50 Things That Are Being Killed By The Internet

We the technology-awed populace always view all technology as being better, faster and taking us to a better place. The internet seems like no exception. Yet, every new technology also takes away something...

Stumbled upon this interesting article 50 Things That Are Being Killed By the Internet at PSFK. Have a read...

Gleanings enmeshed with my thots on some of them...

1. Punctuality. Before mobile phones, people actually had to keep their appointments and turn up for lunch on time. Texting friends to warn them of your tardiness five minutes before you are due to meet has become one of throwaway rudeness of the connected age.

This is going to be a huge conflict area between generations. My father runs his life by the hour, I am far more comfortable keeping things fluid all the time!

2. Memory. When almost any fact, no matter how obscure, can be dug up within seconds through Google and Wikipedia, there is less value attached to the "mere" storage and retrieval of knowledge. What becomes important is how you use it – the internet age rewards creativity.

Today, if you have a story, the facts and the props are available for free on the net. However, as an agency planner and now a trends and futures consultant, I find this aspect liberating!

3. Dead time. When was the last time you spent an hour mulling the world out a window, or rereading a favourite book? The internet's draw on our attention is relentless and increasingly difficult to resist.

All former dead-time is now pottering time - twitter, flickr, youtube, fb, sms, mobile chat, gtalk...And we are more busy than ever before, our reflection time has dropped to an all time low!

Just because the pipe of our conversations is broader and the flow 24X7 hasn't guaranteed that better stuff is flowing through those pipes. Although, the more plugged you are, the more you can scan the global brain for ideas and inspiration.

4. Mainstream media. While in India, print might be growing and TV getting higher TRPs, for some of us mainstream media has been quietly marginalised over the last few years.

- We don't miss the week-night news. In fact haven't watched the weekly bulletin which were so much a part of life a decade back.

- Right now we are consuming a mash-up of mainstream media and new media. This may be the intermediate step before some of us totally migrate to newer forms of digital media(personalised, customised, on-demand)Already, in the Western markets, free news and the migration of advertising to the web threaten the basic business models of almost all media organisations.

Mental post-it : What else is being killed by the internet, new media? Isn't it an interesting thought to stay with for a while...

Schmidt Speak

On adage.com, browsed through Eric Schmidt's interview. It's always fascinating to tap into the mind of this internet era sage...Some nuggets from the article.

1. The internet is fast becoming a "cesspool" where false information thrives! Brands, therefore are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the internet cesspool.

2. Branding may be an essential element that helps people navigate the world. Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it's not going away. It must have a genetic component.

Interesting stuff...Chewable!

The Feminisation of the Internet

Meraj forwarded me this link from NYT. Thanks Meraj, somehow it feels you still work for me(and that too without pay..LOL). It's an article of how more girls than boys are creating content on/for the web!!

Come to think of it there are more and more women creating content on the web or are more conversant with technology in India as well. The other thing is many of the content-creating guys have a strong feminine side to them(including you Meraj and me:-)

Some key points from the article...
1. Among the youngest Internet users, the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls.

2. A study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35% of girls compared with 20% of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 % of girls compared with 22% of boys).

3. Girls also eclipse boys when it comes to building or working on Web sites for other people and creating profiles on social networking sites (70 percent of girls 15 to 17 have one, versus 57 percent of boys 15 to 17). Video posting was the sole area in which boys outdid girls: boys are almost twice as likely as girls to post video files.

4. A Pew study published in 2005 also found that teenage girls were the primary content creators — but the gender gap for blogging, in particular, has widened. The findings have implications beyond blogging, according to Pew, because bloggers are “much more likely to engage in other content-creating activities than nonblogging teens".

It's interesting. The idea that the gender of the world wide web might be changing over time...Mental Bookmark.

Picture Source : www.jupiterimages.com

Great Train Journey 2

Another long train journey in just over a month...This time around I had my wife too to care care of Neo. So did manage more sleep and few thoughts:-)

Some random observations in no particular order or significance...

1. The humble newspaper is the one true community product. Especially in a railway coach. This is perhaps the only place where people sometimes don't even bother to ask for the paper. They just take and browse. The thank you is implicit, seldom verbalised!

2. Adjust kar lenge. Is perhaps the opening line of most train journeys as passengers begin to arrange their luggage in the compartment. The sweetness of the 'adjust kar lijiye' is directly proportional to the available luggage space!

3. T-bags : the bland equaliser. Till the Taj Mahal and the Tetley tea bags came into circulation, different stations had their own tea flavours and vendors had their distinctive sales andaaz. My favourite was 'Choudhary ki chai' - the adrak spiced milk-tea that I used to get ahead of Bhusawal on train journeys to my college in Surat. Choudhary was a ritual we used to look forward to. He had amongst the most lyrical sales pitch that memory recalls. Had character. A big smile and most importantly good chai.

No disrespect to T-bags; but in one swoop, they have managed to homogenise the tea drinking experience. It's the same bland sugary stuff wherever you go!

4. Graveyard shift As I have gradually migrated to the AC 3/2 tier, the buzz of the sleeper is gone. I never realised that as a nation we are so sleep deprived. A majority of the passengers sleep for the better half of the journey.
Rarely have I encountered the loud conversations/ debates on national politics, cricket and other topical issues which were an essential part of the long 'sleeper' journeys of the past!

5. Purdah-hai-purdah. The other public obsession in the AC 2 tier is the attachment to the purdah(curtains). For an otherwise open, loud, display-friendly and sociable nation, I find this cocooning inside the train purdah quite perplexing! Any insights here? Reminds me of the 'purdah' people had in the good ole Ambasador!

6. The Charger as ice-breaker. Saurabh in his post had pointed out on the ice-breaking qualities of the Nokia charger! I too had first hand experience when a portly Auntyji intruded our purdah with a warm -"Beta tumhara charger kaam kar raha hai kya". And thus ensued a relay race. Between the saas and the heavily sindur-ed bahu, they charged 3 mobile phones! Like good train Samaritans, hum thoda sa adjust kar liye:-)

But for the techno-social effects of mobile phones, mp3 players and laptops...many of the rituals of the train journey are intact...

However, the journey itself has irreversibly changed. With the constant beep of cell phones and the tracking by anxious family members, you are never on your own/ alone.

Yet again I missed the timelessness and the lost in wilderness feel...Promise to myself - Will keep the cell phone switched off for all the 30 hours next time!!

New Age Brands Have a Different Ning!

A little late in the day(48 hours back to be precise), I discovered the online social networking brand Ning introduced to me by my new digital partner and co-conspirator(John Lambie)!

Okay, back to Ning. After 48 hours I try to discover more about it. Google for the site but find that it's down for repairs. However, I still end up liking it. Because it's got a sense of humour and a message that's warm and human. It's also got a cute little bear trying to repair the site...

Ning like a person apologises for the technical snafu and directs me to the Ning blog and enthusiastically gives me an approx. timing when it would be up and running...

In fact this is what the message reads - At midnight tonight, we're going to take Ning offline to add a few new features. We'll be back in action by the time the bars in California close and you'll be free to resume your late night social networking.

Guys my 10 year old credit card company, 7 years old mobile service provider company, my 8 year old bank none talk to me like this - in a normal voice that's full of life, zest and quirkiness!

I like the brand feel of Ning...Here's the post in 48 hours for Ning...Never wrote one for my bank or the credit card, etc.

I guess as we step into this new age/ digital lifestyle era, brands even while they ride mass media vehicles need to have a human voice. Stuffiness of the analog, hierarchy driven marketing era won't get brands love marks from customers!!

Sailing with the Wind

My colleague David from our Tokyo office forwarded this quote of author Paul Graham which appears in “The Long Tail”

“The Web naturally has a certain grain, and Google is aligned with it. That’s why their success seems so effortless. They’re sailing with the wind, instead of sitting becalmed praying for a business model, like the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels."

"Google doesn’t try to force things to happen their way. They try to figure out what’s going to happen, and arrange to be standing their when it does.”

What a wonderful reading of the times we live in. Indeed it appears that

1. Sailing with the wind > Rowing aggressively in a fixed direction
2. Inventing the future > Predicting the future

Google sails and therefore gets it more often...Hey, anyone has links to any interviews with the legends - Lary Page & Sergey Brin!

Wiki Woman, if that's the way it must be, okay...

Read a small article in HT some days back about the new boss at Wikipedia - Florence Devouard...Everything about her company and her job is pretty new-age!!

1. She runs her office not from NY, London, Hongkong or Shanghai but from a village in central France.

2. Her company - the Wikimedia Foundation in it's present avatar came into being as recently as June 20, 2003! Yet in a crazily short span of 4 years, last month it was voted among the world's 5 most influential brands!! No ads. Pure sampling and co-creation brand!

3. Florence's corporate climb(if we can call it corporate or climb) is equally fascinating...
Her first contact with Wikipedia was in 2001, when it was still a fledgling org.!

She started editing entries on genetically modified organisms and was gradually drawn into the community of volunteer editors...

Pretty soon, she started focussing on internal organisation rather than writing/ editing articles. 3 years later, she was elected to the Wikimedia Foundation board.

And last summer it was agreed that she would step into the shoes of the founder Jimmy Wales, as Chairperson!

4. She is a woman with 3 kids, who works from home in a village and heads among the world's most influential brands. All in 6 short years!

This is a really different world. A world my father can't even dream about. A world my MBA never cautioned me about!! But a world that gets bloody exciting every single day:-)

A world shaped by technology, possibility, serendipity and collaboration...

Organisations like Wikimedia are...

More concepts than companies
More collaboration than hierarchy
More content-driven than products/ services driven
More open-source than closed looped
More virtual than physical
More about volunteers than about employees
More hyborg(hybrid organisations) than anything we have previously known

But if that's the way, it must be okay...

Image sourced from Pixelache

The Net Effect

John(Grant) is doing a workshop on 'How has/will the internet transform marketing and retailing?'. On his blog he is looking for thoughts, POVs, foresights...

Here's my 'chawanni' of thoughts...
1. With increase in internet penetration, will the www become one giant Superstore?

2. Will there be a global homogenisation of wants? Like everyone wants an iphone at the same time. Then a neo-moto...Essentially global fads...Glocal fads...

3. Since the sellers connect with buyers, would we need marketing at all?
Does marketing need to be obsessed now with only authenticity, how to make the sale interesting, tone of voice and ensuring that technology keeps its complexities out of the way!!

4. Will all shop facades have the signage www.allshops.com?
www.bademian.com, www.ruddalsamosa.com(my school canteen), www.fabindia.com...

5. Will parking rates at malls drop(incentive schemes) and real estate become cheaper?

6. Will payment gateways be the next giants?

7. Will RSS mean ‘really simple shopping’?

8. Will mobile internet > internet through PC

9. Will Google sense my needs(though my search/ click prints), take intelligent orders and do home delivery.

10. Will ideas be traded? Will more services like Yahoo Answers come up on the internet?

11. Will it be cool/ a lifestyle statement to be off the 'net' for small/ long periods? LOL

Its fascinating to think about the future today. Since all of it may come true sooner than we think. It may not have the same shape though:-)