Synthesizing…

This is a difficult but useful assignment given Molly Wright Steeson, one of my thesis adviser, to audit the latest position I’m in with my thesis research. The requirement is to list everything I did regarding the thesis on the index cards and to write a question each of them asks in relate to one single message at the very heart of the project. The message in this case being: Designing a social network for the future that affords the creation of the impossible, the improvable, the plausible and the invisible user identity.

The cards. Sorted by research method.

The cards. Grouped by threads of topic

The thesis. Mapped with the threads.

Tale-telling UIs

Remember the ‘search stories’ by Google? It’s so interesting that search queries are actually a tale-telling media. Here I explored a similar method that ‘by seeing what shows on one’s screen you experience their mental status and the hidden stories.’

Experiencing Lift11, talking about Web3.0, thinking of privacy’s future

I attended the Lift11 Conference in Geneva the past week as a volunteer. Working in the editorial team means I got to see all the presentations, with the downside being, however, not catching any of them(!) as we were tasked to take notes and moderate the live discussion throughout the event. Some talks resonate louder than others with a shared vision of my interests and insightful forecasting to the future. The On-line Community session brought in Chris Heathcote, who observed the emergence of invisible communities: temporal, anonymous communities that gather and disperse continuously, addressing the separation of identities as the desire of togetherness and playing with technology. Brian Solis’s talk about Social Currency is a brilliant summary of individual effort to manage online reputation through conversations they hold with others and about themselves. He implied that once a company becomes aware of the value of social capital, they are more likely to win out their peers, because it is essentially a one-on-one quality marketing and interest focused investment.

Besides the presentations, there were some other interesting conversations going on with people from different disciplines. One with Ulrich Fisher, a filmmaker who decided to hand out the cutter and let the ‘walkers’ do the editing: he creates video with locative meta-data covering the landscape of Geneva, and uses the walking path and walking speed of participants to determine the editing. I got to meet Hasan Elahi himself, who shared generously the visitor IP to his tracking website with a list of intelligent agencies and government institutions. Alessandra Mattana, who was also one of the volunteer team, is currently working on the Web 3.0 project, that seized me wholly with its revolutionary idea about the Internet. Imagine one will be able to access the data directly without even the filter of APIs, a web of less hierarchical data organization. The search, for example, will be based on a semantic model so that the ‘query’ is no longer the fundamental unit of information sourcing. You can describe something to find it without knowing its name.

In the world of Web 3.0, privacy may become a continuum as big as its opportunities. Encryption will face complex changes as something that determines the permissions to the data in every sharing of information.  On the other hand, it may urge the standardization of the privacy setting protocol, powering the user with a wide spectrum of private service specified by themselves.

Robert Scoble on latest ideas from Silicon Valley