Social is easy

 

The social bandwagon (image from www.kyanmedia.net)

Social networking, social tagging, social newsgathering. The social concept, that is, where we share everything, is spreading like wildfire. Even the BBC has a social media editor now. These people seem to agree with me.

It’s similar to the way the pared-down easyJet approach to business spread into other verticals, such as hotels and cars. Actually it’s so sucessful it’s even threatening on making into the most wasteful place of all: government. The UK’s Conservative party have even called for easy-style local government. 

What I’m wondering now is: how far will ‘social’ go? What other verticals can take advantage of it, and how? How can businesses harness the power of ‘social’?

(And what’s the next useful business/media/tech concept du jour?)

Drowning in TMI

 

Drowning in TMI

Hundreds of millions of blogs, thousands of Twits, online video in the UK up 47% (source: comScore), US Facebook use up 699% and Twitter 3,712% in the last year (sources: comScore and Nielsen) – and all those Youtube videos… it’s got people worrying there’s just TMI (toooo much information) in the world. If we were still printing it and putting it in outboxes, inboxes, pending trays and big grey metal filing cabinets, there would be.

But there’s been a shift. The first, of course, is to digital. But then some bright spark worked out that in today and tomorrow’s oceans of information, filing won’t cut it anymore. 

That’s because there’s an essential problem with filing. Each thing can only go in one file. So that restaurant receipt from Budapest’s Cafe Kor can either go in (1) expenses, or (2) Budapest, or (3) great restaurants. It can’t go in all three. 

That’s a shame because filing things gives them meaning. It means instead of having a pile of stuff on the floor (even if that’s a digital floor) you have organised piles. You know where to go to get something and filing gives something context and meaning. It means we can make sense of stuff. Just think of genus, species etc that biologists and botanists use.

But in a world where there’s zillions of new pieces of information being created every day, filing doesn’t work anymore. It’s too restrictive, too clunky, takes too much time to think about. 

But then along came tagging and the problem of TMI was solved.

Tagging means that your pile of information on the floor can magically rearrange itself as soon as you call out the tag. Call ‘restaurants’ and everything you’ve marked restaurants gathers in a group to say hello. Call ‘Budapest’ and ditto. Which means TMI data becomes JIT (just-in-time) information. Which makes for knowledge when put into our lovely human hands.

With the exponential increase in data being produced and our need to manage it even more keen than ever, this is not only essential – but becoming increasingly sophisticated. There’s now geotagging, social tagging and now even, with the advent of augmented reality ‘air tagging’.

Which means that instead of drowning in oceans of TMI – as some commentators worried – we can find what we want, when we want it, JIT. We’re swimming on top of the seas of information thanks to tagging.

Find the best Wi-fi… with augmented reality

AR may be the emperor’s new clothes at the moment – that is, it’s the old information dressed up in a fancy new way – but that doesn’t mean it isn’t very useful.
For one thing, there are now two applications that’ll help you find the best wi-fi, and that’s gotta be a good thing, right?
First up is Worksnug – see Youtube video above – from futurist Richard Leyland. Hold up your 3G iPhone in London (& coming soon San Francisco & then… the world) and it’ll tell you the nearest place that offers good wi-fi, and a good working environment.
Another company’s trying it too. From Tel Aviv-based Loft Developers comes Lookator, which just tells you where the good wi-fi is. The difference? This one works on Android-powered phones, such as the HTC Hero, Samsung Galaxy i7500 and T-Mobiles G1, G2, G3. (For a full range of Android phones see Android Phone).
It’s getting harder and harder to say you can’t get in touch with the office, isn’t it?

Stop or I shoot

 

Nablus, Palestine: entrance to a tunnel created by Saladdin in the 12th century, used in the Second Intifada

On a twelve-day holiday in Israel and Palestine (the West Bank only; Gaza seems totally off-limits), I visited Hebron, Haifa, Ramallah, Tel Aviv and Nablus. Being there made me proud, ashamed and amazed at what humans are capable of – of what they can achieve and what they can do to other humans. It was an horrific, eye-opening, brilliant experience.

I went expecting to be appalled only at the Isrealis, at their apartheid-style treatment of the people whose land I thought they’d taken. But I was also incredulous at what they’ve achieved in 60 years of nationhood, turning desert waste and ruinous marsh into productive land. And I felt for them, and came away with a far more nuanced impression and understanding.

Seeing the Security Fence/Apartheid Wall that makes the Palestinians caged animals made me cry like a child. But I was glad of it when I took a bus from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, and when I cycled in the city’s answer to Notting Hill, Newe Tzedek – no chance of any suicide bombers since the wall went up.

In Nablus, I met a ex-PLO man who’d been in Lebanon with Yassir Arafat. Now he sold everything that would help the terrorist/freedom fighter – gun cleaning kit, holsters – except the weapons themselves. Nablus is the first place I’ve visited where politician posters whose heroes are draped in ammo belts and carry heavy weapons.

In Haifa, I hung out with a 25-year-old Israeli girl who knew one Arabic phrase, learned during her three years’ national service in the phrase the Israeli Defence Force (IDF): “stop or I shoot”. Which seems horrible, but it’s easy to judge, isn’t it? As a Brit, no one’s invaded my country for almost 1,000 years. The Israelis have been at war with their neighbours and the Palestinians themselves.

In Hebron, a bustling Arab city of shawarma stands, coffee shops and traffic jams, a young boy brought me to the third-floor roof of his home, to get a bird’s eye view of the Jewish settlement next door and the IDF gun’s placements overlooking the market below. From there, I could see into the squeaky clean Jewish barbed-wire ghetto on one side, and, on the other, metal grids above the marketplace, protecting the Arabs below from the the rocks, rubbish and dirty nappies the Jewish settlers throw out the window.

And then there was the taxi driver who took me from Tel Aviv to Ben Gurion airport on the way home. He’d been a sniper for eight years in the IDF. “When they asked me what I did for a living on my license form, I told them: I make people stop breathing,’ he laughed.

Yet they need peace, not chuckled posturing by Israelis and bitter – understandbly bitter – recriminations from Palestinians. They all need it. The Israelis, so they can relax at home. The Palestinians, because more than 90% of them can’t leave their West Bank or Gaza Strip homes. They’re not allowed to – in case they bring terror to Israel’s Jews. As well as restricting access, the wall/fence is a form of economic warfare against them – and since per capita in the West Bank is US$2,900 and US$28,300 (source: CIA World Factbook), it would clearly make sense if they could trade more freely with the Israelis.

What could bring peace? An end to the Jewish settlements? An end to violence? Tony Blair – he’s out there, camped out in West Jerusalem’s American Colony Hotel? He managed peace in Northern Ireland. But the Arabs don’t like him.

I think the Palestinians need a Gandhi figure, a figure head who doesn’t fight back with weapons, but with dignity, with right on his side. Just as Gandhi shamed the British government into submission, so a Palestinian Great Soul could do the same to the Israelis. The Americans, remember, weren’t always so Israel-biased. They stopped them (and the Brits and French) in Suez in 1956, after all. Couldn’t a Palestinian Mahatma shift opinion so that peace and justice in the Mid East became a real priority?

If global opinion swung irrevocably towards pity for the Palestinians, the Israelis might stop building more settlements in the West Bank, might actually want peace. Those in the know wonder if the status quo actually benefits the Israelis.

How would a peace plan work? Just as the British engaged with the palatable side of the IRA, AKA Sinn Fein, and the palatable side of terrorism in India, so the Palestinians need someone who turns the other cheek, who fights hate with compassion and understanding. Someone the Israeli public opinion might even embrace.

It’s a tall order, but it’s a plan that’s worked before.

And wouldn’t it be better if the only Arabic phrase normal Israelis knew wasn’t “stop or I shoot”?