What can we do now with information that we could not do in the past? I’ve abused Kauffman’s concept of the adjacent possible by applying it to the new opportunities, untapped potential, and levels of complexity, that arise with the development of something new. In this case, the “something new” is the ways in which new tools allow us to mess around with information. I’ve compiled a list of nine attributes or new possibilities that new technologies, especially the internet, enable. What am I missing? What can we do with information that I’ve overlooked?
| New Possibilities |
Description | Examples |
| Create, collaborate, and share | Create information and easily share it with others |
Blogs, wikis, image sharing sites, Etherpad, Open Street Maps, mobiles |
| Dialogue | Comment and socialize around information |
Commenting features of most sites, Diigo, central tools such as Disqus, Facebook Connect |
| Edit | Change a document in context and leave an artifact of previous changes |
Wikipedia |
| Aggregate | Pull together information from numerous sources into one central space or interface |
gRSShoper, Google Reader |
| Embed | Using an existing digital resource in a new context without altering the source |
YouTube, Scribd, Slideshare |
| Overlay and mashups | Augmented reality, information integrated with other information sources |
AR browsers, mobiles, Yelp |
| Activity stream | Track the activity of people or information source (such as news) in a continual stream |
Landing (Elgg), Twitter, |
| Information splicing | Filter or adjust an activity stream to serve particular information needs or contexts |
Context Switcher |
| Analysis | Apply statistical and other analytics techniques to visualize and understand activity, influence, networks, or other means of social and information network activity |
Google Analytics, Klout |
4 Comments
I’m not sure where it fits, probably in Information Splicing or Analysis, but something about infographics should be there – representing large data sets in graphic format.
There is nothing new about all that but it would be fascinating if we could see how we managed these activities in the old days without computers and internet.
Your example ‘mobile’ appears very often but is not much clear, otherwise you could mention ‘computer’ as well.
A great tool to aggregate and splice: yahoo pipes
Overlay-example: google maps, OSM!
Generally you could add something like remixing information. A Remix is be fare more creative then a simple overlay or aggregation of data. Examples can be seen on YouTube or soundcloud. Furthermore books have been published which turned out to be nothing more then a remix of existing works.
Another thing that is missing are animations/simulations/interactive charts/etc. I don’t know any tool for collaborative production of animations but they play an essential role in communicating information.
–niels
Semantic annotations like defining a category or tag could be another activity.
–niels
Thanks for the grid of options. The ability to aggregate the growing amounts of information motivate the mash up approaches of taking existing pieces of content as modules to put into focused collections of dialogue and research.
John