Mark Greenfield

Here’s another excellent video on how the Internet is changing society.

I particularly like the following quote:

In the past, you were what you owned.
Now, you are what you share.

Put another way, we are seeing a move from hoarding information to sharing information. Traditionally, those in power held onto information because knowledge was power. The connected age reverses this. Now sharing knowledge is power.

As always, let me know what you think.

The Cluetrain Manifesto remains one of my favorite books. Written in 1999, I still consider the message very timely. Doc Searls recently spoke at a conference that discussed the relevance of Cluretrain as it approaches 10 years.

Here are his presentation slides,

I recommend anyone interested in Cluetrain watch the video. The 38 minutes is time well spent. Searls talk provides great insight into the history of the book. He believes that advertising as we know it will die. The Cluetrain was a rant against BS, and he is concerned that this basic advertising paradigm continues today. His takes on Facebook (starting at the 22 minute mark) is that now BS gets personal. On Facebook, you’re not just a face, you’re a target. It’s still about selling eyeballs to advertisers, and ultimately this model will fail.

The 2008 Horizon report was recently released and as always contains valuable information on the latest technology trends impacting college campuses. The Horizon Report is a collaboration between the New Media Consortium and the Educause Learning Initiative and identifies emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching and learning. As in previous years, the report identifies six emerging technologies that will likely enter the mainstream within three adoption horizons:

One Year or Less

• Grassroots Video
• Collaborative Webs

Two to Three Years

• Mobile Broadband
• Data Mashups

Four to Five Years

• Collective Intelligence
• Social Operating Systems

Among the critical challenges outlined in the report, one really struck a chord with me:

“It is critical that the academic community as a whole embrace the potential of technologies and practices like those described in this report. Experimentation must be encouraged and supported by policy.” (emphasis mine).

And finally, the report lists seven metatrends that extend out beyond the five year horizon:

1. Evolving approaches to communication between man and machine
2. The collective sharing and generation of knowledge
3. Computing in three dimensions
4. Connecting people via the network
5. Games as pedagogical platforms
6. The shifting of content production to users
7. The evolution of a ubiquitous platform

I was happy to see that this report maps well to my ideas about the top web trends. And be sure to check out the report’s extensive use of del.icio.us tags for additional information.

Another great video from Michael Wesch at Kansas State. Based on the work of David Weinberger in his book Everything is Miscellaneous - the power of the new digital disorder.

E-mail has been hijacked by the forces of evil. Spam and misuse have caused many people to declare e-mail bankruptcy, something that I may do in the near future. And now the millennial generation is here and they prefer to communicate through IM, text messaging and the communication tools built into social networks making e-mail almost irrelevant to students today. I know there is a problem when e-mail sent from the president at my university is automatically sent to my junk e-mail folder - by filters set up by the university.

While I’m not advocating that everyone stop using e-mail, I would recommend exploring other communications channels, especially those of you who work directly with students. The good news is that there are now numerous alternatives that can augment and even replace e-mail.

Further Reading

• Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead
• Report: Spam Accounts for 90-95% of All Email
• E-Mail Reply to All: ‘Leave Me Alone’
• The death of e-mail
• Email is broken
• E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago

Previous Top 10 Web Trends

• Web Trend #10 - The End of Print
• Web Trend #9 - Everyware
• Web Trend #8 - Virtual Reality
• Web Trend #7 - The Web as Platform
• Web Trend #6 - Syndication and the End of the Web Page Paradigm

This is the first in a series of posts on my top ten web trends. We will work our way from #10 down to #1.

Trend #10 is the end of print. The web has always provided many advantages over print including greater efficiency, quicker publishing cycles, wider availability, and substantial cost savings due to the elimination of print and distribution costs. That being said, most people continue to print longer web pages because of the difficulty of reading from a computer screen.

The tide is turning. E-reader technology has matured over the past few years. The Sony E-reader was introduced last year and helped revive interest in e-books. Recently Amazon unveiled the Kindle which adds internet connectivity to the equation. The cover story of the November 26, 2007 edition of Newsweek magazine is called “Books Aren’t Dead - They’re Just Going Digital”. Jeff Bezos states “Books are the last bastion of analog… Music and video have been digital for quite some time, and short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early web. But long form reading really hasn’t.” Bezos hopes the Kindle will be the beginning of Book 2.0. This article provides an excellent overview of the issues and impact in digitizing books.

Time will tell if the Kindle will become the IPod of reading. I’m a voracious reader, a trait not shared by a growing segment of our population. The recently released NEA report “To Read or Not to Read” reaches a simple, alarming conclusion - that Americans area reading less and their reading proficiency is declining at alarming rates, especially among teens and young adults. Maybe the Kindle can reach this generation using technology that they understand and help reverse this trend.

Related Articles

• Amazon Sets eBook World Alight with Kindle - Finally, Time For Read/Write Books!
• Envisioning the Next Chapter in Electronic Books
• NY Times publisher: Our goal is to manage the transition from print to internet
• Faculty Members Prefer Digitized Texts

I’m off to Vermont to give the keynote speech at the annual meeting of the Vermont Student Assistance Corporation. I’ll be talking about the future of the web and using a David Letterman style top 10 list as the framework.

So what do you think is the top trend in web development?  I’ll give you my answer after my speech. (I don’t want to spoil the suspense for my friends in Vermont )

I’ve been reading numerous articles lately on how to leverage the power of social computing to bring marketing and public relations into the 21st century. I recently came across The Future of Communications - A Manifesto for Integrating Social Media into Marketing. Reminiscent of Cluetrain, my favorites excerpts include:

• Engage or Die
• Monologue has given way to dialogue
• It is about putting the “public” back in public relations
• Listening is marketing
• Social media is about speaking with, not “to” or “at” people

I would also recommend reading The Seven Principles of Community Building. It’s an excellent overview on how and why to build community. The author’s new book Now is Gone is due to be released in a couple of weeks

A common refrain at HighEdWebDev2007 and other conferences I’ve attended recently has been the frustration many of us feel when trying to convince management that “radical transparency” is a good idea, that allowing students to blog without editorial oversight about what it’s really like to attend our institutions won’t be the end of civilization as we know it.

In Rochester, my colleague Jim Leous from Penn State provided more ammunition for making our point. The cover story in the April 2007 edition of Wired magazine was called The See-Through CEO and provided great examples of how the business world is coming to understand the power of the read/write web. As the inside cover says - “smart companies are sharing secrets with rivals, blogging about products in their pipeline, and even admitting their failures.” Here are some more outtakes from the article:

• Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right - and wrong.
• Power comes not from your Rolodex but from how many bloggers link to you.
• Transparency is a judo move. Your customers are going to poke around in your business anyway, and your workers are going to blab about internal info - so why not make it work for you by turning everyone into a partner in the process and inviting them to do so?
• A generation has grown up blogging, posting a daily phonecam picture on Flickr and listing its geographic position in real time on Dodgeball and Google Maps. For them, authenticity comes from online exposure. It’s hard to trust anyone who doesn’t list their dreams and fears on Facebook.
• Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system.
• A single Google search determines more about how (companies) are perceived than a multimillion-dollar ad campaign.

It’s time higher education embraced radical transparency. Our communications goal should be dialogue, not monologue. Research has shown that the more you let your constituents talk amongst themselves, the more likely they are to listen to you. They will feel their voices are being heard which builds trust which in turn builds relationships.

I have been showing “Did You Know; Shift Happens - Globalization; Information Age” in many of my presentations in recent months. It fits in nicely with the themes in my “Born to be Wired” presentation. I recently came across this updated version

I personally prefer the original version mainly because the music from “The Last of the Mohicans” is more compelling.