Digital Digressions

A Portrait of the Digital Teen

A recent report published by Pew Internet creates a fascinating picture of the on-line media habits of the 12-17 year olds. Some findings at a glance:

• The use of social media – from blogging to on-line social networking to creation of all kinds of digital material – is central to many teenagers’ lives. 
• Girls continue to lead the charge as the teen blogosphere grows; 28% of on-line teens have created a blog, up from 19% in 2004. 
• The growth in blogs tracks with the growth in teens’ use of social networking sites, but they do not completely overlap.
• On-line boys are avid users of video-sharing websites such as You-Tube, and boys are more likely than girls to upload.
• Digital images – stills and videos – have a big role in teen life. Posting images and video often starts a virtual conversation. Most teens receive some feedback on the content they post on-line.
• Most teens restrict access to their posted photos and videos – at least some of the time. Adults restrict access to the same content less often.
• In the midst of the digital media mix, the land-line is still a lifeline for teen social life. Multi-channel teens layer each new communications opportunity on top of pre-existing channels.
• Email continues to lose its luster among teens as texting, instant messaging, and social networking sites facilitate more frequent contact with friends.

Some curious facts about teen blogging
Apparently, girls continue to dominate the teen blogosphere; 35% of all on-line teen girls blog, compared with just 20% of on-line teen boys. The gender gap for blogging has grown larger over time. Virtually all of the growth in teen blogging between 2004 and 2006 is due to the increased activity of girls. Older teen girls are still far more likely to blog when compared with older boys (38% vs. 18%), but younger girl bloggers have grown at such a fast clip that they are now outpacing even the older boys (32% of younger girls blog vs. 18% of older boys). 

Beyond gender and age, two new developments emerged in this survey in the demographics of teens who blog. While there was little or no variation in blogging activity among teens according to household income or family structure in 2004, both variables have become important indicators in the 2006 data. Teens living in households earning less than $50,000 per year are considerably more likely to blog than those living in higher-income households; fully 35% of on-line teens whose parents fall in the lower
income brackets have created an on-line journal or blog, while just 24% of those in the higher income brackets have done so.

An even more pronounced contrast is evident when looking at teens who live with single parents vs. those who live with married parents. On-line teens living in single-parent homes are far more likely to have shared their writing through a blog; 42% of these teens keep a blog compared with 25% of teens living with married parents.

Hmmm.. curiouser and curiouser as Alice would have said. I particularly wonder about the propensity of kids of divorced parents to be blogging, are they just venting their spleen or have they learnt to express their thinking more as a result of the complexity of their family life compared to those with both parents still at home?

For more information visit the Digital native research project.

Meet My Latest Addiction: The Yamaha Tenori-On

Ok ok so you figured I'd gone a bit quiet over Christmas - no surprise really as no doubt all of you have had Decembers similar to mine, trying to finish off everything in time for the holidays and still remain sane. Well Christmas did finally arrive and I went and got myself a long-awaited addition to my musical arsenal: the Yamaha Tenori-On, radically turning electronic music-making on its head through the innovative new user interface. I'll write more later, but here's a demo of how it works:

A couple of links: Global Yamaha site;
UK site for Tenori-On 

2008: When the Internet slows down to a crawl (again!)

A great article over at the Economist.com reminds me just how fragile our brave new (Internet) world is. Several sources have been lamenting the exponential increase in on-line traffic and the subsequent slow-down of speed this will inevitably result in, but moreover it is not just a matter of sheer numbers of people and devices - but also of the volume of data flowing back and forth. As our appetite for on-line video has taken off big-time and everyone and their grand-mother now setting up sites with streaming video, down-loadable video, pod-casts and playing games hosted on-line it is not surprising that the pipeline is getting jammed.

A big surprise (although in a way I'm not surprised) is the enormous bulk of traffic generated by spam (over 90%!) and as it is only in the interests of us customers, phone companies and other large ISPs haven't really bothered to do anything about this, because it would simply cost too much to fix. Personally I'm grateful for the e-mail quarantine system on my in-box, yet still the occasional spam wiggles its way past the jaws of the spam-stopper - suggesting I follow a link to go watch some ungodly assault on women in various imaginative ways or cheap(! not free!) pirated software from some strangely named individual. This of course presuming I don't have yet another security-alert that my account has been unlawfully accessed by a bank I don't even have an account at, prompting me to send all my security details to some Phisher sitting with his finger poised at the buy-button of his favourite e-commerce/porn site waiting for a ride on my card or indeed some Nigerian wealthy official offering me a cut if I help smuggle money out of the country. Honestly, how stupid do spammers think we really are and no, thanks, I don't need Viagra either - I'm a woman in case you haven't noticed..

Not only is it about the increased bandwidth of data continuously accessed - it's also about those hoards of 'smart' little devices that simply refuse to even talk to you unless they have all connected to the net and checked for updates first. And then there is social networking, suddenly creating a captive audience for all that video you shot at the weekend, not to mention P2P file sharing which of course explicitly relies on you to not only download, but upload too. Don't know about you, but my Internet slows down to a crawl as soon as I attempt to upload anything other than blog posts. So now roll on TV-networks, Hollywood studios and everyone else who have discovered that making money with advertising is far more lucrative than charging people to watch your content - if you have it, they will come and better still - if they are watching, advertisers are paying.

Oh and what else - come the Digital television revolution, meaning that the 700-megahertz frequencies used by channels 52 to 69 of old-school analog television will become available to be auctioned off to mobile phone companies lusting for the their long range and broadband capabilities. Bring on mobile television and improved Internet browsing from your handset - in fact, hold on to your hat as the new Android operating system launched by Google, make it ever easier for other handset manufacturers to provide the features hankered for by consumers, i.e open access that have none of the restrictions the big carriers impose, like not being able to download games from other makers, browse the Internet freely or make VOIP calls from a Wifi hot-spot. It will suck to be a phone operator soon oh and guess what, all that traffic from your mobile will also be on - you guessed it - the Internet.

Interestingly, the beauty of freedom in the form of open-source is becoming more attractive too, making it harder for us to part with old trusted toasters of computer equipment, given another lease of life with the sleek Gutsy Gibbon adaptation of Linux. So not only can you forgo the latest OS to make a dent in the information superhighway, Nicholas Negroponte of the OLPC initiative has frightened a lot of big-time computer makers into having a go at making cheap equipment themselves, not wanting to lose out on a potential market measured in the hundreds of millions.. oh and I forgot to say - they will all be on-line too, along with all those old bangers you would have resigned to a computer graveyard in the past, but now with user-friendly Linux on them, even they can join in clogging up the arteries of the on-line world - reminding us how it felt having dial-up.

Update from LEGO Universe

It's all very exciting - we recently had BBC Newsround's Adam over to the LEGO HQ to sample the work going into creating LEGO Universe - a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) where everything is made out of LEGO bricks and you can build just about anything - alone or together with your friends. Here's Adam's report

Jesus Saves - Buddha Does Incremental Backups

This title I actually came across on a T-shirt, which I found hilarious, because an all consuming worry recently made me buy yet another external hard drive, this one now a Tera-byte (1000 gigabytes) to use to back up my various data currently spread across other external hard drives and my computer(s).

This is it - my volume of physical possessions is gradually decreasing (i.e new music albums, printed photos, design visuals, printed matter) as I rejoice in the space efficient way of storing all this information on my computer. Equally it fills me with worry to know that a growing part of my life in the form of memories and content I value is living not readily to hand to be leafed through, touched and felt, but as a collection of zeroes and ones on a hard disk that may just one day decide not to start, or get infected by a virus or God forbid just be carried out in the pocket of some enterprising burglar. I can't quite fathom him running off with my library of books which take up half of our living room, or the vast collection of academic paperwork, but hard disks are far more juicier a price and guess what? If you don't like the content on it, you can always erase it (!) and put something else on it instead.

I'm also really excited by the new operating system from Apple, called Leopard or OS 10.5, which has this nifty feature called Time Machine, which keeps track of all the versions of files on your hard disk so you never accidentally lose a file again. However, I did spot a problem with this though - where it addresses the problem of backups in the past where everything is more or less backed up and it can be arduous searching through your backups to find specifically the one file you are looking for - if you lose your entire hard drive on your computer and have to start from scratch, I'm not sure Time Machine can help with restoring everything all at once.

That means incremental backups of your entire system are still worth while - having it all, done regularly, ready to be restored in its entirety at the touch of a button, backed up on a drive you hide somewhere in a secure place away from your computer, just so that should things get nicked - your memories aren't one of them.

More great geek-wear from Syswear

Why Do We Blog? That is the Question

A great post by Scott Adams, the famed creator of Dilbert has got me re-thinking this whole blogging thing, well - re-thinking it for the fourth time at least as those of you who read this blog will notice.

He says:

I’ve decided to blog less. I posted daily (mostly) for two years, with the theory that my efforts would be compensated in four ways.

1. Advertising dollars
2. Compiling the best posts into a book.
3. Growing the audience for Dilbert
4. Artistic satisfaction.

Readership of The Dilbert Blog is growing rapidly, but at about the same rate people figure out how to use RSS feeds to get the content without the ads. So there’s no longer a correlation between how hard I work and the ad income I earn..

My book based on the blog posts, STICK TO DRAWING COMICS, MONKEY-BRAIN! got great reviews for content, but angry reactions in people who feel that other people, who didn’t read the content on the Internet, and never will, should not buy the book..

I hoped that people who loved the blog would spill over to people who read Dilbert..Instead, I found that if I wrote nine highly popular posts, and one that a reader disagreed with, the reaction was inevitably “I can never read Dilbert again because of what you wrote in that one post.” Every blog post reduced my income, even if 90% of the readers loved it..

I enjoyed being relatively uncensored, and interacting with the readers on fun topics. That’s why I will continue blogging, albeit less controversially..It’s hard to tell the family I can’t spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income.

So all this nonsense about social media and blogging and how it all makes us famous.. naah, it's more likely to make us (in)famous as Scott puts it so well above. So here are my top 4 reasons:

1. Cleaning up the mental jumble known as my brain
2. Hoping that these insightful posts would in 2 years remind me of insights I had 2 years ago and then promptly forgot about
3. Writing for other reasons than work!
4. Gathering the best posts (as voted by visitor numbers) into a book

I'm your classical definition of a knowledge worker. I used to be a skill worker (people employed me for my skill in translating complex ideas into designs that sold toys). Now they employ me to make sense of a ton of stuff happening around us and suggest ways for the business to cope with it all. That means my brain is devouring information continuously to stay ahead of the game. Some ideas stick around and mature into business opportunities, others are forgotten about. Much like you have to clean your office every now and then, I like to clean my mind by putting some thoughts down in a post. Utterly selfish I know.

So occasionally I have some useful thoughts and I find that unless I jot them down I forget about them. I had this dreadful interview recently where they asked me to list a pile of my accomplishments. I couldn't have been asked a more grating question as I'm stuck in this rut where whenever I accomplish something my satisfaction is very short lived and simply serves to highlight all the other things that still need doing. Much like the more you learn the more you realise how little you know and how much more there is to learn out there. So the important thing is to catalogue the learning, not the accomplishment.

So being this 'knowledge worker' I find I spend my life writing emails, letters, and presentations - in fact most of my writing is exclusively for purposes related to work. How boring! At least here is a chance for me to vent my spleen about stuff, which doesn't have to fit into a Power-point and be only 20 slides, in 30pt font size for a presentation lasting 45 minutes.. hurrah!

My highly erratic and diverse topics mean a book of my blog posts would be every editor's nightmare and the posts that are most popular on this blog is my collections of bumper stickers - which are funny, sometimes profound and but always funny. Difference is, I collected them together in one place people can find them and laugh about them, but I didn't invent them. Therefore I'm not sure they should be in the book.. so you can see where this is going. I'll stop now.

1. Advertising dollars
2. Compiling the best posts into a book.
3. Growing the audience for Dilbert
4. Artistic satisfaction.

Readership of The Dilbert Blog is growing rapidly, but at about the same rate people figure out how to use RSS feeds to get the content without the ads. So there’s no longer a correlation between how hard I work and the ad income I earn..

My book based on the blog posts, STICK TO DRAWING COMICS, MONKEY-BRAIN! got great reviews for content, but angry reactions in people who feel that other people, who didn’t read the content on the Internet, and never will, should not buy the book..

I hoped that people who loved the blog would spill over to people who read Dilbert..Instead, I found that if I wrote nine highly popular posts, and one that a reader disagreed with, the reaction was inevitably “I can never read Dilbert again because of what you wrote in that one post.” Every blog post reduced my income, even if 90% of the readers loved it..

I enjoyed being relatively uncensored, and interacting with the readers on fun topics. That’s why I will continue blogging, albeit less controversially..It’s hard to tell the family I can’t spend time with them because I need to create free content on the Internet that will lower our income.

So all this nonsense about social media and blogging and how it all makes us famous.. naah, it's more likely to make us (in)famous as Scott puts it so well above. So here are my top 4 reasons:

1. Cleaning up the mental jumble known as my brain
2. Hoping that these insightful posts would in 2 years remind me of insights I had 2 years ago and then promptly forgot about
3. Writing for other reasons than work!
4. Gathering the best posts (as voted by visitor numbers) into a book

I'm your classical definition of a knowledge worker. I used to be a skill worker (people employed me for my skill in translating complex ideas into designs that sold toys). Now they employ me to make sense of a ton of stuff happening around us and suggest ways for the business to cope with it all. That means my brain is devouring information continuously to stay ahead of the game. Some ideas stick around and mature into business opportunities, others are forgotten about. Much like you have to clean your office every now and then, I like to clean my mind by putting some thoughts down in a post. Utterly selfish I know.

So occasionally I have some useful thoughts and I find that unless I jot them down I forget about them. I had this dreadful interview recently where they asked me to list a pile of my accomplishments. I couldn't have been asked a more grating question as I'm stuck in this rut where whenever I accomplish something my satisfaction is very short lived and simply serves to highlight all the other things that still need doing. Much like the more you learn the more you realise how little you know and how much more there is to learn out there. So the important thing is to catalogue the learning, not the accomplishment.

So being this 'knowledge worker' I find I spend my life writing emails, letters, and presentations - in fact most of my writing is exclusively for purposes related to work. How boring! At least here is a chance for me to vent my spleen about stuff, which doesn't have to fit into a Power-point and be only 20 slides, in 30pt font size for a presentation lasting 45 minutes.. hurrah!

My highly erratic and diverse topics mean a book of my blog posts would be every editor's nightmare and the posts that are most popular on this blog is my collections of bumper stickers - which are funny, sometimes profound and but always funny. Difference is, I collected them together in one place people can find them and laugh about them, but I didn't invent them. Therefore I'm not sure they should be in the book.. so you can see where this is going. I'll stop now.

Visions of the Future: Understanding Trends

Back to that time of the year again, I'm busy collaborating with people across the company and externally to pull together insights and inspire a new bout of business development for next year. It's a fascinating subject, mapping the competitive landscape around any company, because some things you can control and knowing about them in advance will really help and other things, well, they just happen and sooner or later some of it or all of it will have an impact on you too, whether you like it or not.

For my own sanity's sake I keep following a 3-pronged approach when it comes to understanding trends, an approach I originally came across courtesy of Unilever and having chewed on it for quite some time, I've come to the conclusion that it is a very powerful way to understand the difference between cause and effect in the arena of trends.

The word 'Trends' in itself has become somewhat of an overused term and tons of institutions now deliver trend reports of various calibres, sometimes causing more confusion than clarity and this because everything is muddled together: Macroeconomic drivers meeting consumer anxieties in some niche expression through one single on-line service provider isn't exactly a trend, it is an expression, which may be the correct expression to capitalise on a nascent consumer trend, but it's longevity as a business is dependent on other factors in addition than the survival of the potential trend that spawned it. Thus it has to be evaluated as an expression, not as the mother trend - if that makes sense?

Back to the 3-pronged approach: Firstly we must seek to understand

1. Drivers
• External drivers - these are out of the control of individual consumers, but somewhere along the line they may have an impact on your life. Examples are the global economy, climate change, political risk and so on.
• Internal drivers - These are value, aspiration, needs and demands driven and influence the life of consumers.
2. Trends - trends are really about how consumers respond to the above drivers through their behaviour. It's not about whether black is in our out, it's more about understanding that fundamentally our needs don't change that quickly, but external and internal drivers will create new opportunities for those needs to be met, which conveniently leads us onto the third point:
3. Expressions - These are ways in which the trends are expressed in consumers' day to day lives, examples illustrating how businesses for instance are exploiting the trends today.

So bearing this distinction in mind, it is easier when you come across anything labelled a 'trend' to understand whether this is in fact an external or internal driver, a consumer response to the former in the form of behaviour or indeed an expression of the trend in the form of a business.

By keeping a keen eye out for the drivers, both internal and external over time it becomes possible to stay ahead of the curve so to speak, to anticipate trends and expressions, rather than merely notice more and more obscure new businesses cropping up. This is hard and of course it helps constantly being on the look-out for many different kinds of information, sources and so on, but also consciously engaging in monitoring something will gradually make you more sensitive to small changes and being able to identify the crucial indicators in a field that tell you when something is about to change.

Exoforce for Real: Fully Functioning Exoskeleton for Humans

Some years ago I worked on LEGO Exoforce and inspired by the exoskeleton that Sigourney Weaver uses in the Alien movie, in addition to the Manga inspirations of Gundam and NeonGenesis Evangelion, the exoskeleton robots operated by tiny mini-figures took form.

Little did I know that only a year or two later, the technology would be available not just to play with as an idea in a toy, but something for us to try out for real. This video demonstrates the exoskeleton and sadly, here it is shown as something for the military to use, whereas I could see tons and tons of uses for it to help people in their day-to-day activities. Imagine no longer needing a wheel chair, just step into your exo and off you go.. dancing, running, walking up the stairs, playing ball - you name it.

Why the Era of the Insider is Over

Now this is intentionally a controversial title for a post, but hear me out. I'm not saying that we no longer need people who know stuff, in fact we will need them more than ever before - but what I am saying is that information and expertise is becoming so ubiquitous (through the Internet) that some of the models for profiting from expertise and insider knowledge are rapidly becoming redundant.

So back to the post. Let's start by a poignant example. Here in the UK estate agents have been running amok with property prices of late and been trying their best to prop up property prices all around the country. Why? Because the higher the sale price, the better their fee (as it is often calculated as a percentage of the final sale price). So whether you like it or not, it is in estate agents' interests to get as high a price for a property as possible. [Don't even get me started on whether it is reasonable to pay half a million pounds for some house built over a century ago, where heating mostly benefits the pigeons outside and no angle in the house is 90 degrees, making office chairs on casters spontaneously migrate to one corner of the room.]

Anyway - the game has been that of poker: If we tell you the price is going up and you better get on the property ladder soon, (pandering to the human weakness of dreading to lose out) people invariably believe it and more often than not in recent years, have been extending themselves far more than what could be recommended to just get on that property ladder.

Interestingly this began changing not too long ago, first with Nethouseprices, an on-line facility that keeps track on the actual price for which a property was sold. Certainly this began drawing a lot of interest and curiosity from people, but there was still room for estate agents to jump in the middle and say - 'weeeelll, that was then... this is now and I tell you it is hotting up big time!'. What do I mean? Well, the prices listed on Nethouseprices are lag measures - they only tell you the news AFTER it has happened. It's like saying - I would like to lose weight and tracking your weight only by getting on the scales every morning. The scales will tell you your weight at that precise moment in time, but not whether you are likely to be losing some weight anytime soon.

Well, I hear you ask - how could you measure the likelihood of losing weight? By finding a lead measure instead. So if you measured how often you took some exercise and how many calories you burned every time you exercised, offsetting that against how many calories you took in and going on the theory that if you burn more calories than you eat - you will find that sooner or later you begin losing weight. That's a lead measure. Keeping track of that will tell you before you get on the scales what the scales are likely to tell you. How does this apply to the housing market?

The fact is that the housing market is catching up too and instead of reporting lag measures (i.e the price at which properties were sold and no use to you since the property is no longer on the market so you can't jump in and buy it instead!) we, the consumers are beginning to have a chance to peek into that precious secret folder that only estate agents and individual sellers had access to before - that is, how much the price is coming down WHILE the property is still on the market. Ooops! The emperor no longer has any clothes as PropertySnake, interestingly named to be the opposite of the property ladder, will show. PropertySnake tracks how much prices of properties have fallen over time and by looking up areas by post-codes you get a good sense of the overall trend in that area in addition to what is happening to a particular house. If you then are so intrigued by what you find, you can look up with what estate agent that house/flat is listed with by clicking on the listing.

It is also a step on from traditional price comparison sites, which have mushroomed recently, because again - although those sites compare the prices right now, they seldom give you any indication of where the market is going. The same phenomenon is what happens at Ebay - because everyone can bid whenever they like and only by keeping track of something over time can you see whether the demand for that is heating up or not, it means your powers of detecting broader trends are limited to your own power of observation and whatever little software widget you might have that gives you the bids that are just about to close so you can bid in the last few minutes.

All those are still tactical tools, and up till now the strategy has been left to experts, but as we begin to see with house prices and no doubt with other areas too - the last vestiges for insider knowledge is becoming undone.

Teaching in the Age of the Digital Native: LEGO Exploring Creative Learning Solutions for Developing Countries

Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach.

Today’s students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past ...a really big discontinuity has taken place.. This is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century. Today’s students – K through college – represent the first generations to grow up with this new technology. They have spent their entire lives surrounded by and using computers, video-games, digital music players, video cams, cell phones, and all the other toys and tools of the digital age. Today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV). Computer games, email, the Internet, cell phones and instant messaging are integral parts of their lives. (Marc Prensky)

With this realisation in mind, a radical re-think of education and skills development is needed. It's no longer about a teacher at the head of the class-room lecturing a bunch of disinterested students, too busy txting their friends, but about ways to utilise children's competencies and curiosities in the digital fields to improve learning. Another layer to this is the growing digital divide, where said media is becoming more and more important in our lives, but the rate of technology adoption and access is of course the greatest in the Western world, where developing countries are often left behind.

Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the MIT Media lab, pioneered a solution to this growing problem through his One Laptop Per Child initiative, where the goal is to create a hundred dollar laptop, available to kids in the developing world to ensure they will not grow up to be the Digital have-not's whose abilities to learn, network and build a livelihood for themselves is hampered by a lack of key skills. As Negroponte puts it: "Any nation's most precious natural resource is its children. We believe the emerging world must leverage this resource by tapping into the children's innate capacities to learn, share, and create on their own. Our answer to that challenge is the XO laptop, a children's machine designed for “learning learning.”

Drawing on 10 years of research, product development and success as a consumer robotics pioneer with LEGO MINDSTORMS®,  LEGO Education, The LEGO Group's educational division, today begins testing of creative curriculum solutions in three schools in Brazil to establish the best technology platform for bringing 21st Century skills to students ages seven and older in underserved and developing countries.

LEGO Education is exploring how to harness technology to bridge the physical and virtual play worlds to provide advanced teaching methods that integrate science, math, engineering, language, social skills, and more. The plan is to provide selected classrooms with concept products that foster the hands-on, minds-on creative play for which the LEGO(R) brand is universally known. Ultimately LEGO Education is aiming to provide cost-effective, high-impact, versatile tools that foster creative exploration and learning for those schools and students who need it most to prepare for the future.

LEGO Press release

21st Century Skills