It is great how writing on reading seems to stimulate other people’s responses, but how a podcast can do so too. Sometimes I get them via e-mail and this person, who I know is wicked smart, yet still prefers to remain anonymous pens some interesting ideas after a steady stream of sci-fi glue and the Jeff and Sam burn Teh Internets Podcast or whatever they call it, I just showed up and rambled as usual …

Sam’s recap and worth the one hour of bandwidth no matter what field you are in: (Although I have no idea what Sam means by “seedy operations we can’t talk about on the air”…if he isn’t messing with my social networking algos- well I don’t know.)

Jeff and Sam Show for August 13,2007: Happy Days!

This week Jeff Doak and I were joined by Wayne Porter and Converseon’s Jamie Birch. This is, in my opinion, our best podcast yet. Good conversation, humor, music and a few outtakes thrown in at the end…

-Privacy vs Personality

-Twitter Brand Advocacy

-Making Micro-Chunks Work in Aff Marketing

-Search Engine Turf Wars and Future

-Aff Marketing Myopia and Push to Monetize

-How Content is Consumed2.0

I think the show could be called “Ambient Findability” or maybe “Ambient Marketing Talk”, or “Sam Does a Fairly Good Job of Restraining Porter from Endless Rambling”…

Sci-Fi Brain Juice Gets Stimulated by Twitter Talk, Second Life and Doak reading Ambient Findability while this person is reading William Gibson

The creative mind writes the following and provoking thoughts, he is referring to William Gibson’s new book- as part of the stimulus. Read On…

I’m only about 50 pages into Gibson’s new book and it’s sort of completed some connections to different nodes I had floating around in my head. First, I wanted to see if you had read it yet, and recommend it highly if you haven’t.

I read a short story a few months back that was set in the fairly near future in a world where VR had reached near-perfect resolution, and the younger generation was growing up in an environment in which they were always “in world.” What was different about this VR was that designers had taken advantage of GPS and 3D mapping capabilities to use the existing real world landscape as the territory of the VR world. In other words, it was if Second Life real estate was mapped perfectly to the map of the United States; you could visit New York
and walk through Times Square and everything was there in perfect resolution, with all the dirt and nastiness and now-crumbling buildings looking in pristine condition. Those losers who still actually walked around without VR gear (which was implanted at this point), were called “ghosts” by the VR users because they would show up in the environment as hazy figures that you could walk through and who didn’t obey the “normal” laws of physics in the VR environment.

Gibson’s playing with the same meme but on a less advanced scale — it is set in current time where artists are creating art installations by setting up servers and wifi points that allow you to wear VR gear and walk down the street and see scenes or objects superimposed on the real environment.

Combine these two ideas and you end up with people waking up every morning some day in the future and seeing the world around them displayed as a “channel” produced by an artist, or eventually by just normal users given the right tools (VR APIs). If you’re a Goth teenager, you are experiencing the world as a series of dark castles and graveyards, etc. I assume that people in our little group would decide to work “together” in a virtual office where we could easily bounce ideas of each other and go to lunch together, etc.

OK, sorry for the long winded explanation, but you get the idea. What I find interesting about this potential world (and I tend to think something like this is more likely than not, though not sure how far off it is), is that the question Jeff Doak raised the other day on the podcast (and stimulated all of this thought after e-mailing him) — and there were mentions of an iPhone and the book Ambient Findability, and if someone buys them, how do merchant’s track that — is answered. Instead of worrying about tracking real life events and porting them to cyberspace, we port everything to cyberspace and make everything more trackable. If you produce a podcast and people “listen” to it, they’re actually playing back the file via a VR environment, and that file will be tagged automatically as mentioning these products, influence will already have a rating that can be applied to various product groups and to the audience that are influenced, and if they buy that book, you guys could automatically be credited for helping drive the sale based on the mention, one’s influence or combined influence, and the timing.

Quick Response to Some Mind Bending Ideas- (like have marketer’s been shoving a round peg into a square hole for years now??)

I am paying attention- “Instead of worrying about tracking real life events and porting them to cyberspace, we port everything to cyberspace and make everything more trackable.”

“3D mapping capabilities to use the existing real world landscape as the territory of the VR world”- actually you are going to see that very soon or something very basic, but quite neat. Probably or possibly by end of week if Don has time. Get your Free SLTweets (Second Life Twitter) HUD and dust off your avatar.

Speaking of which I think my avatar friends at IBM (whose reports on leadership and 3D worlds are interesting- imagine IBM advocating that one your game playing experience on your resume maybe important) see something large and compelling about the 3D vision- I do note that according to my probes their servers don’t seem to be at Second Life Data centers, but they see the value in the space. See UgoTrade’s entry which echoes the undercurrent I keep hearing from the sharpest minds- once these digital worlds begin to mesh together, when they can interface smoothly, a vision like this “thinker” offers up where worlds span, move, collide and yet remain inter operable could make this vision possible.

Pay attention because if Second Life does manage to stay up for any length of time I think it can be used to measure the X,Y, Z factors and that is the “silly putty” I referred to on the cast and it is this silly putty that Sam is always harping on people to go play with. I think it will deliver at least one item on the Evil Marketer’s checklist.

Books Referenced

By Anonymous Thinker: (Concept- VR Worlds and Interaction) Spook Country- William Gibson

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Set in the same high-tech present day as Pattern Recognition, Gibson’s fine ninth novel offers startling insights into our paranoid and often fragmented, postmodern world. When a mysterious, not yet actual magazine, Node, hires former indie rocker–turned–journalist Hollis Henry to do a story on a new art form that exists only in virtual reality, Hollis finds herself investigating something considerably more dangerous. An operative named Brown, who may or may not work for the U.S. government, is tracking a young, Russian-speaking Cuban-Chinese criminal named Tito. Brown’s goal is to follow Tito to yet another operative known only as the old man. Meanwhile, a mysterious cargo container with CIA connections repeatedly appears and disappears on the worldwide Global Positioning network, never quite coming to port. At the heart of the dark goings-on is Bobby Chombo, a talented but unbalanced specialist in Global Positioning software who refuses to sleep in the same spot two nights running. Compelling characters and crisp action sequences, plus the author’s trademark metaphoric language, help make this one of Gibson’s best. 8-city author tour. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Discussed by Jeff Doak During Podcast (Concept- Findability): Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become- Peter Morville

How do you find your way in an age of information overload? How can you filter streams of complex information to pull out only what you want? Why does it matter how information is structured when Google seems to magically bring up the right answer to your questions? What does it mean to be “findable” in this day and age? This eye-opening new book examines the convergence of information and connectivity. Written by Peter Morville, author of the groundbreaking “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web”, the book defines our current age as a state of unlimited findability. In other words, anyone can find anything at any time. Complete navigability.

Morville discusses the Internet, GIS, and other network technologies that are coming together to make unlimited findability possible. He explores how the melding of these innovations impacts society, since Web access is now a standard requirement for successful people and businesses. But before he does that, Morville looks back at the history of wayfinding and human evolution, suggesting that our fear of being lost has driven us to create maps, charts, and now, the mobile Internet.

The book’s central thesis is that information literacy, information architecture, and usability are all critical components of this new world order. Hand in hand with that is the contention that only by planning and designing the best possible software, devices, and Internet, will we be able to maintain this connectivity in the future. Morville’s book is highlighted with full color illustrations and rich examples that bring his prose to life.

Ambient Findability doesn’t preach or pretend to know all the answers. Instead, it presents research, stories, and examples in support of its novel ideas. Are we truly at a critical point in our evolution where the quality of our digital networks will dictate how we behave as a species? Is findability indeed the primary key to a successful global marketplace in the 21st century and beyond. Peter Morville takes you on a thought-provoking tour of these memes and more — ideas that will not only fascinate but will stir your creativity in practical ways that you can apply to your work immediately.

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