MediaFuturist

Future of Content: more fragmented, more aggregated - and more value in ConText and MetaContent

People subscribe to People, and the mobile device is where it happens

Future trends in business communications: Phone stops ringing, eMail slows down, Social Nets & Media explode

Image by gleonhard via Flickr

I don't know about you but I have been observing a significant shift in how people communicate, professionally as well as socially and privately.  While only 7-10 years ago, most of the work was done on the phone (I recall living in .com boom-town numero uno, San Francisco, and using up all my 2000 AT&T minutes every single month!), eMail soon became big with everyone, and now eMail is still pretty much the prime vehicle of business communications - thus the rise of blackberry mania. Use of the phone declined heavily as a result.

Now, it seems that... well, eMail is for old people.  About 18 months ago, the use of 'social' business platforms such as LinkedIn became more prevalent, and all of a sudden people started to have 'professional' conversations on LinkedIn, Ryze (remember??), Xing, and then, soon, Facebook, Myspace, and now... Twitter, Skype and GTalk.  Now, for me, it has already become the No. 1 method of how people reach out to me: rather than calling (ouch) or even emailing (ehem), people ping me via my various networks - and I think this will increase drastically because it provides a build-in filter as you have to be in my network to ping me via the Network.

This, below, is how I see this developing - and this will have vast consequences for business communications, going forward. Needless to say... I do have some ideas, here. Talk back!

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The Cloud and the Crowd: Our Future

I have been busy reading 2 great books (yes... those long flights without Internet connections are perfect for that) that have become a strong influence on my recent work: Crowd-Sourcing by Jeff Howe, and The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler. I realized mid-way through my reading that both cloud computing (i.e. the fact that everything we need that can be digitized - such as software, media, searches, bookmarks, databases etc - will be stored in the network rather than on devices and machines that we carry around) and crowd-sourcing (i.e. the drastically decentralized way of sourcing content, ideas, co-workers, collaborators and actual production via that very same network) will pretty much be impacting everything else we do, in the very near future. See below. And smile.

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Found this via Flickr and Social Customer - nice overview of some of Chris Anderson's pontifications... more here

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In a nutshell, this is what I do... according to Wordle (which turns text into visualized tags) - see the page on Wordle

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Looking at this, we need a new word for 'Advertising' for sure... someone out there have any ideas?

Web1.0 to Web4.0: getting noise, making noise, filtering noise and ...SmartNoise?

Update: I just across this illustration on Flickr - fits perfectly!