Creative Digifest #SXSC2 Speaker Profiles: Hugh Glaser
October 3, 2012
by Lisa Harris
Hugh Glaser is Chief Architect at Seme4 Ltd., a company that specialises in Linked Data (Semantic Web/Web of Data). As such, he is a technology provider for a wide variety of industries – in fact it is hard to thing of any sector that has not shown an interest in finding out what Linked Data can do for it.
In addition to general work and consultancy he is responsible for a number of significant practical activities in Linked Data:
a) sameas.org, which helps to establish linkage between datasets;
b) dotAC.info, which is a Linked Data application that gives a unified view of some fixed datasets plus data from the Linked Data cloud;
c) See UK, which allows users to explore a number of Open Data resources against a geographical background.
Prior to joining Seme4 in 2009 he was a Reader in the School of Electronics & Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and is now a Visitor in the Faculty.
How are digital technologies transforming our lives?
Not as much as we think. In particular, humans are communicative animals, and we will use whatever works to communicate. It takes years before people work out exactly what a particular technology does, and how it fits into the lives they want. And I think that when they do work it out, it is often not as revolutionary as it seemed at the time, or revolutionary in comparison with the past. Take email as an example. It is very exciting when it first becomes available, and most of us who have used it for a while will have been irritated at some time with the flood of messages from people who have just discovered it for the first time. But slowly the users of the new technology work out what is good for them (and acceptable to others). And in the end it is often not so very different from what went before, just a little more convenient. For many people who have used email for a while, the vast majority of emails they send an receive will be messages that would have gone via another medium (letter, memo, telephone call, water cooler comment) in a pre-digital age.
When I first got an iPod all those years ago, I spent ages getting my music all organised and I needed one with a big disk because I had a lot of music. Now I have worked out that what I want the iPod for is to do time-shift on Radio 4 comedy programmes and a select few spoken podcasts, so that I can listen to them when I am driving. I used to do something similar with CDs and before that cassettes, only now it is just more convenient.
In the creative sphere, artists have always embraced new technologies for rendering their ideas. Hockney’s iPad art is a natural activity, but is not a significant abstract difference to his previous use of Fax. And it is less controversial in its time than the challenging idea that photography might be a branch of the creative arts.
I believe that Blogs and Twitter have close parallels with the various styles of pamphlets in the 18th and later centuries. Perhaps Charles Dickens and Thomas Paine would have naturally moved their pamphleteering to WordPress and Twitter.
I recently came across this enjoyable list of questions, http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/termine/id=20104, which give some interesting perspectives on the historical developments of social networks.
I often think that Facebook moves us back to the villages that we lost with population movements. Many people will feel that they are now closer to the extended families that now live around the world, where these people would have lived nearby in past times. The incidental knowledge from the snippets on such sites is very similar to the comment you make as you pass a relative or friend on the High Street each day, giving background awareness of your circle of acquaintance.
I was (“lucky enough”?) to be in Prague during the revolutionary times of 1968, when the Warsaw Pact invaded. It was astonishing to see the velocity of information around the city. Newspapers and pamphlets were coming out hourly, there were amateur radio stations filling the radio spectrum, and in fact you could meet a radio station on the top of a car as you walked around (they would move to avoid triangulation from the KGB). When people celebrate Twitter as being a necessity for the Arab Spring to happen, I always have some concerns that such people have not experienced or even studied what could really happen without it. Revolutions did happen before the internet.
Of course, scale and accessibility do change, but it is arguable that the fact that people can access more sources of information is as much a political change as one brought about by technology. Printing was a tightly controlled activity in many countries in the 18th century, and the wider access came from relaxation of the controls. Interestingly we see similar tensions online at the present, where almost all countries control access to some extent.
The fact that communication across distance is undoubtedly easier, to the benefit of all, is tempered by the fact that distant communication becomes more necessary as people move apart in the knowledge that they have such communication.
What can the latest technologies do for you?
Ideally they make us more efficient, clearing space and time for activities that we find more self-fulfilling than some of the drudgery. In this sense, the digital technologies are little different from the hardware that emerged in the home throughout the early and middle 20th century. And it comes with the same contradictions: people could find themselves spending more time maintaing their vacuum cleaners, washing machines and especially unreliable cars than the time saved – time spent maintaining the new digital technologies can be very challenging. Again, the road to understanding what the technologies can do for each individual, what role they play and whether they are appropriate is a rocky one.
If youâre not online, are you out of the game?
No. It may seem like it, but things settle down in social circles, so that eventually people find a comfortable milieu. We should, however, have serious concerns about the claims that new technologies make about celebrating the heterogeneity of human interaction and activities. Many of the digital technologies were claimed to be liberating in this respect, the “long tail” idea that on the web there is a good market for minority interests that can therefore support suppliers. As this theory of the long tail has become questioned and even debunked, the interests of the users of digital technologies have become more restricted again, tending back to a more homogeneous world. Of course the majority “centre” shifts, but the minority at the edges is not necessarily being served as well as was promised in the brave new days of the web in the 1990s.
All in all, I’m not suggesting it’s not fun, and not enriching, but perhaps people with grey beards have a responsibility to try and help us all get it in perspective, while still experiencing the huge excitement.
Creative Digifest #SXSC2 Speaker Profiles: Alan Rae
October 2, 2012
by Lisa Harris
This is the latest in our series of speaker and panelist profiles for the Creative Digifest. Dr Alan Rae, in his own words:
“Research – Structure – Present – Set to Music”
I guess I have been a digital pioneer since we set up our first IT company in 1981. Iâve lived through the change from an analogue to a digital world (when I went to University we used mechanical calculators in the labs!) through word processing, computer aided design, e-commerce and social media and mobile working. My career started as a market researcher and marketing manager for a heavy engineering company. I set up my first IT business in 1981 and have been helping businesses large and small implement IT related change ever since as a supplier, trainer, presenter and author. From 1996-2004 I ran the Executive Studio in West London which was a pioneering demonstration and training centre for the use of IT In e-commerce and mobile and flexible working. Since then Iâve been applying what we know about digital commerce to a family horticultural business (the DPhil IS in plant science after all) and to researching how small companies can use the internet in practice to make their businesses work better. Much of this work has been carried out with Lisa Harris and you can check out our findings here
Iâm currently a guest blogger for Brandwatch and the National Farmers Union, run a How to do Business group on Facebook and Iâve created various training programmes for small business including 1 Man Brand and Punch Above Your Weight, and written books like âGrowing Jobsâ and âSocial Media for Real Businessesâ
In what ways are digital technologies transforming our lives?
Digital in the 80s was for large organisations and geeks. Now itâs for everyone. The single fact that you can create an object â a photograph, a video, a piece of text and publish it in many different media to a large number of people or share it for a specific business purpose instantly, completely changes the way we can do business or enjoy our lives.
The tools available to the small company marketer continue to astonish me â tools to assemble and publish information, tools for holding conversations, tools for promoting business or leisure activities, tools for collaboration.
What can the latest technologies do for you?
The I-Pad is a real game changer â supporting both wifi and 3G technologies it means that most of the time you have instant access to the whole body of human knowledge as well as your own stuff in a portable package that you can carry around in a handbag. You can take photographs and share them â the day before I wrote this I was in Bodrum looking for tiles for my daughterâs new kitchen. We can photograph what they have in the shop and she can have the info in Sussex at once. She can tell us what she wants to do when weâve got the details for price and delivery. When we were at the Olympics we could use the BBC feed for online updating of the positions of the competitors throughout the race on a course that we could only see via binoculars. In a windsurfing race where itâs quite hard to follow whatâs going on this gave a great boost to our enjoyment of the day. You can create short videos, annotate them and post them into an environment where they can be shared. For a creator or performer it transforms the dialogue with the audience. And you can access the terrain maps to help you visit ancient sites if thatâs what interests you. This is pretty handy in a country like Turkey where the map makerâs art is not well developed.
If youâre not online, are you out of the game?
That depends on the business â if most of what you sell goes locally and is sold in a traditional way face to face then no. Our organic veg business does not actually need the blog and web site to survive although it has its uses. If you are selling anything with knowledge embedded in it, or you need to build a national or international presence then you can use social media and digital creation tools to build and develop a substantial presence in your own field of expertise. However, you need to be selective â do some automation and some individual activity. Be clear about what you want to say and how to do business with you and work smart and be selective in how you use your time. Itâs like Desktop Publishing â just because you can use hundreds of fonts in one document doesnât mean that you should!
Creative Digifest #SXSC2 Speaker Profiles: Alan Patrick
October 1, 2012
by Lisa Harris
This is the latest in ourseries of posts profiling the speakers and panelists at the Creative Digifest.
Alan Patrick is the co-founder of Broadsight, which focuses on market intelligence, strategy and systems development across the multi-media ecosystem. Broadsight has consulted to many of the major digital-media players in Europe and has helped start or turn around a number of startups. They have also developed innovative technology for a number of clients. Alan also writes the well regarded Broadstuff blog on technology development. He has also developed the âBroadstuff Bubble-o-Meterâ tracking the current Social Media bubbleâs evolution, which has been picked up by other technology blogs and the Guardian.
Alan Patrick with Student Digital Champion Ivan Melendez at the first SXSC Digifest
How are digital technologies transforming our lives?
1982 – Just seen the new IBM PC with a 10Mb Hard Disk!! Am 2 years away from starting to write MSc thesis on interconnecting these new fangled Microcomputers on even newer fangled idea of local and wide area “integrated networks”. Thesis will be mainly typed on a typewriter, with lots of photocopying, cutting, and pasting.
1992 – whinging on new fangled in-company email system, on my luggable PC, about sitting by the fax machine late on a Friday night trying to send a large report to a client. Later that year got my first modem and Demon internet connection. Became au fait with Archie, Veronica, Gopher et al. Report was written on a Word Processor, but has to be printed out, graphics added via a DTP standalone system, then faxed to client.
2002 – Setting up my first new fangled 0.5Mb broadband connection from my new Home Office, writing major report on my laptop and cutting and pasting data from the Web, shortly to email it via my Broadband (so no anxious waiting over the dialup modem). My report is typed on a word processor, and I cut and paste it digitally via an integrated DTP software suite. I am on Skype for a conference call with colleagues as I write, co-ordinating our views. After that is done, I am considering whether Google is finally better at search than Yahoo and whether to buy a book I want via eBay or Amazon. Am very proud of my new mobile, which (in theory) has internet access, Â though it is a pain to use. Still, I can download my emails on it. Hooray!!!
2012 – Writing this while cursing that my 8Mb broadband connection in my home office is running at 1/4 speed, and the kids are sucking up all the bandwidth that it is a pain to synch my iPad, IPhone, laptop and home desktop email quickly. I have run a small company from my Home Office for 5 years now. I will shortly be going into London for a meeting, so I load the address into my iPhone and it gives me a map and directions. As I walk to the station I send a Twitter message to the people I hope to see there, telling everyone I am on my way.
2022 – My iPhone is a tieclip (ties are back in), running on bandwidth of several 100 Mb, and I wear my piezoelectric charging charging laptop on my head and plug it into my cortex. My UI is thought powered, and direct-to-brain display. My car is electric, as are my friends, because geeks still don’t get laid despite the plethora of Big Datamining online dating agencies…..
What can the latest technologies do for you?
- save time and cost all the way across my workflow
- replace physical commute and location limitations with online comms
- rapid access to the relevant information
- visibility of others’ activities
- integrate disparate systems
If youâre not online, are you out of the game?
No, but you may not see all the plays, or see them as quickly as others do.