Transient Web

This Jeff Jarvis essay on the future of the web is a must read. He says :

Twitter is to web pages what web pages are to old media. Our experience of information is once again about to become fragmented and dispersed.

His observation is spot on. If Twitter, Wave and the like become the where information, news, data and commentary gathers and disseminates from, all other on-line media will become increasingly irrelevant. On the worthlessness of SEO techniques that this would lead to, he quotes Paul Gillin :

That’s because search is turning social and our search results are becoming personalized, thus we don’t all share the same search results and it becomes tougher to manage them through SEO. Put these factors together – the social stream – and relationships matter more than pages (but then, they always have).

Once knowledge becomes relationship and connection driven, the egalitarian culture of knowledge acquisition and sharing that the web helped foster would likely come to an end.

Empowering Patients

I always get sticker shock when I see an EOB (explanation of benefits) from my medical insurance provider and can't help thinking about those who have no insurance. The numbers are bizarre to say the least - seven minutes of a doctor's time and some a routine blood test was billed at over five hundred dollars by the doctor's office the last time I saw one of these. To call this a rip-off seems like an understatement. Whatever the underlying reasons for these numbers to be as ridiculously high as they are, there has to be a better, smarter way to get the job done at a cost that is reasonable.

Reading this NYT article on how one engineer repurposed a cell-phone to work as a microscope gives me hope. It should not be in the too distant future that people can run basic tests from home using low-cost kits that can be hooked up to a cellphone. Potentially, they can patten match their readings against the public domain databases and understand their condition.

Thanks for the abundance of medical information online, people are already much better educated and informed about their condition than they had the ability to be in the pre-internet days. Having the tools for running diagnostic tests at home will only make this better. A patient can in the future consult with a doctor, fully armed with the data points needed to make a prognosis. What currently takes several visits and tests can happen over a single consultation. Besides the cost and time savings, the empowerment of the patient this would provide is of considerable value.

Infomavore

Learned a new word today - informavore. The term informavore characterizes an organism that consumes information. It is meant to be a description of human behavior in modern information society, in comparison to omnivore, as a description of humans consuming food.

It is a long winded article and I found it hard to stay engaged to the end. That said, there are some very interesting ideas in it that are worth pondering. For instance, the author suggests that in the future our brains will be in a cloud - what is important to us will not be self-determined but will be a function of what the community deems important. The fact that we don't make an effort to relegate the business of holding what is significant in our lives to Facebook and blogs instead of keeping that information in our heads is a telling sign according to Schirrmacher.

Then there is the idea that there is not enough brains to hold and process the information that is being spewed online and that Darwinism will determine how we will deal with information overload, what will survive and what will perish.Definitely worth reading despite the length.

Universal Authorship

Seed Magazine has this article on society moving from universal readership to universal authorship and what that may mean. One statistic the authors uses to makes their case is that by 2013, 100% of the world's population with will authors in some kind of media. At first glance that seems like too much too soon. There are countless people out there today who have access to every form on-line publishing, are perfectly capable of publishing content should they want to but are not authors. They just don't care to publish their ideas and opinions to the world - it is not important or interesting to them.

There is no reason why this kind of person in the next four years will suddenly morph into an author. Likewise, the legions of illiterates in the world will not likely become Twitter savvy in short order. That said, it the statistic is confusing. The other points the article makes are good ones - the degree of influence and the pace of social change and revolution even that burgeoning number of published authors will bring are definitely phenomena to watch for.

Print And Electronic

Love the idea of embedding video in a print magazine. Now if the thing is foldable (and there is technology to support this already) there is no reason why the entire magazine cannot be a combination of print and electronic blurring the distinction between the two media almost entirely. Once the economies of scale kicks in, the idea will carry over to brochure ware and marketing collateral material of all stripes.

An assortment of sounds will commingle as you go through your junk mail. The collage minded can take these video chips from all over the place and create interesting mashups - that would be a much better way to dispose of these things than tossing them into the dumpster. Books coming to life will take on a whole new meaning with this kind of technology.

Be it livening up some dry academic tome or bringing to life a work of fiction a picture (specially a moving one) is worth well over a thousand words. It will be interesting to see if this is a trend that will catch on or if it will just be a one-hit wonder with much untapped potential.

Third Space

If it took upwards of ten minutes to charge an electric car what would that mean for the culture of instant gratification we live in and who is best positioned to make a quick buck in this space are some of the questions this article in Big Money deals with. The author Mathew DeBord suggests that Wal-Mart with their commodious parking lots could be a very good fit. They could make good use of their space and entice customers to step inside the store to shop while they are waiting for their car to be recharged.

The premise is clearly that people with ten or fifteen minutes of idle time will have no idea what to do with themselves and their pocket books. They will absolutely need stuff to do (that someone can monetize) to fill that time gainfully.

But what if the slow charing cars cause a general cultural shift toward slowness and people get comfortable having nothing to do while their cars juice up. That would be a good third space to have - a place to wait and watch the grass grow, maybe chat with a stranger who like yourself is has ten minutes weighing heavily on them. It would be really nice if some big box store did not jump and kill any chance there was to slow down the pace of our lives just a little bit.

Interesting Times

Nice article on the the future of educational institutes as the hub of scientific research and technology innovation. The author points out :

While there are advanced capabilities that remain available only on campus, that boundary is rapidly receding.

This moment is akin to the turn of the last century, when philanthropists funded the spread of libraries to provide community access to the kinds of collections that had previously been available only to institutions and wealthy individuals. Fab labs are like libraries for a new kind of literacy, the reading and writing of objects rather than books. Instead of building a few big labs, it’s now possible to build a network of many more-accessible smaller labs that can be used for technical empowerment, training, incubation, and invention.

That is nothing short of fascinating. Today's children would probably have access to such labs by when they are adults. Besides the mind-boggling array possibilities that opens up for them, there is also unprecedented amount of choice and empowerment when it comes to education. One can easily imagine courses being tailored to exact individual needs and inclinations, students having the opportunity to create a curriculum for themselves that might require concurrent enrollment at several universities around the world for the best return on their investment of time and money. Instead of walking down the hallway from one lecture to the next, they may log in and out of university portals continents apart.