Future Exploration Network Blog

At the Crunchy awards last week Digg was named best User Generated Content (UGC) site. As many people pointed out since then, Digg is in fact not a user generated content site, since the people don’t submit content to the site, but links to other sites.

Allen Stern suggests that Digg is a UGC aggregator. Josh Catone thinks that UGC is perfectly accurate for Digg.

Back in 2006 I posted the notes to my speech at the Influence conference on Web 2.0 and User Filtered Content, pointing out that Web 2.0 is largely about users collectively filtering content after they have generated it. Earlier in the year the content section of our Future of Media Strategic Framework showed how both media and users create and filter content. Creating and filtering content are different activities.

I think it’s well time that User Filtered Content comes into its own as a term, and isn’t confused with User Generated Content.

Nowandnext.com and Future Exploration Network have once again collaborated to create a trend map for 2008 and beyond.

Our Trend Map for 2007+ had a major impact, with over 40,000 downloads, fantastic feedback (“The World’s Best Trend Map. Ever.” “I got shivers” “Amazing” “Fascinating” “Magnifique” etc. etc.), and inspired several other trend maps including Information Architects’ first map of web trends.

While last year’s map was based on the London tube map, the 2008 map is derived from Shanghai’s underground routes. Limited to just five lines, the map uncovers key trends across Society, Politics, Demographics, Economy, and Technology.

Click on the map below to get the full pdf.

Trends mentioned in the map include:

I’ve just been interviewed by SBS TV for a segment on Skype, which will air on their World News tonight at 6:30pm. There was no particular news that prompted the segment, which simply looks at what Skype is, and in particular how it is impacts the telecommunications industry.

In the interview I repeatedly emphasized how telecommunications companies have for over a century dramatically overcharged for communication, holding back progress, business, and personal relationships. Only now that there is a free alternative are international phone calls getting a fraction closer to their actual cost. Connectivity is a human and social right, which fortunately is now available to anyone with an Internet connection or who can afford 30 minutes in an Internet café. In order for telecommunications companies to continue to be as vastly profitable as they have over the years, they must find news ways of creating value. One way is to add value to the basic connectivity services they provide. Another is to shift into adjacent businesses such as content, services, or to leverage their existing relationships into new areas.

Last year I wrote about some of the strategic issues for how telecommunications firms reposition themselves, in the context of mobile search. I'll expand on this theme anon.

The latest Teens and Social Media report from Pew/Internet gives some great insights into how teens aged 12-17 are using the Internet.

There are a host of great insights in the report, including:

* 64% of online teens aged 12-17 have created content on the Internet, up from 57% at the end of 2004 (this is 59% of all teens, as 7% are not on the Internet)
* 35% of teen girls write a blog, compared to 20% of boys
* 19% of teen boys upload videos, compared to 10% of girls
* 70% of 15-17 year old girls have used an online social network, compared to 54% of boys
* 89% of teens who post photos online say they get comments
* 79% of teens restrict access to their photos in some way, compared to 61% of adults
* Email is the least popular communication form among teens, with just 14% saying they email their friends every day

The fact that close to two-thirds of teens create and share content on the Internet underlines the fact that we are moving into the Participative Age. In fact close to a quarter of over-65 years olds also create content on the Internet, however generational change will see a world in which we take it for granted that we all create and share in some form.

The UK magazine Legal Week has just published an article co-authored by myself and Josh Bottomley, the Managing Director of LexisNexis UK, titled Managing a Law Firm: A networked world.

The genesis of the article is that I will be delivering the keynote to a group of Managing Partners of major law firms in London in late February 2008 for an event organized by LexisNexis. As a prelude to the event, I wrote this article in collaboration with Josh.

The article is available on the Legal Week website, and also below.

Managing a Law Firm: A networked world

Five key factors are driving today’s economy:

• client sophistication;
• connection; 
• transparency; 
• governance; and 
• modularisation.

These forces are steering the professional services sector towards commoditisation, where clients perceive minimal differences between most offerings and often squeeze their suppliers on fees. Only legal services suppliers that actively engage their clients in deep, collaborative relationships are able to differentiate themselves.

We suggest four approaches to improve management, customer service and ultimately profitability.

On December 5 I am giving a “View from the Top” online presentation to US and European members of the Association of Executive Search Consultants on Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships:The Key to Avoiding Commoditization.

There is no question that commoditization is one of the most powerful driving forces in the global economy. While this has been starkly obvious in product markets such as textiles and manufactured goods, commoditization is also fundamentally shaping professional service industries.

If clients believe that professional firms are replaceable, then they are commodities. Even if firms boast top talent and long-standing relationships, it is self-deception if you believe no-one else can do the work. The ‘black-box’ style of professonal services that relies purely on expertise is dated, and encourages clients to shop around. Ultimately the only thing that cannot be replicated and commoditized is a deep, collaborative, “knowledge-based” relationship. The field of competition for professional firms is increasingly the ability to build these high levels of engagement with their clients. This requires, among other capabilities, building effective networks to deliver value to their clients.

The slides for the AESC session are below (as usual, do not expect these to make complete sense without my accompanying presentation):

| View | Upload your own

For more detail you can download chapters from Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: Chapter 1 on the big picture of professional services and knowledge-based relationships, and Chapter 6 on implementing key client programs.

In my 2002 book Living Networks I wrote about the gradual shift to open accepted standards. Earlier this year, in the context of the social network battles, I wrote Is the trend to openness accelerating? Social networks as an inflection point.

I think we can now safely say that the trend to open business is inexorable, and that in hindsight, we are quite likely to point to 2007 as the turning point.

The latest is the extraordinary news that Verizon Wireless will introduce an “Any Apps, Any Device” option for its customers in 2008, allowing them to use any phone runnning any application. There are sceptics, but because there is the real potential to attract new customers and thsu create competitive advantage, this massive step is likely to create followers, shifting the industry.

Let’s review just a few of the other steps towards open business in the last six months:
May:
Facebook opens its developer platform
September:
New York Times online goes open
October:
Google launches Open Social
Path 101 established a ‘naked start-up’
November:
Google launches Open Handset Alliance
Murdoch says he will open up access to Wall Street Journal Online
Verizon Wireless announces open access

The availability of online services exchanges has been changing the nature of the online development business for a couple of years. Over two years ago in a blog post titled The rise of online services exchanges I described how sites such as elance.com, guru.com, rentacoder.com, and getafreelancer.com were globalizing services and tech development, and rapidly commoditizing fees to get work done.

Today Techcrunch has written about someone in Turkey who is asking on getafreelancer.com for a clone of Tangler.com, and is willing to pay $1500 for it. In an interesting coincidence, I caught up with Martin Wells, CEO of Tangler, at an event at Stanford University on Thursday evening, and we were talking about the online service exchanges, though more with a bent to getting work done.

Daniel on DRM finds other people looking for clones of Digg, eBay, Twitter and other leading online sites. I’m surprised that this is seen as noteworthy. None of this is new. Well over a year ago I saw over a dozen requests for Digg clones on Rentacoder. Has this resulted in the demise of Digg? Hardly. There are a few factors at play here.

The first is what the commentators today have focused on: the bidders are rather unlikely to create a worthwhile clone of these online sites for what they are getting paid. It shouldn’t be too hard to emulate a fairly simple site like Digg, though the rich functionality of Tangler is a bit more of a handful. Certainly you can’t expect robust, quality code at this kind of price.

Go here for the launch of the Future of Media Report 2007.

As we did last year, activity on the Future Exploration Network blog will largely shift to the Future of Media Summit blog for the next couple of months.

The Future of Media Summit participant blog will be a forum for speakers, partners, and attendees at the Future of Media Summit 2007 to discuss the issues covered at the Summit before, during, and after the event. When you register for the event you will be given a login and instructions to post on this blog.

Last year we only launched the participant blog for the Future of Media Summit 2006 at the time when the actual event kicked off, so we garnered a range of comments during the event itself, then a very healthy and extremely interesting discussion between the event participants in the month after the event.

This year we’d like to build an conversation beginning before the event, and extending far beyond, so we will continue with the same Future of Media Summit blog for Summits in subsequent years, rather than create a new blog each year.

Look forward to hearing from you on the Future of Media Summit blog - please participate!