Always On

A slow but steady cultural transformation is occurring. People are adopting the values of an "always on, always available" world. The internet is at the middle of this transformation, a behemoth of information that continually grows, and allows easy collaboration at any time. More then ever before, are we able to harness people in an integrated network as the world's largest human supercomputer. When you put the millions of people on the internet together to complete specific tasks, there are endless possibilities. An example is chacha.com, which lets you use a live search guide to help you find what you're looking for. Chacha pays people 5 to 10 dollars an hour to help assist its customers.

The power of the internet is just beginning to be harnessed. If every idle moment of time people spend on the internet could be put towards a purpose, much could be accomplished. The time can be taken from many things people already do everyday, and wouldn't affect anyone's day on the internet by much. Take for instance the ReCAPTCHA project. Captchas are common in our internet world. They act to deter the efforts by spammers and hackers (or crackers, whatever your prefer to call them) to create accounts. Captcha's helped prevent these spammer attacks, which were significantly hurting server loads around the world. Now, bot algorithm's are getting more complex, and some are able to determine some captcha's. The ReCAPTCHA project helps by making the text a little harder to read, thus throwing off the bots. But the main point of ReCAPTCHA is to help document pre-computer age books that could not be read by text recognition software. It's done by using two words for the captcha. The first, an unrecognizable word that the person filling in the captcha determines, and the second word, a known word by the computer to verify you aren't a bot. When quite a few people fill out the first word, the word is known because a few people helped to verify what it is. There are similar ideas in the work for things like videos, pictures, and all sorts of digital content. As the internet expands, these are only going to become more common.

The planet is the most powerful supercomputer, and I can't wait to see what kind of things will be done with this massive power in the future.

A new era.

We are on the brink of a technological revolution. This will be no small change. It will change the entire world around us. How we live, work, play, and inform. It is known as the "web 2.0". It is changing our world into one of mass scale collaboration, a world of openness. Companies, large or small, will have to adapt.

In recent years, companies that are defining the "web 2.0", have flourished. Sites like Digg, Myspace, and Facebook, are changing the way we communicate; sites like Wikipedia, changing the way we store and use information.

Myspace and Facebook are changing the way advertisers work. Before, incentives (contests, etc) had to be given to get information from people -- things like age, work, education, hobbies, and interests. Now, people freely give this away, making it public for all to see.

The idea of a wiki; a source of information available for people to use and edit freely; allows for companies to put together a massive collection of information for their employees to make use of. Some companies are even taking mass collaboration to the next level, showing all their companies hidden secrets, and providing an incentive to help collaborate with them. Incentives vary from employment with the company, to cash prizes for the best solutions or ideas.

Some, however, are against this change in the roles of society. There are those that would rather the people of the world stayed out of business. They believe that giving information away only works against them. They say proprietary company holdings are the only way to go, providing hard earned value for work.

No matter who is right, one thing is certain. The ball has been set in motion, and there is no way to stop it. The era of mass collaboration is upon us, where the consumer is almost another subsection of companies, helping to create things ranging from instruction guides, to mods and other add-ons to products.

Welcome to a new era. Welcome to the "Web 2.0".

The resurgence of Yahoo!?

The CEO of Yahoo!, Terry Semel, was recently replaced by co-founder Jerry Yang. Many people jumped with excitement at the thought that maybe, after all this time of torture, Yahoo! might be able to turn things around. Even after being sent into a never-ending tail dive by their biggest competitor Google, they're still around at least, right? I for one am hoping for a revival of Yahoo!. I think some good old competition might help kick things up another notch on the internet, and that is when we will start to see some unimaginable technologies evolve for our use.

One major downside is that Jerry Yang hasn't had much experience in dealing with corporate workings. Even though he was CEO of Yahoo! in their 'startup' days, he was never CEO when Yahoo! went public. Even more, according to the London Times, Yang was a big supporter of Terry Semel, and a consultant in some important decisions (I'm assuming one of them to be the rumored failure to buy out Google years back), that left Yahoo! tailing behind Google. So, with that said, there has been some action to merge their search and display advertising departments, and an overall attempt to oil the gears and restructure the company.

I think they need to start taking lessons from the masters, and assign a "cultural manager", someone who keeps things going at Yahoo!, giving the feeling of a startup company, and motivating the employees. One would think that after many years of working for a company, your motivation would start to plummet, especially in the case of a failing company.

With the recent redesign of its advertising platform, Yahoo! is thought to have a boost in sales and start climbing back up as early as this year. So, please Yahoo!, take it slow, steady, reassuringly, and if something as good as Google falls into your lap next time, jump for it!

Did you notice?

My blog has now moved to www.KyleJorgensen.com. Google offers some awesome hosting services, and I felt it was time to get a new web domain.

Wikinomics

I just bought the book "Wikinomics". I've been reading it with great interest. The book brings up a lot of great points, and tries to show that there is a revolution going on among corporate entities. It argues that companies must learn to collaborate on a massive scale in order to stay competitive and refreshing, because if they don't, another will. Sharing all of a companies well kept secrets might seem like corporate suicide at first, but the book raises some very good arguments as to why collaborating with others outside a company can be beneficial. A great read if your into books on economics, even better if your into the way technology is changing the way the world works.