Perhaps it’s the constant ringing you hear - in your pocket, on your hip, in the car.  Or the fact that even a cursory look at the local mall or a city street seems to indicate that humans have mysteriously developed a new appendage, one complete with a dial tone.  Or maybe it’s the haunting realization that the way to your teenage daughter’s heart appears to be through an iPhone.  You may not have heard, but your surely intuit, that the world recently reached a tipping point. There is now one cellphone for every two people on the planet.

The mobile phone has been hailed as the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history.  As with any technology of this magnitude and reach, what follows is revolution - social revolution, to be exact. From fish farmers in India to mobile financing in Africa, the ability of the mobile phone to effect social change is one of the most exciting and important stories being written today.  This week’s Friday Five highlights just a few examples of the growing trend of “mobile activism.”  

Texting for Social Change - FrontlineSMS

In many developing countries mobile phones are not only far more ubiquitous than computers and landlines, in many cases they are the only means of communication.  Organizations such as NGOs rely on tools like text messaging to reach out to the communities they work with. FrontlineSMS is a text messaging system that allows a user with a laptop and a GSM mobile phone the ability to send a large number of text (SMS) messages; because it depends on cellular networks instead of the Internet, it will work in any country on any GSM network. In the first two years since its release, FrontlineSMS has been used by NGOs in 41 countries for a wide range of activities including monitoring elections and disease outbreaks, blood donor recruitment and the exchange of market price information for vegetable and coffee growers.

Mobile Phone Reporters - Voices of Africa

Launched in May 2007, the Voices of Africa project is creating a cadre of “mobile reporters.”  Armed with mobile phones, the reporters are known as ‘camjos’ (short for ‘camera’ and ‘journalist’) who use mobile phones to write, takes photos and makes videos about daily life in Africa on subjects they find newsworthy. Using the mobile phone as the reporting platform is critical, as many journalists don’t have access to the Internet to file their stories. According to the project site, Voices of Africa aims aims to “put Africans in a much better position to take part in discussions that have been taking place about their continent  for centuries without their knowledge and participation.”

Environmental Monitoring - MESSAGE on a Bike

This New Scientist article reports that cellphones used by bicycle couriers are monitoring air pollution in Cambridge, UK, and beaming the data back to a research lab. The project, called MESSAGE, is developing low cost sensors to provide data for the planning and management of environmental impacts in urban areas. Sensors are embedded on vehicles and people to act as “mobile, real-time environmental probes, sensing transport and non-transport related pollutants and hazards.” One very practical application: working with doctors to correlate their patient’s asthma symptoms with the air pollution around them. (thanks to Changeist for the heads up)

Mobile Acitivism = MobileActive

MobileActive is a global network of people (and their tools, projects, and resources) focused on the use of mobile phones in civil society. It’s without a doubt one of the most comprehensive and connected sites on the web documenting the use of mobile phones for activism and advocacy, featuring hundreds of examples, case studies and resources (see this Boston Globe article for a sample). Most importantly, MobileActive taps into activists around the world, connecting a community that is literally creating social change one cell phone at a time.  For anyone interested in following the emerging trend of mobile activism from the ground up, the organization’s news aggregator and del.icio.us feeds are must-reads.

“Socially Networked Consumption” - CarrotMob

What if the most important step you could take to help solve the world’s most challenging problems was to drop into the corner store on a certain week and buy a certain brand of toothbrush? This is the question posed by Carrotmob, a new non-profit that organizes consumers to make purchases that reward companies who make environmentally friendly choices.  At its initial launch Carrotmob organized 300+ people for a few hours of shopping at a local market in San Francisco. The company, K&D Market, pledged to allocate 22% of gross revenue from Carrotmobbers towards energy-saving measures. The big idea, according to founder Brent Schulkin, is to improve the world by helping companies embrace socially responsible choices, leveraging the power of “socially networked consumption”* to do so.  

*4/22/08 update: Stephanie Gerson, a student at UC Berkley, wrote to tell me that she coined the term “socially networked consumption”; while the term isn’t explained in detail on her blog (only: “peer consumption via consumer networking sites”), according to her email she’s writing a thesis on the topic.

How do we visualize cyberspace?  For all of the serendipitous surprises the web has to offer, it’s ironic that the traditional metaphors for cyberspace are about as appealing as a rush-hour traffic jam (”information superhighway” anyone?).  Ah, but the web is so much more than an electronic pileup of bits and bytes!  Looking for a little visual pick-me-up, this week’s Friday Five sent us spelunking for some of the more interesting and entertaining visualizations on the web.  Enjoy!
 

Packet Garden

One of my all-time favorite web apps, Packet Garden allows you to harvest your IP traffic and grow your own personal Internet garden.  As the website explains “To do this, Packet Garden takes note of all the servers you visit, their geographical location and the kinds of data you access. Uploads make hills and downloads valleys, their location determined by numbers taken from internet address itself. The size of each hill or valley is based on how much data is sent or received. Plants are also grown for each protocol detected by the software; if you visit a website, an ‘HTTP plant’ is grown. If you share some files via eMule, a ‘Peer to Peer plant’ is grown, and so on.” A world based on your digital data is born.

Flight Patterns

Whatever else you do today, watch this video.  It’s simply one of the most mesmerizing visualizations you’ll ever see.  Digital artist Aaron Koblin used FAA flight tracking data of aircraft traveling across the United States to create this visually stunning interpretation of globalization.

 Universe

I’ve said in the past that I’m the (unofficial) president of the (unofficial) Jonathan Harris Fan Club, and here’s another reason why.  “Using the metaphor of an interactive night sky, Universe  presents an immersive environment for navigating the world’s contemporary mythology, as found online in global news and information from DayLife. Universe opens with a color-shifting aurora borealis, at the center of which is a moon, and through which thousands of stars slowly move. Each star has a specific counterpart in the physical world - a news story, a quote, an image, a person, a company, a team, a place - and moving the cursor across the star field causes different stars to connect, forming constellations. Any constellation can be selected, making it the center of the universe, and sending everything else into its orbit.”  Like all of Harris’ work, it’s beautifully rendered and brilliantly thought-provoking.

TwitterVision 3D

Sometimes it feels that Twitter has turned the world into an “endlessly chattering global family.” The micro-blogging site has nearly quadrupled its user base in the last nine months, registering over 900,000 members.  Where are all those Tweets coming from? The 3D version of TwitterVision gives you a pretty good idea: it visualizes random Twitter posts from around the world in all of their profound and mundane glory.  Created by Dave Troy, Twittervision is part of the new MoMA exhibit Design and the Elastic Mind.

3D Mailbox

OK, this one’s just for fun. 3D Mailbox has a seemingly impossible mission: Make email fun.  The program turns your email program into a simulation of LAX airport traffic. From the site: “Every email you send or receive is represented by a jumbo jet. New email comes to the arrivals terminal, or to custom hangars (mailboxes) that you define… departing mails leave via the departures terminal. Based on the origin or destination of your mail, each message is depicted by any of over 80 world airlines. Get a message from the UK, it comes by Virgin, British Airways. Send a message to Italy, it goes out on Alitalia or EuroFly. Emails with attachments are carried by the couriers: FedEx, UPS, DHL, and CargoLux.” While the program has gotten its share of mixed reviews (primarily from tech analysts who perhaps take email a bit too seriously), the video trailer alone is worth a look.  And yes, that’s “Spam Air” in the picture above.

 (MB note: The following is part of a new article I’m writing on maps of the future. As I develop the article I’ll post my research here, highlighting some of my favorite maps.)

On January 17th the following things happened:

Protesters gathered in groups and attempted to walk into the town centre; police fired live shots and tear gas canisters to disperse them.  Three protesters were seriously injured and one shot dead.

Police battled youths who set fire to roadblocks; the police shot indiscriminately, “targeting anyone on sight”; one man was shot in the stomach as he stood in front of his house.

A 13-year old boy was laid to rest next to his uncle´s house; the burial was attended by hundreds of residents who wailed and lit up bonfires.

Most likely, you didn’t hear or see these stories, except in perhaps an aggregate way: they all happened in Kenya, a result of the post-election violence which engulfed the country.  In situations such as these, the major media outlets give the world a “big picture” view of the crisis: violence, rioting, bloodshed, deaths. But the individual events, the microcosmic acts of violence, go largely unreported.  They aren’t, however, unseen.

In the days following the Kenyan crisis, a group of Kenyan bloggers from both inside and outside of the country got together and created a website to map the spread of violence.  The site, called Ushahidi, allows users to report incidents of violence (as well as peace efforts) via the web or SMS.  Incidents are verified and then uploaded to Ushahidi’s site and displayed on a geo-tagged map.   The site also features a tool that allows for a “timeline” view of events (see below). The value of the site isn’t in its archival capabilities; as Global Voice’s Ethan Zuckerman wrote in this post, the importance of Ushahidi is helping people visualize the spread of violence in real time.

Why is this important? With all of the famines, wars, floods and other crises in the world today, what good will visualizing the chaos in Kenya do?  Friend and fellow blogger Erik Hersman, one of the founders of Ushahidi, answers this question in the most eloquent way I’ve seen yet.  In this post he suggests that a digitally connected world not only grants us a front row seat to the rest of the world, but also the power to influence events and create change in a way that was impossible just a few short decades ago.  So that events that may occur thousands of miles away are in fact - quite literally - in our digital backyard.  Which makes it a lot harder to just sit back and watch.

Ushahidi is a potent example of the power of what I (and many others) call “collaborative cartography.” Rather than simply create user-generated maps of local wifi hotspots or cool coffee shops, however, maps like Ushahidi have the potential to effect change. As part of its annual conference, Netsquared is hosting a competition to identify the best mapping mashups geared toward accelerating social change. Ushahidi is in the running, as are others like the Rosetta Project. Voting is open to the public until the end of the day Friday; the top twenty will receive a share of $100k in prize money to further develop their sites.   You can support projects like Ushahidi by voting here.

 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!

The clever folks at Botanicalls finally have an answer to the question burning up the blogosphere: is there anything in the world that can’t Twitter?  The answer apparently, is a resounding no, at least in the social sphere of houseplants and the humans with too much on their hands who care for them. Yes, just when you thought it was safe to leave the house, your plant calls looking for a little love:  

According the website, “Botanicalls Twitter answers the question: What’s up with your plant? It offers a connection to your leafy pal via online Twitter status updates that reach you anywhere in the world. When your plant needs water, it will Twitter to let you know… When people phone the plants, the plants orient callers to their habits and characteristics.”  

Uh-huh.

Out of curiosity, I call the listed Botanicalls phone number and punch in a 3-digit code from the menu.  #005 connects me to the Scented Geranium, which says in a sexy-pay-per-minute kind of voice that it’s a native of South Africa and “touching me will release my fabulous scent.”

I hang up, feeling kinda dirty.

What kind of world do we live in that requires we devote emotional energy to houseplants?  A world filled with the slippery slope of spime.  It starts with an emotionally needy plant, or a Nabaztag rabbit that just needs a hug.  Next thing you know you’re trying to broker a peace accord between the broom and the floor mop.

Ah, the glorious (future) world of spime.

Twittering plants and emotionally fragile Nabaztags have been on my mind this week as I’ve been writing a scenario for my upcoming SXSW talk that explores the relationship between social technologies and metadata.  In a world characterized by info-glut, how will social technologies help us navigate, control and leverage the mountains of metadata that surround us?  How will they help us when spime starts to spam?

Designers, for better or worse, are on the frontline as the physical and digital worlds collide. Their burden is to design responsibly, to resist the urge to propagate the world with more Useless Stuff Embedded with Useless Data. How can this be achieved? Minus a full-blown design manifesto (for now), I offer instead The First Rule of Spime Design, which says: Spime Shall Be Socially Useful. To determine whether the blogject meets this criteria, consider the QVC test: if it has the potential (even the most distant or remote) to one day appear on a QVC television special - then don’t make it.  Put the glue gun down and walk away. This is the Purple Ketchup rule, which is another way of saying: just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Because once houseplants start to Twitter, soon they just might Pownce. 

The Foresight and Governance Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center just released a great video Eco-Tour of Second Life which showcases how various groups are using virtual worlds to tackle real world environmental issues.   The video is part of a larger project with the Environmental Protection Agency to explore how computer and video game technologies can be applied to environmental issues. Among the projects featured in the tour:

Eolus One, a virtual world “energy management system” that monitors and manages energy usage in real world buildings via a virtual operations center in Second Life.  is reducing energy consumption in real-world buildings;

SciLands (as in, “Science Lands”), an archipelego of islands for science and technology based organizations, including the UK’s Nanotech Island and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), whose main attraction is a 3D weather visualization map that depicts real world real time weather data.

Green Islands Project, which allows Second Life landowners to offset their virtual world energy consumption.  It’s an interesting project: landowners calculate the energy used by servers to run a “sim” (aka, virtual land areas) and Green Islands Project charges owners (in Linden dollars, the in-world currency) for an equivalent quantity of renewable energy credits (RECs) which it then purchases from the Bonneville Environmental Foundation.

Etopia, an eco village showcasing real world examples of sustainable development, renewable energy,  and organic living including a magnetic levitation train, a wind-solar power generation plant and an aquaculture treatment system.

Second Chance Trees is an island that allows residents to plant trees in Second Life that are then planted in real life.  Eight different endangered rainforest indigenous trees can be purchased for 150 Lindens each; this triggers the planting of an identical species of tree in an endangered region in the real world.

Sixty years after the sale of the first Polaroid instant camera – the iconic camera that captured the imagination of a market by producing finished prints in under a minute – the Polaroid Corporation announced that later this year it will cease making instant film products.  It’s the end of era, but one that most of us probably thought ended years ago.

Science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke once famously said that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”  While the Polaroid camera may seem hopelessly old-fashioned today, there was a time when it did indeed seem like magic.

I was reminded of this on a trip last August to Ipuli, a rural village in central Tanzania.  Ipuli is the definition of remote: it’s 15-hour car ride from Dar es Salaam; set in the hills of the central Rift Valley it has no electricity, running water or cars.  I was in Ipuli as part of a Pop!Tech team to document a health-center project and our four-person crew came equipped with the latest hi-tech gear: video cameras, sound booms, high-end digital cameras. 

What garnered the most attention though, was my boxy little Polaroid.  Everywhere I went people followed me, eager to have their picture taken. But they were uninterested in my fancy, expensive Cannon; what they wanted was a picture from what they called the “magic camera.” With it I was able to instantly hand out prints to people, many of  whom lacking household accoutrements like mirrors, had never seen themselves before.

After the first day I was almost out of instant film. I tried to explain to the disappointed villagers the vast superiority of my digital camera: with it, I could take hundreds of pictures, not dozens!  And I could print them out, as many as I liked! And then I could post them on Flickr, and geo-tag them and…. well, you can guess how that conversation ended.  At that point my translator gave me an exasperated look and simply shook his head.

My digital camera was the epitome of high tech sophisticaton, but my Polaroid was magic - it captured a moment, and then created another, more potent one: when someone looked at the white-framed piece of film and saw their face for the very first time.  All without USB cables, electrical plugs, printers or computers.   Magic.

Shai Agassi wants to make the world a better place, one electric car at a time.

As a World Economic Forum ‘Young Global Leader’ he was asked: “what could you do to make the world a better place by 2020?” His answer: take a country off of oil. To do so, he’s engineered a unique collaboration between the country of Israel, a major automaker and his company, Project Better Place. The government of Israel will supply tax incentives to consumers, Renault-Nissan will supply the electric cars and Agassi’s company will provide the batteries and the country-wide infrastructure to recharge the cars.   

It’s an interesting partnership, but the real innovation is the business model behind it.  Project Better Place is looking to change the way cars are paid for, taking a page from the playbook of mobile phone   companies, which operate cell phone towers and provide coverage to subscribers.  In a similar way Project Better Place plans to offer consumers a subscription-based ownership model for their cars, linking vehicle owners into the Electric Recharge Grid, a nationwide network of charging spots and battery-exchange systems that Agassi calls a “virtual oil field.”  Owners will pay a monthly fee for expected mileage, eliminating the uncertainty of fluctuating gas prices.  Combined with the government’s tax incentives, the goal is to make electric cars less expensive than gasoline-based cars, rolling out 100,000 of them by 2010. 

It’s a vision not only for the future of the car, but for a country.  According to Project Better Place’s website, if the rollout is successful it would position Israel as the first industrialized country to ‘end the stranglehold of oil on its economy’; Agassi describes it as “Israel’s Apollo Mission.”  He’s an evangelist to be sure, but he’s gaining converts. To spread the word about the possibilities of an oil-free transportation future, Project Better Future solicits ideas and support via registered users on its website.  Members offer suggestions about everything from design (”make the batteries open source”,” use solar film on the roof of the car”) to marketing.

At this recent talk at DLD, Agassi explained his motivation for starting Project Better Place was a finding a way to merge his two passions, climate change and peace in the Middle East.  As he sees it, if you could take Israel - a chaotic country - and create a replicable, oil-free model there, you’d have a shot at changing the world.  

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.