Month: November 2008

Freewheeling about visualisation

A number of people brought this site, SayHear, to my attention at the weekend. Go take a look at it, and, especially if you’re reading this in the US, go further. Call the appropriate number and tell people why you’re going to vote for your selection.

So what is the site about? Well, you choose a number to ring based on your voting intention, then leave a message explaining why. You could indicate your intention not to vote as well. The colours of the box represent the voting intention. The information in the box represented where you were calling from. And the information “under” the box stored your voice message for others to click on and replay. Simple yet powerful.

What I particularly liked about the site was the simplicity of the idea and of the visualisation. Rich information, presented in a manner that made consumption of that information intuitive and easy. Colour codes that were consistent with external “standards”. Metadata, the area codes, also consistent with external standards. Information in text form enriched by the embedding of another form of information, that of the “voice file” at each point.

Many possibilities open up. For example, you could take “incoming calls” and represent the options the caller chose by using colour and size and shape, build a variant on a tag cloud. You could choose some other way of displaying call duration. You could associate the “box” so created not just with the speech file, but also the transcript. The capacity to use visualisation to reduce firehoses of information into manageable streams, that capacity has been around for a long time. What is new is the ability to mix and match different types of information while doing that. What is new is the platform used to deliver it.

[Note: I’m biased. The guys who designed and delivered this, Gershoni and Some Random Dude, are completely unknown to me. But the platform they used, Ribbit, is very much known to me. BT bought the company a few months ago, and I have the privilege of serving as its chairman.]

In a networked world, open innovation thrives when open platforms exist. What you see above is the shape of things to come. To echo the words of David Weinberger, small pieces loosely joined, joined to create value that could not have been created any other way.

Bonus link: I found this site an interesting read, both from a visualisation perspective as well as from the viewpoint of education in general.

When you see a fork in the road, take it

That’s my second-favourite Yogi Berra quotation; the number one slot is reserved for “Nobody goes there any more. It’s too crowded.”

Some of us see forks and wonder which road to take.  Others see a single road.

That’s a point made very well by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser in Born Digital: Understanding the first generation of Digital Natives

It’s an entertaining yet serious book, a must-read for anyone interested in Generation M, the first generation of digital natives. [And as far as I can see, that includes everybody. Who wouldn’t be interested in understanding Generation M? Who can afford not to?]

I’m not going to spoil it for you by even trying to summarise it here. Instead, here’s a taster of the kind of issues covered:

  • Generations like mine view the digital world as distinct and separate from the analog world. Those that are born digital don’t know the difference, they live integrated hybrid lives.
  • It’s not just technology that’s changing, the more important changes are in culture and values. Unless we understand the value sets and perceptions of the coming generation, we’re not going to have any idea how to proceed.
  • This understanding is critical to a number of decisions facing us now and in the near future, about identity, privacy and confidentiality, intellectual property, the very internet itself. We face these decisions as individuals, parents and teachers, firms, even governments. We face these decisions in policy making, in regulation, in legislation, both locally as well as globally.
  • The consequences of getting these decisions wrong are significant. It’s not just about throwing away value, not just about wasting or delaying potential. It’s about losing touch with a generation that mankind can ill afford to ignore.
  • The issue of the digital divide is also not going to go away. So when we work on these solutions, we need to keep making sure that the inclusiveness is protected, the inclusiveness that is an integral part of the digital native value set.
  • Time is not on our side. The pace of change is escalating, and escalating fast. We need to prepare for action, informed action. The book helps us do that.

These issues are discussed in depth, fairly and objectively. Importantly, they are discussed from a standpoint of evidence rather than pure theory. The book also does all of us a big favour by having a comprehensive bibliography.

There are going to be a lot of books about the digital natives; books from a variety of perspectives, written in a variety of styles, written to a variety of standards. What Born Digital does is to provide us a benchmark, a yardstick, a reference point for all that follows.

My thanks to the authors.

Ruminating about costumes

As a family, we love fancy dress parties. My son’s at one right now; we go to at least one a year; if there isn’t one to go to, then we try and host one. I guess it’s something they put in the water where we live.

We like wacky themes. For example, when my wife turned forty, she chose the theme “Come as what you wanted to grow up to be when you were a child”. That led to some great entries, the winners being a couple in their twenties who came brilliantly “aged” as people in their 80s. When the theme was to “come as the opposite of you”, I went as a skinhead. Which was fine, up to a point. This was in the early 1980s, and most of the costume was easy to get hold of. I even managed to buy a plastic thingummybob to cover my hair, a skin-coloured skull-cap-like thing. But it was meant for someone whose skin colour was not my skin colour, and changing that was hard.

Most of the time, I try and go as a hippie; the family are used to it. I’m strange that way.

But I digress. Suffice it to say that we like dressing up in costumes.

Now as you know I come from India; when I first entered the West, I could not get over the kind of pampering that pets received, in terms of food and beds and toys and even shampoos. As a child I was told that the USA and the UK spent more on pet food than on aid, and I believed it. And since I’d been brought up to believe that a dollar of trade was worth a hundred dollars of aid, I was pretty relaxed about it.

Like most families with children, we’ve had canaries and budgies and hamsters and goldfish over the years. When it comes to serious pets, it’s been about cats; we have two great cats, Mudpie and Midnight, inherited from friends who’ve emigrated to the US, and a kitten, Tiger. Here’s a shot of the three of them quietly observing an interloper in the garden.

And here’s one of the kitten on his own. Sometimes he gets left out of things, because Mudpie and Midnight are sisters and they go back a long way. But he doesn’t let that get to him:

I hope by now to have established that (a) we love fancy dress as a family and (b) we’re used to pets. Yet nothing, absolutely nothing, prepared me for this, very topical, juxtaposition of the two:

What can I say? Politics makes strange bedfellows. Hat tip to Sarah J-L for the tweet that led me to the photo, which is to be found here.