An IDC report released this year predicts that the amount of digital data we are creating will soon outpace our capacity to store it. One contributing factor: exponential growth in online video. AT&T's VP of Legal Affairs, Jim Cicconi, notes that:

...video makes up 30% of net traffic now and in two years will hit 80%. Add in the move to high definition video which is seven to 10 times more bandwidth hungry....and you get a recipe for failure.

AT&T, whose telecom infrastructure makes up part of the Internet's backbone, is worried about future growth in online video. In a 2008 report, Internet hardware maker Cisco projects the amount of IP traffic will likely grow 46% annually through 2011. However, not everyone is concerned:

Professor Andrew Odlyzko, one of the few academics who studies net traffic growth, said predictions about the collapse of the net have been made with alarming regularity. "It's an idea that crops up very frequently," he said, "but I do not think we need to be worried."

Image: greencandy8888 (Flickr)

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"Multitasking has long been a badge of honor for the digitally well-armed," writes Gloria Goodale in a recent Christian Science Monitor article, "Mastering the high-tech tools that help us."

She goes on to suggest that there is a price to pay for spreading oneself too thin, and asked Social Technologies futurist Simeon Spearman to offer his thoughts on the topic.

Both computers and humans really only process one thing at a time, Spearman said. The machines do this so quickly, in parallel process, that they appear to be multitasking. But they are able to process far more information than humans -- and are more capable with each jump in computer speed.

When you see the demands we put on computers these days and how much they can process, you begin to understand just how much we're being hit by all the time.

Read the entire article.

Image: Michael Verdi (flickr)

SHANGHAI--Youtube, CNN, Anonymouse (my go-to proxy server), even Boing Boing…all blocked as a result of the events playing out in Tibet. This is in addition to the stuff that’s already blocked, e.g., all Blogspot, Typepad, Squarespace, and Wordpress blogs, all BBC access, and Wikipedia, among others. I wonder if Bjork can somehow be blamed for the unrest?

I had assumed the next few months would see an easing of such restrictions. I hadn’t fully considered that domestic groups with a cause would use the fact that the spotlight will be on them from now until the Olympics in August to make themselves heard, but surely some will. This will be true of groups outside the country as well. I imagine we’ll see more powerful people like Steven Spielberg under pressure to make statements against the Chinese regime, whether or not they’re associated with the games in some official capacity, as Spielberg was. I can virtually guarantee a burst of criticism from some members of the US Congress beginning in the early summer and carrying through the games. It’s an election year, after all. Some European parliamentarians are likely to chime in as well.

What no one knows is how the Chinese government will respond before, during, and after the games.

Click to read more ...

"Location, location, location," is increasingly becoming the mantra around new media services, and 2008 seems poised to be a year of growth for hyperlocal content delivery and other location-based services.

Google recently unveiled a new feature on its Google News page--Google News Local, allowing readers to get news occurring only in their local area. Google is moving into this space at a time when GPS is making people more aware of their surroundings and driving innovations in localized content in the form of location-based services like mobile ads for local businesses. Google's local news service joins dominant localized news site Topix.net and newcomer EveryBlock in this content area, and many Internet users will benefit from having better access to news in their area.

Google isn't the only major company taking advantage of hyperlocalized content.

Click to read more ...

"Online privacy? You must be joking!"

Such was the gist of some polite water cooler discussion with some of my coworkers, following my post about Facebook's Beacon service and what it meant in terms of transparency and the erosion of digital privacy.

From my curious coworkers: Didn't I use Google search? Wasn't I aware that Google’s policy was to hang onto every scrap of personal search data for as long as legally permissible? How is that substantively different than what Facebook is doing?

It's true--I confess, I use Google search for most of my searching and have for quite some time.

Thus, I had to admit that I was seemingly out in the digital wilderness ... until, by happy chance, I came across this article on a new feature from Ask.com, an admittedly minor player in the search business (accounting for about 1/12^th as many Internet searches as Google).

Ask.com is trying to appeal to Internet users concerned about their privacy--they’re now offering a search service called “AskEraser” that allows users to search in relative privacy, with a single click. Essentially, AskEraser discards all the data--search terms, links to your IP address, etc--produced by your searches. Though, in a rather ironic rub, as the New York Times put it,

"The information typed by users of AskEraser into Ask.com will not disappear completely. Ask.com relies on Google to deliver many of the ads that appear next to its search results. Under an agreement between the two companies, Ask.com will continue to pass query information on to Google.”

Still, it is a start. And enough for me to give Ask.com a second look.

Image: Rachael Voorhees (Flickr)One of the big ideas to arise in recent years from the disintermediary effects of the Internet is crowdsourcing--the idea that as technology connects us, information requests and other work can be distributed to a wide range of people, all of whom can contribute to completing the task. The benefit of crowdsourcing is that it allows the user access to a wider array of knowledge and talent than he possesses...when it works.

But just like the aphorism that a chain is only as strong as the weakest link, crowdsourcing is only as valuable as the resources available, and vulnerable to misdirection. And, let’s face it, few believe that mobs make the smartest decisions.

Click to read more ...

What will likely be the most important scientific and technological breakthroughs with significant commercial value and impacts on the lives of consumers out to 2025?

To begin to answer that question, S)T's Technology Foresight program conducted a virtual, global focus group of experts in technology, innovation, and business strategy. The group included experts from the Association of Professional Futurists, Tekes, Duke University, Hasbro, Worldwatch, General Motors, Shell, Johnson Controls, and Oxford University, among others.

After consolidating input from the expert panel and analysis by Social Technologies' futurists, what emerged was our list of top 12 areas for tech innovation through 2025:

Click to read more ...

A few months ago we wrote about jobs of the future; here's some coverage of our list at CNBC.

One of the future jobs was "geoscaper," someone who makes corporate and private properities look better in Google Earth-style aerial views.

Well, Google users recently spotted this unfortunately shaped building on a Navy base in San Diego:

In the face of the somewhat silly brouhaha that erupted, the Navy announced that it would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to make the building look less offensive from space. Geoscaping, here we come.

Image: Google.

In addition to the obvious inconveniences of last week's Skype outage (no IM chat, no long distance voice chat—a major headache for a company like ours, with staff scattered around the country and around the world), there was a secondary effect for us here at S)T and likely for others as well: our online networks went from translucent to opaque. For those non-Skype users, let me explain. When you log on to Skype, a box with all of your Skype contacts pops up. At its most basic, this box shows you who among your network is online and who is not. But users can tweak their profiles to provide more information about their situation. There are icons that a user can select to indicate whether one is busy, or away, or not to be bothered. Furthermore, a user can add one or two sentences to their profile that gives more information to other users about their current status, such as “Working from home,” or “Out for an hour, back at 4pm.” This phenomenon is known as presence. For an organization like ours, translucency into the lives of our colleagues, is quite helpful. One glance at my Skype window tells me if someone is working today,or is available for a brief chat about a project, or indicates why they’ve not yet responded to an email I’ve sent. With the Skype service offline, I was flying not quite blind, but perhaps with cataracts.

Increasingly, online services are providing users with greater translucency into the lives of their friends and colleagues: Google allows the sharing of online calendars, while music services such as Pandora let users share their tastes via public playlists, and services such as Twitter promote outright transparency. As this functionality is added to more services, it will be easier to keep track of our friends, and more difficult to find some peace and quiet when we won’t be bothered. In the end, the Skype outage proved the old adage: you don’t know what you’ll miss until it’s gone. I was prepared for the obvious inconvenience of the lack of communication, but what surprised me was how much I use the service to just keep track of people. (Image: Andreas Hagerman, Flickr)

Crowdsourcing--having masses of strangers carry out a task that once would have been handled by a specific entity--has come to family disputes.

According to the NYT, an item appeared on Craigslist in Tacoma, Washington, earlier this spring announcing that a house was being demolished, and so people were free to taken anything and everything. And they did, removing even windows, the kitchen sink, and the water heater from the unoccupied house.

Now a woman is charged with malicious mischief for placing the ad: she allegedly resented how the homeowner, her aunt, had treated a relative, and used the power of Internet-directed crowds to take her revenge.

Three weeks ago, at the height of the British-Iran face-off over those sailors, the following graffiti appeared in Dupont Circle here in DC:

A couple of days later, someone vandalized the message by crossing it out and adding a peace sign:

The graffitists must have reached some kind of détente as there were no new messages until this week:

(This reads: "Bin Laden was a scapegoat".)

("Ayatollahs were the only ones behind the 9/11 attack")

For all the talk of social networking sites such as Twitter, sometimes good old-fashioned graffiti is still the best tool for the job. Dupont Circle is a busy place. It hosts one of the more active metro stops in the city, is home to cultural attractions (museums, movie theaters), a thriving nightlife scene, and some of the most prestigious policy organizations in the world (Brookings Institution, the Carnegie Endowment, and a certain futures firm you are likely familiar with).

Thousands of people walk by this wall daily and see this message, and they don’t need to sign up, register or log-in to do so. Furthermore, as its presence over the past three weeks indicates, the message persists, while new information is added, the old information remains visible.

The use of public space for political messages is as old as civilization. (The Romans were quite adept at politically motivated, scurrilous graffiti). And, for all the enthusiasm in some circles for social networking, this graffiti highlights its current limitations: users are a self-selected group with only those choosing to participate able to receive messages. This is only a temporary limitation as wireless access expands and the social networking ethos is incorporated into the architecture of a growing number of software applications. But as much as I enjoy these applications, I am cheered to see someone is still kicking it old school. Too bad he is a crank.

Who that crank may be is still a mystery—maybe an angry Brit? A frustrated Persian exile? Or perhaps it’s just a hip guerrilla marketing campaign to get the kids fired up for another war. (Images: Social Technologies)

For the last week I’ve been walking to and from work across a long bridge made difficult by uncleared snow and ice.

Clearing the bridge is a city government task, but I don’t know how to contact anyone about the problem.

Meanwhile, if I took a picture of the bridge and put it on the Flickr photo sharing site, I could instantly drag the photo onto the bridge’s location on a map and tag it with “snow” or “better under Mayor Williams” or whatever. And, I see now, someone has done exactly that.

My daily trudge suggested an obvious e-government solution based on annotated reality: the city could have an online map that residents could mark with issues, problems, and suggestions. They could drag and drop virtual push pins with, for instance:

• snow / ice
• pothole
• drug dealing
• dead animal 

It would then be easy for a city to use thousands of citizen eyes to spot problems and judge their urgency by how many markers were dropped on any particular problem. And it could be linked to mobile systems: a message from a mobile phone could place a pin automatically, with the system itself judging the user's location using GPS or tower location.

Perhaps this is already happening in Helsinki or Singapore--but, for better and worse, I live in Washington DC.

Image courtesy Jeanne Welsh

Hell hath no fury like a 12-year-old socially networked video gamer who feels he was ripped off!

Not only are these kids savvier consumers, they use their social networks to praise products and companies they like and trash those that displease them.

My 12-year-old son was furious with a company that sold him a used video game at the same price he would have paid for a new copy of the same game elsewhere. When he found out he’d been taken, he decided to take action. 

His solution: tell everyone in his circle of friends at school AND everyone he met online while playing Runescape. For the next several weeks, he made it a point of talking about how this particular company cheated kids, couldn’t be trusted, and didn't deserve people's business. I suspect he reached hundreds of kids his age with his message.

These kids are creative, they know technology, they are networked, and they are becoming increasingly smarter consumers -- look out if they feel they have been wronged.

The situation with my son is just one example of "age blurring," with kids growing up more quickly, and becoming savvier consumers earlier. We examine the trend in an upcoming Global Lifestyles brief.

A phenomenon dubbed Morgellons may be the first "socially transmitted disease" in which the "vector" is the Internet. According to news reports, some people start experiencing Morgellons-like symptoms only after reading about it on the Internet -- where it was first described and named in 2001 -- and the Internet has given rise to an active community of self-diagnosed sufferers, researchers, and conspiracy theorists around the condition.

The question is whether the condition is physical, as its sufferers insist, or purely psychological, as most medical practitioners maintain. How we deal with this kind of question can have profound implications for the future.

The history of dealing with new medical disorders during the latter part of the 20^th century has a checkered track record. Health problems caused by Agent Orange and dioxin poisoning in Vietnam veterans, exposure to toxic chemicals at places like Love Canal, chronic fatigue syndrome, and other serious health problems have often been initially dismissed as a psychological problem experienced by the victim.

The societal reaction to AIDS/HIV in the early years of its emergence, when moral and political issues interfered with medical research, was also a telling indicator of how emerging diseases can go unrecognized.

Typically, the fewer easily observed physical manifestations there are, the more likely the victim’s complaints are to be dismissed. Even when there are physical symptoms, there is a tendency to minimize them or attribute them to some other, more “conventional” disease. Dismissing emerging medical disorders and health issues is common, particularly when the first victims are among society’s disadvantaged.

Morgellons’ symptoms cluster around a sensation of millions of tiny insects crawling under the skin. Sufferers often feel their lives are dominated by constant itchiness and pain. The only visible symptoms, however, are persistent skin lesions—which may result from sufferers’ own scratching or other ordinary causes.

Although Morgellons sounds like science fiction, in a world in which genetic engineering and nanotech are becoming widespread, it becomes increasingly important for organizations like CDC be able to move quickly to identify the true nature of weird medical conditions.

A recent History Channel documentary on the Black Death was both enlightening and frightening in its depiction of the profound destruction epidemics can wreak. It is humbling to think how all that we have built could be swept away as quickly as the social, political, and economic structures of 14^th century Europe.

Morgellons may be nothing more than a product of the fevered minds of an active Internet community of self-diagnosed sufferers. Let’s hope it is. The danger is that if the CDC finds no medical basis to Morgellons, criticism from naysayers and “told-you-so-ers” will discourage future investigations of other weird and fantastic ailments, hindering the early warnings that we will need when the real thing emerges.

I've been reading Maps Are Territories, a book about the meaning of maps.

Author David Turnbull discusses the cartography of Australian Aboriginal peoples. In essence, for the Aborigines the landscape is a map of itself: points on the landscape invoke aspects of their djalkiri, which is often translated as "songline"--the creation stories that knit reality together.

This all reminded me of annotated reality:  the systems we are now developing to hang any kind of information we wish on the landscape.

Early efforts include Web-based ideas such as the memory map on which a person notes what is salient to them about a given terrain. But increasingly ubiquitous mobile phones and GPS systems are going to enable any bit of info to be placed anywhere we like in the real world.

Eventually, it will be possible to go to any place and see what some person or group thought was important about that street or  hilltop, on your mobile or maybe even a head-up display. You might want to see what an art historian, a Wiccan, or your own family has to say -- and the landscape itself will become an infinite number of maps of its own meaning.