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Branding Trends: Engagement And Creation With Your Audience – The CoCreative Consumer
Posted by: | CommentsHow can you, as a customer, get more engaged and involved in the process that defines the very product you are holding in your hands? How can you actually participate in the very definition of the traits that will characterize a product you like?
Photo credit: Mikkel
Have you ever desired to get more from an item you purchased? To explore its possibilities in order to get the best out of it? Have you ever said: “I surely would have known how to make this better if they only had listened to me?”
According to marketing expert Mikkel, a time has come where the old-fashioned relationship between business companies and the customer will no longer suffice. A new production cycle is arising, where the end user takes control in the process of creating new products, and plays a crucial role in shaping that very product to suit her needs.
The more a company allows its customers to express their creativity on a brand new product, the more desirable that product will look to the target audience. The customers won’t have the feeling of buying something already pre-packaged, but they will rather be more likely to perceive a product which has multiple dimensions and benefits and which can provide a unique experience for each single user.
In this insightful report entitled “The Co-Creative Consumer”, marketing expert and web-designer Mikkel takes you into a journey exploring the emergence of a positive collaboration between consumers and brands creating products and services for them.
Here the full report in its entirety:
Intro by Daniele Bazzano
The Fragmented World
Businesses once had the control: they would develop a product which they advertised, then waited for people to buy it. Besides the necessary means of communication to make a sale, the businesses didn’t interact much with it’s surroundings. The economist Milton Friedman nailed this way of thinking with the words: “The business of business is business”, an expression of a business being a closed and independent entity.
In the previous 30 years, it’s however been discovered that many things influence the business, and that it may even influence it’s surroundings back. Now the talk is of the Corporate Citizen, en expression of the business being a part of, and being responsible to, the surrounding society and that it therefore must behave ethically correct.
This pattern of thinking originates back in the 1960’s growing ideology of holism: that everything is connected. It began in the spiritual awakening in the western world, but spread into more tangible areas like politics and consumer behavior. This was the beginning of a long term trend towards less faith in authorities, which reflected in many different areas of the societies, and culminated in the “fragmented world” as we know it today.
From the beginning of this change in paradigm, it certainly wasn’t all businesses that welcomed it: instead, an industry of consultants and writers began to advise the businesses to direct and control the slowly increasing loss of authority and the accompanying criticism. Companies understood that many factors could influence them, and they invented concepts such as image in order to control it. Thus they ran against the wind and fought the change, by hiring spokespersons and Public Relations directors to handle communications and image, but most of all to erect a breakwater against the criticism of outsiders. Businesses realized that boundaries disappeared, but reacted by re-erecting them. Even today we have not seen the climax of this peculiar contradiction in business communication.
Businesses today are keenly aware that there is little distinction between itself, its customers, its employees, the surrounding society and many other factors. They use concepts such as:
- Autocommunication
- Integrated Communication
- Corporate Social Responsibility
- Ethical (Social) Accounting
They’re all expressions of this holism. From Milton Friedman’s “the business of business is business“, the “business” of a company today is almost everything. Therefore there’s been an enormous increase in the amount of communication which the business must relate to, both that from it’s surroundings but also that which it transmits (and emits).
But businesses struggles to control their image (and with how to do it), their products and the amounts of communication. The term “fragmented communication” is used about a business that is unable to coordinate it’s communication, mostly outwardly. The ideal is controlling employees and departments so only the information which the management has green-lighted, gets out.
The problem is however that control is practically impossible – the technology is too advanced and the respect for authorities is too low. So an increase in the amount of communication has happened – and since the businesses desire to control and direct communication, there is so much more to monitor and control. The desire to control an increasing amount of information, results in the need to become “omnicommunicative“: watch and communicate about almost everything. The more “omnicommunicative” a business becomes, the more there is to monitor and control – and a negative spiral has begun. I wrote a bit about this in Information Overload.
There’s also been a dramatic increase in the amount of criticism of and animosity towards businesses. As mentioned above, the mix of the technological democratization and a lower faith in authorities, has made it prevalent to manipulate with a company’s products, or scrutinize it’s communications and internal conditions.
More important – the perpetrators and critics could be employees, customers, competitors or complete outsiders. They will investigate the company and it’s products, spread stories and find secrets which the company would rather not have published. A bit will be false rumors, but most will be the accounts of frustrated customers about bad service and products, publishing of confidential notes or rumors conveyed by employees. The newest official statements will be compared to earlier ones, the personal lives – past and present – of key officials will be googled, press announcements will be commented out of proportion, rumors will arise out of thin air and for a short moment be regarded as truth.
There’s so much of this criticism, that control is impossible – it doesn’t even make sense to talk about “fragmented communication” (nor “integrated“) any longer. We have to talk about the “fragmented world” or society, which is the new condition that everyone must work within: a uncontrollable world where everyone that has an opinion of the company, also is a part of it.
Attempts to direct and influence this fragmented world, for instance through PR-people, will fare badly – one cannot control a fundamentally uncontrollable world – at least not without losing ethical capital. The Internet contains plenty of examples of businesses that has attempted to edit, direct, correct and manipulate the communication that concerns them. The consequences has only been negative attention and a reduction of their ethical capital in the eyes of their customers and other parties. By trying to protect their reputation, they’ve hurt it.
Living in Chaos
Every mistake the business commits, and every injustice that random interested parties claim or believe to have been committed, will be published. Therefore the business can not wait for the criticism to arise and grow, but it must seek out the criticism, in order to answer and deal with it before it grows too big. This is not meant to suppress or manipulate the criticism, but to recognize “just” criticism, explain the business’ dispositions and choices, kill false rumors and generally engage in a dialogue.
The result of such a behavior will be a better image, deeper contact to customers, interests and the business’ surrounding world, which is vital to running a business the next many years.
Pirate copying will be a condition of existence that can not be avoided either – the clever business will even draw lessons from the pirates or at least accept them as a permanent existence. In it’s essence, piracy means that products and public relations materials will be copied and/or used in other ways then the business had intended.
- In one end of the scale, it means that a logo or product photos is used by third parties, for example, for presentations, ads or on webshops – and often distorted to bad quality or with inappropriate colors. If anything good can be said of this, it would be that the “perpetrators” do it to celebrate your business or to facilitate sales of your products.
- In the other end of the scale, it means that the (copy-) protection of technological or software products is bypassed, and that they perhaps are then modified to the benefit of the consumer. Modification of physical objects soon becomes, with the advent of the 3D-printer, so accessible that unhappy or curious consumers will disassemble the business’ products, copy the parts and build a modified version.
First they’ll be based on plastics but later also of metal and wood, and all sorts of mechanical or static objects could be altered: the user will simply either insert the object in, or download a schematics to, a copy machine which then produces a physical copy. Already the Internet contains many guides to do it yourself in your very own way of adjusting or using products in alternative ways – for example Ikea-furniture.
Releasing and copying equals publicity and for small producers it may be the only way ahead: movie producer Eric Wilkinson’s Man From Earth didn’t have many chances before it was copied, uploaded to the internet and mentioned on the pirate-news service ReleaseLog – which regularly links to obscure movies that mainstream media won’t touch. Instantly the buzz exploded across the net: it got good remarks from those that downloaded it, and Wilkinson even wrote a thank you note to ReleaseLog who naturally published it as a form of legitimizing piracy.
But the method of free releasing has already been used in music: big names such as Prince, Nine Inch Nails, and Radiohead can naturally best afford to release free albums, and do so as political or societal statements. But also small artists can to a degree live from distributing parts of their music for free and are angry at the established music industry.
Unleash Creativity
Apart from the fact that attempts to control may end with a negative reputation, it also ignores a huge vein of creativity: the business has to realize that it’s solution not necessarily is the best.
Basically, the historic development has gone from custom-made over mass-produced to customized. The lessened attention to authorities means that consumers to a lesser degree will accept a mass produced product, but desire some form of individualization. On the other hand, other consumers not only want an individual product but rather a creative experience from (de-)constructing the product: the entertainment and challenge from producing new content to the game can be far greater than playing the game itself.
Especially within computer games, companies have found that “modability” (modification ability) dramatically increases the consumers’ satisfaction, the lifespan of the product and for these reasons slightly increases sales. Around the games, little active communities arises of users producing small programs, mods that can be implemented in the game and thus give it added or new functionality such as new rules or looks.
Computer games such as The Sims, Spore, or Little Big Planet which contains various tools for creative expression and/ or content creation, find that a group of customers doesn’t even play the game itself but rather produce content for it. Others find that the less linear the game is, and the more free choices it offers, the better the customers like it.
The bottom line is that the function of the original product which the consumer didn’t like, she can now change by implementing a “mod” or following instructions made by other consumers. The business has thus, without further investment, has an unhappy customer turned to a happy one. The more creativity and freedom the product offers, the greater value it’ll have – because customers owning the product can produce more content for the product.
Michael Yon is the best PR-worker of the American army, despite his presence being unwanted by some, and the fact that he’s not even in the military! US army has for years used “embedded reporters” to achieve a better image: the philosophy is that the closer the journalist is to the action and to the soldiers, the better coverage and sympathy will he convey.
Unfortunately the army is not happy with the reports of most journalists, and most journalists aren’t happy with the Iraq/Afghanistan war or the military itself – a really bad match. That’s why the former special forces soldier and now self-made journalist Michael Yon is the best asset the army could desire: He’s always at the very front line, and has great sympathy for the soldiers and civilians and enjoy their respect. He utilizes his knowledge of the army to get “under the skin” of everyone, and for describing the action – and people involved in it – which is valuable when one needs to find out what’s really going on. Among other things, Yon could see how, long before most others could, the center of the war would change from Iraq to Afghanistan. And the army doesn’t even pay him to do all this – his readers do.
Neil Gershenfeld is behind FabLabs, which brings semi-advanced tools to local communities and let people experiment and build. At TED06 Neil talked about kids that made better solutions than scientists: how his term “technology of one” or “personal fabrication: products for a market of one-person” is
- An extreme way of utilization of creativity
- An effective form of aid
- A new way of producing good, and to view a product life cycle.
CoCreation – Maslow’s For Businesses
Click above to enlarge the picture
Psychologist Abraham Maslow devised the human hierarchy of needs: that we need sleep more than friends, and that we can only concentrate on playing music after we’ve had a bite to eat. The fundamental factor is thus the cumulative amount of resources. Above is a graphic of three pyramids:
- First Maslow’s original hierarchy of needs
- Then my interpretation of it for use with businesses
- And lastly one for use in relation to products and customers and the relationship between them.
As the hierarchy of needs is true for an individual person, it’s also true for a business: without tools and employees there’s no reason to have a PR-strategy: but the more needs of the hierarchy that are fulfilled, the more successful the business can become.
The hierarchy of needs also pertains to customers: they need to receive and be able to use the product, but if there’s no possibility of having it repaired, there’s less reason to buy it. The more individual needs a product fulfills, and the better it fulfills them, the more reason to buy it.
According to Maslow’s for businesses there’s an increasing element of involvement between the customer and the product she buys: the more it allows her, the more value it has to her. A product should ultimately and preferably fulfill up to and including the top field in the blue pyramid. “Maslow’s for businesses”, as it’s pictured above, is fundamentally true, but an important exception is that some products may well fulfill certain fields better than other fields. The more fields of the pyramid a product or service fulfills the more desirable it is to the customer, and the fewer fields the product fulfills the better it has to be in these few fields, in order to be competitive.
In reality this shows as branding: a certain angle is given to a product by the producer:
- One phone has a stylish or weird design
- Another phone is very easy to use
- A third phone has exceptional service and is of a sturdy quality, etc.
Systems and solutions that leave the control to the customer, according to the top field in the hierarchy, are the products that will win. Today it’s mostly seen in customization options such as:
- Building your Toyota
- Configuring a new Dell-computer
- Coloring your Nike shoes via a web interface
Even though the product in itself is not allowing any form of creativity, it may achieve a competitive advantage if it is “attached” such a possibility in a PR or sales situation.
The New Ideology
The new age is not as much about technology, but mostly about the ideology surrounding web 2.0. Businesses use the new media but doesn’t understand their nature – that’s also true for the companies I just mentioned above.
However, it’s especially true for news media: the printed and TV publications dwindle while the online versions struggle to find the correct format and use of the internet – and journalists are secretly bewildered as to what their role is in this new world. The large majority of businesses (and media) don’t understand the very important fact that consumers expect to be engaged in a different way then 10 years ago, that monologue has been replaced by dialogue and that mass production has been replaced by individualization. And the word dialogue should be understood both in terms of communication, product development and support/service. The businesses that can realize and materialize the new ideology of the CoCreative Consumer, can save lots of money, develop new and better products more efficiently and faster, and make their customers happier.
The mantra is no longer that the “customer is king”, but rather that the “fan club is king”. The former slogan was about service and therefore re-active, while the current slogan is about product development and therefore pro-active.
- From considering technology as developed and delivered from top to bottom, we now need to consider it from bottom and up.
- From delivering complete products, businesses must now – to a degree – deliver tools.
- From telling customers what to buy, businesses must now listen for what customers want to buy.
- From being an arranger of the customers experience, the business must now be an adviser to the customers experience.
Technology is in some cases the means, but it is never the end – a new and open thought pattern is the goal. This way of thinking implies being able to balance in chaos, not maniacally attempting to regaining control in/of chaos. The business must face that it, and its products, will be discussed, abused, stolen and criticized. However, this fact can be turned to one’s own advantage, amongst other things through utilizing the CoCreative Consumer.
Business and the New Ideology
Click above to enlarge the picture
A completely new product life cycle is arising:
- Previously the product was developed by the business after research and planning, and was considered and presented as the final result which consumers could buy or leave be.
- Now the product is a starting point for modifications, which in turn are starting point for social interaction, which in turn are starting point for new products – where after the circle is repeated.
What’ll happen in reality is that some of the customers that bought the product will modify it and then spread this modified version to friends or other customers, in the forums where they meet. The business will discover these new ways of using the product, and they will build it into new versions of the product. There is therefore synergy between the engaged customers, the CoCreating Consumers, and the business.
It’s also important to remember that Pareto’s principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, is true for the CoCreative Consumer: 20% of the customers will do 80% of the modifications, and only a handful will create the really great modifications: find them, engage them, involve them and hire them.
Future business models will far more often be based on dialogue and start with the consumer – or more precisely in the product or the business as a social magnet. Kevin Kelly and Seth Godin use the terms True Fans and Tribe Management, while the Danish Institute for Future Science terms it Creative Man. All of those means that businesses no longer mass produce to unknown customers, but instead have a close and symbiotic relationship with the most engaged ones. Far more “open” products will be made that engages the fan club and is designed to make change and modifications possible.
Therefore new business models will arise: such as ransom-systems, where the artist only produces next album or writes the next book, when the production costs have been covered by the fans. In reality, the producer and fans thus make a contract in which the consumer to a large degree is determining how the product should be – which in turn is secured a certain circulation. Another kind of business model is that one version of the product is free, while another and typically more advanced version costs money.
The CoCreative Consumer is based on procedurality: that content is created on the fly. Though the expression comes from the software industry, I use procedural creation in the sense that the producer delivers the tools and a frame which the consumer fills with content. Procedural products are thus tools and frames for creativity: a saw is not per se a procedural tool but a pencil or Adobe Photoshop is. Online services such as Ebay, Youtube or Wikipedia are based on this principle.
Access / Hindrance
The degree of modability in the product or of dialogue between business and consumer, will have an increasing impact – consumers simply won’t be hindered or interrupted. The consumer’s options for dialogue with the business or/and modability of the product will be seen as Access and yield a positive response, while the lack of Access will be regarded as Hindrance: a hostile act towards the consumer which yields a negative response.
Examples of Access can be:
- easy ways of contacting the business
- download of PR-materials or product-specifications
- forums for exchanging views with other customers or possibilities for product modification.
Access is about the business handing over control to the customer or basing procedures on that which is best and easiest for the customer.
Examples of Hindrance would be:
- Redirecting callers between departments
- Copy protecting software
- Demanding unnecessary registration
Hindrance is about the company keeping control or basing procedures on that which is easiest and best for itself.
Practical Advice
Design to Or with The Fan Club
Include the customer in product development – the prize is avoiding features that consumers doesn’t want, and instead focusing on features which they crave or even the invention of completely new products and features. The more You listen to consumers, the better a product can be delivered, bad reviews are avoided and you gain great sympathy. Note however that it’s important which customers you listen to and how you do it: they have a different agenda than You do, and the amateur-users have different agendas and needs than the professional-users.
Make Procedural Products
Build in a kind of tools, make products that are frames for creativity or allow lots of freedom. The higher on “Maslows’ for businesses” the product is, the more value and life span it will have. One of the most procedural products that exist is the pencil.
Connect to Many Networks
Physical networks can be plugs/sockets or modability: they allow the consumer to adjust the product’s function, expand it’s connections or work in alternative ways. Social networks can be conveying contact to other consumers or secondarily related groups or networks. Knowledge networks can be a library of schematics, links to relevant encyclopedia resources, or conveying consumers tips on modification.
Hire the CoCreative Consumer
Arrange “tweak” contests and encourage the alternative uses of Your products, or accept suggestions for new products – and reward the good ones. The idea is to search for opportunities and future employees – it’s not a celebration of Your business or Your products, it’s a celebration of the consumer/participants and their creativity. The people that “mod” are often long time customers or in related ways interested in Your field , and furthermore technical competent and creative: it’s amongst these that the best of Your future employees are to be found. Observe the creativity in the destruction and the construction in the deconstruction – and remember the 80/20 rule.
Embrace the Fragmented World
Be close to criticism, seek, engage and listen to those that discuss and use Your products. A new job title could be “information detective”, who’d assist Your business in surveying it’s surroundings: who mentions it, how and where? The dualistic advantage of being close to the criticism is that you’re also close to the ideas.
Employees need to have the freedom to satisfy your customers. It will always be cheaper to offer extraordinary service or re-ship a product too many than it is to anger your customer.
The media loves a good story and the internet never forgets. When problems are spotted in the horizon, quickly inform as many interested parties as possible. Safety measures rather annoys your customers than actually prevent piracy: it’s also proven that great sales are not made by copy protections, but from the product being great.
Be Like Lego
After having written the most of this article, I had the opportunity to talk to the communications boss of the Danish toy producer about their methods and how Lego views the CoCreating Consumers. I already knew that Lego likely was a relevant example to include, but I was surprised to learn that the company actually is a living example of most of what you’ve just read in this article:
- The Lego brick, as a product, is located at the top field of “Maslow’s for businesses”, it’s an extremely “creative product”, and there are many different kinds of blocks, sets and ways to use them – even virtual ones.
- Lego, as a company, has a very close relationship with their customers and put lots of effort into using them as a creative resource.
- 5 years ago, Lego found out that they can no longer control their surroundings, and since then they’ve worked on adjusting to living in chaos. However, they’d still like to crush the pirates.
Don’t Be Like…
I make the last touches on this article I discover that Spore publisher EA has put a heavy copy protection on the game, and the negative reviews were being deleted from Amazon – costumers are furious! The next day it was corrected, but the damage has still been done. It doesn’t even matter why/how it happened, it only matters that customers got angry and lost faith in EA and Amazon.
First I was happy that my ideas was proven correct, but then i simply turned sad and dumbfounded. My mind began listing similar examples of negligent and stupid behavior by businesses towards consumers – and you might begin to list a few of your own. Business technology has never been more advanced – yet business behavior is still in the mud
Ordforklaring – The Dictionary
- Access / Hinderance
– The degree of interaction possibility in a product or with a business. The more Access and the less Hindrance, the more sympathy and success.- Circular Product Development – Symbiotic relation between business and consumer regarding new products
- CoCreating Consumer – Ideology surrounding the dialogue with engaged customers. The closer a product can be developed with the engaged customers, the better.
- Fragmented World – Expression of the business’ lack of control, not even it’s own employees. The fragmented world consists of interested partied that relates to the business and which it must create a good relationship to, in order to survive.
- Maslow’s For Business – The human hierarchy of needs in relation to products: the more interaction and creativity it allows, the more desirable it will be to the consumer.
- Modability – Modification Ability: the customer’s possibility to adjust the business’ product.
- Procedural Products – Tools or frames for creativity and content, which the consumer contributes to or works with.
Originally written by Mikkel for Design Af Mikkel and first published as “The CoCreative Consumer” on July 20th 2007
About the author
Mikkel is a marketing expert and web-designer. He focuses his attention on communication techniques and how information should be provided to be as efficient as possible. On his own site Design Af Mikkel he writes: “My philosophy is about balance, about holism. About reaching each other in the best way, about doing it honestly and about having fun along the way.” Mikkel has written some valuable papers about the importance of customer engagement and “The CoCreative Consumer” is one of them.
Learning to learn. Questioning and deconstruncting our long established educational paradigms. Thinking and looking at how to cope with our need for survival and growth in new, innovative ways. This is the end goal of those who see education as a means to better understand and cope with the world we create and live in rather than the means to accumulate informational data on how specific systems did or do work.
Photo credit: Vasyl Yakobchuk
“The quality of academic content is a function of how well it has been designed to accept feedback for improvement after initial creation. Opportunities for improvement need to be added during the initial stage of course development.
Too many course/learning designers assume that a course is complete once it has been created.
While that may have been the case twenty years ago, today a course is the starting point, not the end point of the design process.“
George Siemens, educational technologies and learning expert, takes you into another short journey to see, discover and understand of media and new technologies are rapidly changing the way we think, work and collaborate.
Here the details:
Building a Collaborative Workplace
Anecdote has released a free whitepaper on Building a Collaborative Workplace:
“Today we all need to be collaboration superstars. The trouble is, collaboration is a skill and set of practices we are rarely taught. It’s something we learn on the job in a hit-or-miss fashion. Some people are naturals at it, but most of us are clueless.“
It’s a good paper that will help get people thinking about the importance of thinking and working in collaborative modes. My only mild critique: the paper discusses three types of collaboration: team, community, network. This goes back a bit to Anderson and Dron’s discussion of Collectives, Networks, and Groups (.pdf) or Stephen’s discussion of groups vs. networks.
I’m inclined to say that all forms of interaction are network based. Groups, collectives, teams, communities, etc. The underpinning structure is a network. As such, groups/collectives/teams are all certain types of networks.
The key challenge is one of determining what type of network we require in a particular situation.
How much autonomy is required? How are individual voices captured/projected/aggregated? Who has control and power?
Accreditation and the Catholic Church
“Educational reform is much like religious reform, and our openness movement and desires to innovate in higher education are much like the Reformation. When the Church was the prevailing power, it took Luther a significant amount of courage to stand up, nail a list of issues to the door, and say “Go ahead and excommunicate me. I’ve tried reforming from within with no success. You leave me no choice but to leave and try again on my own.“”
I appreciate his analogy. I’ve found many parallels between the systemic reforms of the enlightenment, industrial era, and economics, with what we are confronted with in education.
A small note of clarification, however: in most systems of reform, the first departure from the established norm is not radical. Luther, for example, was subsequently appalled at the direction the revolution took. His desire was to reform the church, not recreate it. Calvin and his followers took things in an entirely new direction.
Similarly, the French revolution of the late 18th century sought to accommodate a monarchical presence. It was only subsequent thinkers and reformers that wanted to do away with the monarchy. I think this is an important consideration.
First generation reformers still carry much of the ideology of the existing system into their reform activities. Subsequent thinkers, however, aren’t tethered to the ideology of the system. It is here that true and significant change happens.
Connectivism and Connective Knowledge
Stephen Downes and I will be offering an online course starting September through University of Manitoba on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge. The course is available for credit (enrollment is required) or for personal interest (no fee).
All discussions and learning resources will be freely available online. More information on how the course is run, weekly topics, etc., is available on the course wiki. If you are interested, you can sign up here in order to receive more information on participating or enrolling.
Quick update: for some reason, the above link to the wiki doesn’t work for everyone. It is also available here: http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/wiki/Connectivism
The New News
I’ve posted this before, but was again reminded of the value of seeing the full process of content development with regard to news: The new news.
Key point: while much of the initial process for gathering information (or, if you will, creating a course) is unchanged, what is most unique now is the iterative, corrective, and subsequent interaction and enhancement around the content after it has been created (again, think courses and programs if you’re an educator).
The quality of academic content is a function of how well it has been designed to accept feedback for improvement after initial creation. Opportunities for improvement need to be added during the initial stage of course development.
Too many course/learning designers assume that a course is complete once it has been created.
While that may have been the case twenty years ago, today a course is the starting point, not the end point of the design process.
Of related interest, Martin Weller has put together a short online presentation on the future of content.
Desire2Blog Interview
Yesterday, Barry Dahl conducted a short interview with me in preparation for my upcoming presentation at Desire2Learn’s conference in Memphis: Fusion 2008. The interview is available here. The conversation ranged from the social nature of learning to “connectives and collectives” for learning.
Future of Media?
Ballmer on the future of media: “…there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.”
I enjoy broad sweeping proclamations of the future. But 10 years? Yes, the digitization of everything continues to plod forward. But the impact of those changes are hit and miss. Even now, countries in developing regions of the world are still grappling with consistent electricity access.
Ballmer’s prediction, while interesting, are not likely to be experienced outside of small pockets/regions.
Is Google Making us Stupid?
This article – Is Google Making us Stupid – has been receiving a fair bit of attention. The author states:
“My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages.“
The concept of reduced attention span has drawn criticism. Mind Hacks states:
“In terms of any new technology, it’s obvious having tools to hand changes the strategies we use to solve problems, but so far, there is no strong evidence that Google, YouTube, Facebook or any other part of the web affects the fundamentals of how we think.“
While the evidence supporting the idea that we think differently due to technology use may not exist, anecdotal seems to trump empirical for most people…
EdTechTalk
EdTechTalk provides an excellent weekly analysis of educational technology. In addition to providing discussion of various trends, they explore (and use) numerous tools educators might find valuable. This last week, they used ooVoo for video conferencing for up to six people. Looks like a useful tool.
Chris Lott: The Only Netgen Nonsense
Chris Lott takes issue with those who dismiss netgen learners:
“I suspect that we will see, in retrospect, that there are biological and neurological changes occurring due to technological changes, but it’s not really important. The remonstrations about the evidence remind me of scientists concluding that bumblebees can’t fly and philosophers concluding that there is no physical reality. Like Berkeley, I refute you thus, with the students I teach every term…“
He then adds an additional (and quite interesting) metaphor of eating to support his case:
“People eat very differently in times of abundance than scarcity. Their biology doesn’t significantly change (though it does some), but it would be foolish to look around and argue that people aren’t really eating differently, it’s just a change in their food context. It would be wiser to recognize that the socioeconomic context is an important factor to consider when it comes to nutrition and try to teach proper eating habits in an environment that is not just no longer one of hunting and gathering, but one that is very different for most of us from even 50 years ago.“
Learning 2.0 Panel
Case Western Reserve University recently held a panel on learning 2.0. The recording is now available. I appreciated Susan Metros opening points on how technology as a tool looks past the impact – i.e. when faculty use an iPod, is the issue about “the tool” or is it about mobility? Gibson’s notion of affordances of tools (.pdf) is particularly apt here.
Originally written by George Siemens and published as weekly email digest on eLearning Resources and News. First published on June 13th 2008.
To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book “Knowing Knowledge“.
Understanding new media and communication technologies by sharing, networking and engaging in meaningful conversations is what this weekly digest, curated by connectivism guru George Siemens is all about.
Photo credit: KTSDesign
Being connected, learning from others and understanding how different modes of interaction with content and people can deeply influence the way we think, act and learn are just some of the many issues that George Siemens brings to this study people today.
As always, I invite you to take a break from the breakneck pace of today’s pressures and to read with curiosity into some of these precious information gems.
Seven Habits of Highly Connected People
Lisa Neal
A short article on the art of being connected: Seven Habits of Highly Connected People. A few points made in the article resonated with with: the importance of reading/commenting on the work of others, rather than simply producing content…and the importance of finding places online where we can “add value rather than to pursue a particular goal or objective“.
Have Three Hours?
If you have a few extra hours, I recommend you explore these three technology learning related podcasts:
Gardner Campbell: Computers as poetry - a beautiful presentation of how the metaphors of poetry can inform technology use. See also his article on My Computer Romance.
Brain Lamb: Mashups Un-Artist (links to audio file) – This was a presentation Brian delivered in Second Life…I didn’t see the session, but from listening to the audio, I got a sense of Brian Lamb as Bob Geldof in The Wall.
D’Arcy Norman – discusses images/pictures/flickrs, but of greatest personal interest, his description of eduglu project (at about the half-way mark)…one that has potential for much impact.
China’s Higher Ed Explosion
Needless to say (which is why I will), it’s an exciting time to be in education. The promise of change is in the air, driven by technology, social change, and (perhaps most significantly) economic and political power shifts to countries like China, India, and Brazil…and regions like Africa and the Middle East. A small sample of the enormity of the change – China’s Higher Ed Explosion:
“In pure bulk, the numbers behind China’s expansion are startling.
Between 1999, shortly after the country’s leaders decided to focus on expanding access to and improving the quality of higher education as tools to propel the former Third World economy into the leading ranks of the world’s powers, and 2005, the number of undergraduate and graduate students earning degrees from China’s colleges and universities quadrupled, rising to 3.1 million from 830,000. Enrollments grew even faster over that period, with the number of new entering students growing to nearly 5 million in 2005.”
Evolving Media
Mark-Glaser
Changes within educational technology are complex and uncertain in how they may ultimately impact the institutions of teaching and learning. But (as I’ve stated many times), we are not without guides in determining potential paths and directions.
We have the experience of other industries that felt one of their primary products was content and discourse around content: newspapers, TV news, magazines, music, and movie industries. While we can’t directly apply all the lessons of those fields to education, we can certainly gain insight from how different modes of interacting with content and with others may influence education.
Mark Glaser provides a quick overview of changes in media and how communication tools have shifted control/power…and the impact on reduced circulation of newspapers and advertising (advertising follows energy and eyeballs, making it a good indicator of macro trends in media habits of consumers).
Neuroscience and Misplaced Trust…
We often unnecessarily esteem (or fear) what we do not know. Sometimes it’s related to race or culture…and other times to ideas and concepts. For many people, philosophy holds such a distinction. When someone is identified as a philosopher, assumptions are formed as to the depth of their thought and thereby authority to speak knowingly on certain subjects. Sometimes it’s warranted. Other times it is not. We see a similar trend with neuroscience today.
Two fairly recent arguments present the challenge: Seeing is believing: The effect of brain images on judgments of scientific reasoning:
“…part of the fascination, and the credibility, of brain imaging research lies in the persuasive power of the actual brain images themselves. We argue that brain images are influential because they provide a physical basis for abstract cognitive processes, appealing to people’s affinity for reductionistic explanations of cognitive phenomena.”
…and The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations : “Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people’s abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation.”
Does this explain the willingness for many people to accept the crockus as a part of the brain?
Giving Up On Work Email
I’ve been following Luis Suarez’s battle with email (he’s trying to move completely away from email). He links to this simple graphic of the differences between wikis and email. Email is still a primary communication tool for me. New tools – blogs, wikis, twitter, facebook, etc. – to date have been largely supplemental. I haven’t let go of email in any significant way. Maybe I’m a communication tool pack rat.
(update: just saw Stephen had linked to the same image a few days ago…
Disruptive Mobile Learning
I had the pleasure this morning of introducing, and being involved in, a presentation on Disruptive Mobile Learning by Mike Sharples. I was quite impressed with the quality of mobile learning activities currently being conducted in schools. The session has been archived and can be seen here.
A few interesting links from the session:
“Pervasive technologies are used to digitally augment a woodland in a contextually relevant way, enhancing the ‘usual’ physical experience available to children exploring the outdoor world.”
(try reading that to non-ed tech folks)
Originally written by George Siemens and published as weekly email digest on eLearning Resources and News. First published on April 3rd 2008.
To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book “Knowing Knowledge“.
From online children safety to mobile learning and to how participatory web tools have shifted the role of corporate communications, George Siemens takes you once again, like every week, into discovering how to make sense out of all the innovation taking place around you.
Prof. Siemens shares always great insights, valuable pointers found alongside his learning journey, gems and rare nuggets that can help you understand more and better how media and new technologies are affecting the way we work, interact and learn from each other.
Great food for thought.
Safer Children in a Digital World
Growing concerns about how safe our children are online are increasingly reflected in discussion, policies, and politics. Last week, during a parent-teacher meeting, we received a booklet on “safety online” for young children, signs that the conversation has moved from hype/panic, to some more practical steps and directions. I don’t view online safety to be any different than safety in any other aspect of life. All things are potentially dangerous – a trampoline, a pool, a baseball bat. The key challenge we face is in teaching children how to participate safely in any activity.
I was skimming a report – Safer Children in a Digital World (.pdf) and came across this practical statement:
“Children and young people need to be empowered to keep themselves safe – this isn’t just about a top-down approach. Children will be children – pushing boundaries and taking risks. At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim.”
Mobile Learning Presentation
A few months ago, after seeing his Disruptive Mobile Learning presentation on slideshare, I asked Mike Sharples if he would be willing to deliver a similar presentation online. He agreed, so I’m pleased to announce that University of Manitoba’s Learning Technology Centre has organized his presentation for April 2, 9:00 am CST (GMT-6). If you would like to attend, please send me an email: gsiemens AT elearnspace DOT org.
Designing With Failure in Mind
Failure is a valuable experience. We learn more when things don’t go right than we learn when everything goes as planned. Unfortunately, the concept of failure has negative connotations. We find it less than desirable and strive to avoid it, sometimes to the point of paralysis. And thereby miss the opportunities to learn. What has been your most valuable recent failure?
Jim McGee has an interesting post on the designing with failure in mind: “Human systems are interesting and effective because they are resilient. Good designers allow for the reality of human strengths and weaknesses and factor both into their designs. Too many poor or lazy designers ignore or gloss over failure modes. How many project plans have you seen, for example, that assume no one on the project team will ever be out sick?”
When Information and Interaction Change
I delivered a presentation today to the Canadian Defense Academy titled “When information and interaction change”. Slides are here…audio of the session is available here. My main emphasis in the presentation was to explore how the different manner in which we access/use/create information, and the different manner in which we interact with others, defines and shapes our institutions and approaches to learning. As such, changes in information and interaction should impact design of learning and teaching.
Why Everything in Medicine Is Connected
Why Everything in Medicine Is Connected:
“But social networking is about more than just friends reunited; it’s a framework for understanding even the most basic of biological processes…In its simplest form, network analysis can map ties between entities (whether elephants, humans, or genes). The same principles that allowed researchers to characterize the role of matriarchs in the social organization of the endangered African elephant species also illuminated the collective dynamics fueling individual donations to the 2004 tsunami relief fund, and provided the techniques to model the gene network that controls T cell activation in humans.”
The term network is no longer broad enough to encompass its multiple uses. The article listed above describes networks within medicine according to structural patterns of organization. It works well in that instance. But in discussion of networked learning, things become a bit less certain. Does learning in networks refer to the web? Social ties? The neural activity going on in our neocortex? Obviously it refers to all of these concepts…and that is exactly the problem. When a field first emerges, one word describes it all. As the field specializes, more nuanced terms need to arise to provide more descriptive views of concepts. In the end, it’ll still all be about networks, but our language of networks needs to be more precise.
Conference 2.0
What a lovely day. We have (yet) another 2.0 term: Conference 2.0. When we were working on our conference article for EDUCAUSE, I had one driving desire (well, I had several, primary of which was to actually finish the article): under no circumstances would we pick low-hanging fruit to title the article – such as conference 2.0. Fortunately, Teddy (editor) equally suffered from “2.0 fatigue“.
From the article:
“”People now have a voice, enabled by technology, to participate and be heard, and they’re going to use it,” Heuer said. “This has only just begun. It’s only the first inkling of how people are going to seize the power from institutions. People in power need to find ways to get the audience to participate.”"
The Authentic Enterprise
Just read an article on The Authentic Enterprise (.pdf). Ignoring for a moment that the term “authentic” is no longer very authentic and is therefore largely meaningless, the report presents an interesting perspective on how participatory web tools have shifted the role of corporate communications. The ability for a PR department to craft, control, and segment messages is now minimal due to web.
While it’s not a revolutionary statement, the report makes the admission of the current state of information flow: “We are not in control“. Like any individual in need of help/therapy, accurately appraising one’s predicament is important to healing 
. I wonder how many educational institutions have a similar understanding – i.e. that we no longer control information creation, flow, dissemination, validation, etc.
Originally written by George Siemens and published as weekly email digest on eLearning Resources and News. First published on March 28th 2008.
To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book “Knowing Knowledge“.
Extending The Internet: The Peernet OpenMesh
Posted by: | CommentsExtending Internet reach and accessibility while making it more resilient, and immune to possible controls and manipulations has been one of the major concerns addressed, and although some significant steps forward, at least in terms of awareness, have been made in this direction, bridging the digital divide and safeguarding Internet net neutrality has remained for now only a purely economic equation.
Photo credit: Circotasu
Individuals, like you and me have for now very few tools to influence the laws and regulations that determine how and where new cables or new Internet access technologies are deployed and what ISPs, telcos and our own government decide with our votes and money.
But we may possibly be at a turning point.
For the first time individuals can start affecting the way the future infrastructure of the Internet will develop. For the first time we have the tools and know-how to start thinking and experimenting with new ways to extend the Internet beyond the factual limits established by the present telecoms and corporation-controlled infrastructure.
The idea is one of extending the Internet beyond its present physical reach. If more people could extend and relay via the use of new and hybrid technologies their own unused bandwidth to other people not just a few feet away, enormous benefits could be provided to all those lacking quality high-speed Internet connections (let alone any connection at all) in cities and rural areas just about everywhere.
It is not that that those providing access from telcos to ISPs are bad or trying to do anything nasty, but if it comes to something as vital and fundamental as our own planetary communication infrastructure we better evaluate well whether, when the technological conditions exist, it wouldn’t be better if each one of us owned and powered its direct node to the Internet, or redistributed to a much higher degree what he did not use, rather than having to buy exclusively into an existing established commercial infrastructure and depend fully on it (and on whom has the power to control it, limit it, censor it, or close it)?
It would also be good to consider whether it would be good to collectively safeguard the contents and services we use and like most on the Web and made them fully resilient and out of the control of any one entity out there.
Not only.
With trans-oceanic submarine telecommunication cables being cut on the seafloor of our planet with no-one apparently being able to stop or even explain the nature of such rehearsals, or by looking at a recent court action resulting in WikiLeaks being taken off line, it appears increasingly likely that access to the Internet may not be a certainty we can count on in the foreseeable future.
In this light, it would appear wise to study and analyze the opportunity to backup the whole Internet including its content and key services, so that in case a natural or an artificial disaster brings the official Internet down, we may have a fully redundant alternate system through which we can continue our planetary conversation.
While the basic architecture of the net does protect to some degree against these dangers, Sepp Hasslberger brings forward the idea that we might profit from developing a way to “back up the internet” so that, even if there are major disruptions, we still have a workable means of communication, data storage and exchange of ideas.
“My dream is a p2p application that uses some of the free hard disk storage space on our personal computers to redundantly back up the net and allow work to continue more or less seamlessly in the event of a major catastrophe.
Would such a thing be doable? What do you think?
Is anyone already working on this?“
Cyber Warfare on the Rise – Don’t rely on the Internet
Alex Ansary – Cyber Warfare on the Rise – Don’t rely on the internet – a video I run into yesterday which portrays some of the concern expressed in part in this article
What follows is an edited, revised and extended version of what originally written across a series of spontaneous posts by Sepp Hasslberger on the P2P community forum. I have re-organized this content, edited much of it, and added my own contributions after having spoken with the author wherever I felt I could add more clarity and depth to his original idea.
This is just a first draft of an idea that wants to develop more. There is no definite recipe or solution yet available but simply a desire by a few like-minded people to take this further and see where it can take them.
The Medium Is The Mess
While the original internet infrastructure was one of peer connections between university mainframes, the emergence of the world wide web has led to a paradigm shift, as recently argued by Simon Edhouse in The Medium is the Mess.
Today we have a dominant server-client architecture which we inherited from the world wide web that was established in the 1980s. We have clients and servers, and in physical infrastructure, we have consumers and access providers.
The paradigm is great for business, but it does place everyone on equal grounds. The issues of net neutrality and access censorship have already provided some good indications of what the larger implications of this may be.
Revenues are made by exploiting our attention and even things which have a P2P flavor such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook are really ways to keep us linked into the client-server model.
The Web and the entire Internet structure are corporation-controlled on which we are mere guests, much like the first people sending email and discussing on the Usenet, timidly using some of the bandwidth that was there for entirely different reasons.
So, what keeps us from overcoming this legacy architecture with all of its drawbacks, is that the overwhelming majority of transactions today is firmly grounded in the client/ server paradigm.
The worthwhile activity we should engage in is one of shining a big light on the inequities of the currently dominant client-server paradigm, and one of building increased consumer awareness of the client/server paradigm flaws so that large groups of consumers, (and the people who influence them) are more inclined to break away from this web-lock-in, and can experiment with the possibilities of possible new alternative systems.
What is needed, it seems, is a strategy towards the transformation of the web-dominated Internet of today into a possible ‘Peernet’ of tomorrow.
(The term Peernet has not been coined by Sepp Hasslberger and it has been used before, namely in a paper entitled “PeerNet: Pushing Peer-to-Peer Down the Stack” and addressing how a network with separation between address and identity would be designed. This would be a peer-to-peer-based network layer for large networks. Note that such PeerNet is not an overlay on top of IP, it is an alternative to the IP layer.)
Enters Peernet
Peernet would be an ideal extension of the present Web, but capable of running on a fully parallel, fully P2P-based infrastructure. There would be no centralized servers and no Internet Service Providers.
Everyone would be a relay node capable of receiving and sending data to everyone else, while data and services would reside in a “cloud” made possible dynamically by all those connected to this virtual network at any one time.
There are many ways to envision this and at this stage they are all worthwhile consideration. Some see the possible framework made up by a relatively few traditional users hooking up to the mainstream Internet and sharing back access to the majority. Others prefer to view a gradual progress to a fully parallel and independent P2P-based net-like infrastructure. There are obvious and apparently unsormountable problems on all sides, but notwithstanding these technology is bringing some interesting and disruptive new technologies to the open market while some quite interesting ideas are already floating in the P2P community forum who has started discussing in greater this idea.
The difference between today’s Web and a hypothetical future Peernet would be as great as that between the traditional media (both print and TV) and the World Wide Web.
By empowering individuals to take back full control of a global peer-to-peer communication infrastructure there would be hope of development of alternative economic and commercial realities which have no fertile soil on which to grow right now.
Eventually, for Peernet to be an idea empowering everyone, it needs to be based on its own P2P infrastructure quite independent of the hardware and even the connectivity that powers today’s internet.
Digital Divide and Connectivity
There is also a persistent problem with bringing connectivity, especially broadband, to consumers.
Bridging the last mile is not easy. Cities attempting to provide that access with city-wide mesh networks are having trouble with their plans. One recent example: Long Island Wireless, Short. Portland Oregon is another trouble spot, where connectivity has been contracted and promised but is not really materializing. Other news and reports seem to indicate that mobile broadband is “spreading like wildfire“, but the commercial interests involved make it for now unclear whether this will provide a true wide extension of access to the Internet for many, or if it will be just a rich market for the few that can afford it inside large populated metropolitan areas.
A simpler way to bridge that divide between cable and consumers would perhaps be a peer-to-peer consumer built and consumer-maintained mesh network that could be linked to the main, traditional Internet pipes through comparatively few access points.
Perhaps that infrastructure could be improved by adding a layer of mobile connectivity through opening mobile devices up to direct connection between each other, rather than routing all traffic exclusively through the providers.
It would be economically efficient not only in terms of investment but also in terms of traffic.
P4P software as recently tested by Verizon could keep much of the file sharing traffic on the “local” mesh.
There Is Not Just The Web: Other “Nets” Can Be Built Over and Beyond The Present Internet
Right now the Internet provides us with a basic communication infrastructure which consists of the links between all computers making up the internet. The links between nodes are provided by telecom lines, large communication backbones and access providers.
On top of this infrastructure sits a layer of communications protocols we call today the Web.
The point we need to start seeing is that we should not confuse the Web with the Internet by using these terms in a loosely interchangeable way.
Other communication platforms can also sit on the Internet’s connectivity protocols.
A good example is Skype. It is a P2P application, and when people use it, they are not actually operating on the Web in the traditional way, but next to it.
Separate from both the Net and the Internet as defined by Edhouse, peer-to-peer could give rise to a different type of entity that links us up without being subject to controls except those we may wish to allow.
As a matter of fact P2P may in time give rise to something entirely different from both the Internet and the Web as we are conceiving them now.
What Does a Peernet Look Like?
A popular peer-to-peer based network would be best situated on a physical infrastructure built in accordance with P2P principles.
The existing core Internet backbone, (powered incidentally by 340 separate Internet backbone providers globally) while subject to degrees of segmented private ownership is still largely open, flexible, and is a medium that does not overly discriminate against innovation, even in the P2P field.
One just has to reflect on Skype’s fairly successful disruptive activity in the telco arena (246M unique downloads, and 27M regular users) to see clear evidence of the power of a P2P system to take on the status quo and kick butt.
It is fascinating to envision real peer-to-peer connectivity starting with consumer-driven mesh networks based on WiFi or WiMax or a combination of both, and a gradual separation from today’s internet even for long range connectivity, which could in a first instance could be driven by P2P radio bridges. Mobile device mesh networks could be part of this.
As almost everyone has a mobile phone today, it would not be to alien to consider the development of stacks like Android that would run on mobile phones and which would allow for them to become not just receiving units but full relay stations.
At present there would be many technical and infrastructural obstacles to realize this but technology appears to be fast cracking solutions for each one of them.
Backing Up The Internet
At the same time as we develop a new P2P communication infrastructure parallel to the existing Internet, we might also get so ambitious to think of developing a system that could help us back up the whole internet (or what would appear as such) outside the Internet, and possibly through this very Peernet framework.
The idea is the one of dynamically backing up Internet data on a cloud of interconnected computers, possibly with a novel way of distributed and redundant data storage inspired by an algorithm that mimics holographic storage of data. Sounds too far fetched?
Think again.
There is a huge potential in personal computer hard disks, optical and 3D storage and new breakthroughs are happening constantly. The hope that one day you will be able to record and store all-of-the-data-out-there is already become a near-certainty.
Remember also that in a very-large sized network as the one we are envisioning, there would be a huge quantity of computational power available for reconstructing that data residing everywhere and nowhere, on the cloud of networked computers at any given time.
Not to mention that, if we just wanted, communications and digital identities could be re-invented in a secure and spam-free manner.
Eventually, this P2P net (the Peernet) could grow so pervasive that we would allow it to take over most of the functions of today’s Internet while adding new things we never dreamed were possible.
How To Build The Open Mesh
But the question remains: How to motivate consumers to start building this open mesh?
Here is an interesting idea: in The Open Mesh Revolution, Daily Wireless reports about the launch of Open-Mesh, founded by Michael Burmeister-Brown, developer of the Dashboard Software that made managing dozens, even hundreds, of Meraki wi-fi repeaters fast and easy to use.
Here some of the key specs for these truly marvelous units:
- Inexpensive. Open-Mesh WiFi repeaters cost $49 each or $39.95 (qty 20)
- Ad free. Open-Mesh promises they will never push ads into your networks. You decide what, if any, content you want to display.
- 100% open source and deployed on top of OpenWRT. You can change anything. Open Mesh is open source and promises to stay that way, unlike Meraki and its Spain-based competitor FON.
- Re-flashable firmware.
- Free administration, alerting and mapping via the Dashboard management system which allows you to configure the ESSID, splash page, passwords, and bandwidth allocation of your networks.
- Auto-configuration. Easy creation of a neighborhood or apartment network. Supports other management systems as well.
While the reach of the routers suggested by Open Mesh isn’t that great with only about a 100 ft range, this new technology is certainly a significant step towards making the consumer-based open mesh net work become a reality.
Not to be missed in this story is also ROBIN (ROuting Batman Inside) the Italian Open Source mesh network project, developed by Antonio Anselmi and deployed on top of OpenWRT kamikaze, running on the new Open Mesh routers as well as on any Atheros AP51 routers such as Meraki Mini or La Fonera and using the BATMAN routing algorithm (www.open-mesh-net/batman).
Robin’s mission is to produce an Open WiFi Mesh Platform optimized for low-income,community wireless, education and the developing world. Built completely upon open source software projects, it will spread a wired internet connection such as a DSL throughout an apartment complex, neighborhood, village or school, and work on a variety of commonly available, low-cost hardware.
ROBIN is a zero-configuration appliance (plug & play solution): all you need is almost one DSL upstream DHCP capable router offering Internet connectivity where you connect a node (acting as gateway node), others nodes (client repeaters) have only to be powered on.
Presently ROBIN is open for testing and evaluation by simple users, community wireless, commercial and non-profit organizations. Among these, NetEquality has developed own ROBIN backend server for remote management of ROBIN mesh clouds (dashboard, update, upgrade, statistics and graphs, …) also offering dedicated pre-flashed routers. The backend server is part of the NetEquality project open-mesh.com
Would ‘Peernet’ Be Desirable?
The original spark for making such a Peernet idea desirable was originated by the fact that we may actually need such a net as a backup of the internet in the future. So in case of a major catastrophe, we would not lose connectivity and the ability to maintain communications directly with each other.
Our interconnectivity today depends mostly on physical connections such as optical cables which have recently proven to be very vulnerable and which may go down in any major catastrophic event.
Also the mainframe computers on which we depend to act as servers are not immune either to such situations.
A distributed architecture, based on open-standards, that can re-construct its data and which can function regardless of the number of peers involved, seems ideal for guarding against such possible future catastrophic changes.
But not only that.
With the experience we have gained from the Internet, Peernet could be designed to be spam-free and secure, and impervious to any outside interference.
It could also provide a fertile ground for establishing new and effective extensions of our present monetary systems (see also this open money discussion community for more references on this topic) and might have other advantages that are not yet as obvious.
Potential Killer Applications on The Peernet
There are a number of existing and possible applications that could drive high up the perceived immediate value of such a P2P-based parallel net.
Identifying specific killer applications that could drive the initial development and aggregation of multiple Peernet-interested parties would be particularly useful at this stage.
Here a few ideas to start with:
Communication Tools. A company called Mermaid has just come out with a full set of P2P applications that allow the full set of direct communications in a P2P network of any size. News broadcasting, audio and video communication, screen-sharing, movie-casting and a lot more. The initial suite is already quite impressive and nonetheless the UI is yet very simple and somewhat rudimentary, the apps already work and the company is promising versions of all its P2P tools for Mac and Linux as well.
http://mermaid.metaaso.com/
Identity. Much work has been done on identification, and in resolving the issues of security, privacy, spam and identity on the Internet. In the presence of a new P2P based global network new digital identification systems centered around individual users and not around services on which register and define our identities could be more easily introduced. This could potentially provide a level of security unavailable and undreamed of on the Internet today. This would require lots of complementary (and difficult) steps, but nonetheless the path to provide a truly reliable digital identification system. For more info and inspiration in this direction please Wes Kussmaul white paper: “Have Identities Before You Manage Them” (PDF)
Alternative currencies and payment systems. Existing payment systems could be easily extended to the Peernet while new alternative payments system could also emerge with less resistance. Money could flow freely on such a network and it could be quite different from what we consider money today. For more hints in this direction please check out Ryan Fugger’s Ripple Project.
I am sure there a lot of other possibilities, and I openly invite you to contribute them either here on the Comments area below or on the Peernet forum discussion on Ning.
Related Resources, Info and Tools
Amateur groups building up such ad hoc multi hop networks:
- http://freifunk.net in Germany
- http://reseaucitoyen.be in Belgium and Northern France
- some in the country side , such as one covering a whole danish region http://djurslands.net/ and
http://freifunknet.dk/djurslandsnet.htm - and even one in the Himalayas / Dharamsala
- An article in Technology Review about Android (Android Calling), a standard for cellular devices promoted by Google, may bring us a good step closer.
- Also check out Martien van Steenbergen’s comment to another string to the “Backing up the internet in a P2P ‘cloud’” post. He links a post outlining the basic protocol for a software that could keep us all linked up properly. Very interesting approach.
- The Germans are great on linking up with radio hardware running IP protocols. The network seems to be growing already.
- Open Moko
- Martien van Steenbergen – Martien’s Armillaria project
- The Medium is the Message
- Backing up the internet in a P2P ‘cloud’
- Could ‘Peernet’ be separate from today’s internet infrastructure?
Martien van Steenbergen
Martien van Steenbergen wrote up a conceptual protocol that exactly does what you mention: storing redundant copies of every bit of information fully distributed over the net. I called it the Wizard, Rabbit and Treasurer. The Wizard is the illusionist, serving you your information in a smart way so you have the perception that it’s always there. Anytime, anywhere, any device. The Rabbit is the one locally serving the Wizard and other, remote, Rabbits. In fact, the Rabbits implement the peer-to-peer infrastructure for volatile data. The Rabbit uses a local Wizard to permanently store data on non-volatile media.
For more info on this conceptual protocol please see http://wiki.aardrock.com/Wizard_Rabbit_Treasurer
Martien van Steenbergen also commented that Sun’s ZFS contains many pearls for implementing what is describe here. “Simply connect the storage devices through a network rather than through USB, SCSI or IDE. Must fix the timing (latency) issues of course” he writes.
ROBIN
Pre-compiled images download (for Meraki Mini and La Fonera)
Easy-flash tool (only for La Fonera, with beta rv1113 firmware preloaded)
Originally written by Robin Good for Master New Media with significant contributions and original content by Sepp Hasslberger and the P2P Foundation blog. First published as “Extending The Internet: The Peernet OpenMesh” on March 19th 2008.
Ustream Video Clip Conversion and Distribution New Features
Posted by: | CommentsIf you want to easily record your live video streaming broadcasts and be able to easily convert your recordings into standard video files that can be uploaded automatically to the greater number of video sharing sites, I have something you may want to take good note of.
For a long time I have gone crazy trying to get my recorded live Ustream clips on YouTube and other online video sharing sites. Why did I want to do that? Simple: posting and titling your video in a strategic way on YouTube can bring you back order of magnitude more traffic than any other archive of a video streaming site can ever do.
But in the past the problems were way too many.
Difficulties in downloading the .flv clips from Ustream.tv, more difficulties in converting the unique kind of .flv file that Ustream saved into one that could be easily uploaded and read by YouTube. Difficulties in maintaining proper audio and video synch. Difficulties in getting a video quality level worth of that name.
Until things have finally changed. And for the better.
Ustream.tv has recently added a new cool set of features, which are directly accessible from within your MyVideos section. If you pay enough attention you will notice that now, next to each one clip you have previously recorded, two new features have appeared:
a) Video Format Conversion
With the Conversion feature you can now convert any already recorded Ustream video file into a standard FLV, MOV or MP4 video file format with just one click of your mouse. Those are the preferred standard video file formats for just about any online video sharing service making your video recorded material compatible with most video distribution outlets out there.
b) Video Syndication
The new Syndication facility allows you to easily select among over 20 of the most popular different video sharing sites the ones you would like your video clip to be automatically uploaded to. Again, this is as easy as clicking your preferred choice and pressing OK. Nothing more.
Ustream.TV has been able to integrate this super-useful and highly welcome new features thanks to their new partnership with Hey!Watch and Hey!Spread, two of my favourite web-based video support services.
The cool thing is that, you, the user, has to pay nothing to get all these extras. Ustream.tv pays for them while providing its live video streaming community with a very tangible and welcome extra value.
If you haven’t yet tried using Ustream, because you wanted to get a simpler way to record live video streams and then immediately distribute them to as many online video sharing sites as possible, the wait is definitely over now.