digital living

I was struck by the first paragraph in this article by Peggy Ornstein www.nytimes.com/2010/08/01/magazine/01wwln-lede-t.html

Here it is in full:

I like the concept of this - ie: metrics adjusting to reflect new realities. Plus it's nice to have an eg that is not so advertising centric. I suspect this is all a *long* way off happening though. :-)

You probably would have read a very rare Jonathan Ive interview on Core 77 by now. If you have not, do check it out? I would say a lot of the interview was generally not surprising, however the last few paragraphs jumped out at me. What I noticed was that despite Apple’s very digital playing field, their industrial design process was, and is, still very old school analogue.

Not long ago, I was presenting along with some folks to the senior executive team at a large division of a massive insurance company. I had the great pleasure of listening to Eileen Naughton of YouTube, when she referred to Google as the operating system for search, Facebook as the operating system for social, Twitter as the operating system for real time and YouTube as the operating system for video. I found her characterization of the services fascinating and useful. 

There has been a wonderful debate going on in the pages of the Wall Street Journal between Clay Shirky and Nick Carr. Carr became famous for his IT Doesn’t Matter article and has ridden his technology contrarianism to a fantastic intellectual franchise. I have yet to read his newest book, The Shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains, but according to reviewers I respect like Mark McDonald over at Gartner, the book seems to be a worthwhile review of relevant literature showing how the use of new media, including new digital technologies, can cause poorer performance for  important thinking tasks. 

I believe we will see a 10,000 to 100,000 increase in the number of computers, phones, devices and living things attached to the internet in the next 5-10 years — what many are calling “the internet of things“. We have probably already passed the point when there are more things to attached to the internet than people. All cars, many toys, most sick patients, lab equipment, cows with senors on their hoofs, you name it, will have the option to be connected to the network. 

At SXSW, I decided to talk about privacy because I thought that it would be the most important issue of the year. I was more accurate than my wildest dreams. For the last month, I’ve watched as conversations about privacy went from being the topic of the tech elite to a conversation that’s pervasive. The press coverage is overwhelming – filled with infographics and a concerted effort by journalists to make sense of and communicate what seems to be a moving target. I commend them for doing so.

So, yesterday I gave a keynote at a Google video event which featured an interesting line up of speakers followed by a good panel moderated by Matt Brittin, the UK MD. It was a lot of fun doing it. Google have kindly allowed me to put my presentation up here. It touches on many of the themes about which I've been obsessing lately plus some points that I've made before, but which I still think many media organisations are missing. My thanks to the people at Google for inviting me to be a part of it.