www.nickhodge.com

The above is a shrunken screen-shot from my ASUS EEE PC. (aka PrinceEd­mund) Yes, this is 1024×768 good­ness pro­jec­ted extern­ally from the VGA connector.

There is a future in these devices.

Before you get all con­cerned about the word ‘decim­a­tion’, read the ety­mo­logy.

OK, now we see we are get­ting 10 groups of 100 people thinking (thanks for cor­rect­ing my spelling, Uncle Mike) deeply about top­ics import­ant to the future of Aus­tralia in a radio-sound-byte year (why not 2022. Nah, 2020 just sounds better)

On the inter­net side of this week­end in Can­berra I’d like vote up six inde­pend­ent, smart thought lead­ers in the future of tech­no­logy space. Cameron Reilly, Stilgher­rian, Mark Pesce, Peter Black ‚Laurel Pap­worth, Duncan Riley

Think­ing ahead of the game.

Scoble is leav­ing PodTech. Doing some­thing else from mid-January 2008.

In his post he talked about live streaming/twittering and the con­ver­sa­tion that res­ults from imme­di­ate con­nectiv­ity to an audience.

From Scoble’s post:

Another thing that opened my eyes? The Google Open Social press con­fer­ence where I had the only video, thanks to Kyte.tv and my cell phone (they had asked for me to leave my pro­fes­sional cam­era in the car — funny that’s a story I’ve heard sev­eral times, includ­ing on the panel dis­cus­sion yes­ter­day where Jeff Pul­ver showed off video he shot on a small pocket cam­era of the recent Led Zep­plin con­cert. He told the audi­ence that Led Zep­plin wants to buy his pho­tos and videos because they were bet­ter than the pro­fes­sional ones).

Blogs, Video-Blogs, Pod­casts emu­late the old media. Push out. Wait for com­ments (aka let­ters to the editor). The imme­di­acy is miss­ing. There is too much latency between thought to feedback

Immers­ive Con­ver­sa­tions.

Live-streaming/Live-twittering/Live-full immersion-SecondLife/Live un-meetings of the ilk as dis­cussed on EEL recently is the next step. The tech­no­logy is here per­mit­ting low-cost, high-bandwidth imme­di­ate two-way sessions.

In con­ver­sa­tions with Cameron Reilly, this is exactly where his mind has been for some months.

The move is on.

At the Hill and Know­lton “Sur­viv­ing and thriv­ing in the next dec­ade — Tech­no­logy Pub­lish­ing” Break­fast Bytes this morn­ing, a group of emin­ent pan­el­ists in pic­ture above, from the left:

• James Tuck­er­man – Pub­lish­ing Editor, Ant­Hill. New rel­at­ively magazine about ideas, money and skills. Pre­vi­ously more print than online, but adding new online pro­jects later in 2007.
• Heather Craven — Dir­ector of Mar­ket­ing & Com­mu­nic­a­tions, Cir­cu­la­tions Audit Board,
  Aus­tralian Cir­cu­la­tion Bur­eau. Sub-committee research­ing digital.
• Brian Haverty – Edit­or­ial Dir­ector, CNET Net­works Aus­tralia : Read­ers first, video and text style publishing.
• Tony Sarno – Editor, APC. Adding new online APC pro­jects later in 2007.
• Peter Roberts – Man­aging Editor, BRW. Part of the Fair­fax group, around since 1857. Noted that http://www.afr.com/ relaunched this week, and closed con­tent model AFR Access continues.
• Andrew Kirk, Hill and Know­lton: Chair

The theme from the morning’s panel and Q&A is that “there will be a mix­ture of online and print” and that “online and print” read­ers are treated as dif­fer­ent read­ers by the big-names. My per­spect­ive as a cor­por­ate online/citizen journ­al­ist is slightly different.

Like the quint­es­sen­tial invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ists: Wood­ward and Bern­stein learnt: fol­low the money. In the above list­ing of pan­el­ists, notice where their stated invest­ment is going. It’s online.

From a tra­di­tional publisher’s per­spect­ive, the busi­ness is about employ­ing journ­al­ists to gather hid­den facts, con­nect, ana­lyse and write stor­ies. People buy the paper (atoms) to read the stor­ies and maybe their eye­balls will stray onto an advert­ise­ment. The mar­ket­ing groups of com­pan­ies buy these pos­i­tions on the paper in the hope that the right eye­balls are enthralled by the product and/or ser­vice — and buy the product. The core of a publisher’s job is man­aging the com­pel­ling con­tent such that a spe­cific audi­ence is cre­ated that advert­isers value.

The web is no dif­fer­ent, except that any­one can be a pub­lisher, and out­source the rev­enue side (advert­ising) to Microsoft or Google. Large pub­lish­ers, such as Fair­fax, are unhappy that their expens­ive infra­struc­ture is sub­ver­ted online: Peter Roberts men­tioned twice that Google made $200 mil­lion in Aus­tralia without invest­ing in the content-side.

Peter Roberts also com­men­ted on one of his com­pet­it­ors, Alan Kohler’s Eureka Report, hav­ing only an online mech­an­ism but suc­cess­ful busi­ness model. My per­spect­ive is that Alan’s busi­ness is suc­cess­ful as he is seen as a respec­ted and inde­pend­ent entity within Australia’s fin­an­cial com­munity. Alan Kohler is a trus­ted brand.

The Gad­get Guy, Peter Blasina’s ques­tion near the end sum­mar­ised the morn­ing for me: What does the future really look like? Each of the rep­res­en­ted panelist’s organ­isa­tions (maybe with the excep­tion of cnet) have their busi­ness strategies weighted toward print, and the brand-value that print brings.

Peter Blas­ina comes at this with cred­ib­il­ity as a true multi-channel brand and per­son­al­ity: print, online and TV — and sur­mised that the com­ing gen­er­a­tion will change the face of the print publisher’s world. And they know it.

The future for pub­lish­ers is where the eye­balls are. And eye­balls are not going to be in print, it is going to be online. Eye­balls stay longer where this is trus­ted value, and most import­antly where there is a com­munity. Read­ing a magazine is an almost high-latency feed­back medium; where two-way inter­ac­tion is slow if attemp­ted at all.

Demo­graph­ics of the eye­balls are chan­ging to more online: younger read­ers being digit­ally nat­ive and older gen­er­a­tions hav­ing more time to explore online; with more females than males desir­ing a com­munity and inter­ac­tion rather than pass­ive accept­ance; high band­width con­nec­tion to per­mit TV, Radio and Print being equal online mediums.

Whilst I have no research to back this up, I am going to state it here. A com­mon refrain from print pub­lish­ers is that “Radio did not replace news­pa­pers, and TV did not replace radio” as their back­wards look­ing per­spect­ive on why online will not replace these old media. My argu­ment is that the inter­net can replace the media styles: with web pages, pod­casts and vid­casts. As Rupert Mur­doch is quoted as say­ing: “Big media no longer con­trols the conversation” 

James Tuck­er­man knows his read­ers, and I think has a plan to cre­ate value in Anthill’s com­munity. He under­stands the emo­tional con­nec­tion that he has with his read­er­ship. James also stated there are “pop­u­la­tion lumps” at birth-years of 1949, 1974 and 1985. Accord­ing to the ABS, there is another pop­u­la­tion lump in the 2005–7 range too. My sug­ges­tion is to watch Ant­hill as a pub­lisher. They are start­ing a con­ver­sa­tion with their community.

A Ques­tion about Second­Life, the cur­rent “craze” in Aus­tralia poten­tially due to a visit in meat­space by a Linden Labs per­sona, res­ul­ted in Tony Sarno say­ing that “many PBL man­age­ment have vis­ited Second­Life”. I fear it is because of the gambling dens rather than the com­munity aspect. About 20% of the audi­ence of largely PR and tech­no­logy industry attendees had logged into Second­Life, of which most had logged in once.

So, in industry par­lance, what is the tip-on for online? It’s the com­munity. Com­munity is the new Brand.

From Microsoft’s Cam­bridge Labs.

So Google pur­chased You­Tube. US$1.65B in shares, paper-work money or an entry in an SEC filing.

In cold-hard num­bers: You­Tube has a repor­ted 100 mil­lion view­ers per day; based on the pur­chase price, each view equates to US$0.0452 over a year. Or, another way to look at it: as long as Google “earns” US5c for each pair of eye­balls for a few minutes, within a year it is fin­an­cially ahead.

Con­sid­er­ing the cur­rent cost of both text-advertising and TV advert­ising; and the oncom­ing onslaught from com­pet­it­ors such as Microsoft and Yahoo!, US5c per view seems rather attractive.

Oppor­tun­ity cost of not own­ing You­Tube: a com­pet­itor would have pur­chased it, first. Fox had already pur­chased the young Myspace eye­balls; and Microsoft is ser­i­ous about the online world and has all those XBoxen, Vis­tas, Zunes to cap­ture other eye­balls. You­Tube was obvi­ously on the block for sale, and each viewer is val­ued at US$0.0452. US$1.65B is not too much com­pared to a com­pet­itor get­ting the brand. You­Tube maybe the “text break­out” and single product weak­ness that dogged Google in recent months. (Robert Scoble has a per­spect­ive on this, too)

Look­ing into my crys­tal tube: Google’s Video Future: It is all about about the advert­ising. Poten­tial changes to Google Adsense:

• Text links inside an ad (trans­par­ent text on bot­tom); through to top+tail video or sound bytes
• Throw more smart maths at tech­no­logy to recog­nise the con­tent inside video and then attach appro­pri­ate a like advertisement
• The ori­ginal pub­lisher of you­tubes (another verb com­ing on, here?) self-categorises, so advert­ise­ments could sim­il­arly be targeted.
• For you­tubes pos­ted on blogs or other non-Google web sites; under­stand­ing the con­text would per­mit smarter tar­geted Adsense ads

Instead of crawl­ing the inter­net, Google is becom­ing the inter­net. This is rather a scar­ily thought that crossed my mind when read­ing this Wired art­icle (The Inform­a­tion Factor­ies) on their new data cen­ter in Wash­ing­ton state, US. Ulti­mately, it may have been cheaper to buy You­Tube than cre­ate a backing-store to hold indexed video and sound.

So next: watch Apple and Google. Not sale or pur­chase, just closer ties. Apple needs the con­tent, Google needs the hard­ware. Microsoft is the com­mon competitor.

Hav­ing recently used Google Spread­sheets , and the bet­ter fea­tured Edit­Grid : I thought it best to give Google’s Writely a spin.
As a sid­e­note, I am con­tinu­ally impressed with Edit­Grid. The external Web data tool per­mits auto­mated for­eign exchange rate and stock mar­ket updat­ing. Every minute or so, there is a flash­ing in your spread­sheet as the data; includ­ing Aus­tralian Stocks, are updated. Excel­lent for man­aging a port­fo­lio online.
Back to Writely: this post is writ­ten in Writely: nor­mally I use Mars as my blog editor; and this whole “do it in the cloud” is all pretty new to me.
The data from each of these applic­a­tions: Edit­Grid, Writely, Google Spread­sheets: all live in their own clouds, and inter­chan­ging data is copy and paste from win­dow to win­dow. I also have to restart Fire­fox every couple of days as the memory use grows to 1.5Gb. And no, I have dis­abled all Fire­fox 2.0 exten­sions.
My wish is that data lived in the cloud, too. Applic­a­tions could push/pull data in a stand­ard way from the cloud. We are head­ing in that dir­ec­tion. Flickr is the almost the uni­ver­sal static image storer; You­tube the video stor­age “place”. Will an online virutal-file man­ager that ref­er­ences all these formats, no mat­ter the source, be the next ultra-cool Web 2.0 applic­a­tion?
It looks like Google is start­ing to grok: integ­ra­tion is key.

The HTML from Writely is bad. Lots of br’s; cer­tainly not XHTML compliant.

Inter­est­ing read about the future of Web Applic­a­tions; and spe­cific­ally their arche­types, by Matt Webb.

From applic­a­tion design, to applic­a­tion size, loc­a­tion and other bits.

Some months ago, Bump­Top appeared from Anand Agarawala. “Phys­ical Desktop Inter­face” using phys­ics to rep­lic­ate and show what will be pos­sible in the future.

Today, Sony has this cool video demon­stra­tion of the future of the desktop expand­ing from the laptop screen to the desktop.

With the emer­gence of devices such as holo­graphic pro­ject­ors, the abil­ity to show light out­side a device without heavy and bat­tery drain­ing optics will drive the user-interface bey­ond the flat screens we have today.

TechZone recently pub­lished an art­icle look­ing at games tech­no­logy, and its applic­a­tion to the desktop.

My opin­ion is that we have yet to see the next “meta­phor”; the power and the base abil­it­ies are there in the oper­at­ing sys­tems; but the applic­a­tion is lan­guish­ing behind what is possible.

Here comes the future.

In 1988 Mitchell Waite sent me a small paper­back to read: Ver­nor Vinge’s True Names. I was a mere, lowly Hyper­talk pro­gram­mer from Adelaide, South Aus­tralia. He was an import­ant person.

This book has stuck in the neur­ons, and now the vir­tual is becom­ing real. It really goes to show how hard sci­ence fic­tion depicts a future that cur­rent liv­ing humans will not see. Based on some work I was doing to Tricks of the Hyper­talk Mas­ters, cre­at­ing what would be now known as a “skin” over Com­puServe; the book was just sci­ence fiction.

True Names pub­lished in 1981, describes a world called “Other Plane” were people inter­act online. The premise of sep­ar­at­ing your online from your phys­ical inden­tity; and the concept of a future Sin­gu­lar­ity per­vade my per­sonal world-view today.

Thanks Mitch.

Now, what does this have to do with today?

Second Life. It’s more than the tech­no­logy; it is also about the plat­forms involved. It is also how it impacts real people: such as Dave Wal­lace. Second Life is what I visu­al­ised as “Other Plane”

Watch the first half of this video: Jim-Cory-SecondLife.wmv, Lang.NET Sym­posium.

The first half of the video is light on tech­no­logy; but heavy on the eco­nom­ics, and wider-world impacts of the vir­tual world. The user cre­ation rate (Write­ness in the Read/Write equa­tion) is over 60%; com­pared to the web which is less than 10%.

A key reason seems to be the eco­nomic value attached to vir­tual objects scrip­ted in Second Life. As items in the Second­Life vir­tual world are intel­lec­tual prop­erty; an item can be cre­ated, sold and purchased.

Ensur­ing that intel­lec­tual prop­erty is val­ued is going to be one of the toughest chal­lenges for upcom­ing generations.

Is the script­ing in Second Life the new HyperCard?