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Great summary article which covers the basics with lots of video examples.

In his short treatise On Bullshit, the moral philosopher Harry Frankfurt gives us a useful theory of bullshit. We normally think of bullshit as a synonym-albeit a somewhat vulgar one-for lies or deceit. But Frankfurt argues that bullshit has nothing to do with truth. Rather, bullshit is used to conceal, to impress or to coerce. Unlike liars, bullshitters have no use for the truth. All that matters to them is hiding their ignorance or bringing about their own benefit. Gamification is bullshit.

"Late last week, Google representatives unveiled a significant enhancement to the company's ubiquitous search engine. They're calling it the "Knowledge Graph" and claiming it will support "more intelligent searching for real-world things on the internet"."

Great analysis of the "spinternet".... "TED Fellow and journalist Evgeny Morozov punctures what he calls "iPod liberalism" -- the assumption that tech innovation always promotes freedom, democracy -- with chilling examples of ways the Internet helps oppressive regimes stifle dissent."

ONE of humanity's ultimate dreams, to peer into the future, may be moving a step closer with a controversial €1 billion ($1.3bn) EU plan to recreate the entire world in a computer system. The Living Earth Simulator project would take the vast streams of data pouring into the internet, ranging from Facebook and Twitter to dry-as-dust government statistics, and try to spot the economic and social trends that will shape the future.

*I'd agree that futurists talk about what futurist clients want to hear about. Nobody talks about the absolute future, any more than historians would discuss the entirety of all events in all thirteen-point-seven billion years of history.

Most popular web-based businesses are deflationary. They substitute expensive forms of content consumption for cheap ones, they make it logistically easier to deliver discounts to people who will respond to them, and they create numerous financially cheap forms of social status. As more activity moves on to the web, the main effect on the economy will be broadly lower prices and less need for employment.

Society 5 plans to explore the past, present and potential futures of our society, initially as a blog at society5.net, and then as a book and beyond.

DataSift offers the most powerful and sophisticated tools for extracting value from Social Data. The amount that Internet users are creating and sharing through Social Media is exploding. DataSift offers the best tools for collecting, filtering and analysing this data. Social Data is more complicated to process and analyse because it is unstructured. DataSift's platform has been built specifically to process large amounts of this unstructured data and derive value from it.

In computing, ambient intelligence (AmI) refers to electronic environments that are sensitive and responsive to the presence of people. Ambient intelligence is a vision on the future of consumer electronics, telecommunications and computing that was originally developed in the late 1990s for the time frame 2010-2020. In an ambient intelligence world, devices work in concert to support people in carrying out their everyday life activities, tasks and rituals in easy, natural way using information and intelligence that is hidden in the network connecting these devices (see Internet of Things). As these devices grow smaller, more connected and more integrated into our environment, the technology disappears into our surroundings until only the user interface remains perceivable by users.

Conducttr has been around for a while as a tool for automating the telling of a narrative over several platforms - online, text messages and so on. This seems like the very logical next step, to take it out from the laptop or tablet and into the world of mobile. A three-part ecosystem, where the audience takes part of a mobile app which lets them take part of different "Worlds", each belonging to a separate story or story world, the designers of the narrative get a "cloud-based network intelligence" and the developers get an API to play around with.

looks like a pretty cool futures project, good to have this as background knowledge. "Societies are developing and investing in technological and scientific innovations that have ever longer-term consequences for human and non-human life. Current future-producing practices include biotechnologies, nanotechnologies, and nuclear technologies. Such developments unleash futures that we cannot predict, and set in motion processes that will affect untold generations to come. "

this is connected to panoptic and cyber civ

Did you have a look at the "We live in public" video link.... v. interesting. Great idea that we are all big brother...

"People sense the world is passing through a Technology Revolution but they lack good information. We pool the knowledge of 100 experts to forecast breakthroughs for corporations, governments and others in real time. TechCast was cited by the National Academies, featured in Newsweek and the Washington Post, and recognized as possibly the best forecasting system in the world. "