We’ve just finished a interesting assignment covering Orange Business Services’ annual customer event Orange Business Live! as part of a team of internal and external bloggers from France, UK and Belgium. The idea of the coverage was to show that interesting things happen at shows like this by publicising it to the outside world in real time. Stories,photos and videos were published to the Orange Business Live! blog and to the Orange Business posterous page. I wrote a round up of some of the stories that the bloggers wrote in this post and the social media presence was so successful that the new Orange Business Services CEO Vivek Badrinath came and checked us out himself.

It’s the London Marathon this weekend, which will see over 30,000 people run or struggle through the heat for 26.2 miles. Good luck to them all. One part where technology will help them is in the timing systems which rely on RFID. Virgin, which sponsors the London Marathon has just got a new timing ship supplier, and all marathon runners will be wearing one of these on their trainers.

So when the runners go through the start a timing pad will pick up the fact that they have passed that point and will record their times. There will be pads positioned throughout the course that will give the runners their split times – i.e. how fast they have gone through each checkpoint – and at the finish. As well as offering vital information to the runner in their post race analysis, the chips also allow organisers to eliminate cheating as anyone who doesn’t have a chip spilt time has not gone over the pad and may have taken a short cut. Of course for runners whose chip breaks or gets lost, it is rather unfortunate as they will probably be disqualified and won’t get an official time.

All this info from the chips can also be used for real-time information as well. I ran the Paris Marathon two weeks ago and my split times were sent automatically by SMS to my supporters’ mobile phones, so that they could keep track of where I was during the race – and when I finished.

Sometimes we get the opportunity to stand back from our most pressing work commitments, and gaze across the technology landscape at the changing Internet. We are frequently told that social media is a work in progress, and is still its infant phase. So let us ponder where it may go in the coming years. What follows is idle future pondering, scenarios almost. Please do not take the following as a forecast.

Twitter will not last without a radical reinvention

The increasing openness between networks – LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter – will increase. Status updates on one will be seamlessly available to all, and also embedded in Microsoft Office applications, in collaboration tools, with SMS and so on. Status will be your thoughts, your retweets and @’s and also your car’s GPS location, and your appliances’ status (you’re washing machine will let you know when the cycle is complete). In fact the ability to display status updates will be as common a function as voice: completely commoditised.

Imagine a future Facebook interface which selects your real friends, the people you have interacted with on Twitter (or the like), or that have used common hashtags. Powerful algorithms will serve up only the status and conversations you are likely to find interesting. So what value in having an army of followers that is not listening to you? Will those that are currently trying to greedily acquire social capital now find their efforts were in vain?

I believe the effect of this evolution in social media interfaces (not the networks behind them) will help to cut down a lot of the noise.  In terms of which social media applications will dominate, the winning environment will be the one with the best usability and the best distribution because being a walled garden isn’t going to last.

Junk content will get worse before it gets better

Ever wonder what happens when you pay “writers” $1 for a 1000 word? It ends up as a How-To article on websites funded by Google Adsense revenues.  Many (not all) of these sites operate without any accountability whatsoever. What’s wrong with this? People are paid a pittance to plagiarise, cut corners or simply write with fake authority about subjects they know absolutely nothing about. Hundreds of millions of pages of junk content is clogging up Google. While bedroom publishers can build an economic model based on Adsense, don’t expect any self restraint.

This is not to say that How-To sites are the only ones manipulating or exploiting dubious online content to gain Adsense revenue. There are many technology sites doing this also, grabbing articles about popular brands and scurrilously twisting the meaning into something sensational. The best of the Adsense-funded sites are enthusiasts with not enough time to check facts; the worst simply don’t care at all about veracity. Their only interest is traffic because now they have a direct correlation between views and cents.

Eventually we will stop reading and the noise will quieten down

Looking further ahead – 10 years for instance – and the verbal diarrhoea generated by UGC and copy factories will be on the wane. As more and more of the content we will view becomes video, audio and spoken-word menus, our reliance on scanning stories for what we want to know will dissipate. Natural language-based search (sometimes called the semantic web) will make it easier for us to go direct to the information we want. Intelligent agents will learn our habits and interests and will interoperate with these search tools to ensure that each search is really, really targeted. And the widespread deployment of touchscreen interfaces – in work PCs, the living room TV, in-car computer and the home control panel – will gradually break our century-old connection to the keyboard. Intelligent speech, search, profiling and interfaces could combine to end the rule of the Word on the Internet

So which of these scenarios could come true? What other futures for media/social media can you envision?

Ever wondered how Google search has joined up all bits of your life that you previously needed a secretary, PA and office assistant to accomplish? Well check out this 1 min ad – featuring the awesome band The National. Watch, learn the lyrics, buy gig tickets and plan your journey within a minute. In truth, think I need at least a whole album to plan that much, a lot of procrastinating along the way….

Google says “Every search is a quest. Every quest is a story. These videos show that anyone can do anything when paired with the power of search.” They’ve showcased some other amusing ads here. Not sure about Kerouac’s On The Road powered by search. It would kind of undermine it wouldn’t it?

My apprehensions about the #Likeminds social media event was that it would be a love-in among insincere folk selling sincerity services. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Nearly all of the people I met over the course of two days in Exeter were genuine, enthusiastic and passionate about social media.

And I learned a lot from the sessions – about Chris Brogan’s jealous Followers that need regular loving, to Olivier Blanchard’s discovery of disconnected organisations that are listening to social media but unable to channel listening into doing; and debates about the future of journalism, paywalls, bloggers and brand advocates.

And the networking and discourse (a true Socratic symopsium?) at an event like this was far more informative and vibrant than any of the hundreds of technology conferences I have attended in my working life.

But the lasting thoughts that I left with is that of noise and the inability to filter it out. Every moment of the Likeminds event was caught on iphone camera, on Kodak Zi8 and of course the ubiquitous Twitter tap tap tapping. A multiverse of content was generated on this most sociable of days. Ok, as a consumer of this data (rather than producer) I can dip in an out.

But how much juicy content am I missing? Fear of this, and a desperate desire to taste everything, as it happens, means that I am monitoring social media streams 24/7.

It has to stop. The noise has to be filtered out somehow.

The future of publishing, of blogging, of social media, will depend on some way to filter.

I’m thinking about how I can do this with my own work – Futurity produces up to 1000 articles are year, with ideas inspired from a vast array of sources. I need to organise and filter this, and in doing so, capture underlying trends.

When I trained in Futurology (a dumb term, I know), we learned how to think slowly, see real changes behind the vapid. But it’s getting harder to do this since the advent of the social media. So how can we learn to filter?

Your thoughts please?

#stewartbaines

Normally, we like to post finished articles, but in this instance, I’m going to post my request-for-information.

I’m writing article for the good people at Silicon.com on the pains and barriers of deploying social media in the enterprise. I have a number of issues that I am struggling to deal with. So, in collaborative writing kind of way, have you got any answers?

Either leave a comment at the bottom of the post, or send me a tweet (#stewartbaines) or email (stewartbaines at futuritymedia dot com)

1. Can enterprises truly engage in social media then they are “anti-social” organisations (argues Benjamin Ellis). Is this true? Is the profit motive inconsistent with sharing (which is intangible)?
2. Should enterprise social media stay under the radar (with small projects) until you have an ROI and then roll-out extensively?
3. How do you identify social media champions in an organisation, how do you motivate them (without financial rewards)
4. How do you get those with the most knowledge to share their knowledge when they are increasingly working to time sheets with minimum no. of billable hours? Surely those with “knowledge capital” are disinclined to convert this into “social capital”
5. If you can’t demonstrate ROI, will participating in social media ever be written into a job description
6. What happens to social networks in the enterprise, when you remove the champions (e.g. they move jobs) – do the networks collapse? (I’ve seen some evidence to suggest this does happen with immature networks.)
7. How do you measure the value of enterprise social media in terms of marketing/PR terms, particulalry in B2B space? My point is that traditional B2B marketing was all about segmentation based on job title, location etc. Social media is so scattergun, and your audience typically doesn’t fit the segmented target audience (i.e you can hire an agency like Futurity to be your social media mouthpiece but what are you getting back for that, in terms of increased sales, or raised profile in your target audience.

Your thoughts, comments, corrections or criticism very welcomed.

UPDATE: I am going to be at Like Minds social media conference in Exeter on Friday 26 February. If you, or a client, is going to be there and has something interesting to say, I’m happy to meet up.

#stewartbaines

My Futurity colleague Steve Costello points our that for some public sector CIOs the need for power (i.e. being a big spender) is more important than looking after the public purse. Here’s a post he wrote….

An interesting paradox was reported in the UK IT press recently, when one of the UK government’s Chief Information Officers revealed that if he cut his IT spending by too great a sum, he would be excluded from an informal “club” of top purchasers which has a significant influence on informing cross-departmental policies and procedures.

This will probably come back to bite me….

I love my iPhone, it’s indispensible. I run with it (tracking my distance and speed), i’ve used it when i’ve been lost in the mountains, i’ve checked train times, used maps, watched TV episodes when I’m on the treadmill in the gym, search recipes in the supermarket, found recommended cocktails when wandering around the West End, and listen to audio books on the Tube. I’ve even used it to have multi-way, international Skype conferences while I’m stuck in a service station on the M1. It’s properly integrated with out MS Exchange, so i have pretty seamless communications.

For me, its the personal and portable nature of the iPhone which has become indispensable – and i think augmented reality apps (when mature) will entrench the addiction even further.

So what of the iPad? Its seems to me predominately a device for using at home – although yes it would make a great accompanyment to a long haul flight if the 10 hour battery life for video playback is a genuine.

So what would I use the iPad? Which of the dozens of location and office productivity tools that i have on my iPhone will be useful on a tablet that spends most of its time in the living room?

I’m sure that the enduringly innovative app developer community will prove me wrong, and before you know it there will be a plethora of compelling and addictive iPad apps – but it seems to me that the most likely use of the iPad in my home will be the web and possibly TV series. I already purchase TV through the iPhone and connect to my giant plasma screen using an AV out cable so that’s not nessarily a new feature. The iPad doesn’t have HDMI either. Or USB. And its 4:3, so not great for most of today’s video content.

And so to the Web – the Web that requires so many plugins and updates that allow you to view the broad spectrum of file formats. Like Flash – the iPad does not offer in-browser Flash. Kind of dumb in my humble opinion.

Apple in its rather closed, limited environment, would rather that you were a viewer or consumer of the Web rather than a contributor to it, they would rather you purchase your leisure time through iTunes than finding you pleasure spread throughout the four corners on obscure site. I cannot believe that the iPad will offer me a sufficiently flexible and rewarding experience as my £500 laptop, with which i can download all manner of content and plugins. My cheapo Dell Vostro is light enough, with a long enough battery life, to support most of the living room browsing I need. A Windows tablet would probably do the trick if i really wanted a tablet. Or maybe the new Chrome OS ultra-mobile PCs.

So for me, the iPad is just a little bit too much. Just like the Touch, and the Apple TV. A profitable niche perhaps, but unless you are a Mac lover (I’m not), the tablet in my living room will need to be a lot more open than an iPad.

There are some more objections here: http://technologizer.com/2010/01/27/my-first-25-questions-about-apples-ipad/ and this wonderful sanitary towel courtesy of failblog.

@stewartbaines

After years of gnashing teeth about the brain drain of innovators out of the UK, it appears that the tide may be turning. A recent article in Reuters claims that international technology entrepreneurs are in fact choosing the UK, with London and Cambridge proving particularly popular. It quotes someone from the OECD saying that the “UK is now well placed in Europe on a number of indexes measuring factors like taxes, red tape, the dynamics of internal markets and how they are connected on the world stage, and the ability to access a qualified workforce.” The article also points to a review by the Legatum Institute, that places the UK 2nd in the world in “Entrepreneurship and Innovation”. Good news indeed, particularly with our esteemed bankers all threatening to take their expense accounts to Geneva.

In the mainstream media, there is still far too much rubbish, lies and misinformation about technology. Too many pundits who fail to question what they are being told.

There was a classic example on Radio 4’s Today Programme  - a discussion on why 3G service in the UK is so disappointing and patchy. While Peter Cochrane, one time CTO of BT, did make the occassional relevant point, such as why O2 has a poor network***, he also blamed poor 3G network coverage on clustering. Apparently kids sit around coffee shops, simultaneously watching the same video on their individual mobiles. This, apparently, is the reason for our collectively poor service experience. I’ll leave you to make your own conclusions about that. Check out the interview here at 7:13 on Friday 15 Jan: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/listen_again/default.stm

But it got me thinking about all the recieved wisdom about technology, all the rubbish masquerading as fact.

One of those is country league tables for broadband speeds. It may be interesting to know where the UK is – 26th apparently – but does this mean that we are really way down the list of broadband competitiveness, or indeed if broadband competitiveness has any baring on the digital economy? Does the relative position of where we a country is in the league table mean that somehow that its internet users are less evolved, that with 5mbps they do not operate on the same level of conciousness of citizens graced by 50mbps? Or does it mean that those with higher speed, more reliable connections simply are recipients of even more mass media channelled downwards through these fat pipes.

I love my fast broadband, I genuinely like the experience of BT Vision’s IPTV, and I regularly use BBC iPlayer and download games to my PS3, I use Spotify and spend huge sums on TV and music on iTunes. But will i be disappointed if in two or three years this isn’t a 50mbps or 1gbps connection?

My current 16mbps pipe is a conduit to mass media. Of course, that’s not so say that my internet experience is limited to this – quite the contrary, much of my working life is spent researching online, and I buy online in preference to visiting stores – but this does not need require a constant race for increased broadband access speeds. The impact of high speeds means that much of my Internet experience is now a sit-back rather than sit-forward experience. I watch, listen and play much more now than read and browse. Any rich media I want, it’s on demand. And i can’t help thinking its a little addictive, and that i’m spending less time discovering and learning. So tell me now – what does broadband competiveness means to the digital economy? It means more supine people, able to consume media in more ways, more often. Hardly enlightened! So why do writers, consultants and politicians continue to bang on about the need for broadband competitiveness without thinking about what it means?

Footnote:

***O2’s lower GSM spectrum band – 900Mhz – means it had quite large cell sizes originally. The high spectrum of 3G – 2100Mhz – needs smaller cells sizes, and therefore more of them. O2 is still in the process of trying to acquire additional cell sites rather than using just the GSM sites it already has, a process known as infill. This may have been fine if it wasnt for the boom in mobile apps and content created by the iPhone, which has taken O2 by surprise. The shear volume of data traffic generated by apps and content has highlighted another weak point – backhaul. Even when there is sufficient wireless capacity, many cell sites do not have sufficient capacity to bring the traffic back to the core network. That’s why as an iPhone user you are offered free access to BT Openzones – its cheaper for O2 in the short term to pay BT to backhual its apps and content over WiFi. More backhaul is being provisioning but at the moment, it can’t keep pace with demand.