Bruno Giussani is a writer, the European Director of the TED Conferences, the producer of the Forum des 100, and a frequent public speaker. He has authored several books. Most recently, his articles have appeared in Business Week, The Economist, IHT, WSJE, Foreign Policy, NZZ, Ilsole24ore Nòva24, Infoweek and others, and he is a frequent commentator on Swiss Public Radio's Grand8. He is a member of the Boards of Internet consultancy Tinext and of the Knight Fellowship at Stanford University, where he was a Fellow in 2004. He lives in Switzerland.
Running notes from the Picnic07 conference in Amsterdam.
The winner of the 2007 Picnic Green Challenge is Qurrent, the Dutch-based company developing and enabling Local Energy Networks. The jury choice has just been announced by Sir Richard Branson, the jury's chairman. In the picture, Igor Kluin -- Qurrent's founder -- with the 500'000 euros check, surrounded by (from the left)Bas Verhart (Picnic), Marieke van Schaik (Postcode Lottery), Richard Branson (Virgin Group) and Liesbeth van Tongeren (Greenpeace):
The five finalists presented their projects yesterday evening during an event that I hosted (read Susan's post for details on each of them, on the competition process and on the jury), at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam.
Today, before opening the envelope and revealing the name of the winner, Branson told the 600-people audience about his own green epiphany. "Five years ago, I read Bjorn Lomborg's "Skeptical Environmentalist", and for the founder of an airline it was somehow comforting, saying that climate change is a natural phenomenon. So for a couple of years I ignored climate change. Then I had a discussion with Al Gore, following which I met with many scientists and experts, some of which like James Lovelock think that we are already gone beyond the point of no return. Others are more optimistic, saying that as long as we move quickly we can save mankind."
That's what led Branson, last year at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York, to commit all the profits from Virgin's "dirty" businesses (airlines and trains) for the next 10 years would to investment in clean energy. "Over the last 12 months we have worked on the fuels of the future, and we will test a promising one next year in one of our 747, but we have also lobbied other airlines". Among the things Virgin suggested, is the idea that all airplanes be towed from the gate to the runway rather than turn on their engines at the gate and then remain, engines running, for minutes (or hours) waiting for a take-off slot. He said that if this was applied to all airplanes, "8 ou 9 % of the carbon produced by airlines could be avoided". If that's true, one wonders why this is not already implemented.
The event closed with a session of questions and answers between Branson and the journalists and audience, which I moderated, where Branson shared his experiences as an entrepreneur.
Congratulations to Igor Kluin and Qurrent, and to the four other finalists!
Picnic07 closed yesterday evening with drinks and television shows
and folks running around in green swimming caps snapping photos of each
other, The attendees streamed into the Public Lighting room -- floor
covered with woodchips, checked tablecloths -- for the pre-final stage
in a process dedicated to finding concrete solutions to fight climate
change: the Picnic Green Challenge (see also thesepreviousposts).
The PGC is the result of a collaboration between the Picnic conference an the Dutch Postcode Lottery.
Picnic contributed its networks, its platform and its catalytic role,
and the Lottery brought its expertise and the funding of the serious prize money: 500'000 euros.
Bruno Giussani was up on stage hosting the whole evening, so he
turned the LoIP blog over to me. And be warned: this will be a long
post. The evening opened with a video starring Amsterdam major Job Cohen
suggesting his own response to climate change. It's short, and you
really want to watch it. As Bruno said after it, "I don't know what you
guys in Amsterdam really think of your major, but if you can clone him,
I want one for my town":
Marieke van Schaik, head of the charity department at the
Postcode Lottery, explained that the Challenge was inspired by a speech
given by Bill Clinton Bill Clinton in Amsterdam last December, when he said that the solutions to the climate crisis will come from the new economy fueled by new ideas, not from the old economy fueled by oil.
She also explained this very unique construct that is the Postcode
Lottery: half of every lottery ticket sold goes to charity, and a big
part of the lottery's appeal is that the winner "shares" the prize with
everyone else who bought a ticket in the same postal code. Nice cycle.
The Picnic Green Challenge was launched in June with a deadline of
the end of August. 439 applications were received, from 50 countries.
Bruno, who was a member of the preliminary jury, has already blogged
some considerations after they read all the entries and shortlisted the
five finalists. In particular, he said that if we took the PGC entries
as a sample of current trends in "green" thinking, this would be the
shortlist:
carbon compensation/offset schemes
systems for coordinating carpooling (via cell phones, the web, or both)
systems for monitoring household energy and water consumption/increasing consumption awareness
solar lighting and solar panels in-a-box
wind turbine kits
initiatives to induce/encourage people to act "sustainably"
green labeling and certification of products/services and of business/brands
sustainable building and construction materials and concepts
alternative approaches to transportation and energy infrastructure
biofuels
The preliminary jury did the first cut, each jury member creating a
shortlist of 15, which were then pushed through several rounds of
reviews, additional research and discussions. They finally focused on a
shortlist of 8, before sending 5 to the final, yesterday night. The
preliminary jury was made up of Emily Farnworth from the Climate Group, Joris Krüse from Media Republic, Jeffrey Prins from the Doen Fondation, Femke Rotteveel from the Postcode Lottery, Marleen Stikker from Picnic, and Bruno Giussani.
The five nominees were:
The Solar Lampion: a designer uses available solar
technology to create a beautiful lampion, an invitation to designers to
engage with the technologies of sustainability (website / article)
The Sustainable Dance Club: a project to change clubbing and mass events to make them sustainable (website)
The Green Thing: an online, not-for-profit social movement to mobilize the masses to act against climate change (website)
City Cargo: a project for zero-emission cargo distribution in cities using existing tram infrastructure (website)
Qurrent: an energy company that doesn't sell you energy, but helps you make and manage your own (website)
The five finalists that were presenting had been at Picnic all
week, attending the conference but also having their own "bootcamp",
with speaking coaching, private discussions with entrepreneurs and
investors, and the gift of an electric bike.
The finalists had 10 minutes to present, strictly timed (there's a
clock in the corner of the screen, and Bruno cut one off), followed by
7 minutes for questions from the jury and the floor. Then the members
of the final jury have worked on the final evaluation. Their decision
will be unveiled in a few hours. The members of the final jury were: Avery Baker, from Tommy Hilfiger; Helen Jones, from Ben&Jerry Europe, John Thackara from Doors of Perception, Liesbeth van Tongeren from Greenpeace Netherlands, venture capitalistEckart Wintzen, Steve Howard from the Climate Group. The jury was chaired by Richard Branson, founder of Virgin. Branson and Howard were not attending the presentations -- they were in New York at the Clinton Global initiative,
flying in overnight -- but Bruno explained that they've been constantly
briefed and that the presentations were only one of many elements in
the final jury's choice. Branson had sent in a video message: "To make
an impact on climate change, we will have to give people a better
choice. You won't get them to stop consuming, so let's get them to
consume in a better way". So here my running notes of the five
presentations.
Damian introduced himself as an industrial designer, based in Rotterdam. He described how he has been surrounded by solar cells for as long as I can remember, as his father was responsible for solar panels on some of the European consortium satellites. Ugliness doesn’t sell. Determined to come up with a solar lamp that was aesthetic and mobile. Looked to the past for inspiration, lights made of glass and steel, Chinese and Japanese lanterns weigh next to nothing and give beautiful light, simple candles and oil lamps. However, these are beautiful but not efficient. Standard white LED lamp is 1500 times more efficient than a naked flame. Now we don’t need to carry lights with us anymore, light is everywhere. So maybe it is a romantic notion to move away from the supply, cut the umbilical cord connecting us to the power. Damian presented his working drawings, the final image, and then the lampion itself -- a lovely cylinder of solar cells, designed to sit on a table or be hung from a tree. He wanted to use standard materials such as 50x50 mm solar cells, and come up with something as beautiful as possible. To explain the design, he plotted the lamp on a matrix of Fixed vs. Mobile, Innovative vs. Traditional, placing it in the Mobile / Innovative quadrant. Mobility: he described how you can pick it off the branch and take it anywhere you want. The bedroom. The living room. The porch. Innovation: The lampion is made of solar cells fitted into an exoskeleton made of a metal alloy designed for strength. The cells are translucent, so the light shows from the sides, not just the top or bottom. Damian developed the exoskeleton, and each crown includes 6 inclined solar cells. Once the design was complete it looks like a spiraling pine cone. The prototype lampion has 30 cells, which all work with a rechargeable battery. The lamp works for three hours after a day charge, and is expected to cost around 185 euro. He showed the lampion, tuned it on, and got a series of "ahhhs" from the audience. Well deserved, it's beautiful.
Michel’s idea is to change the world by changing clubbing. What if we could capture the energy that we produce every time we take a step, he asks? In a club, that could be used to power the music and lights, and the dance floor could be turned into a generator. The SDC (Sustainable Dance Club) intent is to make clubs and festivals more sustainable all over the world, and to do so without having to go into the clubbers comfort zone. Clubs are the places for the young, with 1.5 million clubbers per week just in the Netherlands. However, clubbing today is not sustainable at all. Clubs don’t think about the issue, and the yearly impact of a club for 1000 people, is that they use 30x more water than a household of 4, create 40x as much waste, use 7000x more bottles, and burn 150x times as much energy – even if the club is only open a couple of nights a week. The total carbon production of one club in a year is 450,000 kg of carbon. Michel and his colleagues have a lot of experience of clubbing, and have developed expertise about sustainability. Their initial focus is on the SDC energy dance floor, with the idea that the more people dance, the more energy you make -- there is a system under the floor to capture that kinetic energy. However, the total energy produced from 500 people dancing for a night, is only around 25,000 watts, or about 1% of the energy required. The team is opening up a club, “MyTown” in Rotterdam, in the spring of 08, targeting a 50% reduction in waste / water / energy. “So… Shall we dance?”
The Green Thing is a free online community that makes it really fun to change your behavior and “get more green”. This is based on the premise that the vast majority of people really want to live greener lifestyles, however, they feel it’s too futile, too confusing, or too difficult. Most of the actions recommended are seen as too activist, or too scary, or too preachy. The Green Thing aims at using creativity to fight climate change. TGT is set up as an online not-for-profit (get rid of that issue as a potential barrier). The process is simple; you sign up, get an intriguing email at the end of every month which leads you to a short video / call to action, inspiring you to undertake that month’s activity. Two weeks later you get a reminder, with another film that dramatizes this month’s Green Thing. The Green Thing has lots of things to make acting more fun. The launch activity will be walking so it will come as a podcasts that you can listen while walking (Tracy Chevalier, the author of the "Girl with the Pearl Earring", is apparently writing the story). Their research has also shown that community reinforcement is really important, to create social currency. The intention is to create a series of Green Things for each month’s action, which you can trade, and show them on sites such as Facebook and MySpace, launching a green YouTube. The power of the idea rests on the premise that entertainment will hook in the community, understanding to bring them context, which drives them to serious behavior change over the longer term. The people in turn, will drive government and business to do Green Things too. Green Thing will launch in October in the UK, and possibly in April in San Francisco. The plan is to reach 25 million people by the end of 2008, inspiring 2 million actions per month, which could save at least 135,000 tons of carbon. Andy closed with his launch video, a funny blend of steet signs and storytelling, and the whole room smiled and laughed.
CityCargo is focused on using old and existing things in new ways, in particular sustainable cargo distribution in urban centers, using the existing tram network. The process starts by receiving cargo in large warehouses on the outside of the city, where the cargo of four trucks get transferred to one freight tram. That trams go to locations inside the city, where they are met by smaller electric vehicles that take cargo from the tram to the final destinations. CityCargo aims to take out half the number of trucks that come into the city (in Amsterdam, that would mean cutting the number of trucks from 5000 to 2500 a day). In addition, Citycargo intends to use zero emission electric vehicles (clean), to reduce the number of trucks (safer for streets), to use the tram infrastructure (fast and efficient). The market is global with over 240 cities with tram systems. They have found all the partners to make this happen, have done a trial run and obtained a 10-years license from the city of Amsterdam. Michael closed by reporting a conversation with a CEO two days ago who said, “I love green - it’s the color of money and the color of nature. If you combine the two, I’m in.”
Igor opened by challenging Picnic08 to set a better example in being green –- by lowering the temperature in the rooms, using different lighting systems etc. (Applause). The focus of Qurrent is to be the first energy company not to sell you energy, but to help you make and manage your own. Qurrent produces a small black box, called a QBox, which does three things: (1) Energy Optimizer: turns on and off things such as your washing machine at the time when it is most efficient and cheaper; (2) Energy monitor: gives you clear insight into energy flows of your home presening it in a very friendly fashion; and (3) LEN: is a router for a Local Energy Network (LEN) within your neighborhood, connecting you to the grid and to your neighbors. Igor believes in decentralized energy systems. Which, so far, is not affordable and too complex. Lowering those two barriers is Qurrent's focus (they also will advise people on how to set up their own energy production systems -- wind, solar, etc). Qurrent's product is already post-prototype stage, and they are trying to sell them to energy companies and real estate management companies, "which are very conservative". He plans to use the prize money, if he wins, for demonstration projects. “For mass CO2 reduction, bring CO2 reduction to the masses", he says.
In closing the evening, Bruno stressed that whoever wins, the prize money must be used for investing in taking the project or idea to the next stage.
The winner's name will be announced by Richard Branson in a few hours.
Running notes from the Picnic07 conference in Amsterdam.
Susan Kish (founder of FirstTuesday Zurich and social networking expert, and occasional blogger on this blog) discusses communities (a word that she uses interchangeably with networks or groups).
Rather than talking about the business of communities, she asks, are there communities of business? The new technologies of belonging/participating challenge companies to understand how to use them, how to work with this exploding range of tools that allow collaboration.
Why do people join communities or networks? Susan identifies eight main reasons:
they have shared interests (passion, nanotech, ski, etc -- something that brings you together)
shared beliefs
shared location (physical location still maintains high importance)
shared experience (went to the same university, etc)
shared profession
shared language
shared entreprise
shared time
Business is a bundle of communities/networks (internal, suppliers, customers and the people with whom you do business, experts, personal). How can businesses leverage communities? How much do they want to engage/work with that particular customer for example? At one end of the scale, "I'm selling you stuff for money", at the other end of the scale, there is engagement/immersion.
She talks about emerging business models for communities:
translators (people who can take that power and make it available to digital immigrants (PDF) or corporates - ex RedHat)
enablers (Skype is an enabler; Facebook too; people that enable plaforms)
exchanges (biggest exchange in the world and the one that hundreds of thousands of people make a living from, is eBay)
brokers (there are dozens of communities of experts; p2p models like consumer-to-consumer lending Zopa are also brokers)
hunters: there is a small group of people who creates networks (ex: Tapestry Networks)
blenders (there is an ancient industry who people who do marketplaces, exhibitions, trade shows, conferences like TED or Picnic)
builders (ex: alumni networks for corporates)
What's next: communities and networks will help redefine what the corporation is gonna look like. Is it possible that the community is a business? And for the individuals: how is it gonna change my career and way of working? And on the broader sense, what's the impact on industries? How are communities going to redefine them?
Running notes from the Picnic07 conference in Amsterdam.
Anthropologist Stefana Broadbent (I've already blogged about her research here and here and here and written an Economist story about her) talks about trends in entertainment and communication. With her team of sociologists and psychologists she observes people closely and collects a whole set of data (diaries, bookmarks, playlists, they ask people to keep logbooks of communication and media usage, etc). She is a great speaker and a much-needed tech myth buster.
She shows a set of apparently disconnected data that all point in the same direction. Written communication prevails: if you ask people to keep a diary of their daily (mediated) communication, there is a huge prevalence of the written channels (IM, SMS, e-mail) over voice. This correlates to another phenomenon: private life is going into work life: what has changed in the last few years is that there is constant contact with people in our private social network, even during working time. TiVo: you may have heard that the main reason why people have bought TiVos and other digital video recorders is to skip through the ads. Add that to the list of urban myths: DRV owners watch 40% of the ads that they could skip. Another myth: online video is gonna kill TV. Actually, people who watch video online watch more and not less TV. Another: substitution effect: only 10% of people say that they've been listening to less radio because of MP3 players. Another: newspapers are dead? So how comes that daily paper circulation, free dailies included, has increased in Europe in the last five years? (The free dailies are not about "free" only, they success is tied to the fact that they're ubiquitously available).
There is no substitution: everything is added. There is more and more media piling on, more devices, more channels. What's happening is that everything is moving into the background, everything is becoming wallpaper. Radio and music has always been background. Now, TV is becoming wallpaper too, the daily newspapers are read as background (or as interstitials), IM and e-mail also are starting to run in the background, a constant flow of "open channel interaction".
What does it mean to be background? Something that we pay less attention to, that becomes subconscious. In psychology, it's called creating a routine. Attention gets refocused on that activity only when there is an unexpected change. People have incredible media routines. All their day is organized around routines, from waking up in the morning and switching on the radio to the same channel (remember that scene in "Groundhog Day"?), to switching on the PC to check e-mail (including a routine within the routine in the websurfing sequence), to the call and SMS routine. Skype users have the highest routine of all, they plan their calls.
Now, there is a problem: the whole industry is trying to say bye-bye to routine. The whole ICT industry today has to do with putting people in total control and deliberate choice of everything that they will listen to, look at, etc: VOD, HDD recorders, IPTV archives, podcasts, videocasts, personalized radio stations, layout skins, etc.
But users can only multitask if we don't ask for all their attention. Choosing kills routines and requires attention -- the moment you choose you commit to something -- it moves the activity to the foreground; being in control means being actively focused.
Individuals are pretty good as making choices about things that are important to them, and we are also good at constantly moving other things to the side, which allows us to constantly integrate all these new devices, channels, etc. So the question is: how important something is to you to makes you make that specific choice of focusing on it?
Running notes from the Picnic07 conference in Amsterdam.
Just hosted a series of sessions (Gervis has a picture of my intro, but the caption is wrong) with Pablos Holman, a hacker playing
around with technology (great speech); three demos of recognition
technology; and Sugata Mitra of the "Hole in The Wall" project (always very inspiring). No
blogging from the stage, but:
Sugata Mitra: read this previous post for the "Hole in the Wall" story, and then consider the recent developments: last spring, building on the insights gained in 1999-2004, Sugata conducted a new experiment to test whether groups of children can complete their schooling on their own, self-teaching. His general answer is yes. In other words, he's thinking about ways to allow kids to get schooling without seeing a teacher.
Running notes from the Picnic07 conference in Amsterdam.
Moderator (and WSJ tech columnist) Walt Mossberg: "There is a digital tidal wave that changes every walk of life, every business, every part of the society. The question of this session is: how can we tell who has authority in today's world?" Two opposite points of view in the session: Andrew Keen (left in the picture) and David Weinberger.
First, David Weinberger, author of "Everything is Miscellaneous" and Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center. He says: We are very good at organizing things, we have a lot of experience in organizing people and goods. But there is always one box, in the organization chart or in your kitchen, labeled "miscellaneous", where we put in things that don't fit. When the box is too big, then we have to fix the organization. But digitally, allowing that box to grow and take over the whole organization it's possibly the right thing to do. There is more of everything on the web: millions of entries for any words. How do we organize this? The real world's key principle seems to be to keep things apart -- to structure them, to separate them into bins and boxes. We can't fit more in a given space (he shows a picture of two cars that tried to go through a too-narrow passage and got stuck). We are good at organizing physical things. But there is a price. When you start to organize ideas into the physical medium of paper, for instance, we need people (editors) making decisions, deciding what comes first (front page). In Western culture since the Greeks we have assumed that ideas are organized the way the real world is (he shows a beef chart). Truth is, there are many ways to slice and dice and categorize ideas (he discusses the definition of "planet"). There are so many properties and attributes, each of which can be used to organize and categorize. To think that there is a single order of the universe, is to mistake the universe for a shoestore. Now we are digitizing everything. We are getting away from authority that comes directly from the limitations of paper. First principle of change is: leaf on many branches. If you sell a digital camera, you put it in one shelf, you can't put the same camera in multiple stores. Second: messiness has a virtue. If you post something online and there are so many links to it that you can't even follow them, your post is a huge success, because each of those messy links adds value. Messiness is good online, you can sort through using a computer. Third: no difference between data and metadata. In the real world we understand the difference between them, we don't confuse the label and the thing. Online it gets messier. Online, if you search Herman Melville, you will get the content of his books or a picture of the author -- there is no difference between data and metadata. Fourth: unowned order. If you go into a clothing store, the rational thing to do would be to create a pile with all things your size, because all the rest to you is just noise, useless. But if you do that the store owner will throw you out, because he owns the organization of the store. Online, it's exactly the opposite: there, the user of the info controls the organization. The site may offer a classic "tree" (menu) but systems of faceted organization allow you to select "only items under 200 USD" or "only this specific brand" etc. The user decides what the order is. The other way to take control of the organization is through tagging (he shows the de.licio.us link-sharing site). We are leaving behind the time when we thought -- because we had to -- to organize the world according to experts who would exclude things of no value. But in a world of abundance, that no longer is the only right strategy. Let's take the leaves off the tree, make a miscellaneous pile, a pile rich with connection, with metadata, saturated with links and tags etc, which includes everything. The point is: we cannot predict what other people are going to be interested in. And now we are no longer forced to decide for others. We can postpone the moment when we need to organize, because we have the tools. Include and postpone, which is radically opposed to the limitations of the real under which we have been living until recently. Experts remain available of course. The way the editors of the NYT organize the paper is still available to us. He challenges the idea that information is an asset that a business needs to protect: it's better to let information go, so that it can be meshed up with other information and add value. We are coming out of a time of mass media -- very few people got to speak and many to listen. The principle to reach the widest number of people was to make the simplest content possible. So we've been treated like idiots for generations. That's true in news, in politics. "Keep it simple". He gives an example of a Bush speech, that was written to be "kept simple", but within hours many bloggers had analyzed it, making it more complex (comparing with previous speeches, analyzing, etc) and therefore making it more interesting. Bloggers make things more complex because that's what humans do. That's one of the reasons why we all rushed into blogging. Part of this regime of simplification was also a regime of implicitness. Implicit is the whole meaning and juice of life. When we read a newspaper, we can understand the metadata (bigger headline = more important, etc). But we get confused at the implicit vs explicit thing. Humans are not computers, you can't press a button and make explicit everything that's implicit (for example, I can't be immediately explicit about my kids, that's unsaid, that's emotions, etc). Social networks require us to make information explicit (when we create a profile and connect with people). Around this expliciteness (how you know a "friend" etc) grows human flesh. That's why Facebook is so successful. Using the example of a discussion on the Wikipedia deep-frided mars bar article he quotes Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) on neutrality: "a page is neutral when people have stopped arguing about it". Those who don't engage in the conversation become less relevant (the NYT tried to make some money out of its columnists with TimesSelect, but it made his columnists less relevant because they were less present in the conversation -- the Timesabandoned TS). Compare newspaper front-pages decided by editors, and Digg user-chosen headlines. Where does Wikipedia get its credibility? After all you may hit it right after a lunatic has changed some important fact. (By the way, Wikipedia defies the idea that facts are straightforward). Wikipedia appends a lot of notices and disclaimers to articles announcing the problems in articles ("the neutrality of this article is disputed" etc), so it's willing to admit "this article is not very good". That's not something you will find in newspapers, because mistakes diminish their authority. That's paper-based authority. And their unwilligness to be comfortable with human faillability will make that kind of authority less relevant. What we are doing now with the web, this pile of connected miscellaneous stuff, is that we are externalizing meaning. We do it every time we use tags. Tags allow us to link different pieces. Those relationships are there for us to understand how things are connected. The web was built to solve the problem of messiness -- of making messiness accessible, to allow to create dynamic "orders" ot of the miscellaneous pile. We have a generational task, which is to build this infrastructure of meaning, and that's not only the work of experts, it's the taks of all of us.
Andrew Keen, author of "The cult of the amateur", is supposed to do the rebuttal. His book suggests that the Web hasn't produced much in terms of sustained quality because it doesn't provide an ecosystem to nurture talent. He is in a tough position, because Weinberger's polished keynote would require a careful dissecting, not just a few-minutes "contrarian" speech. But Mossberg sides with Keen. Weinberger, says Keen, brings together two worlds: philosophy and marketing. "What you heard today was a philosopher selling the web to you, in a sexy, seductive way". There is one issue in which fundamentally they disagree: complexity. Weinberger says we want more complexity, more complexity is interesting. "I believe he is making a categorical error. He's mixing up media with the world. Let's assume he's right, human beings are indeed complex. However, what David wants is for media (Wikipedia, etc) to reflect the world. Media should not reflect the world. For me media need to educate, inform and entertain. It doesn't have to reflect the world. The most successful media is not complex. Doesn't need to be utterly simple, am not arguing in favor of dumbing down. But the job of media is to simplify the world, so that we can understand what is happening in the world". It's too easy to criticize the "mainstream media". "We need media not to trivialize the world, but to simplify in a way that makes it readable. In my view the Internet is not doing that today: it increases the confusion, the noise. The job of gatekeepers in traditional media is to simplify -- like a tech columnist who simplifies my choice between buying a Mac or a PC. I think we are confusing categories here".
An audio podcast of a discussion between Dan Kelsen at BizTechTalk and myself, recorded a few weeks back, about innovation big and small on the global stage.
The MacArthur Foundation has announced the names of its 2007 Fellows (often nicknamed "geniuses"). Each gets 500K $ plus an enormous visibility boost. My friend inventor Saul Griffith is among them this year.
Twitter is a service that allows to share with friends "updates" (up to 140 characters) on what you're doing etc. I am a Twitter skeptic.
But Ethan Zuckerman earlier today told me of Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El Fattah, who has been detained many times and who uses Twitter to constantly let people know where he is, as a form of personal
protection through publicity -- if he stops twittering, his friends
know that something's wrong.
Running notes from the Picnic07 conference in Amsterdam.
I have already blogged about NY artist Jonathan Harris, saying that he's "an artist who gets news better than publishers do". He talks about computer programs as art projects (his works here), including: WeFeelFine -- It scans the recently updated blogs for words like "I feel" or "feeling", and the sentences containing them, and the pictures connected with them, get collected (currently at a rate of 20'000 new feelings per day, for a total of over 9 million since the project began). The most common feeling is consistently "better" ("I feel better"), followed by "good" and "bad". The software basically makes use of people's online footprints. Harris has built multiple interfaces to access this information according to feelings, gender, location (for blog posts that are geo-tagged), etc. Universe -- While WeFeelFine is about people's individual feelings, Universe is about trying to find out if there are global stories that are affecting all of our lives. The project uses the metaphor of the starry sky to organize thousands of news feeds. "The news page is an outdated metaphor to present information, there are better ways, based on relations", he says. In Harris' Universe, everything (every news item) can be selected to become the "center of the universe" (screenshot left) and everything else will reposition itself based on its relation to that main node. The Whale Hunt -- "This spring I became interested in trying to develop some empathy with computers, submitting myself to a similar set of repetitive rules that we submit computers to", he explains. He spent a few weeks in Alaska accompanying a whaling expedition by locals, setting up a rule for himself that "I would photograph the entire experience at five minutes intervals (even when i was sleeping I would use a timer to take pictures)". And when exciting things were happening, he would speed up the pace of photographing. That led to 3214 pictures, starting with the taxi ride in NY and ending with the butchering of a whale. He built them into a sophisticated picture album (it's not online yet, will be in a couple of months) but also used them to experiment with new interfaces for human storytelling, which allows for metastories and substories to surface (basically, he tags every picture, so that he can select them according to specific criteria, creating an infinite number of sub-narratives).
Follows a session on social networking moderated by Linda Stone (who coined the concept of "continuous partial attention" -- read about it in these previousposts). Jiry Engestrom (Jaiku, microblogging platform) opens with a speech, then a panel with Matt Biddulph (Dopplr, which allows to keep friends updated on your geographical location), Felix Petersen (Plazes, similar concept), Raymond Spanjar (Hyves, mobile social network) and Biz Stone (Twitter, where people broadcast in a few words "what they are doing right now" to their friends). Engestrom talks about the idea of "social objects" and the "social graph" (the idea of mapping people and how they are related), saying that in most of today's discussion about social networks "we are forgetting that people are connected to each other by objects". Jobs, hobbies, etc are social objects, as are shared links (de.licio.us), photos (Flickr), videos (YouTube) etc. "So if we think of social networks, we should start from this question: what is our social object?" We are becoming surrounded by realtime activity streams that describe what your friends are doing right now on the social objects that are relevant to you and them. Facebook is an example of leveraging that stream of actions. Engestrom sees in it an evolution of the portals: "we went from browsing (Yahoo) to search (Google) to sharing (Facebook). If PageRank (the Google software that looks at who links to what) was the most valuable software code in the era of search, will "Facerank" emerge which will look at social proximity, physical proximity, or shared objects to determine relevance?" he asks.
I come out of the session feeling social-networking-overloaded. Appropriately, Engestrom mentioned a great recent essay by Brad Fitzpatrick on the social graph, tackling the multiplication of social networking platforms and features that make, as he writes, people "sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site". In the paper, more than worth reading, Brad explores how to "ultimately make the social graph a community asset, utilizing the data from all the different sites, but not depending on any company or organization as "the" central graph owner".
Bruno Giussani is a writer, the European Director of the 
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