(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.

Earlier today, legendary science fiction writer and future visionary Sir Arthur C. Clarke passed away at the age of ninety in his home in Sri Lanka.  This Washington Post obituary fittingly refers to him as the “unofficial poet laureate of the space age.”

A few months ago he recorded what ultimately turned out to be his final message in this YouTube video “90^th Birthday Reflections” (see this post).  In it, he reflected on his diverse career as a writer, undersea explorer, space promoter and science popularizer.  Of these, he said he hoped to be remembered most as “a writer, one who entertained readers and hopefully stretched their imaginations as well.”

In a testament to the power of social media, a virtual memorial is quickly amassing on YouTube.  The crowd-sourced eulogies range from the personal and profound to the poetic and offer a wide angle view to Clarke’s enduring ability to inspire.

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.

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. 

What can social media tell us about the future?

That was focus of a workshop Sandra and I led recently as part of IIR’s Future Trends conference, the goal of which was to explore how the social media sphere can be used as resource for identifying, monitoring and analyzing future trends.  It was an afternoon-long session so there’s too much to cover in a blog post, but what follows are some of big themes.

The social media sphere has become the primary means for disseminating information and ideas throughout society.

The social media sphere can be divided into six categories: Wikis, Blogs, Content Ranking sites (Digg, Technorati, etc), Boomarking sites (Del.icio.us, Stumble Upon, etc), Visual media (Flickr, YouTube, etc) and Social Networking sites. All are seeing exponential growth:

In 1993 there were 130 web pages; today there are over 108 million.*  There are over 2.5 billion Google searches every month. According to Technorati, there are 120,000 blogs created every day; that’s about 1.4 per second.  Japanese is the world’s number one blogging language; English is number two, followed by Chinese.  The 10^th?  Farsi.

Facebook currently gets over 60 billion page views per month, making it the 6^th most trafficked site in the U.S. Flickr is home to 3.5 million photos - 82% of which are public. Wikipedia has more than 75,000 active contributors, working on some 9 million stories in more than 250 languages. And don’t even get me started on Twitter.

The Clickstream Culture & Making the Invisible Visible

As inherently social spaces (in which users share, collaborate, create, ideate and muse) social media sites act as idea transmission systems.  The clickstream of our online lives - our Google searches, Facebook walls, del.icio.us links and blogs - are digital archives of our thoughts, ideas, emotions, behaviors, actions and desires.  Collectively they create a collage of our lives, rendered visible to the world (John Battelle calls this the Database of Intentions). In a sense, we’re making the invisible visible.

And here’s the punch line:

 If We Can See It, We Can Map It

For the first time in history we are able to see - in a real, tangible way - the physical movement of ideas throughout society.  To use a familiar metaphor, we can think of the social media sphere as a complex urban environment where blogs act as villages, bookmarking sites become neighborhoods, ranking sites are cafes (or billboards), Wikipedia is a community garden, Facebook a dense city center.  The links and trackbacks and blogrolls which connect them become highways and roads on which ideas travel. 

Because we can “see” this landscape, we can map it. The electronic exhaust of our clickstream culture allows us to see how a thought, a meme, a sentiment move from blog to Digg to delicious and beyond.

The New Physics of Information Flow

By understanding the “physics” of information flow throughout various social media platforms, we can use them to identify and track future trends. Several transmission models have emerged in recent years to map information flow, including Social Network Analysis (SNA) (mapping of human relationships), Complexity theory (a “systems” view) and epidemiological models (a popular metaphor and model, using the modeling of disease epidemics to understand how ideas spread by identifying their source and mapping “infection” rates).

A final model draws from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point which attempts to explain how ‘social epidemics’ spread via three types of people: connectors, mavens and salesmen.  Categorizing social media platforms in the same way provides  an interesting lens through understand how - and why - ideas spread in the social media sphere:

Connectors : social networking sites & bookmarking sites, which connect large (and often diverse) numbers of people;

Mavens: blogs & wikis, which are knowledge hubs on topic areas;

Salesmen: content ranking sites & media sites, which “promote” an idea and provide a context for its popularity.

NEXT UP: Social Media and Foresight ….

*(that, BTW, is mind-blowing if you think about it. I’m rather unsurprised by the number of web pages today, but I admit that it’s almost incomprehensible to think that at one time there were ONLY 130 web pages in the world. Total. Wow.)

note: THANK YOU to our colleagues at Pinkegreen Design for designing the above Social Media Map; the online version will be available in a few weeks.

Just in case you didn’t know, South by Southwest Interactive just launched its interactive panel picker for SXSW 2008. The panel picker is a cool way for you to shape the programming for SXSW Interactive 08. There are over 600 panel proposals to peruse and you can vote for all of the panel proposals that you want to attend, pique your curiosity, or are proposed by folks you know. All you have to do to cast your vote is register for a *free* SXSW voting account.

Why all the info about registering and voting?

We submitted two different panel proposals:

Content 2.0: Social Media Evolved

Panelist: Sandra Burchsted, Michele Bowman, Jerry Paffendorf, and Jon Lebkowsky

Description:

Web 2.0 is transforming into Content 2.0. Learn about three social media projects that illustrate this rapidly evolving landscape; FringeHog Tags the World, an open source foresight project that’s building a visual database of trends; the Metaverse Road Map Project which explores multiple pathways to the 3D enhanced web and WorldChanging.com a network of communities that’s both virtual and physical.
Futurists’ Sandbox: Scenarios for Social Technologies in 2025

Panelist: Michele Bowman, Sandra Burchsted and Jamais Casio

Description:

What futures emerge when everything is “hyperlocal” and the boundaries between what is real and virtual disappear Take a futurists’ tour of emerging social technologies and tap into the collective genius of fellow SXSWer. In this *interactive* session, we’ll explore four scenarios about the future of social technologies in 2025.

If you find our panels interesting or if you just want to give us a five star shout out because we’re friends, we’d greatly appreciate your vote. Below you’ll find links to some of our friends who have submitted panel proposals to SXSW. Check out the 600+ proposals and take the time to give your online friends and your favorite bloggers a five star shout out. Remember, you can vote for as many as you’d like.

Thanks,

sandra

Panels proposed by our friends:

The Future is You

The Whole World is Watching

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Call me inherently optimistic (ormaybe just naive) but I have a thing againstlocks. I don’t lock my house, my car or even my luggagewhen I travel. And needlessto say, I don’t lock my internet connection. I’m one of those people who believe that internet access is a common good and that sharing my wifi connection is just a neighborly thing to do.

And I’m not alone. The city of Magala in Andalucia (Spain)is poised to become theworld’s first wifi city, thanks to FON Technology SL, a wifi start-up company that allows users to share their broadband access with their neighbors. ?

The idea is a simple one: FON’s La Fonera “social routers” let broadband users in homes and small businesses split their internet connection, creating a secure network as well as a public one. FON users, called “Foneras”can choose how much of their broadband capacity is dedicated to their own use and how much is available to the public. Anyone who uses the router to share access at home can use other La Fonera routers when they are away from home. Other people, called “aliens,” can pay $3 per day for access. (for a more detailed description of FON’s business model, check out Bruno Giussani’s Business Week article).

FON isn’t as much a technology as it is a social movement: the company describes itself as a community of people making WiFi universal and free.That community is heavily backed by investors such as Google and Skype, who in March poured an additional $13 million in funding into the company which will help FON realize its goal of one million hotspots by 2010.

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Who says we live in a loveless society?

In a day and age when the term “customer service” is at best an oxymoron the love fest continues at Digg, where users have rallied around founder Kevin Rose for his refusal to remove posts containing the worse-kept-secret code on the Internet.

“I support Kevin Rose and Digg” continues to be a top-rated story at Digg.com, the community news sharing site that has been the buzz of the blogosphere all week. For those just tuning into the story, here’s the cliff notes version to date:

In February a hacker named arnezami cracked the AACS, an encryption technology used to restrict access to and copying of HD-DVD and Blu-Ray disks. Arnezami posted the so-called “processing code” (09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0 - just in case anyone is interested) on an Internet bulletin board.

From there, the code started to spread around the web, to blogs and tech forums as well as mainstream media like Wired. Sniffing out lawsuits in the making, last month lawyers for the AACS-LA, a consortium that includes Disney, Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Sony and others, began sending out cease-and-desist letters, claiming web pages carrying the code violated intellectual property rights under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Interestingly, the campaign to remove the code from circulation went largely unchallenged: Wikipedia duly complied, removing entries containing the code and restricting users’ ability to recreate pages. Digg fell in line too; acting on the advice of its lawyers it removed submissions about the code from its database earlier this week.

And that’s when things started to get interesting.

Digg users revolted. The removals were seen by many as caving into corporate interests and an assault on their right of free speech. In response, they flooded Digg with stories about or including the code, swamping the site’s main page for most of Tuesday. By the end of the day, founder Kevin Rose had a change of heart, posting this message to users:

“… after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying.”

There area couple of interesting aspects of this story.

First, the obvious: the Digg maelstrom highlights the raging war on digital rights management (DRM). The story about the AACS being cracked wasn’t just reblogged; the code itself has been posted on every corner of cyberspace, making the blogosphere a giant collective accomplice and a 32-digit string of code a manifesto for the future of copyright and IP.

This is also a great example about the social life of ideas - that is, how ideas emerge and migrate throughout social spaces. Consider how fast the story spread: when the story broke on May 1, Technorati was listing slightly less than 300 blog posts where the code had been mentioned; the next day that number had jumped to over 800; today it’s above 1600. On Monday, April 30, Google search results for the code returned 1000 hits; by the end of the week it was over 1 million.?

The story was front-page news in the New York Times on Thursday and yesterday Alexa Internet reported that web traffic from the last week had propelled Digg into the world’s top 40 most-visited websites.?

Finally, in less than three days a DRM technology has transmogrified into an icon of social media expressed as music (viewed 181,000 times on youtube), fashion, a saleable “product” (up for bid on ebay).

But wildfires breakout in the blogosphere all the time. The question is: why was Digg the tipping point?

One reason is that Digg and other social media companies (youtube, del.icio.us, etc.) are built on “user-generated content” (UCG). In this business model customers are no longer at the end of the supply chain, they ARE the supply chain: they’re designers, producers and marketers all in one.?

By removing posts Digg managed to piss off both their customers and their suppliers at the same time.

It’s no surprise that Digg users feel they own the content - they do. The upside is companies like Digg inspire passionate users with a sense of brand loyalty that any Fortune 100 company could only dream of (anyone seen an “I (heart) Jeff Immelt” t-shirt lately?).

The open question is: what does this foretell about the emerging ethos of social media companies and their leaders? At the end of the day will Kevin Rose be seen as a sacrificial lamb or a soldier of Internet fortune??

Stay tuned: it looks like this mini-series is just getting started.

(note: I’m filing this under CONNECT in our Verge taxonomy … under the category “hazards of connecting in the information age.” Enjoy.)?

Normally I love Mondays. While other people approach the beginning of the week with dread and trepidation, I see Monday morning as an eternal fountain of self-renewal, full of promise and possibility. Monday is the opportunity to baptize oneself of the sins from work weeks past and to start anew.?

Not today, though. Today I wake with a massive email hangover. Over the last twenty four hoursI’ve been on an email binge the likes of which will surely require Google to add another herd to its server farm. It started innocently enough, a typically lazy afternoon on the couch. Figuring I’d use the pre-game show as a chance to catch up on some correspondence, I fire up the laptop. In less than an hour, I’ve sent a colleague a number of emails. Five, to be exact. Well, actually, six:

“Do you know Greg W., CEO of xxx?”

“Have you read “The Best of Technology Writing?”

“Do you have Claudia’s email?”

“Do you know the date of next year’s (insert name of random technology conference here)?”

“Do you remember us talking about a pollution-eating metal thing that goes on the outside of buildings? I remember seeing the picture; it’s sort of bronze and looks like a small sculpture or a metal “screen” that would attach to a fa?ade. Do you by chance have any idea what I’m talking aboutI can’t find the website and it’s driving me crazy….”

After the fifthmessage it occurs to me that sending several one-off questions as separate emails is an extremely inefficient use of bandwidth. And despite Chris Anderson’s assertion that we live in an economy of abundance where bits are as free as air, my guilt over the digital divide finally overwhelms me (how can I use so much bandwidth when others have so little??). I decide that going forward I will put all of my random questions to said colleague into a single comprehensive (perhaps numerically organized) message. And because I’m a compulsive list-maker, I create a draft email full of questions (which I intend to flesh out later) that reads something like this:

Why isn’t tif carbon neutral?

Lots of MAWGs…

Semapedia??

… and then I promptly hit “send”. Aaaarrrggghhhhh! Mortified, I stare at the screen in horror, realizing that seconds from now my colleague will read this last message and come to the rather obvious conclusion that a) my caffeine addiction has reached epic proportions and b) I’ve now started to cyber-stalk him. My emails, in addition to pouring in at a rate of one every twelve minutes, have now taken on a deranged, psychotic tone, surely the fragmented ramblings of a serial-something in the making.?

But here’s the thing. I wish I could say that this particular colleague was the sole victim of my email assault, but sadly that’s not the case. I sent 114 emails yesterday. On a SUNDAY.

Clearly I have no self-control. Clearly I have an attention span equivalent to that of a five year old. Clearly I’m using email in a desperate attempt fill some unmet emotional need. Clearly, I have issues.

It occurs to me that in my email rampage I have revealed certain carefully hidden personality traits, which is as disconcerting to me as the impending delivery of the restraining order that I’m sure is on its way. In short, my uninhibited use of cheap processing power and a DSL line is now threatening the very social relationships I sought to enrich. On the one hand, in the case of said colleague, I haven’t known him long, so he could likely escape any future contact with me with the help of a sophisticated spam filter and a few well-timed “Out of the Office - Forever” replies. On the other hand, he doesn’t know me well enough to understand that (despite all evidence to the contrary) beneath the veneer of a crazed email lunatic I both enjoy and am actually semi-proficient at alternative means of communication. Such as talking, for example.

As the haze of my email hangover begins to subside, I promise myself that I will change. In an effort to regain some measure of self-control (my self-esteem is way past saving at this point), I resolve to engage in an email blackout. A diet, if you will. I will hydrate. I will share the bits and bytes of the world with those who are less fortunate than me. Along with eggnog and macaroons, during this holiday season I will limit my consumption to seventy-five (ok, eighty) emails a day.?

Happy Holidays.