3tv

Recently had an encounter with people into trend aka future research and not surprisingly it was funny how general their predictions for the future were, they basically said that you cannot predict about the future, which is a fair, true and obvious statement – and then they went on to predict – huhm – had another encounter today reading the trendcentral (via Peter Svarre), where they spot out this trend:

We are finding that personal “cool” is being redefined by technology, and as a result, digital cool is spilling over into the real world. The union of technology and personal identification has created a new set of categories by which cool, or social status in different areas, can be defined. “Digital footprints,” including everything from ringtones, iTunes libraries and MySpace profiles to eBay ratings, World of Warcraft levels and YouTube views, are all contributing to a new digital social status. Who you are online is now having a significant impact on how you are perceived in the “real” world.

Well as it is often stated in this blog – despite the low amount of posts – if these people would take the time to read some of the new research done by a lot of scholars on the internet and more generally media usage, they would know that this is not a new trend, this has been going on for years – not just the intermingling of on- and off-line – but also ”digital footprints” through gaming accounts, blogs, personal homepage (1.0 style). Let me end this with a suggestion to everybody doing future/trendspotting things, read the research on the latest new mediatechnologies – it will make your job a lot easier!

I finally got a new phone, so I’ve started using Imity, an application that uses bluetooth to connect you with people that are near that you either know or do not know. And it works! Yesterday I was eating tapas at Atame with a friend of mine, suddenly the persons sitting next to us asks ”Søren Mørk?” and it turns out to be Christian Dalager and Trine Rahbek whom I’ve never met before. I’ve been reading Dalagers blog for some time and strangely enough I just added him as a contact on flickr yesterday morning, and then we end up at the same tapas bar that evening and because of imity, we ended up talking and having fun for a couple of hours together.
This is a wonderful example of a technology that mixes what goes on in your online life with your offline presence; it truly takes the social networking online offline. Most online activities have relations to offline things and the other way around, which is why we should not distinguish so much between on and offline.

yes that’s right - you are the person of the year 2006 - you as in blogger, moblogger, vlogger, social networker. Read the article here.

Good news for everyone doing research in social networking :

“Friend-what?” you might be asking, but it’s true: Red Herring is reporting that Friendster, the ill-fated social networking that (I think) started it all, has been granted a patent on social networks. Following a great tradition of painstakingly clear patent language, Friendster owns the patent for a “system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks”.

Whether Friendster will use the time-tested ‘if you can’t beat ‘em, take em to court’ strategy is yet to be seen, but to their credit: they apparently applied for the patent (issued June 27 of 2006) way back in the day, before they fell from their perch. (Via the social software blog)

Now that the patent is out we don’t have to spend time anymore defining what system, method, apparatus, user, online, relationships and social networks are - its all in the patent!

UPDATE: The complete program is now online, find it here

On October the 6th Aalborg University has a seminar on web2.0 I will be giving a talk with the above titel, and the abstract is here:

Are blogs the savior of modern democracy or are they the biggest attempt
till date to flatten our culture with superstitious narcissistic
babblings? Are moblogs and videoblogs the liberation of consumers in a
process of making them into content producers or are we witnessing an
overflow of reality TV addicts gone crazy in exposing themselves online?
Are social networking sites the rise of globalized friendships making the
world more coherent or are they just narrowing the scope of people to only
being interested in their closed circle of friends? Are users the new
designers in a strategic employment of user driven innovation or should we
rather talk about loser driven innovation? Are we witnessing the break
down of the public and private?
Are we asking the right questions to address the social software and
web2.0 movement? In this talk I will give an account of social software,
from both a personal and academic perspective. What kind of questions
should we ask? How do these technologies provoke our concepts in academia
and culture more generally?
Expect more questions, personal confessions, theoretical babblings and a
few answers.

Not surprisingly I do not think we are asking the right questions, the above questions only continue the AlphaGeek and AlphaGeist dichotomy. So how and what should we ask? I’ll try to come with suggestions in the weeks to come.

Michael Zimmer from New York University and Mikkel Holm Sørensen from Actics are speaking as well so should be really interesting

The latest version of State of the blogosphere is out now by Technorati (who tracks 50 million blogs). I must admit that it is the first time I look at this and what really caught my eye is the language blogposts are written in:

One statistical thing that looks a bit weird is the difference between some of the languages since the last surveys. English goes from 34% (April) to 41% (May) and the ends at 39 % in June. But nonetheless I am surprised by the amount of non-english post, is this indicative of blogs and social software/web2.0 being the technology that finally restructures some of the hegemony we all thought the internet would do in the 90’ties? Of course one would have to do some research into what is actually written, how is it incorporated into everyday life, business and so on. But the numbers are impressive.
Speaking of hegemony I stumbled upon this today http://www.functionfeminism.com/. It is a guide to theory and artworks related to cyberfeminism – check out the timeline -awesome! I’m though missing the net.art generator by Cornelia Sollfrank, but since it has its primary authorizing context within net.art it is probably judged to geeky - sorry for the hegemony ;-)

The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently published a survey of American bloggers, as is obvious from the quotes below there is not much that is surprising. What did catch my attention is the amount of bloggers amoung internet users: 8% and 39% read blogs, which probably means that the amount of people reading blogs that do not blog themselves are 31%. This is a quit impressive number, but then again, it is difficult to measure the impact of the blogsphere on civilsociety, democracy, the intellect of the public blah blah, from these numbers since most people are writing about their own life and alike. But one question remains though, what does this mean to the small circle of friends reading their friends blogs and writing themselves from their everyday life. This is probably where the biggest impact is.

Quotes:

Some 54% of bloggers say that they have never published their writing or media creations anywhere else; 44% say they have published elsewhere.
Eight percent of internet users, or about 12 million American adults, keep a blog. Thirty-nine percent of internet users, or about 57 million American adults, read blogs
……

The Pew Internet Project blogger survey finds that the American blogosphere is dominated by those who use their blogs as personal journals. Most bloggers do not think of what they do as journalism. Most bloggers say they cover a lot of different topics, but when asked to choose one main topic, 37% of bloggers cite “my life and experiences” as a primary topic of their blog. Politics and government ran a very distant second with 11% of bloggers citing those issues of public life as the main subject of their blog. Entertainment-related topics were the next most popular blog-type, with 7% of bloggers, followed by sports (6%), general news and current events (5%), business (5%), technology (4%), religion, spirituality or faith (2%), a specific hobby or a health problem or illness (each comprising 1% of bloggers). Other topics mentioned include opinions, volunteering, education, photography, causes and passions, and organizations.

………

The following demographic data comes from two surveys of internet users conducted in November-December 2005 and February-April 2006 (n=7,012).
The most distinguishing characteristic of bloggers is their youth. More than half (54%) of bloggers are under the age of 30. Like the internet population in general, however, bloggers are evenly divided between men and women, and more than half live in the suburbs. Another third live in urban areas and a scant 13% live in rural regions.

Another distinguishing characteristic is that bloggers are less likely to be white than the general internet population. Sixty percent of bloggers are white, 11% are African American, 19% are English-speaking Hispanic and 10% identify as some other race. By contrast, 74% of internet users are white, 9% are African American, 11% are English-speaking Hispanic and 6% identify as some other race.

Yesterday I was interviewed by Karen Toftegaard aka Miss Kato from Airplay. We talked about blogging, what is it, what does it do, and perhaps more specific what does it not do. The interview is to be used in a public performance at Airplay on the 20/22/23 of June. Look at airplay.nu for details.

don’t ever make a course, conference or public talk called something with web2.0

one more reason to use the better term: social software. Social software has a history, web2.0 is oblivion.

The program for this years Reboot is now finally available and it looks really interesting, in fact to interesting, so will have to make some difficult choices. But then again that is better than to little of interest. Must go to either: Matt Webb or Adam Arvidsson, Adam Arvidsson or Bill Liao, Tim Pritlove or TL Taylor (probably gonna choice TL since she is my supervisor and I would like to hear her give a talk to this 2.0 crowd), Nicolas Nova/ Julian Bleecker or Chris Heathcote. Choices all ready made: Steve Coast, Rebecca Blood, JJ Garrett, Bruno Giussani, Tom Armitage, JF Groff, Jeremy Keith, Doc Searls and Euan Semple – damn this is gonna be good…..