The Knowledge Web Live

I was typing this into Google Sidewiki on Google Chrome even as I was attending a live seminar. Here is what I had jotted down (content is edited for typos etc.) -

I am watching a live seminar on Web Science: An examination of the World Wide Web and how it is transforming our society – Arikia Millikan and Nate Silver - right now on Upstream. "Twitter was an upgraded version of Status Updates on AOL Messenger".I was earlier in a session where one of the participants had pointed out that from search engine optimization, we may be moving towards social graph optimization.

The live seminar which I am attending also allows me to use the Social Stream feature to discuss the talk with other virtual attendees using Twitter.

I think, in India, while there is a lot of buzz being created by Shashi Tharoor, we are still to wake up to what is happening - very few knowledge workers are waking up to how SN tools can be used for knowledge exchange in real time - in a seminar, for example.I say this on account of the relatively weak buzz around the new technology.

The other question, when you consider the nature of exchange here - live vs. recorded is whether Google will also come up with a similar product and link it to YouTube. Also, what happens to large organizations in the IT/web innovation space? Are we likely to see a surge in diffused innovation?

As an aside it's sad that Vodafone does not have an Indian Twitter number for texting tweets.

in reference to: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/scienceonline2010 (view on Google Sidewiki)

Revamped my blogs

I had started this as a private blog (viewable only to myself) and had decided to go public with the contents well after the things had changed completely - a new semiosis had set in - meaning was being constructed in entirely different ways - and had decided initially to retain the personal rather than start a new blog because it gave a perspective  in terms of old contexts - but the meanings having changed, memory came into play so that the old contexts were no longer  associable to any distinct memories to the extent that one is no more aware of what/who was being referred to or why. 

Remember that one allusion was to a particularly erudite and ill-behaved neighbor who liked to hold forth on everything under the sun and enjoyed beating me at chess and TT and the other, to his equally vociferous and erudite wife who enjoyed beating me at chess alone. But people move forth and what was once a particularly helpless situation of tolerance is now a correspondence of mutual learning. The old blog, therefore had to go, not the least because it was in the public sphere, but also because it's focus had changed from the inner to the outer - and this act of deletion was itself a part of the hermeneutics, a new construction of meaning.  

Thus old posts have disappeared and some have new headers and were edited 

Posted via email from Noumenon - The Wayfarer's Stack

The Internet as Discourse and the Scientist as Sociologist

This is indeed worth the read and provides not only a wonderful introduction to the semiotics of the web and the metaphors of everyday tech language, but provides a fascinating glimpse into how real innovators think - understanding a metaphor also allows us to unravel and question it and thereby understand how things can change.

Venkatesh Raju works at the Xerox Innovation Group where he leads "technology projects that aim to invent the future of documents and information work." He has worked as a post doc at Cornell's robotics lab on command and control systems for future battlefields. He (also) blogs, among other things on the Internet as a discourse and on the construction of meaning in interaction with the web - trained sociologists would be proud to write the way he does on discourse and metaphor. 

This man is a pleasure to read - a very erudite and thinking man, he writes with a fluid meta-style interweaving the technological, literary and philosophical sides of him in posts that are singularly attractive, structured (though he talks of how the hyperlink allows the construction of your own dissonant discourse) and forward looking. He is at home with the metaphysical poets (one cannot help noticing the analogy between his take on the hyperlink as facilitating dissonance in the reading experience and Donne's fantastic hyper-linking of the points of a compass or the latter's even more fantastic hyper-linking of  a mosquito to the nuptial bed - famed dissonance), with the theater of the absurd and with the cinema of Lynch. Here are a few gems to get you started on Raju:

"Click trails are texts whose coherence derives from your mind, but whose elements derive from multiple other minds"

"If there is no clickable hyperlink involved, you are just using the browser as a novel reading device."

Read his brilliant essay on "The Hyperlink as Metaphor" at his own blog and his take on how conceptual metaphors may inhibit Web Innovation at Mashable.com.

      

An Excellent Report on Consumer Trends for 2010

A retweet again, this report is as good as it comes and a must read for those interested in consumer research  - watch out for (f)luxury, social mingling and tracking and alerting. The former has a bearing on segmentation by personality traits which I had discussed in an earlier post. Social Mingling and Tracking and Alerting are sub-trends of what I like to call "connected selves" - a movement away from fragmentation as we understood it in the post-modern sense. On a more synthetic level, this merged stream of "fragmented" and yet "connected" selves is truly a unique social phenomenon of our times and both exist happily (with connectedness nurturing fragmentation but at a more global level) without a dialectic. Get the report here:

http://trendwatching.com/briefing/

Good night!

    

CES Aside:Kiki Sanford@TwitterLive

This lady has a spectacular career - A neuro-physiologist, she also has a black belt in Tae Kown Do and is now a well known science reporter and journalist. Dr Kerstin covered the CES with Leo Laporte. But  she kept mostly silent on Twitter's live coverage of the CES 2010.  Leo Laporte hardly let her talk and she was more or less playing second fiddle - which was a pity as she is a very successful show-person on her own right. Amazing what Leo says when she asks "Am I too quiet?" to which Lao says she's perfect. No wonder - she was not speaking

Read about her at  http://www.kirstensanford.com/

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Yusof's Posterous

"Focus"sing Ford: A Spectacular Branding Story

The new Ford global car is aptly called "Focus". In a year when GM and Chrysler went bankrupt, Ford was well on way to reconsolidating, shedding flab and building new "focus" on the consistent delivery of a global brand. Refocussing from many different local designs to a global design (with minor tweaks to suit local tastes), a plethora of advertising campaigns to a few major ones,  and from a dispersed hierarchical bureaucracy often at odds with each other to "One Brand...One Goal", Alan Mulally was planning strategic focus on a brand that is global and consistently so - communicating this externally to markets and internally to employees. This meant a change in work-systems and flows, product line width, engineering philosophy and a change in marketing philosophy. The Ford "Focus" is aptly named and for the first time, an American car hopes to take on Toyota in the small passenger car segment. This is likely to become the most spectacular case study in branding from the first quarter of this century.

Follow up this great story at:

http://bit.ly/7WbjM8 (The Guardian tech blog)

http://bit.ly/5vAwrU

Thanks and regards,

Yusof

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Consumer Electronics - 3 motifs for 2010

Three consumer electronics motifs for 2010: 

A) 3-D HDTV: More intense experiences in a more diffused world

 

With 3 films including Avatar having been launched with 3-D versions in 2009, this is likely to become the biggest video trend in 2010. Those of us who have seen Avatar in 3-D would find it difficult to think of Sci-Fi without 3-D, anymore we need more comfortable glasses than the ones I got at PVR, Ambience Mall, Gurgaon).Not only Sci-Fi but anything that needs conjuring up huge cosmic vistas, panoramic landscapes or nature detail (imagine National Geographic in 3D). 3-D TV is  one of featured attractions of the CES this year and YouTube has already launched its test versions. 

I provide the links here - thanks to mashable.com, - but you would need to see these on the YouTube site and not as embedded video - just hoping posterous does not embed these (use glasses - in case you did not have to return yours after Avatar - or select cross-eyed from the pull-down at the bottom right of the video screen): 

1. 3-D Watz of the flowers
2. 3-D Digital Vision Demo Reel (not too good)
3. 3-D Wide Angle Night Drive

Samsung, Sony, Panasonic and Toshiba are all displaying their 3D products (TV, blu-ray players) at CES 2010 along with smaller players like Vizio (TV). 3-D camcorders (from DXG) and PCs (from MSI) are at the concept stage. These two are unlikely to hit the shelves in 2010. Again, the blu-ray format is likely to take some time before it becomes the standard.  Look up the CNET coverage on 3D at CES:

http://tinyurl.com/yd7lvuv

The pessimism from some industry watchers on 3D centered around the inconvenience argument is likely not to be borne out as consumers look for a customizable TV viewing experience. The success factor is likely to be the possibility of having the ability to choose between convenience (without the glasses) and the experience (with the glasses) in the confines of consumers' homes. Also, 3-D glasses are likely to evolve with combined audio-video providing for a much more integrated and intense experience (shut-out). These are also on display at CES.

An important aside from the CES is that blu-ray seems to have won the day.

 B) Simplifying the Interface - The Power of Touch:

Not many Indians use the Kindle (appears to be a judgement on value for money and reflecting reading habits of the well-heeled - for a book-reader, it is expensive) and Amazon has not disclosed sales figures for the Kindle (not even on Wall Street - see http://bit.ly/62x7ZG).  Touch Screen tablets are likely to do much better because of the broader functionality and it is likely that the slate form - not really convenient for a computing device (you would still need a keyboard to write programs and syntax and it is not easy to type documents and long notes on a virtual keyboard) and more convenient as a reader, browsing and social networking device - would really do much better than netbooks have done on 2 counts, the touch factor and slate form factor. Ballmer showed two more slate PCs running on Windows 7, one of which was from Pegatron. This will obviously beat the HP on price, but brand? (Pegatron is the former manufacturing arm of Asus that is now branding itself). The Pegatron slate would be competing against the Eee PC netbooks in the ultra-portable category and the same is true with the HP slate vis-a-vis the HP mini-notebooks. The Pegatron slate is on the Intel atom unlike its smartbook which is on the ARM Cortex. This is likely to be a decisive victory for the Intel-atom over the ARM Cortex. 

The F5 from Motion Computing (on Windows 7) and the Dell Latitude XT2 convertible Tablet (both with the Intel Core2Duo) are probably the most appealing. The latter supports multi-touch with gesture recognition. Watch these videos:

The move to "touch" is pervasive. Samsung came in last year with the Corby touch at INR 7,800 and the market for touch-screen mobile phones is  growing worldwide. Look up this (back by a few months) review of offerings in the Indian market from dancewithshadows.com

http://bit.ly/8HB7vV

Carrying touch forward, Samsung has also announced its highest end LED-TV with a touch-screen remote. The power of touch is everywhere. The consumer is the Midas once more. 

 B) Always connected - On the Clouds

Businesses have realized the importance of harnessing the social media. There is push and pull involved here. While Twitter is covering the CES live, consumers are busy exchanging notes on many hundreds of thousands of products and services. Samsung's LED TV has a Facebook page of its own - and promises first release of updates to fans on Facebook. The power of social media technologies was on full display at CES when Twitter reported Leo Laporte (The Tech Guy) gave the short shrift to a senior executive from Trend Microsystems even as the latter's CEO, Eva Chen announced taking malaware detection from local stations to the cloud. Ford is upping the sync on its Sync System - free Wi-Fi connectivity via the cloud is what it hopes will differentiate it from Toyota and Honda as it enters the small car segment riding on a new focus of consistent global delivery of the Ford brand. Web 2.0 unleashes its full potential with cloud computing.    

There is also increasing evidence now that far from creating a global community of recluses, online connectivity is promoting social mingling in the physical space as well. What we have today are interconnected global "community-scapes" inhabited by consumers who are or would like to be "always on". More and more electronic gadgets and software applications on open-platforms will try to make this possible.    

This, then, is the third major trend for this year. It has already picked up a lot of steam and what we saw in 2009 was just a precursor of things to come. A major part of movement here, among Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, MySpace users, in 2010, is likely to be the movement towards integrated social networking with applications like posterous and ping.fm providing users the ability to integrate across different social networking platforms.    

 

 

       

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