Bookoven. Hip-hop. After social networks, what next? In digital media, as in fortune-telling, the future is pretty much treated as part of the present.
"What is the next big thing? " is a question everyone who works with the internet asks continually. But after several years of boom, the question of what comes after social platforms is no longer so remote. Luckily, some experts just gave us answers. On Monday evening, the Said Business School in Oxford had invited some very bright and successful entrepreneurs who spoke in front of a packed alumni audience as Silicon Valley came to Oxford for the ninth year. The first expert to confront us with an answer was Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and made early investments in Facebook and LinkedIn.
"If you look back from today, it becomes clear that in 2002 even experts missed that Google had already become the main search engine. He asked the audience: "Where in the history of social network are we? Being the CEO of Twitter, Biz Stone was quite sure that for him that wasn't the case. The New Journalist in the Age of Social Media. I’m at Day 2 of a remarkable two-day conference that is bringing nonprofits, citizen journalism and social media together in ways I’ve never seen before.
I’m jazzed, hopeful and intrigued by the challenges ahead. The passion in the room is palpable. The 40 people who convened at the Visioning Summit yesterday in San Francisco, and the 30 participants who are steering the program today, consist of some of the most talented and forward-thinking innovators — nonprofit execs, strategists, journalists — that I’ve come across in recent years.
Above is the presentation I gave at this gathering, organized by a group of nonprofits in a project called the New Media Lab (there’s no public presence yet, just a private wiki) . • entrepreneur • conversation facilitator • social marketer • futurist • metrics & research nerd • journalist/storyteller. Virtual ivy: why the US needs more e-colleges. Children born since the dawn of the Internet Age probably wouldn't think twice about learning online.
They might just as soon read a Shakespeare sonnet on Twitter as hear it live from a teacher in a classroom. Skip to next paragraph Subscribe Today to the Monitor Click Here for your FREE 30 DAYS ofThe Christian Science MonitorWeekly Digital Edition And yet the educational establishment still debates whether e-learning (aka "virtual schooling" or "distance education") can be as good as traditional in-person teaching in a campus setting.
Now the results of a recent federal study should help "log out" of that tired debate. That's quite a seal of approval. The big advantage in digital learning is the "time on task," or flexibility for a student to absorb the content of a subject. The most effective learning occurs when a school combines e-learning with classroom teaching. The US needs more competitive workers with advanced degrees, a goal set by President Obama. Civic-Minded Teen Video Gamers. Babbling about Twitter & Microblogging. Danah boyd points to a study of Twitter usage by PearAnalytics, that concludes: 40.55% of the tweets they coded are pointless babble; 37.55% are conversational; 8.7% have “pass along value”; 5.85% are self-promotional; 3.75% are spam; and ::gasp:: only 3.6% are news.”
As danah boyd suggests in her first sentence, studies like this are irritating. Every time someone complains about Twitter, or microblogging, blogging, or the web or anything else being overrun with “useless” information, I always have the same reaction: you could say the same thing about talking, but no one ever questions whether talking is useful or not. These are means of communication, used by humans to communicate, each with their own idiosyncrasies, but all driven by the same impulses that have always driven humans to communicate: the urge to connect, to find, to babble, to sell, to buy, to share, to romance, to complain, etc etc etc…
Eat the Young! There was a fair amount of chatter among my friends last week as a result of Lawrence Martin’s column If there’s an inspiration deficit in our politics, blame it on the young.
My friend Alison Loat wrote an excellent, albeit polite, response, pointing out that blame could be spread across sectors and generations. She’s right. There is lots of blame to go around. Backbone Magazine - Top 20 Web 2.0: PICK 20 - 2009. NOTE: The print edition of this article will be available in the July/August issue of Backbone magazine - to be released on newsstands and in the Globe and Mail on July 28, 2009. 20 companies that are driving innovation and changing the way we use the InternetBy Peter Wolchak Welcome to the second annual PICK 20 roundup of Canada’s leading Web 2.0 pioneers.
Created by Backbone and KPMG, the PICK 20 is the only national ranking of its kind. The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version)