Last Thursday was something of a watershed for the UK government. Data.gov.uk was launched, becoming one of a growing number of government portals giving us access to reams of official government data. That might not sound terribly exciting, but for businesses and research organisations that use official and reliable information, the announcement may fundamentally change the way they operate.

Government data has traditionally been stored in departmental silos where it is difficult to access. Many aggregation sites, such as the ONS, are notoriously hard to navigate.

The Guardian has been campaigning for such an initiative for some time,  although its progress could only be described as incremental. In one of a number of articles on the site (you can find them here), they trace the birth of data.gov.uk to a comment made by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the world wide web, to the Prime Minister at a dinner for recipients of the Order of Merit:

“Gordon Brown said to me, ‘How should the UK make the best use of the internet?’ and I replied that the government should just put all of its data on it,” Berners-Lee recalled. “And he said ‘OK, let’s do it’.”

The site has been open to developers since October, in which time – without wanting to rely too heavily on one newspaper – The Guardian has created a portal which allows you to search for data from other ‘open government’ sources. It’s rather ambitiously called World Government Data, although currently supports only Anglophone countries. It mimics other efforts to combine official data from around the globe in an accessible way.

Why is this good news? Firstly, it seems only fair that taxpayers have access to information whose collection they have financed. Secondly, releasing such a vast body of data to the public enables a greater pool of talent to find ways to use it, in building new applications or finding new insight.

Ito World, for example, created some great visualisations using transport data . They were also responsible for this amazing video showing the edits made to OpenStreetMap over the course of 2008:

Greater access to data like this can have profound consequences. Members of the online mapping community scrambled together data from various sources to create an OpenStreetMap of Port-au-Prince that aid workers could use to help co-ordinate their efforts. Whilst their work was undoubtedly appreciated, it would have been made far easier with greater access. Here’s to Open Data.

The image above is used with kind permission of Jason Hawkes.

Oliver Wright writes:

Humans have always been predisposed to gossip. French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville once said “If an American was condemned to confine his activity to his own affairs, he would be robbed of one half of his existence.” In this vein, celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and Stephen Fry have done themselves no harm by revealing the minutiae of their day to day activities to the masses.

Celebrities, of course, usually have a slick PR machine on their side to ensure that potential pitfalls are avoided. The new wave of sports tweeters (twits, if you prefer), however, seem to lack this essential facility. Where the sporting media may have previously traded on snippets from a group of closely guarded sources, they can now rely upon a host of tweeters for a steady stream of bitesize stories.

These messages left on social networks and microblogging sites have the nasty habit of transforming tittle-tattle, hearsay, and rumour into cold, hard evidence – often supplied by the protagonist. Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen cyclist Lance Armstrong show his hot headed reactions to Alberto Contador’s comments on his teammates after the latter claimed the Tour de France’s yellow jersey. Also tweeting regularly (and with a little more restraint), was fellow cyclist Bradley Wiggins, who quashed media speculation regarding his team affiliations next year half way through the tour. After the tour’s epic climb up Mont Ventoux, he later paid tribute to Tom Simpson, a British rider who collapsed and died on the stage in 1967.

More recently, Australia’s Philip Hughes let slip that he had been dropped for the 3^rd Ashes test due to start that morning – inadvertently informing anyone studious enough to notice of Australia’s batting line up, which they didn’t have to divulge until much later. Darren Bent also fell foul to his emotions on twitter (and later apologised), perhaps leading us to be thankful that most footballers’ 140-character musings are usually confined to the pitch.

Of course, sportsmen and women aren’t the only ones adapting to new media. As politicians have taken to using Twitter, Whitehall has released a rather lengthy guide for ministers thinking of using the service, no doubt in a spirit of public dialogue. Thanks heavens that British caution is not shared abroad.

Tom Ding writes:

You may have noticed that Wired, the ‘magazine about what’s next’, recently re-launched in the UK after a twelve year hiatus. We’ve held off rushing to judgment, but after three issues it’s possible to more reflective.

The editorial from the first (re)- issue explained: ‘Whatever may be happening in today’s economy, the pace of change in business, science and culture is not slowing – which is why, unreconstructed optimists that we are, we believe there’s no better time to launch an exciting, inspiring magazine.’ The time has come, apparently, to ‘Subscribe to the future.’

But of course, Wired is itself a contradiction: everyone knows that there will be no magazines in the future; everything will be digital. Bytes, or bits, will have replaced atoms. As one reader tweeted, Wired is ‘the mag that cuts down trees to write about the paperless office’, and the editors also seem to struggle with an existential tension: in the third issue there are reviews of the latest e-books and a ‘how to’ guide about turning the magazine into a snack bowl or a picture frame.

There are many brands that manage to exploit internal tensions – American Apparel, for example, maintains its cool by combining pioneering ethical production with a reputation for sexual controversy – but instead Wired seems trapped by its own status, by its format. For all its engaging content, the magazine is caught uncomfortably between the lads’ mags and the blogosphere, between the mainstream and the cutting-edge, between the past and the future.

Yet whilst subscribing to Wired may never truly feel like subscribing to the future, it would be a mistake to think the most exciting alternatives are all found behind a screen. Stack is a new service that delivers a different independent magazine each month to its online subscribers (shades here of Rough Trade’s music subscription service), and Russell Davies (who also writes for Wired) recently helped print a ground-breaking newspaper called ‘Things our friends have written on the internet’. Perhaps the key for true magazines of the future will be to embrace the tension between paper and screen, and make more of the benefits of both.

The picture at the top is borrowed, with thanks, from magculture.

Oliver Wright writes:

Since my last post on the role Twitter is playing in relation to more traditional media, a couple of events have highlighted how Twitter, and social media in general, is having a greater influence on significant news events.

When riots recently broke out in Moldova’s capital, Chisinau, thousands of young Moldovans protested against elections whose outcome ensured the communist government would stay in power. The events were quick to grab the headlines, with Twitter once again thrust into the limelight as an example of microblogging’s ability to mobilise people.

It was quickly dubbed “Moldova’s Twitter Revolution”, at least by journalists, but after a week of protests (judges subsequently ordered a recount) a more nuanced story has emerged. Those involved in organising the protests explained they used many online tools to organise the protest; planning involved blogs and LiveJournal accounts, followed closer to the actual event by facebook groups and text messaging. Twitter was, among other things, a clever way of ensuring their message gained space in influential media outlets. By this measure the protests have been a resounding success. (For some more in-depth analysis, take a look here and here.)

Closer to home, the political scandal that has dominated media discourse has been ‘smeargate’ (or #smeargate in Twitter), the saga in which Gordon Brown’s political and press adviser, Damian McBride, resigned after leaked emails described plans to publish gossip stories about senior opposition party politicians on a ‘political gossip’ blog, Red Rag. These were, it was said, primarily to be a response to claimed slurs about members of the Labour party on the Conservative-leaning Guido Fawkes’ blog – a Westminster rumour mill.

Whatever one’s political affiliations, the incident highlights the importance placed within government on the influence of the blogosphere. As a result (unintended), the public is now more aware of political mudslinging previously shared between small groups of politically motivated bloggers. In Moldova, a couple of shrewd planners used their knowledge of how the media operates to take advantage of social networks, particularly the viral nature and gravitas of Twitter, in order to garner the maximum media exposure for their cause.

As we’ve noted earlier, taken individually, services like Twitter, and previously facebook, can seem like isolated fads, but seen within the context of an increasingly savvy and networked online community, they take on greater significance.

The picture at the top of the post was borrowed, with thanks, from the Political Graffiti blog.

Oliver Wright writes:

The noise of Twitter has reached a crescendo over the past couple of months, partly because of its role in sharing and even breaking news. The fact that it’s been used for this says something about the gaps in conventional forms of media.

One of the first news events that caught the attention of ‘tweeters’ was the earthquake in Sichuan in May last year, where people across China started using various blogging services – including Twitter – to tell friends and family that they were safe. A technology blogger, Robert Scoble, reported news about the earthquake ahead of the US Geological Survey (which tracks earthquakes in real time) simply from tweets he received from his followers in China.

Similarly (but with greater media coverage) with the Mumbai terrorist attacks, where tweeters effectively covered the event live, mashing up news from sources on the ground via tweeters and other agencies as new stories emerged. Doubts about the accuracy of these versions of events eventually led the Mumbai authorities to call for tweeters to stop spreading the news – a call that was, predictably, ignored. The viral nature of the information being spread by Twitter was captured, perhaps chillingly, by one user, “naomieve”, who wrote:

Mumbai is not a city under attack as much as it is a social media experiment in action.

The ‘social media experiment’ has continued with the Obama inauguration, the Hudson plane crash, and cyclist Lance Armstrong’s stolen bike (found) all receiving much publicity.

It was in the 1960s that the cultural analyst Marshall McLuhan argued that electronic media was a series of extensions to the human body which would create an ‘electronic interdependence’. As James Harkin observed recently in The Times,

The impact of this electronic information loop coursing through all our veins, McLuhan thought, could only enhance our ability to understand one another. It would, he felt sure, precipitate the rise of a “global village” and a new era of greater responsibility and understanding.

Instead, the cost of this electronic interdependence is a media landscape which is more fragmented than ever. Shared social experiences such as these are reduced to cultural nostalgia. But in an age where so much media, and politics, is carefully packaged, what Twitter – and media cousins such as the text message – can do is to reclaim a sense of immediacy, and to increase our sense of shared engagement in the events which are happening around us. Maybe McLuhan will have the last laugh after all.

The graphic is courtesy of Carrot Blog – on the addictive nature of Twitter.

Tagged: McLuhan, Twitter ]]> http://blog.thefuturescompany.com/2009/03/04/trusting-twitter/feed/ 0 thenextwavefutures twitter http://blog.thefuturescompany.com/2009/01/29/impossible-polaroids/ http://blog.thefuturescompany.com/2009/01/29/impossible-polaroids/#comments Thu, 29 Jan 2009 09:39:07 +0000 Jo Phillips http://blog.thefuturescompany.com/?p=814 ]]>

Tom Ding writes:

“One day I will tire of digital photography
and ‘get back to basics.’
While my pictures will not be
easy to share with friends and family
[via popular photo sharing websites]
If a photo is unsharable,
does that make it more personal,
therefore
more meaningful to me?”

(Carles, Hipster Runoff)

Now that everyone and their mum has a super-compact, many mega-pixel camera in their bag (and another on their phone), some have begun to miss the bits of photography that they have left behind. The lomography movement has been around for a while now, long enough to spawn satirical blog post poetry and iphone imitations anyway, but the impossible project feels more substantial. And more interesting.

In case you hadn’t heard, almost a year ago Polaroid announced that due to a lack of demand, they were to cease production of the film used in their cameras; the countdown to the final time when someone would truly “shake it like a polaroid picture” had started. Most enthusiasts were left with no option but to pay over the odds on ebay for the last scraps of the stuff, but a few have embarked on something altogether more ambitious: ‘the impossible project’.

Inspired by the original inventor Edwin Land (“Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible”), a team of twelve amateur experts have acquired the equipment from one of the old factories. They are determined that by 2010 they will have invented a new type of film, compatible with the original cameras, but that uses components that are still in production. On the website a new clock is ticking (29,333,530 seconds at the time of writing); if they manage it, and if Russell Davies is right when he says that this is going to be a year for ‘real, post-digital things’, then it may have been a manifestly good idea.

The photograph, from The Impossible Project website, is of the former Polaroid film factory.

Stacey Yates and Denise Hicks write:

Stelarc is an Australian artist and post-humanist who believes that the human body is obsolete. He is acting on his belief, using his own body as an experimental laboratory. So who better to have on a panel at an event organised by Kinetica Museum about the convergence of art and science within the realms of robotics and cybernetics?

If the human body is obsolete, the only way forward is to embrace our already co-dependent (at times dependent) relationship with technology. Stelarc believes that it’s time to create a new design and architecture for the human body. To demonstrate its potential, he has been growing a left ear on his left forearm since early 2007, with the goal of making his body ‘internet enabled’.

After a year and a half, the ear is only in relief on his arm, but a third operation will lift it from the arm, giving it better definition. After that, he plans to implant a miniature microphone into the ear, connected to a bluetooth transmitter, enabling a wireless connection to the internet.

The microphone and transmitter will allow people to hear what the ear is listening to, wherever they may be. When electronically complete, it will form part of a distributed Bluetooth headset.

The body becomes internet enabled. The extra ear becomes an internet organ.

Although this all seems extreme, technology is increasingly being used surgically in cases of disability, such as cochlear implants for those that are deaf or hard of hearing. A quarter of teenagers say they are willing to go under the knife to improve the body they have (according to Great Ormond Street Hospital), and the quest for everlasting life (or at least a youthful glow) is a permanent feature in cosmetics aisles. Corrective laser eye surgery has become commonplace. If artists see the extremes of the future more clearly than the rest of us, Stelarc’s work suggests that it is only a matter of time before able-bodied consumers turn to technological ‘improvements’ to break through through the flesh-bound limitations of their body. Is it ‘man’ or ‘machine’? The question is already out of date. It will be both.

Tom Ding writes:

When I discovered last week that my brand new phone gives me unlimited Google Maps on-the-go, I had one of those ‘The Future Has Arrived’ moments, able to locate the nearest pubs and bus stops at a glance. Which got me to thinking about the different functions of a map, and how cleverly Google has partitioned them. You see, Google Maps is useful indeed: It can be a Sat Nav in your pocket or a route-finder on your PC and it has an interface perfectly suited for such quick tasks.

Perhaps though, we should regard it as the latest evolution of the 1920s ‘wrist-mounted, wind-up Sat-Nav’ shown in the picture at the top of this post. Google Maps gives you no context. It is great, so long as you know exactly where you want to go to. It is a road map, not an atlas, and definitely not a globe.

And this is where Google Earth comes in. Here, exactly the same data has been used for something completely different, and this time it is all about looking, rather than finding. Instead of the watch, I think of Google Earth as being a modern equivalent of the Gallery of Maps in the Vatican- somewhere that you go when you cannot see a place first-hand, somewhere that you could easily lose a few hours and somewhere that not enough people know about.

And Google Earth is getting better. We are now all free, in a Wikipedia-esque spirit of collaboration, to hack the program, at least a little bit, and create our own ‘layers’ dedicated to whatever topic we choose. Just this week, someone has published a layer called “Crisis in Darfur“. There is a layer of “Lighthouses in New Zealand” and another of Frank Gehry buildings. With all of this within a couple of clicks reach, I can’t help but feel like Google is biding their time here- waiting for their user-generated library to reach a critical mass before they tell the world about it.

By then, it will not just be an old fashioned globe, but an encyclopedia inside a globe. We will be able to visually explore almost any subject by geography, by topic and by time. And then, well, then the future really will have arrived.

Jo Phillips writes:

Our More London office reopens today after two days of closure following the Great Flood of Tooley Street. Some took the fact that the nearby Greater London Assembly building was out out of action in the week of the mayoral elections as a bad omen for Ken Livingstone. The events have demonstrated rather vividly the vulnerability of all city infrastructure; you might have thought a fifth floor office would be immune (I did), but servers and electricity supply in the basement are – unsurprisingly – vulnerable to street level flooding. Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospital was similarly affected.

In this instance, 7 million litres of water poured out of a burst water main. But it gives us a glimpse of a possible future London — as we see more climate-change related extreme weather events, what will change? What I learnt was that crises in the real world push us further into the virtual world. With email and phone systems down, our company used text messages and a blog to disseminate important information. Local residents similarly used the SE1 community forum to communicate with each other. One possible outcome is an increase in mobile working (or more exactly, ‘extended working’, in which the workplace is extended in space and time), but this leads to interesting questions about infrastructure. Maybe not that sensible to leave it below street level when the local flood risk map looks like this:

So maybe there’s likely to be less emphasis on managing your own infrastructure, and more on getting it delivered to you as a service by a supplier – already a strong developing trend, as Nicholas Carr blogged this week. Having servers down in the basement may provide an illusion of control, but would not prove very resilient in a world of increasing environmental risk.

Our former colleague Chad Wollen, who has spent the last few years working for digital media companies, sent me a cartoon by Eric Burke that’s being going the rounds in the digital community:

Judging by the response to the original post, it’s clearly struck a nerve among designers and programmers, even provoking some discussion about the purpose of jokes.

What’s interesting, reading the comments, is that people are taking a somewhat ‘binary’ view of simplicity (it’s either ‘good’ or ‘bad’). As John Maeda reminds us in his Laws of Simplicity, it’s a bit more complicated than that. One of the ‘laws’ of simplicity, he suggests, is to ‘reduce’, for example by removing functionality – the Apple and Google trick. But he also reminds us that simplicity often requires knowledge on the part of the user, that “simplicity and complexity need each other” – and that “some things can never be made simple”. The design skill is knowing what can be, and why.