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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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