Running Notes from SXSW ‘08; for more blog coverage check out: the SXSW Interactive Community Blog.

If you’re over the age of 35, don’t bother reading the rest of this post. 

Why? Because what follows will likely be incomprehensible to you in the same way that portable, pocket-sized wireless telephones once seemed like objects of science fiction to a generation before you. In short, you’re not going to get it, and you’ll likely finish reading this post feeling like you don’t understand anything about web 2.0, or technology in general, and that the future is passing you by.  Which is likely true.

That said, if you want to know what your kids will be doing for the rest of the online lives, read on.

One of the highlights of SXSW Interactive was the panel PMOG: The Web as a Play Field.  PMOG stands for “Passively Multiplayer Online Game”; according to game designer Merci Hammon, PMOG “transforms the existing topography of the internet into a game world for players to vandalize, annotate, and curate.”  Huh? In short, it’s a new online game that turns the web into a game world. What that means in a practical sense is that players download a plug-in for their Firefox web browser.  In the vernacular of game designers and Navy fighter pilots, the plug-in installs what’s known as a Heads Up Display (HUD); the rest of us might think of it as a dashboard or toolbar. With the HUD turned on, players can leave “gifts” for one another on regular websites.

The catch, of course, is the definition of “gift”.  If the player is an Ally, you might wander onto your favorite website and find that they left you a crate filled with tools (tools being generally useful and as such, appreciated).  If the player is a Rival, however, you may find a mine that will explode in your face.  Not to worry, though: you can retaliate by planting a “St. Nick” for your rival, which causes his next mine not to work.  

There are two main differences between PMOG and other multiplayer online games such as World of Warcraft or Everquest.  The first (and key) difference is that PMOG is played asynchronously, meaning you don’t need to be online at the same time as other players to participate.  You also don’t need to be in the same space: because PMOG uses the entire web as the game world, players don’t have to download (or play on) a separate platform. There’s no Second Life-type of world: PMOG simply creates an additional layer onto the existing architecture of the web.

All of this means that if you can’t spare a few dozen hours a week to play World of Warcraft, you can turn your everyday web surfing into a game (says CEO Justin Hall: “We’re building a game that’s actually LESS popular on the weekends”). To keep track of who’s winning, players earn “datapoints” (the game currency) just from regular browsing - every unique URL you visit is worth two datapoints.  In addition to gifting crates and exploding mines to other players, you can also go on player-designed missions which lead you on virtual tours of related sites (for example, the “Tech News Tour” mission includes visits to Engadget, Gizmodo, Digg and Slashdot). The goal, says Hammon, is to encourage people to broaden their experience with the Internet by exploring places they’ve never been on the web. A little like StumbleUpon, part of PMOG’s attraction is the fun of discovery and serendipity (although one could easily imagine a later version in which advertisers create sponsored missions that give users some “reward” for completing them).

If all this sounds simply like fun and games, think again. Aside from being interestingly quirky and original, the basic premise of PMOG could change the way we interact with the web and with each other while online.  Today we experience the web in a distinctly anti-social way: we surf alone, interacting with content, not people. But the ability to leave metaphorical “crates” and “mines” allows us to annotate the web in a very personal way and then share that experience with others. 

As I said in the beginning of this post, many people will look at PMOG and see at best another online game and at worst, yet another way to waste time at work. But what it really offers is a glimpse of the future: what the Web can, should and truly is meant to be: a social universe where content and people co-exist - if not in perfect harmony, then at least with a cache of St. Nicks.

 In a few hours I’ll be doing a session at SXSW ‘08 called The Futurist’s Sandbox: Scenarios for Social Technologies in 2025, with my colleagues Wayne Pethrick, Jamais Casico, Stuart Candy and Jake Dunagan. As the title suggests, we’re presenting four “experiential” scenarios that explore how social technologies might evolve over the next few decades.  What are experential scenarios? They’re scenarios that engage the audience in the narrative of the future story; as such they’re much more interesting to tell (and watch) and give you a hands-on feel for what the future might look like, rather than a written story in which you’re left to imagine the details in your head. Since we have the last session of the conference and I fully intend to go directly from there to the nearest party, here’s a sneak peak at my scenario, called Can You See Me Now?

As information technologies continue to propagate the world, the electronic exhaust of our click stream is generating unprecedented amounts of metadata.  Rather than a useless by-product however, metadata is a valuable resource, an untapped gold mine of previously invisible patterns, intentions and relationships.  How can we recycle and repurpose metadata to expose the hidden layers of connections between people, objects and environments? In the future will we use metadata judiciously, or will we create a world of information obesity?  How will social technolgies instantiate themselves in a world scaffolded by metadata?  Maybe they’ll look something like this:

The Unauthorized Lifelog of Cory Doctorow, Volumes 1 - 6 (pre-release, March 2025)

Turn objects into Blogjects with DNA Markers, customizable with your DNA

The new bling: iCandy contact lens stream up to 5000 info channels directly to your eye

The Emotional Forecast

Protect yourself against anger mobs with Anger Away!

More notes on the session and descriptions of all the scenarios will be up soon.  Many, many thanks to Pinkergreen Design for creating the above future artifacts!

 Running notes from SXSW ‘08; for more blog coverage check out the SXSW Community Blog.

Journalist Dan Pink (widely known for his best-seller A Whole New Mind) says the market for manga (Japanese for comic book) offers two important lessons for American media businesses.  

Pink spent a year in Tokyo studying both the culture and business of manga, where it is “staggeringly ubiquitous”: 22 percent of all printed material in Japan is in manga; volumes the size of phone books are sold as weeklies in retail outlets, bookstores carry acres of it.  It sits at the epicenter of what he calls the “Manga Industrial Complex” influencing every other form of media and entertainment from anime to video games to television. 

But despite its ubiquity, the manga industry is experiencing a slow but steady decline. How the industry is dealing with this offers two specific lessons for American media companies. The first concerns the business model which underpins the industry.  He tells the story of his first visit to a comic-book market in Tokyo, which drew tens of thousands of fans.  But the fans weren’t there to buy manga produced by mainstream companies, they were they buying fan-created, self-published manga, known as “dojinshi.”

Dojinshi often feature copyrighted characters and material; amateur writers riff on established works, remixing the plots and characters, and creating new storylines (for instance a series called BLEACH centers around the chaste relationship of the main characters, but dojinshi versions feature the characters hooking up).  How do fans repurpose copyrighted material without drawing legal fire?  Via an unwritten, implicit agreement between dojinshi writers and established media companies, what Pink refers to as “anmoku no ryokai” (literally: “agreement or understanding”).

Why?  Why would media companies look the other way to clear-cut violations of copyright law?  In essence, it’s a symbiotic relationship: by ceding some control of their material to dojinshi writers, media companies get 1) customer care (doinjinshi drives sales of original material) 2) a talent market for new, emerging writers and 3) free market research (dojinshi sales are indicators of trends in original series).  The short version is: involving the fans and ceding control is actually GOOD for business.

The second lesson for US media companies: manga is a huge missing genre in the US that can help revive an ailing industry.  Manga is spreading globally: there are manga cafes in Paris, manga-versions of Shakespeare for sale in England, and US sales have increased from $65 million in 2003 to $200 million in 2006 (see Pink’s Wired article “Japan, Ink”).

Pink’s new book “The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Book You’ll Ever Need” capitalizes on this opening in the American market.  It’s the first business book (in America) written as a graphic novel; it’s “plot” centers on six lessons to succeed in the workplace.

Intuitively, the concept makes sense: IMO 95% of all business books are too long, needlessly over-complicating points to achieve an acceptable industry-standard word count.   It will be interesting to see how the American market will respond to manga-style business books.   The answer, hopefully, will be in the next episode.

One of the best things about LIFT is that the organizers are fanatical about getting the videos from the conference up within hours.  Some 80 videos are now up here.

If you have time to watch just one, make it Paul Barnett. With flair, humor and lots of hand-waving for “technology joy”, Barnett compares his work as Creative Director at Electronic Arts to the history of cinema and Vegas casinos. Really.  

Note: These are running notes for LIFT ‘08; for more complete blog coverage check out the official LIFT Conference blog or LunchOverIP. 

Genevieve Bell says that people on average tell “between 6 -20 lies per day”. 

Which of course makes me think: what have lied about today?  Well, I told my 3-year old nephew that if he didn’t finish his yogurt that he’d never play professional football (although the truth is that his genetic disposition will likely be the primary cause of his future career disappointment, rather than the vanilla yogurt).  I also told him that the batteries of his Lion King reader book had died.  This was a total lie, because in fact I removed a battery when the bugger was in the bathroom, rendering the book mute (although in my own defense, I truly feel this was a lie necessary to protect the both of us, as I was afraid of what I’d do if I heard the “Circle of Life” song one more time today).  And I told my mother I was relaxing and taking the day off of work (yeah, right). Ok, so that’s three lies.  According to Bell’s stats, it looks like I’m below average. I suppose for once I should be glad I’m not an over-achiever.

Bell, an anthropologist at Intel, conducted research to explore the role that lies and secrets play in our digital lives.   She starts her talk by admitting that she lied to Yahoo about her birthday.  Not a cardinal sin of course, but it did have consequences: she had forgotten her Flickr login and since she couldn’t remember her fictitious birthday, she was unable to retrieve her password and was locked out of Yahoo and other online accounts.

It turns out lying is more common than we think.  Bell says a UK survey revealed that 45% of mobile phone owners admitted to having lied about their whereabouts via text messages.  Cornell research showed that 100% of online daters have lied (usually about height or weight).  The rest of us lie for a variety of reasons: 40% to conceal misbehavior, 14% to keep our own social world ticking over; 9% to increase popularity.

The point is that lies - and its cousin, secrets - are a natural and integral part of life, and that we have constructed various social and cultural responses to them.  Lying on the witness stand is perjury, but telling a secret to one’s lawyer is perfectly legal, and in fact protected.  While most religions proscribe that lying is bad, secrets are a different story.  Secrets, Bell assets, cement relationships; paradoxically, they create trust: forms of “secret” or sacred knowledge are deeply rooted in our cultural, religious and political systems.

So what does this have to do with our digital lives?  If lies and secrets abound in the “real” world, online they positively flourish. Bells says lies about location, context, intent and identity (physical appearance, aspirations, demography, status and standing) are all possible, sometimes even required, in the context of our digital lives.  For instance, MySpace restricts access to those 14 years old and up; there are a surprising percentage of MySpace users who claim to be over 100. The question is: are information/communication technologies (and related applications and services) succeeding in part because they facilitate our lying ways?  Or are our lies and secrets are necessary to keep us ‘safe’?

Lies and secrets online are not only commonplace, they’re sometimes celebrated: the website PostSecret is a gallery of “secrets” that people have sent in via postcard, letter, etc.  (side note: PS is one of the most addictively voyeuristic sites online; it’s the 14^th most popular website and has spawned a book and community meetups).

Bell quotes James Katz, saying we’re “entering an arms race of digital deception” - that for every device that provides “truth”, another channel or device emerges that facilitates deception: cell phone tracking technology can reveal your whereabouts, but services like MobileAlibi can create a fictitious back story about why you were there (and who you were with). A newer generation of technologies have even greater potential to tell the “truth” unbidden: lie-detection algorithms on text messages and emails, GPS trackers and more.  Bell’s talk is fascinating; like most provocative speakers she raises more questions than answers, but they’re intriguing ones: is technology creating or mitigating truthiness? How are our cultural ideals and practices - something as basic and “moral” as truth telling - changing as we interact with technology?

Note: these are running notes for LIFT ‘08.  For more complete blog coverage, check out the official LIFT Conference blog or LunchOverIP.

François Grey is the Head of IT Communications at CERN, the Switzerland-based research center most widely known as the birthplace of the web and home to the world’s largest scientific instrument, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In addition to smashing participles and looking for new ones, when the LHC begins operations later this year, it will produce roughly 15 Petabytes (15 million gigabytes) of data annually.  To analyze the mountains of the data the project will rely on the LHC Grid, a globally distributed network of computers. The approach is similar to that used by SETI @ Home which taps into the spare computing power of millions of volunteer computers to download and analyze radio telescope data in search of extraterrestrial life. The idea is catching on: Grey says today there are dozens of distributed computing projects in fields such as molecular biology, climatology and particle physics; the Sony PS3 is pre-loaded with software to enable it to connect with Folding@Home, aStanford-based project that’s studying protein folding.

A unique culture has evolved around distributed computing projects, creating tight-knit communities of volunteers.  To incentivize participation projects like SETI give volunteers “credits” for donating computing time; individuals and teams self-organize and compete to donate the most hours.  Message boards act as a social networking site for volunteers and individual profiles make participation in the project personal: Matthew Tine (aka Stainmaster) is a 32-year old Australian who has been a SETI@home member since 2000 and has to date donated over 18,000 hours of CPU time.

Grey says is science taking the distributed network concept one step further, from volunteer computing to “volunteer thinking”.  As he describes it: a new generation of projects is emerging that taps into not only the computers, but the brains of the volunteers, inviting them to analyze scientific data online: cataloguing galaxies, scouring microscope images, or mapping out remote regions.  For instance, Galaxy Zoo taps armchair astronomers to help scientists classify galaxies by looking at images and identifying whether it’s a spiral or an elliptical galaxy.  Using legions of people is not only efficient, it’s also more effective: collectively human brains are better than computers at pattern recognition, and algorithms would invariably throw out the “unusual, weird or wonderful” patterns that would attract the attention of a curious human.

Herbaria at Home is using a similar crowd-sourcing approach digitize and document the world’s largest collections of herbarium specimens; another project, AfricaMap seeks to create more accurate cartographic maps of Africa by asking volunteers to look at satellite images over the African continent and search for roads, bridges, human settlements, rivers, agriculture fields, etc.

Distributed computing has spawned distributed thinking, a trend Grey calls “citizen cyberscience”, or philanthropic crowdsourcing. It’s a fascinating concept and one that could mobilize an army of amateur scientists into service.

 The speakers are great, the networking is casual and unpretentious. But what really ties the LIFT experience together is the cheese.  Specifically: the Thursday night fondue, a LIFT tradition that this year reached epic proportions as organizers managed the super-human feat of hosting for 600 people. Yes, that’s one big bowl of cheese. 

Note: these are running notes LIFT ‘08.  For more complete blog coverage, check out the official LIFT conference blog or LunchOverIP.

On the outside, Kevin Warwick looks like your typical middle-aged, mild-mannered Brit. On the inside, however, he’s jacked his body up with most of the technology you’d find in your living room.  His experiments with neural implants, RFID sensors and robotic arms have earned him the title of the world’s first cyborg. 

Kevin’s theory is simple: as human beings, we have very limited senses - just five to be exact, and none of them particularly noteworthy.  Collectively, dogs, cats and bats outweigh us from a sensory perspective.  But why should we be satisfied with the genetic equivalent of second-place?  Why not use technology to extend our senses, to give us super-sonic hearing or ‘bionic’ eyesight?

For both ethical and legal reasons (”I’d never get permission for a test group”) Warwick has conducted his “cyborg” experiments on himself and his wife.  In the first, he implanted a tiny RFID tag into his arm which, connected to his computer, allowed him to control the doors and lights in his lab as well as operate a robotic arm some 5000km away.  In effect, his arm had its own IP address.  Another experiment extended his sensory range, in essence giving him an extra sonar sense: blindfolded he could “sense” (like a bat) when an object came close to him, just from the impulses in his arm.

In a later experiment, Warwick connected (via another set of implants) both his and his wife’s nervous systems: when he moved his hand, she felt the impulses, creating a nascent form of telegraphic communication between their nervous systems. He cautions that these are early-stage experiments, that it will be decades before brain-to-brain communication becomes a reality.  But the question is out there: what happens when it does?

As usual, Kevin captivates the audience - he’s funny, articulate and completely engaging.  Perhaps it’s his guy-next-door persona that makes the message all the more potent: maybe cyborgs of the future will look less like the Terminator and more like Mr. Rodgers.

I’ve heard Kevin speak before, and was grateful for the opportunity to spend the day with him last year in his lab at University of Reading, where he is a professor of cybernetics.  The hype around him abounds, but while he likes to play the cyborg, my sense is that his real passion is improving the human condition.  The possibilities of super-sonic senses may sound narcissistic, but side-effects of the research (ie, a cure for Parkinson’s disease) are anything but.  To cure neurological disorders or repair damaged or severed limbs (of which there are record numbers of in returning war veterans) we need to come to grips - both scientifically and culturally - with a new concept of what the human body, indeed a human being, can be.  

Switzerland.
Fondue.
Chocolate.
Wicked cool people and ideas.

What’s not to love?

I go to my share of conferences (well, truth be told, more than my share) and as a result I’m turning into what could be politely described as a conference snob.  It takes a bit to get me revved up for a conference these days, but one of my absolute favorites is coming up in a couple of weeks: LIFT.

Held in Geneva, Switzerland (reason for going #1), LIFT describes itself as “three day event to explore the social impact of new technologies.” What makes it different is a thoughtfully designed program and a hip but relaxed vibe (think designers and techies, minus the black turtlenecks and the awkward geekiness).  Yes, there are traditional keynotes and panels, but in the spirit of user-generated content the program also features a number of workshops and “open stage talks” that are proposed and selected by LIFT attendees.  Accompanying all of this is “LIFT+”, a set of artistic activities, many of which are interactive (last year included gaming, a digital orchestra and a wall-sized conference ‘book’ designed by attendees).  And of course, there’s the fondue party.

Registration is here.

Picking up where I left off yesterday….

I was pleased to see a grassroots example of Designers R Us in action. Animatronics Workshop was the most interesting exhibit in the future of education section. It is collaborative, generative, open-source and DIY the four values that define Designers R Us.?

Animatronics Workshop was the brain child ofPaul and Catherine Diets, a couple of parents who wanted to provide kids with “a chance to experience a significant interdisciplinary project that requires the tight integration of both artistic and technical capabilities”. The workshop, designed as an extracurricular activity, began in the fall of 2006 with 14 children ages 11 -14. Check out a video of their first show called Perspectives, based on the familiar Sunday talk show format.?

Transforming ideas into objects… Up until now 3D printers have been gigantic, extremely expensive machines making them unsuitable for the consumer market. This is about to change. The Desktop Factory 3D printer will hit the market costing $4,995.00 making it within reach of businesses, schools and individuals.?

What I enjoyed was being able to see the machine up close; it reminded me of a microwave, and to hold some of the objects that had been “printed”. They felt substantial, like they would hold up to an average amount of wear and tear. The Desktop Factory uses standard 3D file formats and it has a maximum build volume of 5×5x5 inches. Instead of a laser it uses a halogen light bulb and the feed stock is nylon based power similar to what is used in makeup.?

Think of how cool it would be to print a 3D version of your virtual world objects, your avatar, toys you design! There is a waiting list for the machine which is expected to be available in early 2008. I want one.