Technology That Can Read Your Mind
New technology sometimes brings out my cantankerous side.
Back in my day, you used to have to buy whole albums if you liked a particular song that wasn’t released as a single. Albums came on these plastic discs called CDs, and to play them on the go you had to have a device called a Walkman that was a whole 8 inches in diameter. If you heard a song you liked and didn’t know the title or artist, you were never, ever going to find it again to listen to.
Back then, radio was low-def and loaded with commercials. You could pick your genre of music (maybe) by choosing one of a dozen stations on your dial, but then you were at the mercy of the DJ’s particular tastes.
When you got in your car and drove down to your local Blockbuster, you had to walk through a sea of DVD releases, loosely grouped by genre. Maybe you had a friendly clerk who go to know your tastes over time and could recommend other movies he thought you’d like — but maybe you didn’t.
Fast forward — what, five years? NetFlix has a now-famous patent on a proprietary algorithm that takes your past movie ratings, compares them to other users with similar tastes, and makes frighteningly good recommendations for what to watch. Not only does Netflix pick my movies for me, it has them waiting for me when I get home from work — so that even before I consciously think “You know, I’d like to watch a new movie tonight,” one is already in my hand.
Pandora was next, redefining radio. In fact, Pandora is so far from traditional radio, we probably should come up with a new word for it. Suddenly I can create my own radio Pandora stations based on a song or an artist I already know and like, and Pandora will play me other music that I don’t even know I like yet. Pandora knows you better than you know yourself.
The latest, greatest step in the evolution of mind-reading technology, hands down, is Shazam. Hold up your phone in a club, or in the car, or to your TV during a commercial — any time you hear a song you don’t know, Shazam will listen for a few seconds and tell you what it is. If you’re using Shazam on the iPhone you can then click through and purchase the song immediately through iTunes — now you own that song you couldn’t even name 30 seconds ago.
WHAT??! Where was this ten years ago when I was just discovering my passion for ’70s funk standards that get radio play about once a year (now you know something about my taste in music — but still not as much as Pandora does).
Media consumption now is cross-platform, on-demand, and fully customized to your individual tastes. Kids nowadays are growing up in a world where they will never have to worry about finding new music or movie suggestions, sitting through commercials on television (Tivo is a topic for another post), or tracking down an unknown song they like.
Every generation likes to think that it was character-building to have faced all the challenges that technology overcomes automatically for subsequent generations, but maybe it just makes us bitter. Then again, it’s hard to stay bitter for long while you’re grooving to a commercial-free Kool & The Gang Pandora station, knowing that an obscure indie film you’d never heard of (but are almost guaranteed to love) is on its way to your doorstep.
Social Media for Higher Education
I wrote this yesterday from Rochester, New York, where I was attending my alma mater‘s homecoming reuinion weekend. It’s given me pause to consider the implications of social media for institutions of higher education, most significantly as multidimensional tools for recruitment and growth.
In a traditional, one dimensional sense, social media tools provide yet another channel for schools to broadcast their promotional messaging to prospective students. Social networks, Facebook in particular, represent the greatest concentration of high school students online. Advertising within Facebook is a no brainer.
Leveraging the relationship-building tools that social networks and other platforms provide adds a second dimension to the promotional opportunities available to colleges and universities. Creating a Facebook Page (like the one pictured), for instance, allows prospective students to receive timely and relevant information from schools in a setting that they are familiar and comfortable with. In addition to the one-dimensional mass-marketing approach, schools can interact directly with prospective students through messaging, discussion forums, and other media.
Finally, the third dimension consists of establishing not just one-to-one or one-to-many relationships with prospective students, but truly enabling a community built around the school. Through social media, schools can build a network of prospective students, current students, and alumni who are able to carry on a public dialogue with one another directly. This is win-win-win-win: prospective students get their questions answered and the “real deal” about schools they’re looking at, current students can offer advice to future classes as well as connect with alumni to learn about job opportunities, alumni can tap directly into a pool of current students for recruiting purposes, and of course the school itself benefits from every conversation and interaction that takes place within the community.
I’m proud to say that the University of Rochester is farther along than many schools when it comes to using social media for recruitment. There’s already a U of R Facebook Page, and a community like the one I just describe has begun to grow up around it. It’s a great start, and sets and example that I hope many other institutions of higher education take notice of and resolve to follow.
Stop Versioning The Web!
I’ve been coming across a lot more references to the idea of “Web 3.0” lately. Is Web 3.0 really upon us? And what does that even mean?
The concept of “Web 2.0″ had meaning. Clearly it was a new epoch from Round One, aka the Dot-Com Bubble. Sites were suddenly social, dynamic, and overflowing with user generated content.
But don’t even talk to me about Web 3.0. Assigning labels based on discreet “editions” of the web has outlived its usefulness. I might go so far as to call it a scam — for who would ever want to admit they’re not up to speed with the latest web paradigm shift? I for one refuse to put “Web 3-dot-0″ on my Buzzword Bingo board.
This is a plea to marketers, agencies, bloggers, developers, and anyone else talking about web technologies: stop versioning the web! It’s an utterly pointless rat race that benefits no one. Let’s just celebrate the fact that the web is an incredibly dynamic, perpetually evolving space that we’re all lucky to be a part of.
Just in case no one listens, I’m already planning a Web 4.0 conference: next Friday, my place, BYOB.
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