Newsledge
This year was about full focus on getting clairvoyance to my business.
I had luck with my only success story in startups, smuff.ro which supported me financially to have time catching up the flow, to bleed on the edge of technology, to understand as I can our world today and the trends behind driving it.
Newsledge is what happening today — a new lifestyle — being with the news and gaining advantage from it.
Napstering
2009 — in the same way as in earlier years before — was about the war between the digital and real.
No doubt digital is a new lifeform, a complete new universe anybody — you, your friends, your city, your country and your business, your entire world — must take into consideration.
We don’t know yet the laws governing this long awaited alien civilisation. The only thing we know it is here and takes over our lives. Without digital there is no future.
History thought us the basic driving force behind evolution and we might hope the digital revolution still fits this old pattern — the theory of metasystem transitions.
And we also know currently the new world order is driven by asymmetry where small is taking over the huge, and in the same time huge is getting bigger by taking over smaller.
Connecting metasystem transitions with asymmetry we can see the control of culture today is about digital taking over the real, and real trying to control digital.
Until recent times culture was controlled by classic channels like state/citizenship, religion, tv, books and newspapers. Today we have to add a new layer, the digital to the control pack.
Up today the single pattern digital revealed to us was its huge force and potential to napster classical control mechanisms instead of being an easy channel to control culture.
Identity
As Facebook grow in record time one of the biggest nations on Earth many control organisations are wondering how to deal with. Who owns these netizens, what laws are governing them, how somebody can monetize the simply existence of this new ecosystem.
And again there is just one immediate answer, a classic one, an old universal law to help: who names you controls you.
Who controls your identity is controlling you.
Good for us, unfortunate to control structures: in digital identity is a vague phenomena.
Your digital id is just a simple e-mail address and nothing more. One can have as many online identities wants, tracing them to a real person is easy and possible only because we don’t have yet the culture of managing our online identities.
The next year will be about creating this culture and all the necessary tools and infrastructures to support it.
Canonizing, the war is on netizens taking over their identity and internet companies to trace their digital path for better understanding and manipulation.
Too Big To Know
So far society and control is mapped to current trends, the third force — spirit — needs to be examined too.
The world moves from information to knowledge. From ubiquitous information to connected information.
Knowledge is nothing more than information which works — it is one’s ability to do. We will move from procrastination caused by the logorrhea of information to enjoy knowledge.
Since the world is too big to know we will need tools to extend our brain, a new sense dealing with knowledge built on digital. Every metasystem transition equipped life with a new dimension and a new sense to interact with.
This new channel might be our digital selves living on the net and syncing back to us — or any form of synthetic life. It’s up to scientists and artists to find the best way how to integrate human with digital.
We, hackers have just one aim: to provide the best tools for the new transition.
Newsledge — Information That Works
We have to connect napstering, digital identity control and the knowledge economy into form and function capable to evolve, to have a life.
This year old media and especially the news industry was napstered heavily. The first front of O’Reilly’s war is on news. Consuming, producing and monetizing information will be changed completely. Value added news services will rise others just selling ads will die.
One thing is sure: we will have access to more and more quality information regardless of source.
And we will be able, by using new tools and services to distill knowledge from these information in a way which gives us flow instead of frustration.
For identity — helped by the open source initiative we can be very sure we will have a comfortable and safe way to start knowing and nobody will abuse our work done for obscure personal interests.
The question of how to become the real owners of all information we are producing, how to make it fully understandable to us and others, and how to evolve together can be and will be answered soon.
Knowledge cannot be taken from you.
