Today the world welcomes its newest democracy.

Sixty years ago the remote Himalayan country of Bhutan was, by thoughtful intention, stuck in the Middle Ages.  The small Buddhist kingdom saw its first wheeled vehicles and the end of feudal serfdom in the 1950s. Today - a few relatively short decades later - thousands of electronic voting machines will record the results of Bhutan’s first ever general election, and with it, the birth certificate of a new democracy.

Trapped between India and China, Bhutan is a small country (about the size of Switzerland) with a population of around 700,000. The nation has a reputation for being protectively insular; it’s never been colonized and a century of royal rule has stressed the preservation of tradition and culture: a national policy of Etiquette and Manners includes a compulsory dress code (knee-length robes for men and ankle-length “kira” dresses for women) in public places; television and the Internet were only cautiously introduced in 1999. Bhutan is perhaps best known to the outside world for its policy of Gross National Happiness (GNH), which advocates that cultural traditions and the environment not be sacrificed in the pursuit of economic development.

Yet despite its self-imposed isolation, the country - at the specific and determined behest of its kings - has followed a careful, thought out plan to join the modern world.  In 1998 Bhutan’s fourth king, Druk Gyalpo  (”Dragon King”) Jigme Singye Wangchuck announced his plans to transition the country from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy, voluntarily reducing the scope of his powers and ruling with the advice of his government.  In 2005 he declared that the country’s first national democratic election would be held in 2008, saying in part, “The sovereignty, stability and well-being of a country must be placed above everything else.  The country is more important than the king.” It was a move of remarkable foresight for a king who ascended the throne at the age of 17, and earned him a spot on Time Magazine’s list of “100 People Who Will Shape the World” in 2006.

In the West we talk a lot about the rapidity of change, often referring to the explosive adoption rates of mobile devices, or our ever-shrinking electronics, or the how fast Facebook is growing. Yet these data points pale in comparison to the type of change that Bhutan is embarking on.  In preparation for the social and political transformation ahead, Bhutan’s Election Commission spent two years canvassing the entire country with a massive civics lesson, educating villagers about their role and responsibility as citizens of a soon-to-be-democratic country.

In 2006 King Wanchuck abdicated the throne to his son, 28-year old King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wanchuck, who will oversee Bhutan’s first steps as a democracy.  Today, Bhutan’s citizens are voting for their first-ever National Assembly. The new leaders - nearly all of whom are in their 20s and 30s - will write the next chapter of Bhutan’s unique history.  How this remote country handles the growing pains of democratic ideals is yet to be seen; like any democracy, conflict is to be expected, perhaps even courted.  Will Gross National Happiness survive? How will Bhutan’s citizens - and their new leaders - negotiate the social and political changes of this next period of modernization?  How will Bhutan respond to being led by many voices, rather than one?

It’s not often that a democracy is born in relative peace; in Bhutan’s case the credit can be laid at the feet of far-sighted leaders and a community that values spiritual harmony above economic gain. Bhutan has undergone remarkable changes in the last 50 years; one can only wonder what the next fifty will bring.

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.

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.

If you think a new web app comes out nearly every day, you’d be partly right - it’s actually closer to about five per day. Google has popularized the practice of crowd-sourcing product development by releasing “beta” versions of unfinished products into the world for its customers to play with.  I admit to being a bit of a beta geek; the lure of being the first kid on the block to know about the coolest new web toy is irresistible to a futurist who loves to see around the corner to the future.  There are thousands of betas in the marketplace, which made finding a handful of them to feature for this week’s Friday Five more than a little difficult.  That said, here are five products in beta that we think are worth keeping an eye on.

Grand Central

Grand Central seeks to solve an increasing problem in the mobile age - converging multiple points of contact into one. The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.”  The service provides a single number tied not to a phone or location, but to you.  According to the website, with GrandCentral “you can be reached with a single number, answer a call at any phone you want, seamlessly switch phones in the middle of a call, as well as check messages by phone, email or online.”

(Thomas Friedman’s talk at Pop!Tech, subtitled in Kiswahili)

dotSUB

dotSUB is quietly staging a revolution on the web. Its mission:  to make online video content accessible to the millions of non-English speakers by offering open-source translation services. The idea is deceptively simple: think YouTube meets Wikipedia: users can upload videos, films (even TV programs) for either the rest of the world or dotSUB’s team to translate. Translation services are either “closed” (utilizing dotSUB’s team of freelancers) or “open” (posting a video on the site and letting volunteers translate it for free, wiki-style).  For a great example of the service in action, check out Pop!Tech speaker talks (called Pop!Casts) which are translated via dotSUB into nine languages.   

MetaNotes

MetaNotes is “social graph paper” on which users can paste stickynotes containing text, images, videos, and widgets, creating scrapbooks to track and remember any topic.  It won the top “Experimental” website at the 2008 SXSW Interactive Awards last week, the category which tracks “cutting-edge and trend-setting destinations that are pushing the envelope and challenging our perceptions of the web.” While it still has a ways to go (i.e., it really needs private spaces for users to post notes); MetaNotes’ intuitive interface is familiar and user-friendly. And: it plays well with others, integrating with sites like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Pownce, and Photobucket.

Google’s Experimental Search

Courtesy of the brainiacs at Google Labs comes the Experimental Search project which offers new visualizations of search results including a timeline, map, or in context of other information types. With these views, G-Tech (the ambiguous but patent-pending-sounding term for “Google Technology”) extracts key dates, locations, measurements, and more from select search results so you can view results in multiple dimensions. Timeline and map views work best for searches related to people, companies, events and places. Info view shows all the data found for each result, to help you select the best choice.

Museum of Modern Betas (MoMB)

Aptly named, the Museum of Modern Betas is the go-to place to check out and track web apps that are in beta.  In fact, we think it should be called the Motherload of Modern Betas - since it opened in two years ago its listed over 4000 sites that are in beta, helpfully organizing them into categories such as Top 100, Most Anticipated, Recently Added and by Language.  The large number of sites it tracks makes getting in-depth information about each one difficult, but active links are provided.  The MoMB is a like a giant playground for the future of the web, perfect for those who don’t want to wait for the new ‘new thing’ to arrive.

P.S. - Last but not least, here’s a bonus track: keep Wello Horld on your watch list; it’s still in alpha and very hush-hush, but I want to go on record as being (one of) the first to say “I told you so!” when it launches.  

P.S.S. - If you’re wondering why I didn’t include PMOG as a beta to watch, stay tuned.  It’s so cool it deserves it’s own blog post.

 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!

If you could have one superhuman power, what would it be? 

Admit it: we’ve all harbored some fantasy about what it would be like if we could fly or walk through walls or move objects just by looking at them. The wildly popular tv show Heroes taps into our inner superhuman desires, telling the stories of ordinary people who discover that they have superhuman abilities (including a cop who can read minds and a cheerleader who can heal herself). How closely does fantasy mimic reality?  Turns out pretty closely, in some cases.  The heroes on the show gained their powers via a genetic mutation, but several superhuman abilities are within reach, mainly thanks to some well-funded military research. This week’s Friday Five explores future superpowers we can look forward to, and what they might mean for society.

Bionic Eyes

This Discover article reports that engineers at the University of Washington are developing contact lenses that contain electronic circuits that would allow wearers to see information superimposed over their view of the world in front of them (such as driving control panels and immersive virtual games) and “surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.”  Someday, the lenses might also offer tele/microscopic vision, the ability to see infrared frequencies, or the ability to take pictures and videos.

Super Strength

From the Incredible Hulk to Superman, the ability to pick up large objects (such as cars and meteoroids) seems to be the most common attribute of superheroes.  So it’s no surprise the military is investing heavily in giving its soldiers super human strength.  Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is first in line, developing an exoskeleton - a frame that fits over the body designed to help soldiers move faster and farther, carrying heavier loads and weaponry.  The key?  The robotic frame contains miniature internal combustion engines moving each powered joint.  This New Scientist article provides an update on the research, which is expected out sometime this year.

New Limbs

This much-watch video from IEEE Spectrum showcases Dean Kamen’s “Luke Arm”, a robotic arm named after Luke Skywalker’s mechanical hand in Star Wars.  It’s amazing footage of a emerging vison of next-generation limb prostheses that are fully functional, neurologically controlled, and have normal sensory capabilities.  More than that, it’s also incredibly inspiring: the soldiers featured testing the arm (some of whom are double amputees) talk about the feelings of liberation and independence the arm is giving them.

Mind Reading

Perhaps the most potent (and the most controversial) of future superpowers is the ability to read minds.  Psychics claim that this is an inherent ability, but science is taking another approach: last year researchers used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future.  While the ability to truly read minds is likely still decades away, the brain scan technology is also driving developments in human-computer interfaces such as mind-controlled computers that would allow people to operate email and the internet using thought alone.  Check out this Guardian article for more.

Super Humans

Joel Garreau’s best-selling book Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What It Means to Be Human discusses the implications of human enhancement.  In the future, how will “Natural” and “Enhanced” children compete in school?  In life? I’ve argued that we’re on the verge of a socially fracturing debate about what it means to be human; Garreau explores how this debate will affect us at every level. It’s a great read, one that will change what you thought you knew about the future.

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.

Note: Our usual end of the week gig, the FringeHog Friday Five is back after a brief interruption. My new year’s resolution to travel less worked fabulously until exactly the first week of February, at which point back-to-back road trips derailed the semi-normalcy I was just becoming accustomed to.  But we should be back on schedule.  Almost.

FringeHog Friday Five: Future Bestsellers

I like to think of FringeHog as a mental whiteboard; a space to play with ideas that may not be ready for prime time and a way to indulge my inner writer.  And apparently I’m not the only one: a growing share of bloggers are using their blogs as drafting boards for their upcoming books.  Why blog your book?  Lots of reasons: to mark your intellectual territory; to translate mindshare into market share when the book hits the stores; or in Jeff Howe’s case, to prove your point.

Watching these future atoms start out as neo-bytes is a voyeuristic dream. It’s another example of making the invisible visible: we’re offered a glimpse (although sometimes not a pretty one) into the writer’s thought process.  So if you’re the type of person who shows up to the movies early just to watch the trailers, then this post is for you, because this week’s Friday Five looks at future books-in-the-making.  Will any of these be The Next Big Idea?  You decide.  (Thanks to Bruno G. for the suggestions)

Chris Anderson: FREE (Due out: mid-2008)

In this follow up to The Long Tail, Chris Anderson (editor of Wired) takes a look the many ways to make money by giving things away for free.  The book is aptly titled FREE (subtitles under consideration include: FREE: How companies get rich by charging nothing). Blog posts tagged with the title include a rich assortment of “free” experiments including: music , books and even cars.  Anderson even gets in on the gig himself, with some not-too-shabby free publicity, compliments of this month’s cover story in Wired. 

Charles Leadbeater: We-Think (Due out: March 2008 in the UK)

Charles Leadbeater’s thesis is that “new forms of mass, creative collaboration announce the arrival of a society in which participation will be the key organising idea rather than consumption and work.” Leadbeater puts the theory to the test in his new book, We-Think: The Power of Mass Creativity, which charts the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation from science and open source software, to computer games and political campaigning. With the support of his publisher, Leadbeater is releasing the book in its entirety online (prior to formal publication) so that “people can comment upon the text, add to it, disagree with it.” Each chapter is profiled, and next to it a running list of comments by readers. 

Kevin Kelly:  The Technium  (Due Out: ??)

Kevin Kelly describes the Technium as “a word I’ve reluctantly coined to designate the greater sphere of technology - one that goes beyond hardware to include culture, law, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types.” Since November 2004 he’s been blogging about the Technium; his posts are thought-provoking and far-reaching, from Humans are the sex organs of technology to the inevitability of lifelogging, to the four stages in the Internet of things. All explore Kelly’s view of the Technium as an extended face of technology, as a whole system with its own dynamics. It will be interesting to see how he ties these together into a book but in the meantime, watching it unfold from Kelly’s mind reminds me of the television series Lost; the plot is complex and overlapping, often paradoxical and filled with unforgettable narrative.

Jeff Howe: Crowdsourcing (Due out: July 2008)

If veteran writer Charles Leadbeater is the Pro, then first-time author Jeff Howe is the Amateur.  Which makes it all the more interesting to see how the two authors approach the same topic.  What Leadbeater refers to as “We Think”, Howe more descriptively calls “Crowdsourcing.” His book, Crowdsourcing:  Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, is an extension of his June 2006 article in Wired in which he described the rise of mass collaboration as an economic tipping point.  In a nod to the editorial wisdom of crowds, selections of Howe’s book are (also) being released online for review and he promises to publish the “most salient, witty or astute remarks” as an appendix in the final chapter. The first chapter to be released can be found here.

Mobile Novelists: It ws bst f tms, it ws wrst f tms…

In Japan, writing a novel on a blog has become positively passé.   Just in case you missed the story, Japan’s biggest book distributor Tohan recently reported that of the 10 best-selling novels in 2007, five were originally “mobile novels” (”keitai shosetsu” in Japanese) - stories written for downloading on cell phones before being (re)published in book form.  Mobile novels (typically short stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging) have seen explosive growth: in 2003 sales of mobile novels were worth 1.8 billion yen; in 2006 the figure was 9.4 billion. Experts say the growth is due to a change in business models; when Japan’s mobile phone providers starting offering unlimited data for flat monthly rates, sales skyrocketed.  Download sites like Maho no-i-rando have hundreds of thousands of novels listed; increasingly many of those are finding their way into book form, putting the next bestseller, um, under your thumb.

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.