getting creepy

New technologies can look like magic. That's Douglas Adams speaking.

But magic comes in two shades: black and white (which if the last posts are anything to go by seems to be a minor obsession at the moment).

The black stuff indicates some dark intention; the white stuff a benevolent effect.

New tech goes the same way. Phorm looks black. Genius looks white. But, in essence, they both do the same thing: use our data to sell more effectively.

And there's going to be a load more black technologies as the web breaks out and evolves into an Internet of Things.

Throw into the mix that data capture will get a whole lot smarter not only because of new ways of getting it (through GPS, RFID, accelerometers and the like [SPIME devices]) but because our increasing desire for personalisation means absolute transparency (that's Kelly), and you have some really quite creepy tech around the corner.

Stuff that knows about YOU. Where YOU are. What YOU like. Maybe even why YOU like it - and tense changes of all those. It's gonna get freaky.

The challenge is to tweak and present these technologies from having a perceived dark purpose (I don't really think Phorm does) to being understood as benevolent. We need to fuzz them up.

crime mashup

"It is simply unacceptable at this point in history that a citizen can use Web services to track the movies he is renting, the weather around his house, and the books he's recently purchased but cannot as easily monitor data regarding the quality of his drinking water, legislation, or regulations that will directly impact his work or personal life, what contracts are currently available to bid on for his state, or what crimes have recently occurred on his street."

James Willis, director of eGovernment for the Rhode Island Office, 2005

It is.

Or it was.

Now there's ZubediPI which tells me the West End is a bit dodgy when it comes to theft and violence amongst a whole host of other rather useful stuff.

Crystal Ball 2.0

Martin Wolf Wagner Photography

Advertising Age asked 150 power bloggers about what to expect from digital advertising in 2008. Some of my favorites:

1. Branded content - more services, less messages (Tom Martin & Joe Pulizzi)

2. Local search - digital microbiology not digital astronomy. (Andy Wibbels)

3. Simple mobile apps - splitting the bill, pre-ordering coffee, knowing that song on a TV program (Marie Lena Tupot)

4. Sociosemantics - culture into data into culture (e.g. LastFM music recommendations) (Jay Moonah)

5. SEO - cheap and powerful. Getting search right is gonna be important (Joost de Valk & Martin Calle)

6. Online TV - Real-time video ad-matching + droves of people flocking to digital TV rooms (Paul Cheney)

7. Social media - Facebook (Mike Volpe)

I would add:

8. Location-aware stuff

9. Games

10. Behavioural targeting (for an interesting take on this see Mindset Media, who have developed a personality periodic table)

9,581,206 abortions

The World Clock. Real-time data (well, statistically predicted data) on all sorts of things, abortions, marriages, divorces, oil pumped, bikes produced and so on. Also check out The Food Clock - that's a lot of chickens.

Happy Maps

In 2006 Adrian White, a social psychologist at the University of Leicester, compiled this, a world happiness map. You can get the full version here. The redder, the happier.

In a similar spirit, this little gem maps out 'feelings' from around the user-generated web and mashes it up with Google Maps:

It's not particularly powerful at the moment but is nevertheless a really interesting idea. I love the possibility of analysing subjective content over geographical location like this. If time were to be added in as well it would become even more interesting because you could potentially track the emotional wake of a certain news story after it breaks. Nice simple and playful interface too.

Data made lovely

Tables, charts, numbers and all that prompt me to embark on completely unrelated journeys of imagination into other more interesting things. Data is boring. However, the Trendalyzer - a vast pot of data - is not. It is magnificent.

Set up by the Gapminder Foundation and acquired by Google last year (there was something Google-like about the simplicity, look and spirit of the software even before they got involved), this software “unveils the beauty of statistics by converting boring numbers into enjoyable interactive animations” (source).

I love it for its central idea (pooling lots of data and making it beautiful) and the execution (a simple, powerful and playful interface).

When do people use sunbeds?

I love Google Trends for things like this graph, where the numbers carve out a picture of people's otherwise unknown behaviour, like hitting the sunbeds in the first few months of the year. This makes perfect sense but would have otherwise remained a secret had I not decided, on a whim, to search for "tanning bed" (not that I was looking for one or anything, even though now would be the time to search for one!)

I suppose this sort of information could be factored into AdSense to make things more seasonally relevant.