Um, that should really be Reporting ON the Future, but I thought this title was cooler :)

Anyway, what was the last thing you got really technically geeked out about?  (I'd really actually like to know, if you feel like sharing.  I dig stuff people are excited about.)

I mean, what was the last thing you saw that really made you say "wow, this is really going to change things"?

I haven't had one of those moments in a while but I'm learning something now that has me feeling that way.  You know, when you start thinking of the potential implications and it just takes things to a whole new level.

We bought my brother a vintage 1944 Underwood typewriter for Christmas.  I hadn't played with a typewriter in probably 15 years, and it was bizarre trying to write something on it.  I never realized just how much the text I put down tends to change and rearrange itself as it flows out of my head, thru my fingers, and onto the screen.

As I write something I jot down a couple of words to capture an idea, write a sentence or two about them, go back to the beginning, drag paragraphs around, and delete entire sections.  My workflow is flatly impossible on a typewriter.

I realized that if this typewriter was the tool that I had to work with there's no way I'd be generating as much content as I do.  It's just far too time-consuming and requires far too much planning in advance to generate a polished final product.

One of the innovations I'm really looking forward to from a personal standpoint is the ability to do personal reverse auction on the Net.  I think they'd really be handy when it comes to picking up bargains after deflation has ravaged the country for another few months.

In case you're not familiar with reverse auctions, it's where you place a bid for something and let sellers find you, instead of sellers posting an item for sale and you placing a bid with them.

Seems simple, right?  It should be, but we don't have the infrastructure for it.  In order for this to be a universally useful function it needs to be baked into the Web stack.  Right now, it's not.  The method for publishing your wishlist doesn't exist yet, and then there's the little issue of how people will discover your wishlist--Google won't cut it. 

RDF and linked data provide a perfectly wonderful way to discover these reverse auctions eventually, but that's only part of the equation.

A post by Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch today really got me riled up:  The SEC has shut down Prosper, a peer-to-peer lending site.  This was up in the air until yesterday:

Yesterday, the SEC issued its formal cease-and-desist letter (embedded below or download PDF), outlining its reasoning for characterizing Prosper as a seller of investment, something prosper had vigorously resisted in the past by arguing that it was merely a marketplace matching lenders and borrowers. But the SEC is having none of that.

If this sounds familiar, it's because this is an exact rerun of what happened with the original Napster and the music industry, only worse in my opinion.

The key here is that Prosper itself was not lending or borrowing, it was simply matching up willing borrowers and willing borrowers.  It also provided additional services such as collection and tracking.  The HORROR.

The real fact is, if private citizens were allowed to freely lend to one another, the private banking cartel that is our central banking system would lose the little control they have over the economy.  The free  market would freely set interest rates and people and businesses would be free to do an end-run around our corrupt and bloated financial system.  The financial engineering that has allowed Wall Street to siphon off trillions of dollars in profit at our expense would be crippled.  The SEC is simply acting as the enforcement arm of our private national banking cartel.

Don't fall under the protection of the cartel?  Goodnight, chump.

About two years ago now (wow...) I wrote a post about my fragmented online identity, and all of the pieces of it scattered across the Internet.  The list at that time was pretty big:

• My blog
• My LinkedIn profile
• My Flickr account
• My YouTube account
• My XBox 360 profile
• My Yahoo IM account
• My ICQ IM account
• My Gmail account
• My Latigent (work) account
• My personal (jason+NOSPAM@jasonkolb.com) account
• My TypePad account
• My BlogLines account
• My Google account
• My Microsoft Passport account
• My bank accounts
• My other bank's accounts
• My brokerage account
• My Amazon account
• My eBay account
• The bazillions of forums I'm registered to

Since that post my online identity has only grown even more fragmented due to all of the different sites I have added to my roster.  (Well, except for the Latigent account--that one's dead now, replaced with my Cisco email account.)  I've since added a Twitter account, a Digg account, a Reddit account, a forex brokerage account, an options brokerage account, a LibraryThing account, a Jott account, and a Google GrandCentral account.  And those are only the ones I use on a regular basis, not the throwaway accounts for checking out a service.  If you add those into the mix I've probably literally added well over 100 accounts to my identity in the past couple of years.

Solutions like OpenID work great--when they're supported.  I set up jasonkolb.com as my OpenID, and I LOVE it when sites support OpenID.  I don't have to remember yet another account, I just plug in "www.jasonkolb.com" and I'm done.  And it's linked to my permanent identity, so I can switch OpenID providers with NO problem at ANY time.  Unfortunately, sites that support OpenID are still in the minority.  Companies like to pay lip service to single sign-on by allowing their accounts to be used as OpenID's but not accepting OpenID's themselves.  Bah, hypocrites.  Two steps forward, one step back... such is life, I guess.

I still firmly believe that ultimately your online identity will revolve around a single URI that you own, and OpenID has made some great strides in that respect.  This concept is still in the nascent stages, but you can certainly see where it's pointing, and that's exciting.

One aspect of online identity that I don't see discussed often is the intersection of personal and corporate identity.  I think the technology is certainly available to make this happen, after all OpenID is nothing but a layer of abstraction that removes the authentication plumbing from the application.  Enterprise apps could certainly just hand off to OpenID for authentication and companies could be rid of user provisioning altogether, except to turn access on and off.  Creating an internal OpenID provider would be dead simple, using public OpenID providers gets even more interesting.  It would allow people to use the exact same set of credentials when they're working and playing.

The only reason I can see why a company would NOT want to do this is for security reasons.  When applications hand off user security to OpenID, they're making the assumption that the user's OpenID account is secure.  In this scenario, the chain is only as strong as the user's OpenID provider.  If the OpenID provider doesn't force the user to use complex passwords, change their password every 90 days, etc, I don't think this will fly in the corporate world, as nice as it would be.

The solution to this, however, is relatively simple, and I think presents an interesting business opportunity for a large company.  A public OpenID provider that conforms to Sarbanes-Oxley security standards would be secure AND would certainly work as the employee's personal OpenID provider as well.  For example, if Cisco were to offer a public, secure OpenID provider that enforces enterprise security I could simply redirect jasonkolb.com to that provider and bang I'm done.  Cisco could even use its existing Active Directory to authenticate me, the only difference would be that I'd be using that account for both my internal AND external accounts.  All of the sites I currently use my OpenID for wouldn't even know the difference, I could use my OpenID for internal secure applications, and the Cisco enterprise group policy would be enforced for every single application I used OpenID to authenticate against.  Beautiful.

As I wrote before, there are some business opportunities only available to the big boys in the market who have something a startup can't buy--trust.  This is one of those opportunities.  Here is an opportunity for a large company to leverage its position as a trusted entity to both create a new market and move the industry as a whole forward in the process.  Hopefully somebody will pick this idea up and run with it, because I'm sick of managing all of these accounts :)

Working at Cisco is a new experience for me, as far as the size of the company.  Prior to Cisco the largest company I worked for was around 5000 people.  Lately I have been thinking of the advantages of being a big, well-known company, and how those advantages can be leveraged in new ways.  I have found that there are many things a startup can do that a larger company simply cannot because of size, but there are opportunities larger companies have to leverage their brand which are closed to smaller companies.

The one thing that a startup can't duplicate is company brand and history.  Brand equates to automatic relationships and trust, especially from a business perspective.  There's a certain amount of latitude and respect that you get automatically when people recognize and respect the brand of the company you're working for.  That's been a very interesting thing to observe at Cisco.

There's one use case for this trust that I haven't seen explored much:  Cross-business social analytics.  Daydreaming about this, I can see some very interesting opportunities for a trusted intermediary to become a clearinghouse for metrics and industry insight.  By having access to individual companies' data and being trusted not to share it, competitor data could be aggregated and individual companies could compare their metrics against the industry average, without anyone's data being exposed.  The only thing required is that each of the individual companies trust the clearinghouse with their data.

Personally, I think it would be incredibly useful to see how my company's issue resolution rate compared to my competitors, what my conversion rate is compared to the industry average, etc.  By consolidating this over time you could even look at industry trends against your individual metrics etc.

It would be interesting to see how open companies are to this.  If it was actually successful I can see several interesting offshoots such as the clearinghouse becoming a "credit rating agency" for the industry, providing reports that verify that the company is in fact in the Top 10% for a given metric against the industry.

The one real drawback I can see is companies might become excessively metric-driven.  For example, if software development managers started comparing a BS metric like lines of code to the industry average, that would be an extremely bad thing.

Every once in a while I like to take a step back, survey the landscape, and take stock of the direction technology is moving.  It’s a fun exercise, and the feedback lets me know whether I have my head on straight or not.  So in the tradition of Wired’s Wired/Tired/Expired trends, here are my picks:

Hot Trends

Currently emerging trends that are catching on fast.

#1 - Crowd Sourcing

Crowd sourcing is getting a lot of press lately, primarily thanks to Wikipedia which is the best example and the shining superstar of crowd sourcing applications.  User generated content is huge, and if you can find a way to leverage your user base to create relevant content it’s money in the bank for you.  Other notable examples:  Amazon Mechanical Turk, Google Image Labeler, and Threadless.com.

I should also note that I’m a huge fan of the wisdom of crowds, which is one of the reasons I’m so big on crowd sourcing.  The knowledge of masses of people has proved to be far more accurate than a small group of very smart people, which in my mind is one of the biggest reasons that Wikipedia has been so successful.  Related to crowd sourcing are prediction markets, which are hard to grasp for a lot of people but otherwise intensely interesting technology.

#2 - Mobile Web

The Mobile Web has been getting a lot of attention lately thanks to the iPhone.   Ironically, although the iPhone was designed to make the normal everyday Web browsable without any changes, since its release there has been a proliferation of “iPhone compatible” sites which are sites specifically designed to be more readable on smaller screens.  If you don’t have an iPhone you must suffer with one of the old-school mobile Blackberry, Windows Mobile, or HTC browsers, all of which suck pretty badly in this day and age of AJAX.

While the Mobile Web is certainly improving, devices still have some improvements to make, and the networks themselves need to speed up.  Scott Karp has a nice writeup of why the Mobile Web is still maturing on his blog.

#3 - IPTV

I’ve been anticipating the decline of Old Media for a while now.  I think it’s one of the most archaic and painful systems we still have to deal with today, not to mention an insidious way for the people who control it to manipulate public opinion and politics.

Thankfully, IPTV is on the way.  More and more content providers are streaming their content directly from their Web sites, and televisions are progressively gaining the capability to connect directly to the Web thanks to products like Apple TV, the Xbox 360, and my new favorite company Cisco with their acquisition of Scientific Atlantic.  YouTube is creating a global pool of content that anyone can contribute to and consume from.  The Web is already creating waves as it breaks news and provides information ahead of Old Media, this is (thankfully) a serious threat to their business.

Fading Fads

These fads are currently still creating buzz, but my gut says they’re all hot air (l probably just sucked on the flame-mail firehose, oh well…):

#4 - Virtual Worlds

It’s possible I just don’t understand this… but then again neither do a lot of other people.  While virtual worlds like Second Life continue to generate a lot of buzz, the results speak for themselves—and they’re not saying good things.  The businesses are not anywhere near profitable, and the worlds are mostly empty places populated primarily by porn-hounds.

My take is, if I want to play a game I’ll play a game.  If I want to find information, Google and the standard Web work just fine.  I’d rather not go finding and flying to a virtual kiosk somewhere.  I get the impression that this is the virtual reality of the 00’s—namely, a fad.

#5 - Web Desktops/Operating Systems

Web Desktops have been all the rage lately, and these companies have begun labeling themselves Web Operating Systems.  I always dislike it when someone takes a perfectly fine word like “operating system” and dilutes it to the point of uselessness; to me this is exactly what these companies are doing.  Google and Yahoo basically own the virtual desktop space (NetVibes seems to be doing alright as well), and there is no need for more entries in this marketplace, it is already saturated.  They make nice personalized home pages.  Relabeling your product a “Web OS” only serves to kill a perfectly useful word.

#6 - Proprietary API’s

I’m probably stepping into some hot water here, but I hate closed, proprietary API’s.  Anytime a company announces a new API (see SalesForce and, more recently, FaceBook and LinkedIn) they get applauded for being open.  To me this does not feel “open”, it feels more like an attempt to lock people into the system.  It's like buying a phone that only calls the company you bought it from, just doesn't make much sense to me.  If you actually sit down and take a look at these API’s you’ll see that they carefully pick and choose what they open up, and they typically try to keep most of the value locked up in their system.  A truly open API would open up some possibility for interoperability.  Instead of launching proprietary API’s that don’t work together, these companies should form an industry workgroup and hash out something that will work for everyone.  If they don’t, it will EVENTUALLY be their undoing.

Promising Trends Looking for Traction

These trends are extremely promising, just not popular. 

#7 - RSS/ATOM

So, so useful, but outside of the technology elites people just don’t get it.

#8 - Universal Contact Lists

One unified contact list (as opposed to a different contact list for every service you use) is one of the most useful things ever conceived.  Unfortunately, it’s just not here yet, so we’re stuck managing ten different accounts.  Hopefully that will fundamentally change soon, but in the meantime we have products like Plaxo that do a pretty bang-up job of synchronizing your lists.

#9 - The Semantic Web

Ah, the Semantic Web… it’s kind of like Green Energy—you always hear about it, it’s supposed to be a great thing, but you just don’t see it out there.  It also suffers from ambiguity, I take its meaning to be marked-up machine readable content.  I think it’s missing that one killer app that will make it more mainstream, but we will see.

Creeping Onto the Radar—Tomorrow’s Trends

These trends aren’t even really on the radar yet except in theoretical discussions by tech geeks, but I believe they’re the future.

#10 - Message Ambiguity and Convergence

The lines between different types of messages is blurring.  Witness the popularity microblogging (see Twitter and Pwnce), which is essentially just a hybrid text messages/blog post.  A message is a message is a message, and technology is starting to reflect that by allowing you to handle more messages in the same way.  Eventually you will have one universal inbox for voicemail, email, SMS, and instant messages—the iPhone and sites like GrandCentral are hinting towards that future.

#11 - Online Identity Convergence/Consolidation and Protection

Online identities are becoming increasingly important.  What comes up when you Google yourself matters, a lot.  This is sure to become a big, talked-about issue soon, because theoretically your online identity can be stolen.  Parents should be advised to start protecting their kids’ online identities proactively, and monitor what their kids are putting on the Web, because it all goes on your permanent record.

#12 - Personal Servers

No, not a big heavy loud server in everyone’s basement (like the two I’m currently sitting next to), but a virtualized, personally-owned and -controlled online presence—an extension of yourself that can be reached directly over the Net.  Or, as someone smarter than myself recently called it--much more accurately--your online avatar. 

So what do you think?  Agree/disagree/have other picks?

It occurred to me that we’re probably seeing the last days of large music labels, even if they do stop resisting the Internet and extend their lifespan a bit.  Eventually, they probably won’t be needed—they are middle-men, and by its nature the Internet allows people to bypass middlemen.

If you think about what a group needs in order to be successful, most groups are able to produce a first recording on their own, and it really comes down to needing one thing to get started which only record labels can provide:  marketing.  The marketing comes in the form of radio airtime and music distribution as CD’s (and now online music stores).  Just about everyone knows that groups don’t make much money off of CD sales, they make the majority of it off of merchandise and ticket sales.  So in actuality the record label only serves to attract people to the group so that people can their stuff.

Most bands are able to record something on their own dime (and for those who aren’t maybe somebody could start a music capital investment venture…).  But promotion and marketing are going to evolve; soon I don’t think they’ll resemble anything that we have today.  Whereas today promotion is done business-to-consumer, record labels using mass marketing to reach mass audiences, I think the future holds a lot more consumer-to-consumer marketing, more closely resembling what we think of as pyramid marketing but with the performers at the top of the pyramid.

One of my friends was handing out CD’s for a band that his friend was a part of, which got me thinking.  If people are willing to hand out CD’s for bands because they like them, why not capitalize on that and turn it into an associate program?  It would be cheaper and easier to just hand out cards with some information including a URL to get free MP3 downloads from the Web site.  The Web site could offer the rest of the tracks as a paid download along with selling merchandise and tickets—the cash cow.  Just put a unique identifier in the URL so you can track it back to the person who gave the card out, and give them a cut of any revenue that comes in as a result of their evangelism.  All the benefit of record label marketing without the gatekeepers and middlemen.

And then if you really wanted to get fancy with it, make the program multi-tiered.  Let people sign up their friends who dig the music and then give them a small percentage of whatever their friends bring in as well.  You’ve just given them an incentive to tell people about the group as well as try to recruit other people to spread the word as well.  Amway, meet Atlantic Records.

In any case it’s inevitable that some kind of shakeup is going to happen in the music industry, it’ll be interesting to see what music promotion looks like a few years from now.

Man, if I only had the time to actually build all of the ideas I have I'd be a disgustingly rich man.  But I don't, so they end up on my blog :P

Someone really needs to build an online AJAX-driven data modeling tool (a la Embarcadero ER/Studio, or ERWin).  If you've never used one of these for your software development you don't know what you're missing, because the data model really is the foundation for the application (especially if you use code generation utilities, which are just cool as all hell).

I love using them, but it drives me up the wall that I have to use a fat Windows app to do it.  That makes collaboration even more difficult because usually to hook multiple installations together you have to purchase some kind of uber-expensive enterprise package that usually only works over a LAN anyway.  I would be in heaven if I could use some kind of Google Apps type of online application to do data modeling and collaborate with other people.

So there it is, somebody please take this idea and run with it, this is a market just begging to be disrupted.

In my view, your online identity is made up the handles people use on the Internet to get to the "real you".  In other words, a way for people to find and communicate with you without physically meeting you.  As we use the Internet we tend to build up a collection of handles to ourselves in the form of user profiles, email addresses, and search engine results that link back to us.  The sum of these handles comprises our online identity.

I believe that in 2007 a lot more attention will be paid to the value of our online identity.  This will take a number of forms including the Web sites that pop up when someone searches for you on Google, how much control you have over those Web sites, and how much control you have over your email address(es).  And last but not least, would it be possible for someone else to hijack your online identity by making alternate handles that they have created more publicly visible than the ones that you really want people to see?

Let me share some steps that I've taken in the past year to control my online identity and safeguard it so that I ultimately control it.  In the process I've learned some pretty cool tips and tricks that have made the Internet far more enjoyable for me to use.

Take Control of Your Online Presence

Ultimately there are two ways people will reach you on the Web:  One is by searching for you, probably using Google, and the other is by using handles such as your email address or your Web site that you've given to people on a business card or by word of mouth.  If you don't control those handles, the very first thing to do is to stop the hemorrhaging and take some cheap and simple steps to start controlling them.  Here's what I did:

1. Buy your own domain name.  This is the starting point, and something you'll probably keep forever.  Your Web site, your email address, and your search engine hits will all point here eventually.  It is important that you own this yourself so that nobody else can shut it down or point it somewhere else in the future.  You need to have your own site, otherwise your online identity is in the hands of MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, or wherever else you might currently be "living" online.  It's cheap, too.  You can buy a .com domain for only $7.95 a year from sites like GoDaddy, cheaper if you don't care about the .com extension.  This is really the only expense you need to incur in this entire exercise.  On a side note, having a domain name with the terms that you want to target (your name, in thise case) in it is one of the fundamental todo's in proper search engine optimization.
2. Set up email at your domain.  Extricate yourself from Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, or your company email address--at least for your personal communication.  For example, I use jason@jasonkolb.com.  You no longer have to deal with setting up an email client and configuring SMTP settings and techie things like that, you can now easily set up Web-based email that behaves identically to Gmail or Hotmail by using a free service such as Google Applications for Domains.
3. Set up a Web presence at your domain.  This is the key to controlling what people see when they search for your name.  You have a myriad of choices as to what to put here, the easiest being whatever comes with your email host (such as the Web hosting facilities that come with Google Applications for Domains or Microsoft Office Live, both of which make it easy to get a simple Web site up and running).  When you're ready to start adding some serious content to your site you can move to something like TypePad or Wordpress, or if you really want to do something slick you can use an open source content management application like Drupal or Joomla to put something completely customized together.  Hosting services often use Fantastico which makes installing and configuring these open source packages a trivial task.
4. One thing that I really enjoy is the added functionality that something like Google Applications for Domains can give you on your domain.  For example, my start page is now set to http://start.jasonkolb.com, my calendar lives at http://calendar.jasonkolb.com, and my inbox is at http://mail.jasonkolb.com.  My Jabber chat handle is jason@jasonkolb.com.  I get all of this for free, and I guarantee I'll never forget them, because they'll never change.

What's really cool is that I ultimately control what lives at all of those addresses.  If I decide that Google is too Evil for me, I'm free to switch at any time.  I can move to Microsoft, or pay a monthly fee to host everything on a shared server, and all of my email will keep flowing and my Web site address stays the same--I never run the risk of an address going stale.

Promote Your Online Presence

Now that you have your own domain and site, the next trick is to make sure that people end up there when they search for your name.  You could just leave a placeholder page on your Website, but that won't necessarily ensure that people end up there when they search for you, especially if you have a common name.  Why not do something more interesting and productive?  Here are some steps to make sure that you control the results that pop up when people Google your name:

1. Publish some actual content that will get linked to.  Even if it's not much content, if you can get people to link to the content, or if you leave links to it on other sites, it will rise up the search engine rankings.  The goal is to get it to the top, so the more links the better.
2. Use your site address on business cards and in forum and email signatures.  Not only will this build search engine juice, but it also firmly establishes your site as the center of your online identity.
3. Instead of filling in profile information on sites like LinkedIn, MySpace, forums, user groups, etc, simply post a link to a profile page that you host on your own site.  For example, my MySpace profile (which pretty much just collects dust) only contains a link to jasonkolb.com as far as content goes.  That way if you want to change the information you only have to change it one place, and you'll rest easy knowing there's no outdated information out there that you forgot to update.  This applies to resumes as well.
4. Google yourself regularly.  If you're not at the top of the results, you need more links.  If you have the bad luck to share your name with a celebrity, you're either going to have to create a LOT of content with your name in it, and a lot of inbound links to your site, or you'll have to settle for working on other keywords in combination with your name.

The sooner you get moving on this the better, because with every link to your MySpace or LinkedIn profile, you become more joined to that particular site.  Every time someone puts your Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, or company's email address in their contact list as their primary point of contact to you, that's one more inbound link that you ultimately have no control over.  And the more content you put on a site that you don't control, the more search engine juice you're giving that site and the harder it will be to eventually regain control of your name in search engine listings.  Better to start now than to be at the mercy of MySpace tomorrow.  If they decide to start charging you to be a member, it'll probably cost you a lot more in the long run than the $8 a year to own your own domain.  And you'll have a lot less geek cred as well :)

Keep Your Private Online Activity Private

One last aspect of protecting your online identity comes from a different angle.  Certain companies, like Google, have an incredibly powerful ability to track what you do on the Internet.  If you don't care, that's fine.  At least you're aware that you and your history can be exploited at some point.  However, if you have a problem with that, there are several steps you can take to keep your online activity private:

• Log out of your Google account when you search.  If you use personalized Google searches or the Google homepage, your searches are being tracked.  Just log out before you do any searches that you would rather not be tied to.
• Use an anonymous proxy.  If you're doing something that you REALLY don't want to be tied to, use a product like Anonymizer that will make it next to impossible to trace your activity back to you.  Using an anonymous proxy makes it extremely difficult to track information back to, so your ISP or anyone else who might be sniffing network traffic won't know where it comes from.

Of course, the classic argument against these techniques is "if you're not doing anything bad, why do you care?"  Well, I care because I don't want to be profiled.  I value my personality and I want to be the one who controls what other people do and do not know about me.  If a Google employee can peruse my search history and see every single thing I've ever looked for on the Net, they pretty much have access to my stream of consciousness and I'm just not cool with that.  In fact, they would probably be able to put together such a good personality profile of me that they may end up knowing things about me that I would be surprised to find out myself (as I've written about before).

Be sure to protect your online identity this year, and every year thereafter.  It's going to be with you for a long time.