Digital “Storage” of our Digital “Stuff”

by | Jan 18, 2012 | Innovation Shifts, Personal Innovation, Tech+Change, White Papers, Work Everywhere

First of a Series of Blog Posts from Maremel’s White Paper: Opening Pandora’s Digital Box

 

“Storage”: An interesting word in the context of “digital stuff.”  Like the word “collect,” storage implies that it is our “digital stuff,” that we have ownership rights to it.

Storage, as a social metaphor, brings with it context from our daily, physical lives. It may bring to mind Public Storage units, areas under overpasses where we put the detritus of our lives: mom’s sofa, the wagon wheel coffee table that we fight over, or three rooms of furniture as we downsize homes.  Storage bears echoes of George Carlin’s 1986 comedy routine about stuff to hold our stuff in.


He detailed how we have stuff everywhere and have some stuff that is more important than other stuff, which we want to keep with us always. Our digital stuff holds many of those same traits: we have digital stuff all over the place, some is more important, and some we want to keep with us always as well.

Email has become a “gateway drug” for the cloud, training users to expect abundance of digital storage.  Digital storage was framed for many years as precious, to be used wisely.  Previously, companies chastised their employees about using too much e-mail space through automated warning messages.  Expectations have escalated since 2 MB in free email storage was offered by Hotmail in 1996.  Yahoo started at 4 MB in 1997, and Gmail started its beta with 1 GB in 2004.  Yahoo joined in with unlimited storage in 2007, and Google upped the game soon after with its “Infinity Plus One” storage plan, which has grown individual storage now to more than 7 GB for free unlimited storage for Gmail[i].  Hotmail has since moved to “ever-growing,” nearly unlimited storage, continuing to change social norms about digital storage expectations.

Entire business ecosystems have sprung up, dealing with sharing, backup, and cloud storage.  These tools have shifted home and business users to consider storage issues such as ubiquity, mobility, sharing, multiple devices, and permanence.  Despite these roving ambitions, most people’s work and social habits have not kept up.  Products have launched to help us filter and gather our email, though the majority of users still let the content swamp us out and push into unfiltered folders.

2011 was a year of many media “cloud” storage toolset launches, with more solutions to this “problem” on the horizon.  Cloud-based content storage now reaches into consumer lives as well as business services.  Digital media is a growing percentage of our personal digital storage.  As a digital culture, we also are rethinking storage as to digital media.

This transition brings with it a series of questions about this “problem,” and about the relationships between the consumer and cloud-based media storage in the future:

  • What are the problems that companies and consumers are trying to solve with cloud-based media storage?
  • Is this time a transition while we are in changing habits of mobility, sharing, and recommendation with tablets and smartphones?
  • Is it a transition, with different trajectories for our existing digital stuff and entirely new behaviors with new acquisitions and our own digital media creations?
  • How might this transition drive permanent changes in our concepts of content ownership, collection, and storage?
  • How will this change our willingness to pay for storage and to pay a premium for ownership?

Further, playing off of the George Carlin riff on stuff drives two related questions:

  •  What do I expect from the stuff I need to manage my digital stuff?
  •  Is the nature of stuff itself changing?

The music and book media sectors have been facing these issues head-on.  Their company leaders have been forced to rethink what the context and containers for our media content mean in an environment of abundance.  They have been rethinking books and music in a terrain of fluid data and scarcer time.  Other sectors, including video and even education, may find ideas from looking to other media platforms and sectors for pain points, challenges, and new business models.

This blog post from Maremel’s white paper will continue in three steps:

  • Drivers that are accelerating cloud-based consumer media storage,
  • Challenges to be met as Pandora’s Box opens, and
  • Opportunities that lay beneath, beyond the popular discussions about content in the cloud.

 

[i] Now adding 3.3 MB each day to the limit, per Google.

How to Start with Google Docs

How to Start with Google Docs

by | Jan 16, 2012 | "How To" Tech, Innovation Shifts, Personal Innovation, Work Everywhere

We tend to start at the middle when sometimes we need to start at the beginning.

Some of us at Maremel have been setting a non-profit organization up for cloud-based collaboration.  To get them all on the same page,  we helped them move their shared work documents to Google Docs.

Movement screeched to a halt.  Quite a few group members needed a tutorial-style boost into Google Docs — just the basics to get started — though did not raise their hand directly that they didn’t understand the basics.

This need prompted us to return to the web for inspiration.  We took a look at the currently available tools online to understand Google Docs from scratch.  We hope this might be helpful for some folks who might not be comfortable otherwise getting started by trial and error.

Comprehensive Text
Videos

We found three YouTube videos that provided a good launching point for Google Docs:

There are a host of other YouTube videos with instructions.  Just search in YouTube on your specific question, which can be anything from how to use Forms (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzgaUOW6GIs&feature=relmfu), details on how to use spreadsheets and documents, and how to use Google Docs in more specific situations.  You can find a host of videos also within the Expert Village YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/expertvillage/search?query=google+docs .

We’ll be adding some digital basics to our blog in the future, just to brush us up on what is available, as well as what the current state of easy learning resources is online.

 

Consumers in the Cloud at CES

Consumers in the Cloud at CES

by | Jan 9, 2012 | Events and Projects, Innovation Shifts

Dr. Johnson is looking forward to joining in the Content in the Cloud Conference Track at the Consumer Electronics Show.  The afternoon session—”The Impact on Consumers of Implementing Cloud Computing for Media Storage”— will run from 1:45-2:30 pm on Wed., Jan. 11 at North Hall N258 at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

CES White PaperWe’re releasing a very recent white paper that Dr. Johnson has written as a thought-piece about the impacts on media ownership of transitioning to the cloud.

You can download the paper at this link.  Please join us as well with our e-newsletter, where we will be sharing future white papers, event announcement, and executive leadership programs.

Abstract:

In moving content to the cloud, content companies challenge social norms in ownership, payment, time, and place.  This move toward empowered computing and shared online services is not new, and has been driven by long-term shifts in costs of digital storage, computing power, and communications across vast distances.  As this ecosystem continues to develop and expand, challenges and opportunities are unfolding for consumers, content creators, and content service providers.  These challenges include building new behaviors and attitudes about ownership, discovery,  value of storage, offline media use, joint ownership, commoditization of services, competing with freemium business models, and licensing of content across blossoming new platforms layered on IaaS delivery.  This shift may change across broad spectrums of media what it means to own content, as well as reshape the perceived need to own content.  The shift also provides opportunities for new players to question what it means to create for “containers” (O’Leary, 2012) versus the past modes of creating for platforms.  Content might instead spread between traditional media types and may add value with a perpetual beta mode and direct long-term connection with consumers.

Please contact us for additional information about this and other reports from Maremel.

 

Infographic and Data Visualization Tools Galore

Infographic and Data Visualization Tools Galore

by | Dec 18, 2011 | Innovation Shifts, Tech+Change

UPDATED March 2013

We enjoyed recording webinar sessions with Marc Johnson of marcato multimedia, which will appear later on Emmys.com for the Television Academy’s new educational series.  We compared notes on resources available to create infographics and data visualizations for presentations and storytelling.  I had begun a broader search, and created this list to share with Marc and readers of my blog.

A Bit of Background on Infographics

Infographics have been adopted by newspapers, PR, and others who want to share complex information for audiences to pass along.  Sharing JPGs can be easier than sharing links, and has been referred to as linkbait in its ease of drawing social media links and referrals.  Infographics are part of a whole spectrum of info-glut or infoporn.  Job titles in this space also get expansive, including  information artist, information designer, data enterprise editor, and visualization scientist.

I’m just a social scientist dealing with change management, however.  I’m also amused at all the great tools out there at our disposal as less sophisticated storytellers using diverse sets of data.

Some Good Examples of Infographics

Some remarkable articles share regular “best” infographic lists, “how to’s,” and methods articles.  Here’s just a few for perusing:

Enjoyable Infographics Tools

So what can we use to tell digital graphic stories?  I’ll start with easier, and work to more complex.

Playing with Words

  • Wordle – http://www.wordle.net – fun tool to turn words from documents into word maps
  • Tagxedo — http://www.tagxedo.com – similar to Wordle, Tagxedo lets you create word clouds and sculptures from URLs, Tweets, and other social media documents, as well as export them into a variety of formats.

Playing with Maps

We can tinker with maps, both as pre-made images as well as data-driven tools.

Playing with Concept Maps

Several tools let you expand how you lay out concept maps and linked ideas:

  • FreeMind — http://freemind.sourceforge.net – I enjoy this free tool.  Graphically simple, it lets you play with a free tool for mind mapping that can be adapted into all sorts of other applications.
  • Webspiration – http://www.webspirationpro.com – I miss its freemium mode; it now has a trial period and then costs $6/month.  I found Inspiration and Webspiration wonderful for group presentations and immediate work.
  • VUE by Tufts — http://vue.tufts.edu  — I really enjoy this “Visual Understanding Environment” tool, which combines concept maps with search and graphics.

Playing with Presentations, Charts, and Graphs

I tend to live in PowerPoint, and enjoy some of the extenders that work with it.  Beyond PowerPoint, there are some great presentation, chart, and graph tools.

Presentations

  • Prezi — http://www.prezi.com — My recent undergraduate class spent half of their projects in Prezi, which has a zooming camera metaphor across a vast digital white board.  They enjoyed putting in music, video, and other embedded content.  I got a bit dizzy, but enjoyed the creativity.
  • Sliderocket — http://www.sliderocket.com — Several of my students enjoyed using Sliderocket for class presentations.  It gave them a robust and elegant toolset to work with.
  • Brainshark — http://www.brainshark.com — Friends who are professional business development executives heartily recommend Brainshare as a way to pre-package and present content at a distance.  We’ve just started working with them as a teaching/broadcasting medium here at Maremel.

Graphs and Charts

  • Gliffy — http://www.gliffy.com/ — I just found Gliffy, a great diverse creator of charts and graphs.  Different versions of it work with different social workspace/sharing software:
  • Many Eyes — http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/ — an experiment by IBM Research and the IBM Cognos software group let users create and evaluate data visualizations.
  • GGobi — http://www.ggobi.org/ — free data visualization tool for your datasets
  • Mondrian — http://www.rosuda.org/Mondrian/ — open source toolset for charting and graphing data plots and more complex graphs and data-driven visuals
  • OpenDX — http://www.opendx.org —  Older open source software, based on IBM’s visualization data explorer.
  • Spotfire — https://silverspotfire.tibco.com – a whole visualization suite, free for individuals for the first year, then $99/year thereafter.
  • Visualizefree — http://www.visualizefree.com/ — Sampler of more complex system; shows real-time images from the FAA of flights as a sample
  • Mycrocosm — http://mycro.media.mit.edu/ — quirky tool to create displays of your own personal data that you can input by cell or email and track

Playing with Motion Charts

  • Hans Rosling’s Gapminder Foundation worked with Trendalyzer, which then was sold to Google in 2007, then folded away when Google Labs.
  • VIDI — http://www.dataviz.org/ — VIDI Data, run by the Jefferson Institute, provides a visualization module for Drupal CMS to show motion charts, timelines, geodata, and comparative data.
  • TrendCompass — http://epicsyst.com/trendcompass — lets you add your own data to their data visualization tool if you register
  • Eurostat Explorer — http://www.ncomva.se/flash/explorer/euro/ — sample with EU data that can be played with using a motion graphic.

Playing with Images

Playing with Data Resources

There are lots of extensive tools to work with large public databases.

Additional Tools

Our eBook Future: Glut or Glory?

Our eBook Future: Glut or Glory?

by | Oct 27, 2011 | Innovation Shifts

I enjoyed a recent article in The Bookseller by Philip Jones.  Philip Downer, who used to run Border Books’ UK operation, warned of the glut of content and the control by Amazon, Google, and Apple of the pipelines to the consumer with proprietary formats.  He urged change and a pooling of resources by the publishers.  He expressed concern about the “seduction of colour, movement and noise” with digital ink, and concern that publishers are not quick to act, stating in their slowness, “Steve Jobs is dead, but sometimes I think Queen Victoria is still alive.”

In Richard Caves’ 2002 book Creative Industries, he stated that without the natural filters (like agents and publishers) within creative industries, which make money by making judgements for production, the vast volume of creative properties becomes overwhelming.

The cost of creation has plummeted, as has music.  When we all can (and we already can) self-publish to our hearts content, will we be under the deluge of new books like we are underwater with new tracks coming into the music systems from the likes of Tunecore, CD Baby, and Reverbnation?

“But is he happy?” Ian Richie’s TED Talk about Missing the World Wide Web

“But is he happy?” Ian Richie’s TED Talk about Missing the World Wide Web

by | Oct 19, 2011 | Innovation Shifts, Tech+Change

TED.com inspires, thrills, amazes, saddens, and enlightens.  I enjoy getting their regular email blasts as to new videos, learning something new each time.

This cycle I’m bemused.  Ian Richie spoke about how, at Owl, he missed “getting” the World Wide Web when Tim Berners-Lee came to him.  In his talk, he brought me back to Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” from The Atlantic in 1945.  He brought me back to thinking of how we look at and miss innovations.  He also brought me back, in a closer timeframe, to my current enjoyment of Christensen, Roth, and Anthony’s 2004 “Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change” on how we have missed and found past innovations.

I spend a lot of time with my classes and learning partners on trying to look with a critical lens at change and its impacts.  Sometimes part of the challenge is to recognize how we are refolding data, time, and space when the idea walks in our door.