In this new TED video from the 2007 conference, Kevin Kelly looks back at the evolution of the World Wide Web, which, he points out, is only 5,000 days old. Kelly then casts a glance forward to the next 5,000 days and asks, how can we predict what’s coming in the next 5,000 days?

In this older TED video from the 2005 conference, Kevin Kelly asks and tries to answer what technology wants.

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In this prescient video from the 2005 TED conference, Clay Shirky talks about the challenges that business, educational, and media institutions face from emerging models of online and decentralized collaboration.

Using the photo-sharing community Flickr as one example, Shirky examines the potential of the new types of largely decentralized group communication and collaboration tools. But he does not shy away from taking a look at the dark side of this trend as well, citing the 9/11 attacks and anorexic teens as examples.

More recently, Shirky turned up at the April Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco, to keynote and promote his new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The book examines what happens when people use online collaboration tools to get together and get things done without the need for traditional organizational structures.

His Web 2.0 talk, Gin, Television, and Social Surplus focuses on what Shirky calls the cognitive surplus – the amount of personal free time produced by industrialization and automation. Quote:

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn’t know what to do with it at first–hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn’t be a surplus, would it? It’s precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

To find out how gin fits into the picture watch you can just watch the first couple of minutes of the video. But both videos, at total running time of just over 37 minutes, are worth every second of viewing in terms of the information and entertainment imparted by Shirky in his original, accessible and wry style.

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A new report by IT market research firm IDC names Octopz as one the 10 Canadian Web 2.0 Companies to Watch. The ten companies profiled in the report include AdHack, dthree Inc., Octopz, Overlay.TV, PlanetEye, Ramius Corporation, SceneCaster, Standout Jobs, Tomoye Corporation and Tungle.

The IDC report is part of The Canadian Technology Innovation Watch series and highlights smaller companies that have the potential to make an impact in the broader information and communication technology (ICT) market. According to the report’s author, IDC analyst Krista Collins:

Emerging Canadian businesses are changing the dynamics of the ICT market, and we are seeing a rapid increase in the availability of collaboration solutions. The companies in this study, including Octopz, are differentiating themselves from the myriad of other solutions in the market, guiding users through the adoption stage to help them understand how the various features and functions relate to them, and developing strategies that give users compelling reasons to stay engaged over time.

Octopz CEO Ron Octopz had this to say in our news release about our inclusion in the IDC report:

For an up-and-coming company such as Octopz, it is a thrill to receive this recognition from one of the world’s most respected sources of information about the technology industry. This report brings IDC’s research and insight to senior managers of ICT companies providing them with best practices and recommendations on innovative Web 2.0 technologies. It’s a phenomenal endorsement.

The full Octopz news release is here.

In addition to being included in the IDC report, so far this year Octopz has also turned up on the KPMG & Backbone’s 2008 PICK20 awards list, Startup North’s Ten Web Startups to Watch, the inaugural Canadian Innovation Exchange (CIX) and Branham’s Top 25 Up and Comers.

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Octopz has been chosen as one of the top Canadian Web 2.0 pioneers in the first annual PICK 20 Awards. Other winners include b5media, FreshBooks, Kaboose, NowPublic and StandoutJobs. The full list of winning companies is here.

According to the offical news release:

PICK20 winners will be formally recognized in Vancouver at the Wosk Centre on Sept 16th 2008, and in Toronto during TorontoTechWeek at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on Sept 22nd, 2008

PICK 20 is a roundup of Canada’s up and coming Web 2.0 pioneers, produced by Backbone magazine and KPMG. The winners on this year’s list were selected by a diverse range of industry pundits including Dave Forde, Michael Geist, Mitch Joel, Sean Moffitt, Michael O’Connor Clarke, Rick Segal, Ron Shuttleworth and Kate Trgovac. You can read the judges’ bios and their comments on the chosen companies here.

In related news, Canadian technology uber-evangelist David Crow wrote about Ten Startups to Watch in StartupNorth earlier this month, and included Octopz on the list. It’s really a thrill to be acknowledged for our efforts, nearly at the same time, both by established organizations and independent pundits.

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It all began innocently enough in 2003, when Matt Harding (aka Dancing Matt) left his job as a video game developer to travel the world. Almost as an afterthought, he began videotaping himself (with the help of others) doing his own particular dance jig in front of different landmarks.

Harding then shared the clips on his website with family and friends who wanted to keep up with his worldly adventures. On his return, he created a compilation video, Where the Hell WAS Matt?, of 15 dance scenes, set to catchy background world music.

Word of the strange, hypnotic dance video spread virally by email and eventually landed a sponsorship for Harding. This allowed him to take a second trip around the world, and in turn make another travel/dancing video, Where the Hell is Matt?, in 2006. By this time, video sharing sites like YouTube were online and on the rise, garnering Harding an even bigger audience and a steady stream of emails and tribute videos from around the world.

In 2007 Harding announced that he would do another world dancing trip. He used the internet and his website to coordinate dance meetups with fans and fellow dancers around the world; fourteen months and 42 countries later, he released the video above, Where the Hell is Matt? (2008).

So one guy shared a simple and slightly crazy idea with family and friends and then went on to dance with thousands and entertain millions. Don’t you just love it when the virtual and the real world come together like this?

Update: The New York Times reports on the Matt Harding travel/dance videos.

Previously on The Pond: Just for fun, All together now . . .

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VizThink, a favorite source of insight and understanding about visual communication here at The Pond, is officially one year old today. Congratulations VizThink!

VizThink (short for Visual Thinking) is a global virtual organization that promotes the use of visualization tools and techniques for thinking, communication, collaboration and learning. The initial concept for VizThink came from Dave Gray, the founder and chairman of XPLANE. Find out how VizThink went from idea to reality in The Story of VizThink, published today on the organization’s blog.

The VizThink website and blog have information on upcoming workshop and conferences, as well as a section of informative podcasts on a variety of visual thinking topics, including:

What qualifies as visual language anyway?

Creating Powerful Presentations with Nancy Duarte

Collaborative Knowledge Visualization with Martin Eppler

Related post: Octopz and meaning

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Tim Berners-Lee (TBL), the inventor of the World Wide Web, recently remarked that developing online means of fostering collective creativity is the next major challenge for the web. Berners-Lee, echoing some of Douglas Engelbart’s pioneering ideas on online collaboration, made his remarks during his keynote presentation at the Tetherless World conference on the future of the Web.

According to Berners-Lee, the Web should evolve into a system that allows people to connect and share partly-formed ideas online that with the help of others can be turned into solutions to huge and pressing problems.

How can we make the Web be an infrastructure that allows more than one person to think more effectively than one person can? There’s no proof yet that for creative thinking we’ve done that. The challenge is to build a system that allows the formation of half-formed ideas and allows collective creativity.”

A video recording (with slides) of Tim Berner-Lee’s keynote is here. The part on collective creativity begins around the 60 minute mark. Computerworld reported on the keynote here.

Related Pond post: Douglas Engelbart, online collaboration pioneer

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The Gilbane Group, a consulting company specializing in content technologies and trends, have released their 2008 report on collaboration and social media, and include Octopz as one of the profiled companies.

Collaboration and Social Media 2008
by Geoffrey Bock & Steve Paxhia
Collaboration and Social Media 2008 shows how social media, based on “Web 2.0″ technologies, is approaching the tipping-point. First generation tools now in widespread use, such as text-oriented email, web sites, and shared workspaces, are soon to be supplemented by social media applications that incorporate blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, rich media, and other innovative technologies. The Gilbane research report predicts the transition from horizontal applications to vertical solutions, and offers a number of strategies to help companies with the transition.

A summary of the report is available on the Octopz website (1.0MB PDF)

The full report is available at the Gilbane Group website (2.3MB PDF – 130 pages)

The Gilbane Group new release announcing the Collaboration and Social Media report is here (PDF).

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Our recent post on Bill Buxton was about his OOM (Order Of Magnitude) rule and how to use it to overcome creative blocks. This entry is about Buxton’s take on good design for telepresence and online collaboration technologies.

Speaking at the recent Mesh 08 web conference, and perhaps channeling Marshall McLuhan, Buxton described the role of a computer’s screen, speaker, microphone and camera as social prosthetics that extend the functions of human hearing, speech and sight online. He also proposed that both the social prosthetics as well as real world social factors have to be taken into account in order to design online collaboration technologies that are simultaneously less intrusive and more engaging.

To make one of his points about the disruptive nature of today’s online conferencing tools, Buxton staged an impromptu experiment of social intrusion (6:05 on the video) with the involuntary help of his interviewer Nora Young. The resulting reactions are both hilarious and informative.

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