge: explaining the new paradigm of "Constructive Capitalism" in 45 minutes. That's like asking Marx to walk you through his Communist Manifesto in a Twitter chat. It didn't help, certainly, that Haque used the much gushed-about Prezi presentation software; all the zooming in and out was dizzying and, if anything, exposed the lack of stringency in his outline.

Fortunately, Haque had an opportunity to correct this first impression and reiterate some of his thoughts on a panel with Jarvis a day later, which turned out to be a much more suitable format for his ideas on the transformation of capitalism. He also took the occasion to rebut the attacks of Andrew Keen ("The Cult of the Amateur"), who, on the opening day, had chastised Haque (and all the other thinkers he considers to be under the dark influence of Silicon Valley) for propagating rampant free market liberalism and a dangerous new radical individualism in the guise of the social, consumer-empowered share economy that the conference was celebrating. Keen poignantly remarked that Twitter was getting us back into the 18th century: rather than liberating us from institutional hierarchies, it would reinforce an old power structure and an all too human division of roles: between those who follow and those followed.

Andrew Keen: "Digital Vertigo"

Jeff Jarvis & Umair Haque: "When Money Talks"

Keen accused Haque et al of naïveté and insisted that Google and the other web juggernauts were not "leveling the playing field" through link love (by sharing the scarcest resource on the web: attention), as Haque had claimed, but were rather using it to expand their pursuit of world dominance. In Keen's eyes, Google's openness is nothing but a suave mechanism to foment a monopoly in the attention markets. In the same vein, a party pooper in the audience asked Jarvis: "If free sharing is the future of business, why doesn't Google share its page rank algorithm?" Jarvis' response wasn't all too convincing: concerns over malicious abuse of the data. Hmm. So much for radical transparency and trust as overriding principles in the share economy.

To Google's (and Jarvis') defense, one could counter with Haque's sharp line: "When we're all hyper-connected, the cost of evil goes up." True. Moreover, Google does provide real value as it has created a win-win-win business model (advertisers, consumers, Google) that is vastly different from the toxic chunk Haque bemoaned in the non-sustainable and ultimately value-free products that toppled capitalism as we knew it: the Hummer, fast food, derivatives, etc. And yet, if advertising is the admission that you have a mediocre product, and that it is in fact an expression of "failure," as Jarvis put it, then it is hard to reconcile this view with the fact that advertising remains the main revenue stream in the very Google economy from which Jarvis wants us all to learn.

Despite the flaws in Jarvis' and Haque's thinking, however, I am eager to defend them. It's easy to deconstruct constructive visions of the future as ill-informed descriptions of present realities but it is a much bigger task to actually come up with a positive vision. Keen, the rebel with a good cause, does nothing but throwing a bomb, which he readily admits, but he falls short of offering an alternative to the frameworks Jarvis and Haque and others provide in response to the fundamental crisis of capitalism.

Google wouldn't care about any of this intellectual arm-wrestling all that much. It is fully consumed with doing what it does best: firing out beta-products and services, successfully failing by failing rapidly. One mistake that it made, however, may arguably have lasting implications. It didn't buy Twitter. And so the question, it seems, is no longer "What would Google do?" but "What will Twitter do?" Does Twitter mark the beginning of the end of the Google economy?

Jyri Engeström, who sold Twitter-competitor Jaiku to Google and is now a Google employee, might have a clue. On a panel with social media guru Chris Messina he offered some good insights on micro-blogging trends on the web and defended the new Google Profiles ("you have to opt in"). Messina seconded him and brought up another interesting point that established the context for upcoming business models in the Twitter economy: the "glocalization" of Twitter. He described how Twitter is failing to extend the real-time conversation to the whole world, simply because of time zone differences: one part of the world is always sleeping when you're tweeting. The instant social web conversation is therefore asynchronous, after all, and it is an interesting thought experiment to envision services that bridge the time zone gap and deliver tweets when the recipients can actually receive them (keeping them on the top of the feed), almost like an echo across time zones. What if the real value of real-time was the delivery of tweets when it really mattered?

The whole time dimension of Twitter is uncharted but valuable territory, and there are other add-ins, integrators, and localization services that will emerge in this vibrant new ecosystem. The conversation on the social web is as rich as the human communication (if not richer), and it is just beginning to fully emerge.

What everyone agreed on at next09 is that the next big frontier on the web (and in the Twitter economy) is how businesses talk to their customers. We are witnessing an irrevocable convergence of players. Conversational services such as Twitter and Yammer are moving into the social networking space and are acquiring the credentials of social networks and collaboration tools, while traditional social networking sites such as XING, LinkedIn or Facebook are embedding conversational features to catch up with the irresistible pull of real-time communication.

For both groups, and in fact for all other companies, Umair Haque's advice is golden: Take one of the big ideals (democracy, peace, transparency, equality, etc.) and apply it to an ailing industry that is in need of transformation or at least some serious disruption: healthcare, finance, news, energy, government – you name it. Combine that with the principles of the Twitter economy – transparency, instantification, collaboration, and free sharing – and you have a winner.

The Future of Business is Social

Notes from the Milken Institute's Global Conference 2008

"The difference between the optimist and the pessimist is that the pessimist has more facts," said Jean-Paul Betbèze, Chief Economist and Head of Economic Research Department, Crédit Agricole S.A., in a panel at the Millken Institute's Global Conference 2008 in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago. True as this may be, his statement stood in sharp contrast to the overall vibe of the event: Yes, we can, was the prevailing sentiment, and the overwhelming majority of attendees would probably have outed themselves as fervent optimists, despite an abundance of fact-featuring PowerPoint slides supporting each of the panel discussions (I've never seen so many pie charts in my whole life). In fact, the gathered crowd was comprised of optimists with lots of money to spend on the world’s most pressing problems (poverty; terrorism; population; resources; energy; environment; human rights; social justice; etc.) and may well have the power and means to solve most of them if they wanted to. Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and micro-lending pioneer, pointed out: "We wanted to go to the moon, and we went to the moon. If we really wanted to end poverty, we would have ended it a long time ago."

After listening to him and some other brilliant minds, I felt over-inspired and under-accomplished, ready to change the world or at least my life. It was indeed a humbling experience. And yet, it stunned me to realize that many members of the powerful elite are struggling to cope with the new realities of business and society. The difference between being on top and being ahead, between being innovator and pioneer, became obvious in several of the panel discussions, particularly those that addressed the changing media landscape, the ongoing digital revolution, changing consumer behavior, and the new business paradigms that come with it.

These trends include:

- A surge in broadband penetration enabling ubiquitous content distribution and hyper-social connectivity
- The explosion of user-generated content: every minute 10 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube
- The collection and the friction-less, platform-independent distribution of content as the next big challenge for media and communication companies
- Mobile as the new container and memory device: 85 years of video (a whole lifetime) will be able to be stored on any new iPhone in a few years
- The power shift from content providers to media distribution platforms (Comcast, Hulu, etc.)
- The consumer consuming on his own terms
- The "prosumer" as a market force to reckon with
- The wisdom of the crowds as a source of innovation ("we are smarter than me")

Lex Fenwick, the CEO of Bloomberg LP, exemplified the old guard's awakening almost in real-time. First he boasted that he invented email and created the world's most valuable user community (of 350,000 customers) "by mistake," then he warned of giving users too much control ("they may join forces to challenge your prices"). Barry Libert, CEO of collaboration software provider Mzinga, nailed him on this: "If you have something to hide from your customers, or you are afraid of giving them too much power, you have a problem." At the end, Fenwick had converted from Saulus to Paulus, from "From Me to We," and, in a cathartic turn of events, he admitted he had learned quite a bit from the panel: "Thank you for your insights. I am inspired to make a few changes to the Bloomberg community based on this discussion."

Other companies have made this leap before him: Amazon, Netflix, Virgin Mobile, P&G, Dell, and recently Starbucks are all moving from a firm-centric to a network-centric organization, building and leveraging their community of users by giving them a voice in strategy, product development, and marketing decisions. They understand that crowdsourced and peer-to-peer business intelligence helps them overcome the "not-invented-here" syndrome, reconciling "inside-out" and "outside-in" innovation. Libert: "If customers cut the red tape and re-connect with customers, that's making it easier for them to find out what they really need." Of course it's always easier to proclaim a new paradigm than defending an old one, or as someone noted on another panel: "If you’re a futurist and you think ten years ahead, by the time you're wrong, no one will notice."

Jason Calacanis, founder and CEO of Mahalo and in-character as enfant terrible, thrived in the devilish charm of the futurist. In a panel on "The New Rules of PR," he joyfully exposed the insecurity of his audience. It was not so much his co-panelists -- some old-school PR pros who bravely defended their profession against his "PR is dead" claim -- but rather the ensuing Q&A that demonstrated how disturbing the new rules still are for many who have held the power in organizations for decades and find it difficult now to grasp and embrace some of the earth-shattering changes happening these days. "Should our CEO blog?" -- Yes. "How do I stay in control of my brand if our CEO gets critical comments to his blog posts?" -- Well, the truth is, you don't. Just let go. Brands are assets in the public domain. With production capabilities and financial assets off-shored and out-sourced, brands are ever more important as the only remaining indispensable value of a company, and yet they are ever more volatile. In this open-sourced, hyper-transparent economy, your customer owns your brand, and no brand platform, no brand book, no rigid compliance guidelines designed to protect your idea of your brand, can change that. Brands are social funds. Your mission is to raise their intellectual and emotional capital. The creation of brand equity is a cooperative act based on the values that you share with your customers. And, by the way, marketing's job is to promote these values, not to invent them.

In a panel on "Business Innovations that are Changing the World," Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said: "Let's not forget that the fundamental goal of any corporation is to change the world and not just to satisfy the interests of particular stakeholders." Indeed, this was the overarching theme of an economic summit that was all about social: social innovation, social media, social networks, social web, and social capitalism. What once was a noble mission is now a mandate for CEOs: the future of business is social, both in terms of raison d'etre and modus operandi. Companies that open themselves up to promoting and fully leveraging the social dimension of human beings in order to create smarter and more effective solutions for social problems will be the winners of this new social economy.

SXSW Interactive 2008: Who Will Be This Year's Twitter?

Next weekend, just a couple of days after the dust of the primary campaigns will have settled, national media attention will return to Texas as Austin is turning into party central for the annual South by Southwest Festival (SXSW, March 7-16). SXSW Interactive, added in 1994 to the music festival, has evolved into one of the most influential tech conferences in the country and beyond. While somewhat geeky in its first years, SXSW Interactive is now considered a must-attend venue for big tech players (Google, Microsoft, Seagate, etc. all have a strong presence at the show), start-ups, creative agencies, software developers, futurists, designers, artists, media, and bloggers alike, all of whom are chasing the next big digital thing. A key contributing factor for SXSW's success may have been that the initially narrow meaning of "interactive" has expanded its relevance to more industries, media, and platforms over the past few years and now serves as the modus operandi of all business, no matter how creative or digital it is. With its more solid business underpinning, SXSW Interactive has overtaken both the Push conference in Minneapolis and Wired's Nextfest in terms of relevance and commercial success.

The Soul of the Machine

Yet despite its explosive growth (16,000 overall attendees are expected in Austin this year), "South By," as conference goers dub it, has done a good job evading all attempts to be easily categorized. The interactive part, in particular, has somehow managed to remain its cutting edge. It still offers a wildly eclectic bazaar of topics, trends, opinions, and applications, and one can truly say that all of the tech conferences out there it is the one best positioned to explore "the soul of the machine."

The organization is professional but there is still a lot of room for the unexpected, below-the-line, grassroots eccentricity that gives the conference its special flavor. A big part of this can be attributed to Austin, which has emerged as a thriving hub for creative people and embeds SXSW in the kind of community fabric that doesn't tolerate any over-spin or sell-out. The organizers have also made a point to add many community elements to the event: web 2.0 for web 2.0sters, if you will. For example, this year, they pioneered a "panel picker" that allowed users to vote on submitted panel proposals and essentially democratized the entire programming. I'm not entirely sure if this is the best application for the "wisdom of crowds" since there is a real danger that the panel selection turns into a popularity contest or an easy target for PR professionals and speaker bureaus. I, for my part, am old-fashioned and prefer conference programs to be curated by a curator, simply because it is otherwise daunting to ensure the right balance between diversity and cohesion. Anyway, it's too early to tell -- we'll see how it turns out.

In addition to the panel picker, SXSW has teamed up with Microsoft and frog design to create a rich, interactive online community hub for the conference. The application features premium content from SXSW Interactive, including video clips from keynotes and panels, as well as user-generated videos, Flickr images, and social networking content. At the same time, aggregators from Technorati and del.icio.us comb the Internet for relevant information, keeping the site dynamic.

But not everything at SXSW will be user-driven. In fact, some of the program highlights were carefully chosen: Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, will give the keynote on March 9. Other keynotes include Frank Warren (March 10) and Jane McGonigal (March 11). Opening Remarks (March 8) will be delivered by Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson, and Michael Eisner, former head of Disney, will be interviewed in a special session on March 11.

Searching for the Killer App

As eyeballs wander towards Austin, it will be interesting to see which digital innovations this year's conference will bring. Google's Dodgeball blew up at SXSW Interactive in 2006, and last year, a hitherto unknown service called Twitter enabled attendees to chat about panels in real-time and in public, and as instant as the format was its proliferation in the blogosphere: Twitter became the app de jour at SXSW and then, quickly, the rage of all digerati.

So who will be this year's Twitter? Practically speaking: Meebo. The instant messaging service is the official sponsor for live chat at SXSW 2008 and has stepped into Twitter's footsteps, which is kind of ironic. Meebo as Me-too. And philosophically speaking? Who knows. It seems safe to place a few bets on models around the new "Digital Green." The conference will be hosting five panels devoted exclusively to sustainability issues (five more than in previous years, if you're counting), among them "10 Ways to Green-ify Your Digital Life" and "Green Software -- Really?" Another big topic will be how gaming, virtual worlds, mobile and contextual web will converge (yes, convergence is resilient!) in the "Age of Engage," including discussions on OpenID and hardware mash-ups ("the long tail of gadgets"). And then there are interesting sociological tangents such as "Sexual Privacy Online," "Self-Branding," or the existential question for the attention junkie: "Do You Have to Disappear Completely to Get Things Done?" The most exciting domain for disruptive innovation right now is probably news (which, as we know, is broken), and several panels will discuss the future of Internet radio, Internet TV, as well as crowdsourced, hyper-localized models of news production and aggregation.

Or maybe, after five days of "geekspasm" and partying, ReadWriteWeb's prediction may come to pass: "The killer app in Austin might just be beer."

Links

Here are a few helpful links to get you in the mood:

Official SXSW Festival Site: http://www.sxsw.com
Interactive SXSW Schedule/Calendar: http://sched.org/
Official SXSW Live Chat: http://www.meebo.com/sxsw
SXSW Insider Guide: http://sxsw.ning.com/
SXSW Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/SXSW-Festival/7826953993?ref=s

Online Video Consumption is Growing Fast; Google has 31% Market Share

According to comScore's Video Metrix report, more than 75 percent of US internet users watched a video online (either streaming video or progressive downloads) in November, up 29 percent from January 2007. In total numbers, this means that 138 million Americans -- approximately three in four US internet users -- viewed online video during that month. The average online video viewer consumed 69 videos, spending a total time of 3.25 hours (195 minutes) and 2.8 minutes per video.

The report further states that Google continues to capture the lion's share of the online video market as its share went up to 31%, with 3.0 billion videos viewed, 2.9 billion of which occurred at YouTube.com (30.6 percent share of all videos viewed). Fox Interactive Media ranked second, with 419 million videos viewed (4.4 percent), followed by Yahoo Sites with 328 million (3.5 percent), and Viacom Digital with 304 million (2.6 percent).

iMedia has a good piece on "misfit content" as the centerpiece of an effective video-strategy for marketers: "As more and more traffic is directed to niche content -- whether edgier, lower budget, user-generated or just off-beat -- you need to know why and how to market in this content category."

Bye Bye World Wide Web, Welcome Giant Global Graph

It's the graph, stupid! Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the World Wide Web, has published a much discussed post about the future "Internet of things." Yet he doesn't mean "things" in the real world, tagged and connected by the World Wide Web. He is talking about online objects (things and people) that are reminiscent of Bruce Sterling's "spimes." In line with the goals of the Social Network Portability community, Berners-Lee argues that individuals and objects as well as the connections between them are the key items on the web, rather than the pages or social networking sites that contain them: "So the Net and the Web may both be shaped as something mathematicians call a Graph, but they are at different levels. The Net links computers, the Web links documents."

One can interpret this as the second reformation of the Internet -- in the first one, users emancipated themselves from a closed set of service and content providers, realizing that they held the power of the web in their own hands. And now, online identities, objects, and connections detach themselves from the grid of the web that constrains their movements. Relationships are disenfranchised from the "container" in which they're held.

Berners-Lee writes: "Biologists are interested in proteins, drugs, genes. Businesspeople are interested in customers, products, sales. We are all interested in friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. There is a lot of blogging about the strain, and total frustration that, while you have a set of friends, the Web is providing you with separate documents about your friends. One in facebook, one on linkedin, one in livejournal, one on advogato, and so on. The frustration that, when you join a photo site or a movie site or a travel site, you name it, you have to tell it who your friends are all over again. The separate Web sites, separate documents, are in fact about the same thing — but the system doesn't know it. (…) There are cries from the heart (e.g The Open Social Web Bill of Rights) for my friendship, that relationship to another person, to transcend documents and sites. (...) It's not the Social Network Sites that are interesting -- it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected. We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web."

And further:

"In the long term vision, thinking in terms of the graph rather than the web is critical to us making best use of the mobile web, the zoo of wildly differing devices which will give us access to the system. Then, when I book a flight it is the flight that interests me. Not the flight page on the travel site, or the flight page on the airline site, but the URI (issued by the airlines) of the flight itself. That's what I will bookmark. And whichever device I use to look up the bookmark, phone or office wall, it will access a situation-appropriate view of an integration of everything I know about that flight from different sources. The task of booking and taking the flight will involve many interactions. And all throughout them, that task and the flight will be primary things in my awareness, the websites involved will be secondary things, and the network and the devices tertiary."

Not everyone is happy about the term "graph." The most fervent rebuke stems from Dave Winer: "Before we talked about social graphs we called them social networks, and you know what -- they're exactly the same thing, and social network is a much less confusing term, so why don't we just stick with it? (Answer: we should, imho.) So if you don't want to sound like an idiot, call a social graph a social network and stand up for your right to understand technology, and make the techies actually do some useful stuff instead of making simple stuff sound complicated." Robert Scoble, on the other hand, points out that your social network is who you know, while your social graph is who you're connected to based on interests, location, work, etc.: "The Social Graph is NOT my social network," Scoble writes, "My Social Network is my friends list. But the Social Graph shows a LOT more than that."

Berners-Lee would agree with that. For him, the Giant Global Graph is the natural evolution of networking: from computer (net) to documents (web) to things (and friends). Call it Web 3.0, the Semantic Web, the Open Social Web, the Hyper-Social Network, or the Giant Global Graph -- the idea isn't really new, but it appears as if this paradigm is slowly becoming mainstream thinking. As the Global Graph, or whatever you want to call it, is replacing the traditional World Wide Web, new players will want to influence its composition, as they did with hyperlinks and traffic boosting mechanisms on the "old" web. Will we soon see "graph designers"?

Change as a Feature: Designing for Consumers in a State of Permanent Crisis

Can you call a concept a cultural phenomenon if different people conceive of it at the same time? Within the past few months, three publications have come to similar conclusions. The digital media agency Avenue A | Razorfish released a study called "Fast Forward: Designing for Constant Change." It consists of thirteen essays as well as research exploring how consumers' digital media habits are changing, and how this affects the design of user experiences and brands. The key take-away is: Today's online users are forced to adjust to constant change in increasingly volatile rich media environments, and they are increasingly good at it.

Around the same time, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced an exhibit called "Design and the Elastic Mind," which will open in February, 2008. While the Avenue A | Razorfish study provides actionable advice for marketers, the MOMA exhibit examines the philosophical implications for designers:

"In the past few decades, individuals have experienced dramatic changes in some of the most established dimensions of human life: time, space, matter, and individuality. Working across several time zones, traveling with relative ease between satellite maps and nanoscale images, gleefully drowning in information, acting fast in order to preserve some slow downtime, people cope daily with dozens of changes in scale. Minds adapt and acquire enough elasticity to be able to synthesize such abundance. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to stand between revolutions and life, and to help people deal with change."

And lastly, in a similar vein, Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management and father of the concept of "integrative thinking," elaborates on "The Opposable Mind" in a book published earlier this year. F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote that one sign of a "first-rate intelligence" is the ability "to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Accordingly, Martin argues, a sure sign of first-rate business intelligence is the ability to recognize two diametrically opposing ideas and meld them into a new model that is superior to either. Martin says that designers often engage in abductive reasoning: they imagine what might be and act on that insight -- even though they can't prove it.

The "adaptive," the "elastic mind," or the "opposable mind" -- business or consumer, and whatever the name, the concept is the same: the rise of new digital technologies has turned us into skilled micro-managers of constant change, in all aspects of our lives. Uncertainty has become our routine as we live in a state of permanent crisis, in a multi-task, muti-tab, multi-media, multi-window world where each new online event requires a new and different reaction. Sometimes we flee but mostly we adapt, bridge, and synthesize. We have become adept at adapting. We switch back and forth from from macro to micro, zoom in and zoom out, face-to-face and space-to-space, at the same time but at different paces, shifting time and shifting places. We possess what drummers show when they perform two distinct rhythms in their hands and feet -- excellent coordination. Seamless is our modus operandi.

As micro-managers of constant change, we stretch our minds' boundaries and sometimes over-reach; we combine the long and the short form, the philosophical and the mundane, the narrative and the 140-word Tweet. We understand that the "map is outgrowing the territory," as Bruce Sterling puts it. We can think meta while in beta, and we understand that every idea immediately transcends itself into something bigger, something universal that it is meta-tagged before it is even final.

What does all that mean for product designers, not only in the digital realm? Acknowledge that consumers are smarter than you. Hence, design for input, and do not just satisfy the user preferences. Understand change as a feature. Design a highly modifiable and personalizable experience that is adaptive to change, but build in enough flexibility for the users to adapt the experience itself to changing conditions. Make your products adapt, bridge, and synthesize, as your users do. Give them features that literally scale. Equip them with "peripheral vision" -- the ability to see things outside of the usual spectrum, not front and center but right, left, and in the back. And if all that isn't enough: Allow the user to customize, mash up, and ultimately re-design the product or service beyond its original purpose.

Examples? Netscape, Flash, JavaScript, TCP/IP, IM, and a host of other products in the digital realm have all moved far beyond what they started out as. The iPod enabled podcasts, Google Earth triggered hundreds of mash-ups, Google's Open Social and Open Mobile inititiaves will further spur third-party innovation resulting in myriad new applications that will change the orignal services. And then there is of course Facebook, which from a social network evolved into an operating sytem, a content distribution platform, a whole new micro-economy -- or all of that together. The product is the system and the system is change.

Podcast: From OpenSocial to Open Data Sharing for All

Ashley Angell, Chris Saad (Faraday Media), and Jon Cianciullo (Cluztr) discuss APML, OpenAuth, OpenSocial and how we are moving towards open data sharing.

http://onthepod.thepodcastnetwork.com/2007/11/09/on-the-pod-12-ashley-angell-chris-saad-and-jon-cianciullo/

via http://www.apml.org/