Matt Nagel from the PR firm Shift Communications did an interview with me for the firm’s blog Slice. Here’s me talking about technology and media trends:
In technology, I’ve been covering the consumerization of IT. But I’m also interested in the enterprization of personal life. It’s interesting to see families and groups of friends using “groupware” such as calendar sharing, wikis and Google Docs – or even something like Facebook Events – to coordinate. RIM is offering enterprise security tools to consumer BlackBerry users now. And this new crop of mobile messaging services is inspired by BlackBerry Messenger.
How might consumers take advantage of predictive analytics, mashups, data mining or real-time intelligence? We’re already seeing some of this happening with the “quantified self” movement – stuff like Mint.com, Rescue Time and RunKeeper. Stuff that gives people what they call in business “actionable insights.”
Last year Google released App Inventor, enabling people without programming experience to build Android applications. Adam Greenfield wrote a post about it, and I followed that up with some of my own thoughts about how consumers could start using the same sorts of visual programming and data mashup tools that BPM and business intelligence professionals are using.
In media, I think we’re going to see more evolution and refinement of how we present news and information online. List posts and infographics are often associated with fluff right now, but there’s no reason that serious journalism couldn’t be presented in an easier-to-digest format. If the Watergate scandal were to happen today, perhaps it could be presented as “5 Ways the Nixon Administration Broke the Law” or whatever. You could still tell the story and present all the information without dumbing it down. That said, there still needs to be a way of funding this sort of investigative journalism, as it will still be time-consuming to research and craft important stories. I’m a little cynical about funding models for journalism, but as the cliché goes, “where there’s a will, there’s a way.”