For anyone who has tangled with Derek R. let me offer this resource: http://www.healthyplace.com/communities/personality_disorders/narcissism/faq4.html.
And this: http://www.mhsanctuary.com/narcissistic/dsm.htm

I'm posting this anonymously because I do not wish to incur his wrath. Mr. Morville has every right, however, to turn this guy off and delete his posts.

here's that first URL repeated without the period on the end
http://www.healthyplace.com/communities/personality_disorders/narcissism/faq4.html

Okay, so here are couple of predictions:
- Ambient findability will present some interesting new opportunities for marketing. I'm sure that some of the marketers will find creative ways to abuse the system. Hopefully the devices and services we'll be using offer some equally creative ways to keep from being interrupted at every turn by ads and spam.
- People seem to really like mobile devices. However, I think it will take a while to figure out which ones will be around for the long haul. The pendulum is going to swing through many more cycles of the trend toward single-function devices and convergence of many features into complex devices. Personally, I'm fascinated by the 'smart book' from the Diamond Age. My Palm and cell phone certainly haven't come close to it yet.

-Chris

I'm a sceptic on Futurism, but I'll make a prediction: The ease with which online discussions can become cluttered with irrelevancies from ax-grinders will lead some people to produce high-powered intelligent agents to cut through all the crap to content that's on point to the matter(s) under discussion. Others will decide that reading comments is just a waste of time. Those who want to have serious discussions will try to develop secure sites, providing new jungle gyms for hackers.

I'd like my next job to be a futurist, so I'll bite...

I think just-in-time knowledge offering will become more and more important. So you get prescription pads that know what patients are allergic to, you get drafting board for cars that know if you make a car too narrow it will tend to tip over, and you get a shopping list that knows what shops use sheatshop labor and which have reformed. Getting folks to information is one of the ways we can make the world a better place-- my browser might know the bizrate rating for any site I was on, or the epinions rating. Perhaps that same bar might note how many charitable donations were made as well. You might be able set up your values and have the browser (the first amenesty international browser?) be a filtering intermediary and well as a technological one. Obviously there could easily be down-sides to this (can you really trust amensty international?) but overall I think the shift will be from finding information to information finding us.

I tend to agree with the notion that information seeking behavior will not change much as new technologies are introduced. I also agree with Christina that information will attempt to find us, and probably as our information and product usage gets profiled more and more, some of that information will be targetted toward the specific contexts/behaviors that we're engaging in, and more and more will happen in the wild. I haven't seen the latest Spielberg movie, but the notion of Guiness ads calling out to you as you walk down the hallway of some public building doesn't seem too far off.

But this last notion worries me. I know that privacy is history, but making the connection of your patterns of purchasing behavior or other demographic data to your phone number, addresses (email and snail), etc. is one thing, the stuff of that movie is a little too Orwelian to me. And that is the stuff of nanotechnology and MEMS. Even without planting GPS chips into people -- which I saw recently on some nightly news show about "keeping watch over your kids" -- the concept of smart mechanical devices that float on particles in the air is fascinating but, the potential for abuse is really frightening. Don't think for a second that big brother won't exploit these technologies as soon as they can. I don't want anything to follow me that closely.

Peter, I agree with much in your article and do not think we are that far from having what you desire, but I think that there is another layer to add to the finding informaiton and that is the format of the information. I have found myself thinking I heard a news story that I wanted to follow-up on right after I heard a snippet. Once recently I was at the beach and was trying to use my cell phone to find out who was shot in Las Vegas as I only caught the last snippet of the news. I had all I thought I needed, a cell phone with full Internet access. I thought I had heard it was a rapper that was shot so I used the keypad to check the major news sites for which I have the links stored. The news sites mentioned nothing. I tried Google to get to the rapper's site and his fan sites. These pages were in flash that was tucked in frames or javascript links, neither of which work on a cellphone. The information I was seeking was tucked away in unusable formats making findability impossible even though the rapper's fan sites were using proper metatags. (It turned out it was not the rapper, but his brother-in-law that was shot.)

My desire is not so much pervasive findability, no I can not find everything I want when I want or need it, but when I find something I want pervasive information attraction. I want the information I found to follow me so that when I need it the information will be there. I really could have used this the other night when I did not have an address where I was to meet friends, as it was stuck in an e-mail and not in my PDA nor cell phone. Applications that understand context for information would be great. I guess that would be setting our own metadata or attractors to information so that it could follow us as needed and be with in reach when called upon.

Thinking beyond Christina's belief that information will find us, I say the information will not only find us but stay with us on our person. In a few years, it will cost virtually nothing to store all the information you'll ever consume in a lifetime in a small, wearable package.

That small package - maybe it's a beautiful blue crystal with a holographic display - will always know its location, and be at the end of a fatter, faster version of the wireless global network. The crystal will be powered by body heat.

Information assets could come from a future incarnation of blogging, which might constantly push linked resources over the network to your crystal. Blog friends who share your interests will become your collaborative filters. Once in the crystal, an agent might process the information based on a progressively built model of your personal ontology.

If the network goes down, you’re not screwed because your information assets are all local to your person. Advertisers and the government can’t screw with you because your data will, after a time, fix itself permanently to the crystal. But if you trip and drop the crystal in a sewer, you will be screwed. In this fantastic future, you’ll still need to back up your data.

>For anyone who has tangled

I prefer ionic -->

http://www.chemguide.co.uk/
atoms/bonding/electroneg.html

[ No coincidence this link talks about 'polar ability' and HCl. ]

I think the next ten years will show us a great deal more than metadata and keyword searches, so i dont find the predictions especially bold.

Consider the next genereations of internet users, where many are familiar with three dimensional settings for exploration, collaboration, problem solving and learning due to a wide variety of online multi-user games.

In the old movie "Johnny Mnemonic" based on a Gibson novel we see some glimpses of 3D Internet usage based more on representations and metaphors (sad that the director tried to create a James Bond clone instead of more indepth exploration of the concepts Gibson so vaguely hints about). Virtual hands moving in three dimensional space suggests ways of navigating that a mouse cursor dont....

Is keyword searching relevant in a virtual information landscape?

Keyword searching will absolutely be relevant in a virtual information landscape...because the best way that humans have devised (over millions of years of evolution) to communicate across time and space is through language which is made up of words...when we stop using words to speak and write, then and only then will keyword searching become history.

Well said! I see in retrospect that my closing question could be interpreted as "the end of search", but my position is that the importance of search might be diminshed in the next ten years. There will still be an "elite" of information seekers that prefers searches to other ways of finding information.

Allow me to refine my statements a bit:

We all know that search as a way of finding information may seem as a less than optimal method for many users.

First we have the problems of taxonomies and meanings of the selected keywords (f.ex. how many variances of a keyword is allowed in the search). Culture, language, users level of understanding etc. all escalates this problem.

Further how large percentage of users really takes advantage of searching (f.ex. using boolean searches) and are able to execute searches in a timely and effcient way?

When we are talking about information finding us (other than spam that is), it seems like "push" possible could be seen as a preferred way of recieving information versus actively searching for it.

The catholic church is by the way an excellent historic example of centuries of succesfull communication based on symbolism and ritual to a larger extent than language.

During a recent talk, Marcia Bates (of browsing and berrypicking fame) suggested such a possible transition from pull (directed searching) to push (passive browsing).

She noted that our natural information seeking instincts are shaped by millions of years of human evolution...largely spent as hunters/gatherers...in such an environment, passive browsing (observing nature, learning by trial and error, chatting with each other) was the only option. Cavemen didn't have Google. This may explain why so few people use directed searching as a major way to learn and inform daily decision-making.

Marcia's conclusion was that perhaps we need to design interfaces and systems that cater better to human nature.

My conclusion (which isn't mutually exclusive) is that we should use K-12 education to teach information literacy and searching skills...in my experience, K-12 education is largely about teaching humans to do things that don't come naturally...

Anyway, I hope we have new ways of finding...it will make life more interesting...but for now, I still believe keyword searching may be state of the art in 2010.

For more about Marcia Bates, see
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/

Thanks for pointing out Marcia Bates, i found several articles she has written and her views are very interesting. PS: Of course most of my finds was by means of keyword searching ;)

Interesting thought on K-12 information literacy. Currently information literacy is barely glossed in freshman year writing class and the trip to the library for bibliographic instruction. It was so over my head(despite my mom being a librarian) and could have been useful when I was even younger, but with younger kids on the Net I have a feeling that there is already an expectation for exceptional skills in information foraging. I remember a few years ago leading an online game for Compton's New Media on fun facts(20 questions style) and the kids(7-13 years old) were all over AOL's Compton's Encyclopedia finding the answers. It was definitely a fun way for kids to engage in "finding" answers.

For the future of better finding, I really think tecnologies for auto-extracting metadata will be really critical in helping tag information. Anyone out there know of any good tools?

There's a lot of stuff to read & I'm just off to bed. I do want to respond to the ref to "metacrap" though, so with apologies for being tired I'll paste something I wrote elsewhere [1] :

The "metacrap" argument is a complete red herring, because it makes the
assumption that the creation of metadata must involve extra effort on the
part of the system/application users. In most circumstances there is stacks
of metadata on hand, and I don't have far to look for an example. Nearby
there's all the mail header date/time & routing material etc, there's a
thread in the archives. Without any extra effort on my part, there's a sig
with the addresses of my web space and some of the material I'm working on.
Linked to that there is biographical information about me. Your address is
here too, which may or may not be used to get to biographical information
about yourself, but it does describe a communication channel to you through
which more information could be obtained.
Ok, so the mail client I'm using doesn't take advantage of all this, and
that to recall any of this pile of information post-mortem scraping is
needed. This client (Outlook) is smart enough that if I didn't have defenses
then a bit of kiddy code from a third party could make it spam everyone in
my address book. Why shouldn't the client use this information in a
consistent, secure and useful fashion? C'mon mail dude, the spell checker
knows this is in UK English, why don't you?

[1] http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/200211/msg00707.html

night night!

Danny.

Peter,

On Predictions.

Ants have no problems with food and shelter. Should Mankind? And ants do not have governments, universities, NGOs, media, religion or bank accounts.

Yet Mankind, even much of the top 20% of those in developed societies, have lives enshackled by the uncertainty of jobs to unanxiously cover their food and shelter costs.

90% of a man's value today is the sum of (a) how well he uses his mind *plus* (b) how great he is at building actionable relationships

The single biggest reason for the Dot Com Bomb, is because the resourcers of change are using a wrong compass. The language of finance and accounting uses a language that is tangibles and ends driven (buildings are assets, a human mind is not; creating a trustful atmosphere is an expense -- too many "expenses" are a "loss").

This language undervalues processes and minds and overvalues ends and gadgets. It's impact is even more atrocious lower down it's food chain, eg in Asia.

I believe we are approaching times of greater holistic cognition. Times when we are able to prioritise much better what it is that we really want. For example, a faster gadget or greater self-esteem or is the faster gadget an escapism for that which confounds self-esteem.

I do not have specific predictions to make, I have directional ones. They are mind colonies, mind ecosystems and mind grids and that which these consciousness constitute. And their corollaries (eg less gadgets, more tranquility for those who are over-gadgeted and under-tranquil and more gadgets for those who are both under-gadgeted and under-tranquil).

I would like to invite you and your readers to the thinking basis for a new prioritisation criteria for what problems should be ranked higher and sequenced earlier in my essay "Ecosystems Thinking for the Minds Ecosystem" at http://www.ryze.com/?bala

This will give us a "new paradigm" basis to balance the extrapolation basis that we mostly use to arrive at predictions.

cheers../bala
Founder, APIC Mind Colonies
Sydney, Australia

p.s. is there a way to be email reminded of responses/updates to this page alone?

I like your bold, long-term predictions for findability.

Here's a rather short term development, which may nevertheless be of interest:

Google have just launched a "search by location" feature. See http://labs.google.com/location/