Bruce Sterling in London
I recently had the fortune to attend a talk by Bruce Sterling, here in London hosted by the New Statesman. It was thanks to Dave Green, who publicised the event at NTK, that this came to my attention.
With the kind help of the New Statesman's online manager, Kathryn Corrick, I was sent an invite to join them at The Grouse and Claret, a charming pub that served Fursty Ferret: a fine ale and highly recommended ;-)
Bruce Sterling is rather well known although I must confess I'd only just discovered Bruce last year when Jonathan, the chairman of one of my projects remarked that something we'd discussed was very 'Bruce Sterling'. I looked at him dumbfounded. Jonathan enquired if I read for pleasure to which I replied "only on holidays, I don't have time" so he suggested I ought to take a break from my research and thrust his copy of Bruce Sterling's book Heavy Weather into my hands. I'll never forget as I was reaching the climax of the book a certain hurricane took a 90 degree turn and headed for New Orleans, spooky.
Arriving early I managed to get in a pint of the Ferret before taking my place in the room while the New Statesman team prepared for Bruce's talk. I can't tell you how lucky I felt when Bruce and friends decided to sit with me and that's when I got my chance to take a photo of the famous chap reading the article about Paul Wolfowitz in the latest edition of the New Statesman.
I guess I'll be frank about the talk and say I was more than au-fait with what Bruce spoke about so there were no 'ahh' moments for me. That said, there's nothing better than capturing an expert wordsmith's soundbites that I felt were worth noting down:
"They [Business] don't talk benefits" + "PR people talk about benefits" + "only to consumers"
In relation to Wikipedia-type communities and their architecture of pariticipation:
"Free labour" + "Radical de-centralisation" + "Mass servicing of micro-markets"
Bruce was comfortable using the term "Web 2.0" and gave a great deal of respect to Tim O'Reilly for coining the phrase. He remarked that a web 2.0 site had "minimum content to support the brand" and the focus is "You" the visitor, again remarking about 'free labour' in the context of the way tagging is carried out by the visitor using Flickr as a specific example.
Another good point about web 2.0 sites and while obvious as a key indicator of a successful web 2.0 company is that as it gets bigger it gets better, i.e. web 2.0 sites must be able to grow i.e. increase in membership and pariticipation and those that do provide even more value than those that don't.
He noted that Google will probably have a service as a real-estate broking platform following the recent acquisition of Sketchup.
Here are some of Bruce's web n.0 trends / change drivers:
- Socially generated internet knowledge (which compliments my stance of knowledge commoditisation)
- Interactive chips - RFID technology (one of my current fascinations)
- Real-time locative systems - Geo-location mapping etc.
- Traceable objects
- New search tools
- Cradle-to-cradle recycling
- 3D Virtual objects / modelling - such as Google's Sketchup
- Rapid prototyping
There were also some lovely words that followed this such as 'spyme', 'metaverse', 'benevolent magic elves', 'ambient findability' and my favourite: 'fractal shape of the internet' which Bruce linked to intrinsic benefits.
This all resonates with much of my research so I had a wry smile on my face when he was talking to the audience.
I even got to ask Bruce a question about what his hopes and fears would be as we emerge towards a collective consciousness. I felt he did not answer my question as well as I would have hoped but I guess too many people have played that one out already in sci-fi literature - it is however one of my key interests and certainly in relation to communities of pracitice, peer2peer technologies and facilitating a P2P3C: {CoP.Col.Con.0 : CoP.Col.Con.n} ;-)
Fortunately, if this has whet your appetite there's a podcast of the talk (45mins) and Q&A, courtesy of the New Statesman team, available here.