Entrepreneurship is a big part of what I want to talk about, and anyone who has launched their own business will know aaaalll about the feelings expressed above. It’s only part of it though. Over the last decade, software engineers have been the guys behind innovative businesses launching on-line. The characteristics of engineers however in general don’t lend themselves to the combustible mania that often characterises entrepreneurs, and so in most cases you see two-person teams coming up with and rolling out new software start-ups. One the manic socialiser the other the coding genius sitting quietly in the background. Although this dynamic isn’t set to completely shift, nor is it the only one which works for a start-up (IMO the best start-ups are those spear-headed by the brains behind them, take Matt Biddulph and Matt Jones of Dopplr for instance) it is becoming less common. The reason? Lots and lots more people who want to now have the skills (or easy access to them) to create their own software businesses. Critically, lots and lots more people  have the tools to learn and hone their coding skills without the necessity of tertiary education. They then release their beautiful little special snowflakes out into the world through the web, and increasingly, via mobile market-places.

Over the last 5 years I have watched the role of expensive, magical seeming technology in the B2C market take a fast-forward swan-dive off the precipice of perceived value. Want a site that let’s people buy your physical goods, rate them, recommend them and pay for them over the web? There’s a (free) app for that. There’s an advertising supported infrastructure for that. From educational institutions shifting to Moodle to businesses running on Ning, we have watched the commodification of enterprise level software increase exponentially, plunging businesses once in ruddy legacy-contract-enabled health into the dead-pool. There are of course many notable exceptions – Huddle for example. Great business and doing well. Why? There are some really good reasons for that which will  seem to negate my points on the commodification of enterprise level software, but I’ll come back to that. Huddle is a good example in another sense – it has direct competition from free(mium) services like Activecollab. So what is the future for these companies? There are good reasons to support continuing existence:

• customer support
• lower bottom-line costs by outsourcing technical builds and staffing requirements
• up-time and service guarantees
• low monthly costs

All great reasons. But how long will those remain good reasons? The commodification of software has a corrolary – the proliferation of coding and development acumen.  At what point does it become cheaper to hire one or two mid level developers to get Moodle up and running for your education establishment and factor in a monthly retainer for support and module development?  We’re already hitting that point, and it does not bode well for software providers like Huddle and Basecamp. The globalising effect of the web means that these previously wizard-like abilities are available at a fraction of the cost they would have commanded in say, 2005 even.

I’ve been poking around in the Android market-place a lot lately. I wish I’d kept a count on the number of Augmented Reality apps released over the last 4 weeks. AR is the bleeding edge of mobile app development, and yet I’ve seen at least 15 different apps doing pretty much exactly the same thing as the other launch there. Of course this talks to my points on the commodification of software and the proliferation of coding acumen, but what else does it say? I think it says that even if you are a great developer, even if you have a great product and even if that product has the same basic functionality as the other 14 in the market-place, you have almost no chance of your service getting take-up. There are three reasons I want to explore to help us understand why that’s the case. The first is that the mobile experience is intrinsically (and ironically ) far less social than the desktop/laptop based web. Screen size and ease of input are key differentiators; these completely change our desire and ability to share content or services that we like and enjoy using. So this means that if you have a mobile-only strategy based on the desirability and excellence of your product, even if your customers really really enjoy the product, it’s much much harder for them to share it with others. Another reason you are unlikely to get much take-up is that interoperability between devices (even devices from the same manufacturer) is ridiculously bad. I mean, fagghedaboutit. If you love this bubble bobble clone but can’t even play it (or send it to) with a pal who has a phone from the same manufacturer, we can’t mirror the model which has seen the scaling of social software on-line carve out a place for entrepreneurs. So this implies that mobile only strategy is not a great one for really growing a business – it needs the sharing and social environments that the desktop web is so good at to bolster it and drive new users. The last reason is simply the staggering array of choice available – your customers need a filter, and the filter is really the big decider.

So, the Big Boys. Let’s talk about the history of Railways for a moment. James Watt was an inventor and engineer who pioneered the age of Steam Engines, brought to practical application by John Blenkinsop. Watt is characterised as ‘…a rather poor businessman, and especially hated bargaining and negotiating terms with those who sought to utilise the steam engine.’ Remind you of someone? Indeed… Blenkinsop managed the Middleton Railway, which was the first steam railway in the world and although successful in it’s own right was privately owned and operated, so opportunities and desire for expansion were limited and not, it seems, properly investigated. I like to think that the Middleton Railway was Blenkinsop’s labour of love, and truly a very special child. That said, it would remain a child, which is why today we have Eurostar and Northern Rail and not Middleton International. In any era of technical innovation we see people like Watt and Blenkinsop pave the way, with the technology soon becoming commodified and the major players entering the space, using their capital and infrastructure to scale and deploy the technology in the pursuit of vast profits. There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s the definition of a free market capitalist economy, and I’m not taking a crack at anyone – I only wish to contextualise the place and time we web and mobile entrepreneurs find ourselves in. Funnily enough, the Big Boys today are our start-up peers; Google and Facebook, Myspace and Yahoo. As much as anything else this says a lot about the speed of software commodification in the age of digital replication and massively distributed coding acumen. We are in an age of Innovation, not an age of Invention. We take existing products and we finesse them into something more usable, more pretty, slightly better at a single task. There are not many opportunities for the Watt’s of the world to create new things these days- they simply don’t have the money…

Let’s take it back to my points on massively distributed and cheaply available coding/development acumen, the prevalence of free(mium) services replacing enterprise level software and the dominance of a few players in the web and mobile markets. Entrepreneurs are in a tough spot right now. The big boys are all playing in the same playground when it comes to mobile and web technologies, and they have way more marketing power and capital to both R&D and deploy their products to a global market-place. What are we to do? Do we have to head further out to the edges of what is possible through technology and engineering? That’s one way certainly. It’s a tough path though, as of course the Big Boys are playing there too, they’re just not quite as loud about it. We can continue to innovate and iterate, taking existing ideas and products and finessing them into more accessible and usable products. Occasionally, if someone is very very lucky and very very smart, they’ll do something kind of game changing, like Wolfram Alpha. The lesson is clear to me though: The age of the start-up as we know it is over.

What is the missing ingredient in what I’ve been talking about? The Filter. Malcolm Gladwell talks eloquently about ‘how little things can make a big difference’ in his book The Tipping Point. In the same book he talks about Connectors and Mavens. Mavens in Gladwells definition, are seen as almost bookish collectors of information, getting great enjoyment from being able to help others in their decisions by making their information collections available. Let’s take a blogger named Adam who writes extensively about under-water cameras. Adam knows everything there is to know about these devices. He has written a blog for the last two years citing the pros and cons of particular products, even making recommendations for particular cameras and pointing people to where they can get the best deal. Now the majority of people who want an underwater camera simply don’t know about Adam. They do a Google search but ultimately Adam isn’t really a connector in Gladwell’s sense, he just really really loves under-water cameras. The Google search throws up mostly ‘buy now’ ads for the first page, alongside product specs and details. Adam’s site however languishes on page 4 of  Google, found only by the most committed searchers. So a Maven is helpful, but they don’t really have all that much influence.

You might know Jason Kottke, he writes a great blog at Kottke.org about the weird and wonderful. He is a classic Connector: Influential and objective, with a readership that spans many different types of people. Let’s say Jason is looking for an under-water camera for a trip he’s taking. He is one of those searchers who can separate the great from the garbage effortlessly. He is also someone who will likely skirt past all the product specs on the first two pages of Google. Once Jason finds Adam’s blog he realises he has hit the mother-load for information on under-water cameras. Pretty soon he has found exactly what he needs with a handy link to a place to buy it at a price he can’t match no matter how hard he searched. Jason really enjoyed Adam’s blog – it was heartfelt and funny, and enormously valuable to him personally (potentially saving him $70 let’s say). Jason writes it up on kottke.org and whammo, suddenly Adam’s blog is on page one of Google and he has people coming to his site in droves. At the same time, the manufacturer of the product that Jason bought suddenly sees a spike in sales of a camera that wasn’t doing all that well, and they put another 50,000 into production.

In the Web and Screen age the distinction between Mavens and Connectors is, IMO, and despite the example above, essentially arbitrary. In network theory and sociology, a maven is someone who has a disproportionate influence on other members of the network. Isn’t the web world we live in all about the network and sociology? The thing about Connectors in an innovation age is that a heckuva lot of them are also Mavens. In each specialist area we see the rise of the Connector-Maven. The difference between success and also-ran status for a start-up with a great product and one with a so-so product is in often simply in whether they can get a Connector-Maven talking about their product. Layar is a great example I think. It’s a Great product, but is it really that different or better than say, Somaview or Bionic Eye? Augment This! or Movue? The reason that Layar is the most referenced AR product currently on the market is of course due to a number of factors, but I believe critically it has been the role of Connector-Mavens at sites like Techcrunch and MAKE magazine, Boy Genius Report and Engadget that have given them the right audience and the presence that, in the end, defines you as the leader of the pack or an also-ran. With excellent coders if not a dime-a-dozen (truly Great coders will never be that), there sure are a lot more of them around now, so once you ship and have the Connector-Mavens talking about you, you have no excuse for not having a good product ready for iteration based on your users feedback. The start-up is dead, long live the start-up.

Alfie Dennen is a technologist and so-called entrepreneur. He’s currently hoping that a physical computing art project he’s involved in called Bus-Tops wins the London arc of the Artists Taking The Lead fund.

However, the problem is not actually with the music industry, but with the CD selling industry. There’s an old saying, ‘when all that you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ – if your entire view of what being ‘in music’ is about is shifting CDs, then indeed, the future of the CD selling business looks pretty bleak.

However, most of the statistics relating to this also seem to assume that the kind of spending that went on around the process of releasing CDs is immutable fact of life.

The main problem for the majors is not just a breakdown of the barrier to ownership that CDs put between listeners and music, but that they used to own the marketing channels too – magazines, TV, radio – all required specialist access, which could be charged for. If you had a person in-house at the label who could do those things, then great, you could charge the band’s advance for the work, pay the flunky a pittance, and get paid twice by the band for the same job.

Likewise the recording process – studio time and expertise used to be hugely expensive. But the cost of recording equipment has plummeted, just as the quality of the same has soared. Sure, expertise is still chargeable, but it’s no longer a non-negotiable part of the deal. A smart band with a fast computer can now realistically make a release quality album-length body of songs for less than a grand. (though the question of what is ‘album length’ and why it has any meaning at all is now also up for discussion!)

So against the falling revenue from the sale of music, we need to map the drop in the cost of making, marketing and distributing music. The problem here is that the labels still have most of the infrastructure to do those things. Their business model relies as much on lubricating those wheels as it does putting the music out there. Simply put, it’s much harder to be experimental, personal and fluid in your thinking if your running costs are in the millions-per-year.

What does this actually mean? Well, it means that for me – and the hundreds of thousands of others like me – the process of making and releasing music has never been easier. The task of finding an audience, of seeding the discovery process, has never cost less or been more fun. It’s now possible for me to update my audience and friends (the cross-over between the two is happening on a daily basis thanks to social media tools) about what I’m doing – musically or otherwise – and to hear from them, to get involved in their lives, and for my music to be inspired by them.

I no longer need to pretend to be a rock-star. The mythology of rock ‘n’ roll is nowhere near as interesting as the reality of creativity. Whereas the reality of high-dollar touring, promotional duties, photoshoots etc. is phenomenally dull. That’s why the rock ‘n’ roll myths were created – to cover the tedium that is the day to day reality of most touring musicians. The number that ever made millions from it is so small as to not really be statistically relevant when discussing what’s best for ‘music’ – they just had an enormous media footprint.

So, if things are so great for the indies, does that mean loads of people are making loads of money? Not at all. But the false notion there is that any musicians were before! We haven’t moved from an age of riches in music to an age of poverty in music. We’ve moved from an age of massive debt and no creative control in music to an age of solvency and creative autonomy. It really is win/win.

The machine that was built around selling physical media containing music in the latter half of the 20th century is a statistical blip on a multi-millenia long human relationship with music as an artform. The massive increase in spending on music, music making and music promotion didn’t bring with it a commensurate increase in quality. It did produce a lot of incredible music, most of which would have existed quite happily without the limos, 7-years-in-the-studio and the $2 Million video.

The creative knock-on effect of all these changes is that musicians are now thinking far more imaginatively about what it is that they want to do. The 80s dream of everyone becoming Stadium rock stars has faded, and more and more musicians are looking at fun ways to get to play music in a financially sustainable way. House Concerts, Live streaming, listening parties, free downloads, live video chat, social media competitions and interactive promotion – all ways of musicians creating interest in and around the music they make, and none of them requiring much capital outlay or the involvement of ‘the machine’. Many artists can now make more money playing to 20 people in someone’s living room than they could trying to play rock clubs and bars, and even bands that do play bars are able to play twice as many shows by doing an acoustic house concert tour between the bigger club dates. Once again, win/win.

It looks like the way forward for music is going to be diverse, mobile, personal, niche, fun, cheap and shareable. I’m sure Live Nation will keep putting on stadium gigs for people who really want to see them – U2’s fanbase still has a decade or so before they’re too old to make it up the steps at Wembley – but the life of the average musician is no longer destined to be a series of debasements and indentures at the hands of record labels promising the earth but delivering precious little.

Steve Lawson is a solo bassist who spends a lot of his time making very unbasslike noises. Full Bio here.

“I’m just a face in the crowd,
Nothing to worry about,
Not even tryin’ to stand out,
And I have nothing to say,
It’s all been taken away,
I just behave and obey”

Trent Reznor, Nine Inch Nails, Getting Smaller

Ten years ago our online identity, if we had one at all, was a simple affair to manage, comprising of an email address and perhaps an avatar name or two. Fast forward to the close of the first decade of the 21st century and it’s an altogether more complex affair. You’ve probably got several email addresses, possibly some domain names and then there’s the plethora of social networking sites that you frequent, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, MySpace and so on. All of which define the online version of “you” in much the same way as your passport, driving licence and bank account defines the offline “you”.

The key difference is that the online version of “you” is much more subtle, complex and diffuse. We leave scraps of our path through the internet behind us. At the Being Digital conference in London earlier this year, I tried to explain this with the clumsy phrase “digital dandruff”; in the soon to be published book, “My Digital Footprint”, Tony Fish far more elegiacally describes it as our digital footprint, which is “the digital ‘cookie crumbs‘ that we all leave when we use the some form of digital service, application, appliance, object or device, or in some cases as we pass through or by”.

Managing our digital identity through those sources we know about is a challenge for a significant percentage of the online population. But despite being a challenge, it’s one which is achieveable if you’re willing to put enough time and effort into it. But most of us don’t have the time or are unwilling to put in the effort, so our digital cookie crumbs and the varying online versions of “us” stay online, ready for someone with the time and effort to search for, find and put together with profit in mind.

Some people take an active role in managing their digital footprint and try to exploit it. Some people also try to exploit other people’s digital footprint. Let’s look at a concrete example of this.

Not Your Average Star Trek Reference

My site at garygale.com pulls together a subset of my digital footprint into one place, drawing on my blog, my social bookmarks on Delicious, articles I’ve written, photos from Flickr and presentation decks from talks I’ve given. Inspired by an article written by the Yahoo! Developer Network’s Christian Heilman, garygale.com uses PHP and YQL to dynamically pull in the latest version of all my content so my site is always up to date

Now compare and contrast this information with that available on Spock.com, “the first search engine for finding people on the web”. It’s not as complete as my version, nor formatted as coherently but the key facets of my digital footprint are there. If I wanted to I could add to this digital portrait, supplying tags, biographic information, pictures, quotes and so on.

Spock has crawled the web for my data and it’s created a profile on me, without my permission and without my control. It encourages me to enrich the data held but then requires payment for me to access that information. Now would be a good time to point out that in April 2009, Spock was acquired by Intelius, a company that provides background checks and identity theft protection.

Those that Fail to Learn from History, are Doomed to Repeat It?

Can I stop Spock finding and presenting this information about me, without my request or, more importantly, without my control? Spock’s help page says the following:

“Before requesting removal, please make sure the original source of the information Spock found for you has been removed or made private (MySpace, blog, Friendster, etc). This will prevent you from being re-indexed on the site.”

This means that unless I contact every source that Spock crawls, and not all sources are identified on Spock’s site, and then have each source take down content on me or make them private, Spock will crawl these sources again and find my content and republish it. An evident parallel of this Web 2.0 behaviour is the Web 1.0 problem of large scale harvesting of email addresses for subsequent resale to commercial spammers.

My site speaks for me because I control the information and the way in which it’s presented; Spock’s version of me is out of my control and doesn’t speak for me.

What I do know is that neither the privacy advocates nor the aggressive marketers who want to know all about me – let alone the government that thinks my life should be an open book – can speak for me. I want to make my own decisions about what I disclose, knowing all the while that I cannot control what others say about me.

Esther Dyson

In “My Digital Footprint”, Tony Fish describes a Rainbow of Trust, which categorises people’s online activities as one of Untrusting and Stupid, Untrusting and Wise, Accepting Authority, One Way or My Way.

Untrusting and Stupid give up data without any thought as to the consequences; their online participation is passive and will click on anything, including banners and search ads.

Untrusting and Wise are the opposite of Untrusting and Stupid; they are extremely selective about the information they reveal, concerned about privacy and frequently hide their identify behind multiple digital personas.

Accepting Authority have their computer’s default home page still set, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, etc and are either happy with a portal approach to their online experience or are unwilling or unable to change it. Their digital experience has to work first time, be simple and work with one click.

One Way experiment with one one thing at a time, continuing until they’re happy with it and then move onto another online service.

My Way want it their way, un-tethered, un-filtered and unadulterated, trusting no one until they have mastered it and push the boundaries of what’s possible online.

The readers of this article will (hopefully) fall within a combination of Untrusting and Wise and MY Way, but the reality is that we are but a small percentage of the global population who have access to the Internet, which as of March 2009, numbered around 1,500,000,000.

Two Cultures; Those Who Understand Tech and The Rest of Us

Mentoring programs such as DigitAll go some way to help inform people about their usage of the internet, not only how to use it, but how to use it responsibly and knowledgeably. At this year’s OpenTech in July at the University of London Union, technology critic Bill Thompson lamented the Two Cultures problem; people who understand technology and everyone else. As illustration of this he highlighted how the UK education syllabus places more emphasis on “the ability to format text in Microsoft Word” than on understanding how to use the net and how to identity and protect your digital identity. Until your digital dandruff, crumbs and footprint becomes an integral part of our children’s education, we all have a responsibility to understand what is being done with our personal data and pass this onto our colleagues, our friends and our family.

“Gary Gale is Director of Engineering in the UK for the Geo Technologies group at Yahoo! He blogs and tweets on matters geo for Yahoo! at www.ygeoblog.com and as @yahoogeo and personally at www.garygale.com and www.vicchi.org and as @vicchi. The views expressed in this article are his own and not those of his employer.”

What do you do when you find yourself with a lot more time and a lot less money on your hands than you’re used to? That may be the most important question of 2009.

Start with the numbers: worldwide, the UN estimates as many as 51 million people could become unemployed this year. Here in Britain, if the analysts are right, one million people who currently have jobs won’t do in twelve months’ time. What happens next for those people will shape the kind of society we live in, over the next decade and beyond.

I want to think about some of the ways this situation could play out. In particular, I’m interested in whether the things we’ve learned from social media over the last few years can play a role in lessening the hardship of this recession and shaping the world which comes out the other side.

Why come at the situation from this angle? First, because one of the biggest changes in a country like the UK since the last recession is that most people are networked by the internet and have experienced its potential for self-organising. Whether finding partners through online dating sites, organising birthday parties over Facebook, or Freecycling the contents of the garage – in all kinds of ways, people are using these technologies to connect with others and make things happen, both in the virtual and in the physical space.

Secondly, because a major crisis can create the conditions in which tools and approaches move quickly from the margins to the centre. The London tube bombings turned cameraphones from a teenage fad to a key part of the BBC’s newsgathering process. As Clay Shirky put it last week in his lecture at the LSE, when none of the old tools work, new ones get adopted fast.

My other reason for thinking about the recession from a social media perspective is that I’ve spent the last two years working on a web startup that’s building tools for organising your own education. More generally – from MySociety, to Social Innovation Camp, to funders like 4iP – what’s distinctive about the UK startup scene is the number of people focused on applying self-organising methods to public services and major social issues of one kind or another. If the internet does have an important role to play in finding our way through this global crisis, there are a lot of people here who have been thinking about questions like this for years.

Thinking about needs

Behind the statistics, every story of unemployment will be different; yet there are likely to be common themes. For most people, losing a job will trigger at least three sets of problems:

Practical & Financial – e.g. how do I pay the rent? how do I provide for my family on a much tighter budget? how can I renegotiate my debts? how can I avoid my house being repossessed – or, if I can’t, then what do I do next?

Emotional & Psychological – e.g. how do I face my friends? where do I get my sense of identity from, now I don’t have a job?

Directional – e.g. how do I find work – and what do I do with my time and energy, if I can’t?

These are acute versions of some fairly universal needs: for material security, personal wellbeing and meaningful activity. In other words, the needs of the unemployed aren’t so different, fundamentally, from those of the wider population. Indeed, during a recession, many of those who remain in work face urgent concerns on one or more of these fronts.

How things could play out: the dangers

With a huge wave of unemployment breaking on it, the welfare system is likely to be overwhelmed – at just the moment when it needs to be more responsive than under normal economic circumstances:

“The newly unemployed are not usually a focus of government policy because most will find work quickly. This is not true in a recession, when whole sectors slump and there is little call for previously valuable skills. Decisive government action now will prevent a temporary slide in employment becoming a permanent slump.”

Charles Leadbeater & others, ‘Attacking the Recession’, NESTA

In the early 1980s, millions of people who lost their jobs – or who left education and went straight on the dole – became stuck in long-term unemployment. A quarter of a century later, when official jobless figures had fallen to around a million, researchers estimated that another million people had passed from long-term unemployment on to Incapacity Benefit without working again. (This is not to assume that their benefit claims were not genuine, since long-term unemployment is associated with increased risk of various health problems.)

The nightmare for today’s politicians and policy-makers is that the recession we are living through ends up creating a new tranche of long-term unemployed, locked out of society for a generation. Whether or not that happens will largely be determined in the weeks and months ahead.

How things could play out: the possibilities

If the aim is to avoid unemployment hardening into social exclusion, perhaps part of the answer is a softening of the distinction between employment and unemployment? Or, to put it another way, does the fact that fewer of us will have “jobs” in future mean that more of us have to be “unemployed”, in the sense of having nothing to do and being unable to support ourselves?

One of the most striking tendencies of the internet has been just such a softening of previously hard distinctions. At its best, the result has been to open up a large and fruitful space in between the traditional roles. What eBay did for the space between the garage sale and the retail outlet, YouTube did for the home movie and the TV station. Which was more unthinkable, even a decade ago: that video shot by amateurs on mobile phones would lead TV news bulletins, or that an encyclopedia which anyone could edit would turn out to be anything other than a disaster?

If the idea of applying such blurring of distinctions to something as bread-and-butter as earning a living sounds like a technophile fantasy, consider one of the programmes that got the United States through the Great Depression. The Works Progress Administration took on millions of Americans between 1935 and 1943, with the aim of ensuring that heads of household who received relief money from the government also had something to do. It left an impressive legacy, from road networks and bridges, to its list of literary and artistic alumni (among them Saul Bellow, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock). All the same, it seems questionable how far WPA employment resembled job creation in the normal sense. “How many people does it take to do one WPA job?” ran the joke. “Three. One on his way to the bathroom, one on his way back from the bathroom, and one leaning on the shovel pretending to work.”

Where the aim of employment under normal circumstances is economic production, the main objective of the WPA was to take millions of men and women out of the soul-destroying situation of endless unemployment – whether their activities were particularly productive was a secondary concern. In other words, the programme blurred the line between employment and unemployment, and did so effectively enough that it is currently being suggested as a model for the British government to imitate.

The question is whether there are other ways, besides the creation of such quasi-jobs, that a space can be opened up between employment and unemployment – and whether social media, directly or indirectly, can contribute to this.

Some ideas for a way forward

What follows is not a road-map for how social media and collaborative culture can be applied to the recession, but a collection of ideas which have come out of conversations over the last few weeks.

(1) Tools for all, not just the unemployed

This is really a design principle, rather than a specific idea. If, as I’ve suggested, the needs of the unemployed tend to be acute versions of needs that apply to a broader range of people, it should be possible to design tools and services which are open to all, but have particular value to those with more time and less money. If, on the other hand, these are walled off as exclusively for the unemployed, this will reinforce social exclusion. Worse, it will stifle creativity by artificially limiting the range of possible interactions and connections.

(The value of this approach towards open access is something I learned first-hand over several years hanging out at Access Space in Sheffield, the UK’s longest-running internet learning centre. Everyone who uses the space is there because they walked in off the street, and as a (then) BBC journalist, I found myself learning to build my own website alongside guys who in some cases had been on the dole for much of their adult lives, and for whom the space offered a route to starting a business, getting a skilled job, or getting funding for their creative activities.)

(2) User-generated resource maps

At the level of practical and financial needs, being unemployed means losing access to the market as a source of resources. Freecycle and LiftShare have shown how useful the internet can be for connecting people to free resources – and creating social interactions in the real world along the way. An online platform for sharing information about all kinds of free or cheap resources could give people a way to help each other and themselves – and would be useful to anyone looking to reduce their cost of living.

(3) Free internet access for the unemployed?

The government is already preparing a national programme of free computers and broadband access for low income families with school-age children. This recognition of internet access as an essential service for learners should be extended to those who are out of work. Shouldn’t the government pick up the bill for your internet connection while you’re on the dole, to avoid pushing you over the digital divide?

(4) Collaborative spaces in the real world

If we want to soften the distinction between employment and unemployment, one of the most effect means would be the spread of real world spaces which reflect the collaborative values of social media. What I have in mind are places where learning, making, collaborating, hanging out and starting new projects happen alongside one another. Examples already exist:

• Media labs on the model of Access Space or the Brasilian Pontos de Cultura programme, which has applied this approach on a national scale
• Coworking spaces and social media cafes (like London’s Tuttle Club)
• Fab Labs for manufacturing, as already exist from Iceland to Afghanistan
• studio spaces like TenantSpin, the micro-TV station in Liverpool based in a flat in a towerblock – and like many other examples in the world of Community Media

Again, if these spaces are to work, access to them should be open, not restricted to the unemployed. (If, as some are predicting, we see the return of the three day week, the value of spaces like this open to all becomes even more obvious.) In order for this to work, such spaces would need to be organised with the understanding that hanging out can be as valuable as more visibly productive activities – both because of the resilience that comes from building social connections, and because of the potential for information sharing and the sparking of new projects. There would also be a need for incubator spaces for projects that emerge from these spaces and are ready to move to the next level.

(There is a rich – if unexpected – source of inspiration for this kind of collaborative space in the history of the 19th century mutual improvement societies, reading clubs and other self-organised, working class institutions. For example, the church halls and upstairs rooms of pubs where many of them met are still common enough – and would be worth exploring as possible venues for a group trying to set up such a space today.)

What’s next?

This has been a sketch of some ideas and some ways of thinking about how social media could engage with the recession. What is needed is both a broader conversation – and the kind of rapid experiments at putting ideas into practice which the startup world is good at. The good news is that this is already starting to happen, with events like the Hacking the Recession day which Mamading Ceesay is organising in London this Friday (13/2/09).

It started in 2002 and we had an Alpha launch in 2003. It was ridiculously early to market. Back in 2002 most normal people (i.e. those for whom a “tweet” today is still something only birds do) did not know what a social network was, let alone a mobile location-based social network. Thanks to MySpace, Facebook and the inevitable march of technology, even my own mother is now aware of social networking, SMS and GPS.

By 2005 Google had bought our main competitor Dodgeball and although the mobile operators were still charging for Cell ID lookups (ludicrously, they are STILL trying to!) I already believed it was only a matter of time before location became a commodity. It would too easy to do for start-ups to do and even easier for others such as Facebook, which was on its ascent.

I decided that “who’s nearby?” was never going to create a multi-million pound business and I made three predictions, some which are still relevant today:

* GPS will be in every phone as cameras were then becoming. (GPS chipsets are extremely cheap, power consumption is becoming lower, processing power higher and Galileo is on the horizon -literally, haha).
* One of the gorillas (Google, Yahoo et al) will release a free Cell ID/Location API. (Google have and its excellent).
* “Who’s nearby” will also become a commodity

For the last 2 years I’ve been telling any start-up which is building its own Cell ID database, that it must be mad. I see no business model. Google about as likely to charge for Cell ID lookup as it is for its maps API; and that likelihood is slim.

There was (and is) money to be made with tracking and Cell ID technology, but both industries begin with “S” and neither spell the world “Social”. Instead, it is Security (child tracking, staff tracking) and of course Sex (proximity dating, adult services); infact any vertical where a premium can be demanded – we know that fear and shagging both command strong emotions which can result in a buying decision. Wondering “Where are my friends?” does not; unless of course you’re intensely paranoid or have VERY accommodating friends.

There is no mobile internet: there is only the internet.

This has been my other crusade for the last 2 years; and this is probably what Google believes too. What I mean is, that fix-line world-wide-web access is the black & white TV of the internet. Amazing in itself, but without the full functionality of what we recognise as “television” today.

Location, portability and the need for personalisation (a mobile being such a small, personal device) are the three missing dwarfs which give us our Seven Dwarfs of the modern internet. (The first four were IMHO: the web browser as user interface, freedom to publish without government or minority corporate control, always-on fixed cost access, and broadband bandwidth; Snow White being the internet itself).

So in the near future (3-5years?) no one will talk of the “mobile” internet but simply, the internet. You will have an iphonesque device (in size & looks if not in O/S which you take home and plug into your 24″ screen and keyboard …we’ve still a decade to go before we type goodbye to Mr Qwerty and say hello to HAL.

Be under no delusion, Latitude is Googles Trojan horse into the social networking space.

After Googles purchase of Dodgeball it was clear they had every intention to roll out a service such as Latitude and they are perfectly positioned to do so.

Almost by-passing online social networking entirely (aside from Orkut which only took hold in Brazil) I believe Google will pursue a wide-reaching mobile social play. Google will build up a critical mass of users on Latitude; and they will join because:

* It is Google (so its trustworthy; yes still)
* It’s easy to use – simple UI and simple privacy model: Automatic, Manual or Hide your location (or as I prefer: Honest, Lie or Paranoia)
* It has reach (27 countries at launch, lots of handsets, no GPS required)
* It’s free

They will then likely launch an API (in the process solving some of the standardisation and interconnectivity problems – possibly using the new OAuth hybrid or equivalent) but also roll out other functionality enhancements. Although the latter may take longer than you think.

Latitude has lots wrong with it too e.g. Gmail import only (where is XFN Social Graph import or device address book comparison?) status update is crying out for Twitter integration and a hook into FireEagle (with which Latitude does not compete, yet) would all be very welcome (the last two are unlikely for political reasons but would be a fantastic nod to the open ecosystem) and don’t forget part of Latitude’s beauty is its simplicity; and Google have time on their side.

Many of us have been waiting for location-based services to come of age for YEARS! but in reality we’re still in the early adopter curve. In fact, I’d go even further than that. At BeingDigital in 2008 I stated on stage to a deluge of ridicule, that Social Networking wasn’t yet main stream. The laughing continued until I asked how many parents AND siblings of delegates had email? The answer was predictable: virtually everyone. Then I asked how many parents and siblings were also on a social network; over 75% of the hands dropped.

150 million people on Facebook is a lot, but 3.2 billion people have mobile phones: that’s a lot more. Email is mainstream, social networking is still maturing. Eventually it will of course become part of everything we do “online” rather than be a destination, with your social graph becoming portable and also actually owned by you, not FaceSpace.

So what does this all mean?

1) Location is already commodity AND your friends location will become a commodity. Any service will be able to plug in and use this data (with the right permissions). Its already happening – checkout Yahoo’s FireEagle which is an aggregator of location between services.

2) If you’re a start-up building LBS, Cell ID, friends nearby services, or anything else which is being commoditised as we speak, see above. Loopt; west coast startup run by a bright 24 year old entreprenuer – nice guy, flawed business plan. $13million+ in funding, nudging just 1 million users after 3 years with low engagement metrics. Differentiator? There isn’t one. Case closed, game over.

3) If you’re running anything with the words “mobile social network” in the title, lock yourself in a room with your team and work out how you’re going to save your business. That means innovate. Mobile is not a differentiator, its an inevitability.

At Le Web 07 I met with Christian, Founder of Skout. He had built a cool location based mobile social network (LoMoSoSo anyone?). By Q1 2008 when I met him in San Francisco, he’d already realised that competition was fierce and the concept was flawed — and that was before the gorillas had waded in. I implored him to change strategy (something which in fact he’d already started doing). He chose dating. It’s a smart move. Dating generates money-and lots of it. Proximity dating, or in fact “mobile dating” in general has never been done really well (even Mr Arrington agrees).

As a LBS start-up, you need to think about adding distinctive value for users; differentiating on location is an oxymoron. I know some of you are making money, some of the pure play mobile social networks are even profitable – great. But there’s an iceberg ahead and it may be bigger than it looks: just ask Captain Edward John Smith.

The future is relevance; the context of not only where I am but what I’m doing, who I am, where I will be. In summary: It’s about the data, stupid.

And that will be what I write about in my next post.

This was a guest post from Andrew Scott, CEO of Rummble

Why a rock? Well, one of the oldest forms of art is that of Geoglyphs. The Britglyph project represents one of the newest forms of art: locative art. As well as this homage to our ancestors attempts at leaving a lasting record of their existence, there is another more practical reason for using rocks as part of the work: by taking rocks to these locations and leaving them there not only does the artwork exist online, but it is made a physical reality.

Before I set out on this, I needed expert guidance on whether what I was attempting would actually be considered a Geoglyph, so I needed to track down a Landscape Archeologist. I managed to speak with Dr Joshua Pollard, Dept. of Archeology and Anthropology, University of Bristol and he said

“Historically Geoglyphs had physical faces and their size was restricted. The Britglyph project is a wonderful innovation, bringing Geoglyphs to life using modern technology on a grand scale.”

So in at least one experts opinion, what we’re doing can certainly be considered a geoglyph. Don’t you think that’s wild? That we’re creating a work of art which *is* one of the oldest forms, but can only be viewed through the mediating lens of a web browser and online map? I think that’s just WILDLY COOL! It questions the nature of public art, and even art itself: If the only way you can see the work created is through this web browser, and people have left a rock in some field somewhere, is that really art? Does it even exist?

The title above is not exactly misleading, but in many ways the Britglypyh projects stated ambition of creating the world’s largest image is just a headline grabbing trick to get people talking about the project. What it actually is is an experiment in how social networks can be exploited to engage people across large geographical regions to achieve a shared aim. Certainly yes, when completed the Britglyph project will arguably have created the largest image ever made, but it is an experiment in social media on a massive scale, networked collaboration, rather than an attempt at some kind of Guiness world record.

By fusing mobile blogging, geotagging/geolocation, physical travel and a shared aim, the Britglyph project is an experiment in mass collaboration, bringing people together to participate in creating an image across all of Great Britain. The aim itself is something of a red herring though; what if this combination of technologies and networks was harnessed for mass activism?

Imagine: 500 people, each at a specific location, at a specific time, somewhere in the world, armed with nothing more than a cameraphone and a persistent connection to the internet. Imagine that their positions when taken together and plotted on an online/mobile map as in the Britglyph model created a protest image; a peace sign or Bob’s face. What else might now be possible at the interstice of art and these technologies?

I am hopeful that I will be able to raise the funds to make the technology we created to power the Britglyph project (as well as the Find Me project) available publicly. There are only a few parts to the whole platform:

• the moblog backend (we need to do some more work on our API to make this easier) for media/locative stuff
• a mapping interface where you can add/remove map markers and “draw” the image you are setting out to create
• a list of lat/long data which is then used by participants
• a flash/flex environment using open source map data to display the artwork created
• What also needs to be created to make it a truly useful platform is a mobile discovery tool – probably a QR code generator and sticker printout so that each participant can physically tag their location with something that other people can then discover.
• Participative hooks – a way for people to discover locations yet to be visited and posted from

I don’t know whether this is something a lot of people will do, my gut tells although there will be many who will, it’s not some massive socially networky thing; it’s a collaborative locative art platform that can be used in a number of ways: Imagine, hidden images drawn by thousands of people all over the world, peeking out from just below the surface of reality on the streets we all walk along, personal stories, mysterious narratives you can explore and take part in.

Britglyph has been an awful lot of fun to do, but more than anything I hope that it helps in demonstrating how this approach can be used as the basis for a new paradigm of mass participation.

But unlike 18 years ago, this time I knew where the snow was falling, in real-time, and exactly what was happening with the trains too. How? Because of the power of mass collaboration. In a twist of fate, those new tools enabled me to embark on my journey to London this evening to listen to Clay Shirky talk about that very subject at LSE.

Clay Shirky delivers a précis of “Here comes everybody“ (now available in paperback: UK|US) in these 5 words: Group action just got easier. The book is something of a reference text for proponents of the power of social networks, and a concept will be familiar to readers of CauseWired.

Clay’s roots go deep back into the early days of the Internet. He has studied and written about them at length. Clay says that there are two things he has learnt from the last 15 years: Fast is different than slow and big is different than small. That might sound obvious, but it is actually profound in understanding these new tools.

“When it comes to networks, you can’t just extrapolate from small and slow to understanding the dynamics of large and fast.” Clay Shirky

Today’s networks, both in terms of telecommunications and social tools, are certainly both large and fast. In conversations I often frame the issue as quantitative change versus qualitative change. Technology that gains traction creates one or both of these. Quantitative changes are simply being able to do what we did before, but faster or larger. Qualitative changes are ones that fundamentally alter what we do or the way in which we do it.

It would seem logical that the linear nature of quantitative changes would make them much easier to predict (small and slow to large and fast), while qualitative changes would be more difficult, because of their disruptive nature. At least that is the commonly received wisdom. My experiences with technology say it doesn’t actually work that way.

People mis-predict technologies and put them into the wrong one of these buckets. Entrepreneurs usually believe they have something that produces a qualitative change, when it is actually a quantitative one. Conversely, many technologies that produce quantitative changes at first go on to affect society in a qualitatively way. The automobile changed how quickly we could get from A to B. Slow to Fast. Quantitative. But in doing so it changed where we could work, then our social circle and, ultimately, how society itself is constructed.

Lots of people view social media and social networking sites as agents of qualitative change. I think that doing so both overstates and understates them. Imagine, for a minute, that mass media had never happened. No radio. No TV. No newspapers. Wouldn’t it be quiet? You’d be able to hear the conversations.

Now, introduce social software. You’d have a nice linear move towards conversations that can take place across the globe rather than across the living room. From conversations with several people to ones that include hundreds. Sound familiar? They might include multimedia objects like photographs and videos too. The latter makes it tempting to compare phenomena like Facebook and Twitter to television or radio. That really isn’t a useful comparison. While they can, and do, turn into broadcast tools, with a single video receiving millions of views, they are misunderstood when viewed in that frame. What we are looking at is a return to a bigger faster version of conversations that were, rather that something that has never been.

Back to professor Shirky: We live in a time where tools like these, that lower the hassle factor of finding one and other and enabling collaboration, are changing the way that society works. Tools that started their life in the technical community have now spread out to touch every aspect of today’s society.

In the last 48 hours alone the BBC had tens of thousands of people sharing pictures and videos of the snow fall in the UK. I’ve watched myself and other Twitter users use the #uksnow tag, followed by the first part of their post code and a rating in messages to created data that produced a real-time view of the snow situation around the UK (thanks to an app built by Ben Marsh).

Another Ben, Ben Smith, has produced uktrains – a twitter feed with the very latest information on what is happening to train services in the disruption (there’s a wiki and a post about both of these on TechCrunch).

It’s all about the Benjamins, as a US rapper once said. Actually, it isn’t. These apps were both free. They might not be perfect – how do people agree on what constitutes a 4/10 rather than a 8/10 snow rating? – but they are more than “good enough” and certainly much better than the nothing that was before.

How much investment would have been required to build systems like this prior to web 2.0 and mass user contributed data? The user contribution of data is a major disruptor for traditional publishers and information services. If people are prepared to do what was once paid a job for free, that changes business models, at the very least.

We are in the midst of massive value destruction. Somewhere value creation is going on, but we haven’t quite found out where yet. On-line bulletin boards launched in the 1980’s, so the papers have had 20 years to get ready. While the world has changed around them, they have remained static.  ”This isn’t the transition from business model a to model b,” said Clay, “it is the transition from business a to business models b-z.” While a paper might report that X has happened, social media says X has happened, and this is what you can go and do about it.

Clay cited the example of the MySociety campaign, via a Facebook group, that saw Parliament reverse its attempt to conceal MP’s expenses. He also recounted the counter example of President Obama’s change.gov website. Within a short time after its launch, legalising Marijuana (for medical uses) was voted as the top public policy question facing America. As Clay notes, perhaps it ought to be a little lower down the list with matters like two wars and some collapsing banks that have to be dealt with – although I wonder if there might be some correlation there.

Clearly mass collaboration isn’t going to solve every problem. For the first time in public, Clay said, “I don’t think the technology is ready for the mass legitimisation of initiatives… …There need to be checks and balances applied”. That is a big, and wise, shift from his previously utopian view of what could be achieved. I’ve posted about crowds not providing the wisest answer for every situation before. When we think about the idea of direct access into the political process, we might want to think carefully about what exactly we are wishing for. The tools are fantastic for gathering feedback and generating content, but decision making requires a degree of sophistication that the tools do not provide, yet.

The problem now is not technical capability, it is legitimacy. Under what circumstances do you take the advice from user generated media and when do you ignore it? On-line we can’t do “one person one vote” – the basis of the democratic franchise – so we can’t legitimise it.

The problem is one for business leaders too. The answer may end up coming from government. What (now President) Obama started on the campaign trail, he will have to continue into the Whitehouse. Having opened the door to mass collaboration, that crowd is still looking over his shoulder and will not accept being shut out. Once you build a community, it doesn’t conveniently go away when you no longer have a need for it, it has a life of its own (something to note for businesses that just dabble in social media).

This will be a new and interesting phase for the tools of mass collaboration. ”It is not just about politics, it is about government, and they are subtly different things,” observes Shirky.

Past and present

The role of the Information Architect is to sit at the nexus of business, audience and technology, and to negotiate the interests, needs and expectations of each group.  That is – to communicate a shared understanding that translates the esoteric language of an organisation’s inner workings into the common parlance of everyday people.  This dialogue is mediated by the capabilities (and constraints) of the technology platform that serves as the interface between the two.

Our role, to some, has become synonymous with the tools of the trade; wireframes, diagrammes, blueprints, and sitemaps – our artefacts. However, the skill involved in “map-making” is only at the periphery of what we do.  These residuals are simply the representation of a concept. The real skill is in the activities leading up to these concrete objects, and in our ability as “sense-makers.”

We make sense of what our clients want to build, or create.

We help our clients describe their own mental model of how they envisage an interactive service, and we match that with the ‘design image’ of that service – that is, how people will actually perceive it, once it’s built.

Our tools allow us articulate this model, in ever increasing detail, and to continually test it with the audience to ensure that model and image are aligned. Intention meets perception.

I belabour this point, because the future trends I will describe in this article will point toward the obsolescence of our current tools. So if the role and the tools of the Information Architect become conflated in the minds of our clients, our role too could become an outdated artefact of the Web 2.0 era.

The Future

There are five trends that I believe will have such a great impact on the industry that we’ll find it necessary to redefine the practice.

1. Web of Conversation

– Narratives replace Navigation

2. Hyperlocal Awareness

– an API into the Real World

3. Internet of Things

– the Environment is the Platform

4. Omniscience of Crowds

– the Dissolution of Expert Authority

5. Fun follows Function

– Architects of Delightful Experiences

I’ve deliberately left the “semantic web” off of the list.  I see the semantic web as a machine problem, not a people problem. If we stay focussed on creating innovative, useful and usable services – I believe the semantic layer will emerge as a consequence.

Trend #1 – Web of Conversation

The points originally outlined in The Cluetrain Manifesto ( http://www.cluetrain.com/ ) are just starting to, well– manifest themselves through “Web 2.0″ innovations and social media services. The authors pointed to the breaking of the fourth wall in media communications. They described markets as conversations, and that consumers would turn away from “1-to-many” messages preferring instead personal, “1-on-1″ dialogues.

So how do you model a conversation?  The current tools of the Information Architect are inadequate.  At present, one of our tools is to create pen-portraits or personas to represent market segments and audience groups – to create a human face for the underlying demographic data or ethnographic research.  However, just as you wouldn’t sound very interesting at a dinner party if you’d prepared 6 or 7 scripts to address different categories of people you might meet – creating personas for audience segments will not work in the medium of conversation.

In thinking about these issues, I continually find myself returning to the work of Christopher Alexander for inspiration.  In his definition of “pattern languages” as applied to the architecture of buildings, he wrote:

A pattern language is a system which allows its users to create an infinite variety of those three dimensional combinations of patterns which we call buildings, gardens and towns. (The Timeless Way of Building, 1979)

If you replace “three dimensional” with “online” and “buildings, gardens and towns” with “digital experiences,” it holds true for Information Architecture as well.

What better way to model conversations than to use a language?  It’s appropriate to think of our designing a language, rather than a system, because a language is meant to be used, adopted, and “made your own” as a uniquely individual form of self-expression – which is the basis of an authentic conversation.

How do you develop and communicate a language?   By using a narrative.  The role of the Information Architect will be to find the right narrative….a narrative that then can be easily retold.  To find this narrative, the starting point must be an essential human truth, expressing, at its heart, a fundamental need, want or desire that resonates emotion with anyone and everyone.

Once found, that universal truth will allow any person, from any demographic segment, to make the narrative her own.

Trend #2 – Hyperlocal Awareness

FireEagle, Dopplr, BrightKite, Google Maps, location-aware mobiles – these are just some of the services and devices that are seamlessly integrating geolocation into their offering.  Soon, we will be able to take for granted that we can determine the location of anyone when they are online.

The Flatland ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland) of the internet is now being wrapped around and layered upon the real world.

Web 2.0 is about mash-ups – using the web service-to-service interfaces (APIs) for pulling and remixing information from one online coordinate and plugging it in to another, to create a third, hybrid service.  With the emergence of hyperlocal awareness, we’ll be able to pull this information from the real world itself. It becomes an API into the real world.

For instance, do you want to know what type of music is playing in one of the Kavarnas in Prague?  You can already do this today.  Given the right incentive, you might convince PragueBob ( http://twitter.com/praguebob ), or another Prague local from the Twitter community, to go there and tell you.  However, as the technology evolves, you won’t need to incentivise anyone.  The data will be readily available from any number of sources.  For instance, maybe I allow a programme like Shazam ( http://www.shazam.com/ ) to run continually in the background on my mobile phone. It identifies each song it overhears and then geotags and uploads it to the server where anyone can access that information feed.

For the Information Architect this means that where we would once design a service for a platform (i.e. a computer, a mobile device, a television) – now we must take into account platform and setting.  Both the what and where of an activity are now relevant.

Trend #3 – Internet of Things

If hyperlocal awareness means that there will be a constant stream of information flowing inward from our surrounding environment, the devices we use – our means of interacting with the internet, will dissolve outwardly onto our surroundings. The environment is the platform.

In language of Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI), the Information Architect would model the interaction between the ’system’ and the ‘user’.  However, the system is now the whole of the surrounding environment, so we will need a new language and set of tools to model environmental interactive behaviours.

We will need to understand multimodal interaction that includes gestures, positioning and proximity.  We will have to redefine our understanding of feedback and display mechanisms.  What was once a computer screen, will become an entire digital ecosystem of devices able to communicate information in a multitude of ways – providing visual, auditory and/or tactile feedback.

The role of the Information Architect, just as it was to write the narrative, will also be to act as the stage director in this theatre of interaction.  For instance, you could change the mood lighting to reflect an alert in the stock market.

The challenge will be to apply the core skill of being a ’sense-maker’ to the exponentially growing tide of data available to anyone at any time, and to translate the raw data into a rich, multilayered and meaningful experience that will be able to communicate far more information than text or images alone ever could.

Trend #4 – Omniscience of Crowds

The concept put forward in James Surowicki’s The Wisdom of Crowds ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wisdom_of_Crowds ) is that the aggregate knowledge of “the many” will outperform the ability of the expert “few”. The popular term for the wisdom of crowds in action is crowdsourcing, with Wikipedia as its most visible example.

I’m suggesting that this concept will be pushed even further.  Crowdsourcing implies that an organisation delegates the solving of a particular problem to the online population. With the Ominscience of Crowds, this power dynamic will shift.  Rather than the authority residing with the business or organisation, the power and authority resides with the customer or audience.

Businesses, and the Information Architect, will need to assume that they are not the most informed or expert when compared to the whole of their audience.  This means the dissolution of expert authority.

In practical terms, this means a shift from selling or marketing to customers, to listening and responding to them.  And understanding that, collectively, your customers will change your business operations.

The Information Architect (and this may actually become a specialised field within Information Architecture) will need to move beyond understanding the goals and objectives of a business to understanding business operations and logistics.

The audience, the crowd, en masse will behave like a giant organism – changing and adapting while seeking out efficiencies in terms of price, time and customisation.  Companies that cannot change their processes equally as quickly will be made obsolete by “micro-providers” who can do something small, and singularly focussed.

The Information Architect will need to sell tools to the client that facilitate organisational change, rather than selling complete solutions that will need to be redesigned and redeveloped in cycles.

Trend #5 – Fun follows Function

Given the evolutionary nature and competitive climate of the web, the internet will selectively breed the best – in terms of form and function – for all the different types of online behaviours.  This would eventually happen even if information architects weren’t involved at all.  Of course, no business can be run by trial and error, and so we do have a role in the current market.

Still, the trend suggests that we will soon have a comprehensive library of design patterns to cover nearly every mode of online behaviour.

So where does that leave the Information Architect?  If the patterns work, then you won’t need a senior practitioner to apply the rules – that is the role of a junior draughtsman.  However, maturity and ability of an artisan will still be required to craft delightful experiences.

As with other forms of narrative, there exist tropes – or rules that define the basic structure of a particular narrative.  But routinely following a set of instructions is not likely to result in the next award-winning film any more than applying patterns will result in a delightful experience.  We will need to become the Architects of Delightful Experiences.

From Hypertext to Hypercontext

All of these trends are based on people having access to information and a heightened awareness about the world – trends that enrich the context of their lives. The context around people, and the understanding gained through conversations (Web of Conversation), or gleaned from their collective wisdom and expertise (Omniscience of Crowds). It is the context around physical, real objects (Internet of Things) and the world they and we inhabit (Hyperlocal Awareness). Finally, it is about how we, as curious human beings, explore this world of richly contextualised experiences – quite simply by being playful and seeking out things that give us delight (Fun follows Function)

For the future of Information Architecture, it is a change from the design of hypertext, as in the interactive design of objects on a device or webpage – to the design of hypercontext, which is the interaction of the objects we perceive in the world around us.

And an exciting future it is.

Credit: Aaron Koblin: http://www.aaronkoblin.com/

Digital Cartography of course. While paper maps aren’t going to die, its a limited medium and all the fun stuff is going on in the digital sphere. Remember this – all paper maps are produced from huge amounts of data, 1s and 0s describing our planet down to centimetre accuracy. The AtoZ in the bottom of your bag, the grimy tube map stuck to the station wall and the dog-eared road atlas in the glove box are all renderings of digital data. Lets make it really simple:

A Map = Data x Visualisation

So the paper map and the online equivalent are produced in similar ways, but the output medium is different. True, I can draw on my paper map but apart from that there isn’t much else you can do with it. The online map opens up a whole new world of possibilities, and while we’re at it lets not limit it to an online map. In many circumstances a map is perfect, in other contexts I might not want to see a map at all, just directions. There is a raft of location enabled applications out there, from your mobile phone to your car navigation system to the browser you’re using now. Its a really exciting time to be a neogeographer, especially when you read articles like Trendwatching’s 2009 Briefing which declares “maps are the new interface”.

Web2.0 isn’t possible without APIs and web services. Indeed, back at the Where2.0 Conference in 2005, Tim O’Reilly pronounced “Google Maps with CraigsList is the first Web 2.0 application.” The recent proliferation of map mashups and location enabled devices points to a big future for location. As any geo-geek will tell you, “its all about the data”, and the rise of Web2.0 and semantics (well, its getting better) has fuelled these fires. Looking at ProgrammableWeb’s API directory, three of the top ten APIs are mapping services:

Top Ten APIs from www.programmableweb.com

There is also the larger trend of companies opening up their services with APIs, and the possibilities now are just so much greater with all that data being piped around the world. Visiting Flickr tells me that 2.7million photos have been geotagged this month alone. The mapping services are out there, the data is too and people are flinging mashups together all over the place.

The history of this discipline was grounded in the traditional RDBMS; chunks of data sitting in a machine on the same network as you, that you have control over. Now I treat the cloud as my database – I can juice data from any API, mash it with my own data, stir in some geotagged photos from Flickr and serve on a GoogleMaps platter to any device. Suddenly Everything Has Changed.

Where do we go from here?

The fundamentals remain the same: data and visualisation. This is going to come in two sections, first a sober look at visualisation and then a ranting finale about data.

Visualisation

We need to make better location enabled apps; getting some points on a slippy map was a triumph in 2005 but its getting pretty stale in 2009. I love the variety we get with paper maps, the styling, the history and sense of culture that comes through a vintage map (remember seeing your first map that wasn’t centred on your home country?) Nearly everything on the web is so, so homogeneous. Now I’m not criticising Google Maps, they provide a wonderful service that I use extensively myself but right now we have a one-size-fits-all mapping paradigm. The little variety that’s out there comes from someone using Yahoo! Maps instead of the Google.

A paper map was limited in its interactivity, slippy maps are limited too: they are pre-rendered image tiles that fit neatly together in the browser that you can drag around with the mouse but you can’t do anything more. I can layer as much data as I like over the top, but I can’t access the underlying data because its just a static pre-rendered map tile.

Michal Migurski of Stamen Design has written an excellent piece about a talk he gave called ‘Tiles Then, Flows Now’ over here at his blog. Its a fascinating piece, about moving beyond map tiles to flows of data, utilising real time web technologies and even a little game development theory in there. However, as someone so wisely told me, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

I want to talk about vectors, the underlying data that is used to create those map tiles that everybody is so busy throwing data on top of. Why is this important? Look at a regular search engine, it understands text but it can’t read text written in an image. The text is locked in the image and no amount of searching is going to find it, take that text out of the image and record it as HTML and suddenly you have a very searchable site. Exactly the same principle applies to mapping applications – expose the underlying vector data and it becomes searchable, queryable and customisable.

Right now, none of this is possible with any of the current crop of mapping services, presumably because they pay huge sums of money to get that vector data, process it, host it, and want people to use their own services. Some enlightened countries have openly shared all public mapping datasets but this is by no means wide-spread. Enter OpenStreetMap, the crowdsourced movement to create a free map of the world. Without going into too much detail, its gained massive traction and has better data in some areas than the traditional mapping agencies, worse in others. It is by no means complete but it is improving all the time, and crucially the vector data is available under the Creative Commons licence.

So, if you’re a hardcore developer, roll up those sleeves, download some data and delve into the Mapnik documentation and start making your own beautiful customised maps. One of the best examples of this is OpenCycleMap, its completely customised to show the most relevant information to cyclists.  Note the contour styling, cycle routes are highlighted and the display of public toilets that has been queried out of the OSM data:

OpenCycleMap Customised Styling: http://www.opencyclemap.org

Now this isn’t for everyone, its time consuming and requires a lot of specialist knowledge. Indeed, many people do want an interface and style that is familiar, fine, choose what suits the project best. If you’re creating a map to show the location of one shop, then a simple pushpin on a GMap is all you need. Interestingly, CloudMade the startup creating mapping services with OpenStreetMap data is aiming for the middle ground between these two extremes. They expose enough control over the vector data to allow custom map styling without the headaches involved in a full Mapnik implementation. I would expect the other major players to follow suit and start to offer MapCSS as part of their APIs.

So the challenge is to think of what’s relevant to the user and site style – do they need to see every minor street, should I emphasise certain features, can I match the map’s palette with the site’s? Start making beautiful, customised maps.

Data

We all now what a map is, its a diagram that tries to represent the real world on a flat piece of paper. As a geographer, there is something deeply comforting about a map; its something I understand, that tells me about the world, where I need to go, where things are and what they look like. There is something almost Victorian about it, an obsession with putting the world in order – controlling space. Lets ponder that thought: if you understand something then you can control it, if you can control it then you own it. Property. I’m no Marxist, but issues of ownership and the control of information have been the main preoccupation of governments since they were established.

The Ordnance Survey, the UK’s national mapping agency, has its origins in the quashing of the Jacobean uprising in the Scottish highlands. The military needed maps to protect, plan and control the UK and it was only in 1983 that it became a civilian government organisation. Until recently this model worked well, map making was an expensive and labour intensive process and the format for delivery was always the same, a paper map. Things have changed a bit since then.

How do you get your information? As an Agit8 reader I assume you’re pretty tech savvy. Our methods of interacting with information have been blown away by computers and the internet, and more recently the mobile phone. When I’m looking for a book I don’t go to a library and search through index cards, I Google it. When I’m driving somewhere I don’t carry around a massive road atlas and five 1:25,000 maps, I punch in the destination on my car navigation system and it takes me there.

The methods of interacting with data have changed, but those producing it haven’t. Anyone who has dealt with the Ordnance Survey can tell you just how restrictive their licensing terms are. Indeed, the Show Us a Better Way competition was held last year to encourage the civilian masses to come up with innovative ideas to mashup government data. It was a very Governement2.0 initiative from the Cabinet Office, and innovative approaches like this must be applauded, the reality of licensing geo data is somewhat different. You can only imagine the look on their faces when the OS promptly informed public bodies that using any data derived from an OS map cannot be used on an online mapping platform (apart from their own). So that was pretty much every idea out the window then.

We are faced with the rather ridiculous situation that every public body pays another public body, the OS, for mapping data. Then, if they create any new information with reference to the OS maps, like recording the location of every public toilet, then that data is classified as “derived data”. This derived data effectively cannot be shared with anyone who isn’t also licensing data from the OS. Confused? Essentially, it means that nearly every government dataset with any kind of location information is under lock and key. Its not just the OS, they receive a regular bashing from the Guardian but all aspects of government data policy are out of whack.

Things are in a real tangle here, various government departments are trying to free up data to encourage innovation and the information economy, but how can this be accomplished? There are real positive steps that can be taken to start loosening the bonds that tie publicly owned datasets. Start by reading the excellent “Power of Information Review”, commissioned by the Cabinet Office and was the instigation for the Show Us a Better Way competition.  It is a sign of the government waking up, the juggernaut is slowly turning but needs prodding and poking to get it on the right track. Following its publication The Power of Information Task Force was established by Tom Watson MP. If you’re a Twitter fan, you can follow him here.

The Office of Public Sector Information has an ‘Unlocking Service’, make a request for access to information and they are supposed to unlock it for you. I am not sure of the success rating of this service but the idea is sound, try it here.

Perhaps more effective is the MySociety run ‘What Do They Know‘ where you can easily make a Freedom of Information request and monitor its progress. What’s more any data that is released is automatically posted online so that anyone can access and use it.  So USE IT!  Put in requests, work the system and start unlocking some of the value in public datasets, mash it and get it out there.

But what about the maps you say? Well without wishing to repeat myself I have to refer back to OpenStreetMap. If you want truly free data, that you can edit, share and do whatever you want with then pick up a GPS unit and start mapping. Then make some beautiful maps.