digital living

So this morning I read some quite astounding figures about the growth of digital content and data. Research by technology consultancy IDC estimates that the 'digital universe' grew by 62% last year to 800,000 petabytes (a petabyte is a million gigabytes). To put that into context, according to The Guardian that's enough to fill 75Bn iPads and is a digital output equivalent to the entire population of the Earth tweeting continously for a century (God forbid).

I am very happy to announce that my new book, Personal Connections in the Digital Age, can now be previewed on Google Books. It will be out in the next few weeks. You can pre-order it here.

This article was originally written for and published by Canvas8 in November 2009.

Pay no attention to the man holding the receiver; it’s the phone itself you’ll need to impress.

Today’s FT has an article about the inability of today’s older marketers to ‘get’ the use of social media. Sorry, this article might be on subscription only.

The outgoing marketing chief of Unilever has warned of a “lost generation” of brand managers who do not understand the web and social networks.

A nice reminder from Chris Brogan. I recommend watching the entire talk—it's only 10 minutes. Here's what you need to know: as an observer and active participant of the social web for several years, I've seen the power of serendipity influence how business gets done. Business leads coming in through Twitter because the person inquiring somehow stumbled upon you via the web and after following you for a while, they decided it was time to talk business.

Here is an old vision of a high-tech future. It is an old magazine illustration in a 1969 Japanese Sunday magazine, which shows life in the future, pervaded by computers. This illustration “The Rise of the Computerized School,” by Shigeru Komatsuzaki is an illustrated scenario of what schools will be like in the future. Sort of Webex type of online delivery and interactive learning via a tablet.

I've been playing around with a staggeringly impressive presentation tool called Prezi. Above, I've uploaded a brief look at some of the DIGITAL TRENDS that I see coming to the forefront in 2010 -- real-time marketing, augmented reality, new mega-content companies to replace mainstream media companies, and interesting cultural trends like the re-invention of bank branding in the aftermath of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

I am delighted to announce that "Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media" is now in the wild and available! This book was written as a collaborative effort by members of the Digital Youth Project, a three-year research effort funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and conducted at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Southern California.

This is the unabridged, non-edited version of an article published at bnet.co.uk
The Morgan Stanley report entitled “media and the Internet, how teenagers consume media” is one of the most striking examples of instant information circulation on a global scale. Matthew Robinson — a 15 year-old trainee who was asked to put together a report on how his peers were using the media — no longer needs to work on his online reputation. In a flash, his report was on everyone’s lips (on everyone’s desktop rather) and widely used as a perfect representation of generation Y usage of media and – especially – the Internet.

A couple of years ago, at the end of this post on the crossover between Web 2.0 and anarchism, I wrote that I'd started reading Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, and suggested I might be blogging about some of the ideas in it.