IdeaFestival

Life, Liberty and Data

In order to realize its potential, the web will have to be a place where organizational data is free - as in as transparent as possible - and personal data is portable and under the control of the individual. Swivel argues for the former, and just as syndication and email have standards, there is a movement afoot in various forums to develop standards to return control of personal data to individuals. Yihong Ding at Internet Evolution explains one effort to realize that goal and how he believes it could impact search and the way the web is organized. The comments are also worth a read.

Wayne

Wozniak podcast available

The very latest podcast - this one featuring Steve Wozniak speaking on innovation - is up. See this page to get the audio via iTunes or RSS.

Wayne

How social is social?

How social is social? Saying in his slide deck that he's "sick of inviting his friends," Brad Fitzpatrick is thinking about what constitutes the "social graph." Living somewhere between existing social applications like Facebook and a fully realized semantic web, Yihong Ding, who points to a Tim Berners-Lee post on the subject, elaborates on the idea here:

The emergence of social graphs goes beyond simply cloning the friendships we develop in the real world and placing them in a virtual world. By contrast, the value of this emergence signals the beginning of a great transformation of information management systems on the Web.

Other outcomes of this transformation, should Google succeed in making social networking more open, might be a robust vendor management system under the control of the consumer or client. It's just another way in which the web might - hey, I'm not as sanguine about this as I used to be - turn relationships upside down.

Wayne

Participatory science: can you spare a few clock cycles?

[Cross posted from KySat blog] Would you like to participate directly in a distributed science project?

SETI@home is looking for a few good volunteers. By downloading and running some software from SETI your spare computing capacity - be it your home desktop or road-warrior notebook - can be used to help analyze information coming from the world's largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. Currently 170,000 people and 320,000 computers are helping to crunch the data.

More on the request can be found in this news release.

Perhaps you'd rather help design proteins to fight disease. Check out other projects to which you and your computer might contribute.

Wayne

Virtual worlds are real worlds

Virtual worlds have been the object of study for a while. There are legal and governance issues worthy of debate. The MacArthur Foundation sees digital media and learning is a separate and important education. Businesses communicators and marketers are finding new business frontiers.

What's different now, Edward Castronova says, is that the social sciences are now beginning to look at virtual worlds as real worlds, and not simply as an interesting subject with real world implications.

Lancet and Epidemiology [have published research] on the Corrupted Blood plague in World of Warcraft. A trickle of virtual world social science papers is appearing. It appears we are now entering the next phase, in which hard-nosed, quantitative, social and behavioral scientists will address the likely impact of virtual worlds across all society. A community is forming, and the first conference of this nascent community will meet at Emory University on February 11, 2008.

The subject of the conference is the evolution of virtual worlds and their broad impact on society. Research fields include economics, business, political science, anthropology, sociology, psychology, public health, and more. Developers of virtual world-making software will be on hand to discuss and demonstrate the possibilities for building pocket virtual worlds for research.

That's why Castronova would have you attend "Virtual Worlds and New Realities in Commerce, Politics, and Society" on February 11.

Wayne

Winning the design "peace"

Having won the war to convince business of the value of design, will designers now be able to win the peace? 

This brief post at Intangible Economy reminded me strongly of a recent trend in the information technology industry. Because information technology has simply become business technology, surveys show that organizations looking for technologists to fill senior company positions now strongly prefer those individuals with an understanding of business that is at least as strong as their understanding of technology. I suspect the same transformation may be occurring in the design profession. Great illustrators and industrial designers, for example, need to know - and clearly enunciate - how their work supports the overall enterprise.

The source for the Intangible Economy post is a Bruce Nussbaum column in BusinessWeek, The Crisis of Success in Design/Innovation.

Wayne

How valuable is the Web?

At Internet Evolution, Stowe Boyd asks: "what's the Web worth?"

Wayne

Freeing the health data

The World Health Organization (WHO) has published an editorial on "why health numbers matter." As someone who admires the efforts of Swivel and other similar organizations to free the data, I was happy to see this:

Google, Wikipedia and other information resources have changed the world in many ways, but their users generally search via words, not numbers. Now, those who think about and work with numbers are helping the world’s numeracy catch up with its literacy....

Numerical literacy? I love the idea of "numeracy."

Why is this important? Global health threats make the world seem ever smaller. Viruses and other illnesses ignore borders and leapfrog from continent to continent, exploiting new connections between nations, goods and people. Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and multidrug-resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) show how local outbreaks can have global impacts within days. Yet the tools to combat these illnesses do not travel nearly as efficiently as their pathogens....

Think of a medical study that is backed by experimental data and statistical analysis. This study gets published in an academic journal, and its findings are picked up by the mainstream media. The coverage helps shape political debate, policy, funding and public opinion. It is important that all of this information – both the mass-media sound bites and the original experimental data and raw numbers – is widely available. While no one will dispute the importance of publicity, access to the original data is equally critical so that research, interpretation and experimentation will continue.

It's often been said that the Internet improves information access. And with interpretive skill information can lead to knowledge. But without access to whatever numerical data is being bandied about, the full potential of the Web will go unrealized.

Good on Swivel.

Wayne

Flat world a work in progress

Ethan Zuckerman, who will be speaking at the 2007 IdeaFestival with Global Voices partner Georgia Popplewell, has gone fishing until the end of the month.

Get some rest, Ethan. While he's out for a few day, why don't you check out his recent post about Global Voices in Zimbabwe? It makes an important point:

for parts of the rest of the world, the Internet is NOT Flat.

Wayne

Conference blogging 101

In what must be the first ever comparison between the two, Ethan Zuckerman likens conference blogging to scoring a baseball game. A certain amount of attention and willingness to be in the moment is required.

Having watched Ethan live-blog IF last October - and looking forward to seeing him at the ideaFestival again in September, where he is slated to speak - I'd have to agree with others who have watched him at work: his power to blog on the spot is mighty impressive. I've wondered in the past how he did it.

Now I know.

His list of tips and tricks reads like conference blogging 101 and will be pinned inside my pack along with my Macbook and blogging supplies. If you've got your own ideas for what makes a successful conference blogging experience, why don't you leave him a comment? The comment thread below his post is interesting as well.

Wayne