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Guardian: WikiLeaks the revolution has begun

November 30, 2010. Posted by kindleresearch in Information industry, Social media. Comments (0) so far.

“Diplomacy has always involved dinners with ruling elites, backroom deals and clandestine meetings. Now, in the digital age, the reports of all those parties and patrician chats can be collected in one enormous database. And once collected in digital form, it becomes very easy for them to be shared.”
…
“But when data breaches happen to the public, politicians don’t care much. Our privacy is expendable. It is no surprise that the reaction to these leaks is different. What has changed the dynamic of power in a revolutionary way isn’t just the scale of the databases being kept, but that individuals can upload a copy and present it to the world. In paper form, these cables amount to some 13,969 pages, which would stack about 25m high – not something that one could have easily slipped past security in the paper age.”
…
“This is a revolution, and all revolutions create fear and uncertainty. Will we move to a New Information Enlightenment or will the backlash from those who seek to maintain control no matter the cost lead us to a new totalitarianism? What happens in the next five years will define the future of democracy for the next century, so it would be well if our leaders responded to the current challenge with an eye on the future.”

‘Revolution’ may be hyperbole but access to data is shifting the balance of power. Governments need to wake up to the idea that sharing their public data with us will help us develop while at the same time, they need to house the individual data they hold about us in smaller, more secure silos.

My hope is that governments’ embarrassment will encourage them to start taking the privacy of OUR data a bit more seriously.

Posted via email from Paul’s posterous

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Socially and spatially connecting libraries

July 21, 2009. Posted by Paul in Education sector, Information industry. Comments (0) so far.

Today JISC has launched a video documentary about the future of libraries. It’s really about academic libraries in universities rather than the libraries on our high streets but many of the issues are the relevant to all libraries.

This is a critically important issue. Although they are easy to laugh off, libraries play a fundamental role in our democratic foundations, providing fair and open access to information so we can all make informed choices and build our knowledge. They are a social hub for the community and build social capital.

Librarians play a key role in helping us to access the right sort of information and making these centres welcoming places. More and more people are turning to the internet, typically via Google, and finding their answers there but information literacy can be poor particularly among the younger generations.

Having interviewed many, many librarians about their future I worry. They are presented with an enormous opportunity to help people discriminate and identify great information but they have huge challenges. They see their users less as many access the library remotely but now more than ever they have to sell their expertise. They have to love new technology but they tend to be rather conservative and hanker for the way things were. The job is seen as dull and unexciting – and it isn’t!.

In universities I see the brightest future in converting the library space into a social space. They have to build great online spaces so the information can be accessed from anywhere, at any time. They need to match that with great physical spaces where people can come together to talk, exchange, work, explore.

And these two spaces need to be bridged with social media – a space where people can be drawn into the libraries and where the conversations can continue.

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Short introduction to Twitter

June 12, 2009. Posted by Paul in Consumer technology, Information industry, Research. Comments (0) so far.

I’ve been playing with Twitter a bit more. This short video explains what it is in plain English if you don’t know how it works or why people are using it. The video talks about updating friends, family and co-workers on the minutiae of your life but I’m more interested to see how it works as a business tool.

People are piling into it even if it has slowed up in the last month. Pretty impressive for a company with less than 50 staff. There are lots of market researchers and other interesting people on there but what kind of people are they? Currently usage is dominated by a few people – 90% of tweets come just 10% of users and half of Twitter users have only tweeted once.

It’s people who feel they have something to say. But rather than telling their followers what they are doing, they are sharing what they are thinking and finding. So if you have the time, and you could spend a lot of time on it, it’s a fascinating way to connect and learn.

One of the most interesting questions is how Twitter is going to make money. Here is one of the founders talking about it – they still seem awfully vague.

Follow me: @kindleresearch

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Facing up to the future of education

May 20, 2009. Posted by admin in Education sector, Information industry, Research. Comments (0) so far.

Always looking for inspiration and happy to take a moment’s respite from daily tasks Kindle Research decided to attend Futurelab’s Beyond Current Horizons Conference, ‘ Looking at the future of education beyond 2025’. (One couldn’t help but notice their direct alignment with the DCSF by branding the enterprise ‘technology, children, schools and family’…)

A rather conceptual but fascinating day followed as Futurelab outlined 5 potential challenges facing education in the context of social and technological change.   It would be a disservice to attempt an overview of the day as the scope of themes was vast, incorporating presentations about the…
•    impact of technology on identity and communities
•    blurring distinctions between the public/private and work/leisure
•    incalculable growth in the depth, scale and use of data on every level
•    the outsourcing of intelligence, decision-making and responsibilities to machines
•    and that every age will have to deal with social and generational gaps in terms of access use and comprehension of technology

Whilst each of these themes are fascinating but somewhat well-trodden of most interest was the futurist’s typical practice of challenging the audience to envisage designing educational practice for different scenarios informed by their 5 challneges above. Perhaps the most optimistic of the scenarios given was one of networked individuals, where access to the network is pervasive and provides some kind of cognitive enhancement… you could call it a communal approach. Conversely we were also asked to consider how one might attempt to help learners navigate complex learning environments in a different sort of post-industrialised model of the education environment. A context where commercial learning providers compete, and there is a real blurring of the distinctions between formal and informal learning… a more individualistic vision of the future.

In these times of educational and economic uncertainty it may seem something of a luxury to engage in utopian/dystopian fantasies but they really are worth considering if only for the fact they quickly polarise opinions and reveal something of our immediate values and anxieties. And it is this insight that informs my main criticism of the day; the failure to ask what the implications of these future scenarios are for education and the decisions we need to make about the use of technology today.

Schools and teachers are under continually increasing pressure and for many these are anxious times as they are asked to perform more varied tasks, manage more change in terms of policy and practice (let alone technology… and please, please don’t mention an imminent election) whilst enduring ever-increasing scrutiny and it felt remiss to evade an opportunity to reflect on the many crunchy issues facing us now as they make decisions which will affect the future. But … looking to the future… Futurelab are developing some materials which they plan to release later this month which we look forward to.

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Wolfram (just as well it’s an) Alpha

May 18, 2009. Posted by Paul in Consumer technology, Information industry. Comments (1) so far.

Not a great start for the heavily trailed Wolfram Alpha. While the semantic search knowledgebase may well improve with time, the rather fun comments on the bottom of the article offer enlightening user feedback about its current performance. It’s rubbish! Though I asked it for the meaning of life and it did come back with the literarily correct 42, it might be a while before it can provide good answers to tricky (and not so tricky) questions.

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Revolutionary book machine

April 29, 2009. Posted by Paul in Consumer technology, Information industry. Comments (1) so far.

How interesting that a “thing” is heralded as the most revolutionary development in books for half a century. What about the Google Book Project, Amazon, ebooks? A machine in a London bookstore has over 500,000 titles that it will print on demand, in about 5 minutes and reports suggest the quality is good.

Personally, I think these are a fantastic innovation and I fully expect them to be a more common sight. I still believe readers of books want to touch and feel paper and lots will never want to either buy more electronic kit or settle down with a tablet device. If the quality is good, it only takes a few minutes and the price is the same, they will buy it from a machine.

Maybe it is part of the marketing hype but in an era when we have witnessed one electronic-based revolution after another, people find it easier to relate to things.

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Twitter vs Facebook vs The Nextbigthing

February 24, 2009. Posted by Paul in Consumer technology, Information industry. Comments (0) so far.

With the exponential adoption of Twitter on top of huge growth of Facebook, here is a timely article comparing their relative attributes. They are different animals, each responding to the basic human need to connect and communicate in different ways, but personally I still think there is a huge question mark over their future success.

They’re fun for a while but as all us who work with a keyboard know, they can swallow a lot of unproductive time. When they go down, we feel cut off as exemplifed in gmail’s outage today. It may be warping our kids’ brains. We also need to ask how effective they are. The concerns about this and why we still plunge into the deluge of information are neatly captured by James Harkin in this article:

The delivery of a continuous stream of messages might well be slowly stretching our brains, turning us into creatures who are better at doing many different things at once. Preliminary studies from neuroscientists and psychologists, however, suggest that in the meantime our brains are likely to become strained and confused if we make too many demands on them. Beyond a certain point, in other words, the productivity bonus that we get from responding to many different streams of information on our information loop at the same time levels off, and begins to slow us down. No matter – many of us enjoy it all the same. The reason why we’re so keen to switch through a range of information streams and constantly jump around between them, in any case, is not at all about doing things more efficiently – it is simply that we have come to appreciate being in the loop for its own sake.

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Predictions for 2009

January 9, 2009. Posted by Paul in Consumer technology, Education sector, Information industry, Mobile technology. Comments (0) so far.

This time of year is full of reviews of the last 12 months and predictions for the year to come. Actually I’d like to see more articles that compare last year’s predictions with this year’s reality. It’s in our nature and it’s part of our job to try and understand what will be but the strike rate can be low.

It’s been a time of enormous upheaval globally and personally so I’m a little reluctant to be so brave as to make any specific predictions for 2009. This article helps out by rounding up the tech and information trends to watch out for in 2009 with links to other organisations being a bit braver about what will happen over the next year. I think it is safe to assume that we will see growth in:

- Use of mobile devices to access the internet

- Open source software in businesses

- Rich media social networking tools as a means of communication (with a decline in, uh-oh… blogging)

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Reading Google

October 31, 2008. Posted by admin in IT, Information industry. Comments (0) so far.

After Microsoft’s May withdrawal from the Open Content Alliance it became uncertain what the future of digitised text would be and the main focus of concern moved to Google’s digitizing venture. It seems that many now feel some optimism after Google’s surprise settlement with the American publishing industry. At least if you judge things by the er… cover.

Following the money, the appeal is that everybody gets paid but more importantly book lovers will now be able to access out of print books. However, some questions do remain. Google have been, and will continue to, scan entire books and to display 20% of them at their whim. And this is where some concerns surface. If you’ve read 20% of a book digitally you’re probably going to want to read the rest of it… and probably be willing to do that digitally too. Once Google are the leading provider of digitised books, and also of the online search of those books it becomes very hard to envisage how anyone will be able to compete… leaving them to monopolise the provision of digital books.

Whatever one’s feelings about these developments the prospects for digital readers now looks a lot more interesting, although perhaps not for our namesake the Amazon Kindle. Amazon’s 190,000 titles appear pretty insignificant next to the millions that Google will have. How long before Google starts to compete in that territory too or has it already entered via Android?

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Humans helping computers to read

August 20, 2008. Posted by Paul in Consumer technology, IT, Information industry. Comments (0) so far.

Here is a really nifty use of the internet to solve two problems at the same time. You know those wavy images you need to decipher when signing up for various subscription services such as gmail or facebook? They have a name – CAPTCHAs – and they are designed to prevent bots setting up dummy accounts, which would then get used to spam us with offers to satisfy our carnal, financial or emotional woes.

The other problem stems from the enormous amount of paper text that is now being digitised. Optical Character Recognition systems are pretty good but they still have trouble with old or creased paper.

The niftiness is in us being used to help translate words that have not been correctly read by digital readers as well as authenticating that we are human.

So when you sign up – and the company claims that 40,000 websites are now using their service – you’re presented with two words: one that you need to get right to authenticate yourself and one that you need to translate. The translated word then gets sent back to the digitiser so it can be read electronically.

It’s a form of crowdsourcing where work normally undertaken by a specialist is handled by an undefined, large group of people. This can have implications for market research – why employ specialists like us when you can just throw an idea out there and see what the crowd makes of it? Well, crowds can get mania, they can follow the most popular choices and there is the suggestion that it is better suited to voting than creating.

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We Think...

Socially and spatially connecting libraries

Short introduction to Twitter

Facing up to the future of education

Wolfram (just as well it’s an) Alpha

Revolutionary book machine

Twitter vs Facebook vs The Nextbigthing

Predictions for 2009

Reading Google

Humans helping computers to read