I've blogged in my personal life for years - sometimes as me, sometimes anonymously. Mostly, blogging as me has been for my own entertainment and amusement, the appeal being much the same as keeping a diary might have held in years gone by, albeit one that, in the modern world, a wide audience of people can read if they want to.
Blogging seems to have gone very mainstream in the last year or so. So I now have four different blogs to maintain - this one, one at work, one as the Chair of the Board of Governors at my daughter's school on our internal site and one in the same capacity externally. I'm not convinced there's much value in the latter, which is much what I said about blogging in the work environment a few years ago. I blog here, for me. I blog at work and on the Governors' site because I have something specific I want to communicate. Why would I blog as a Chair of Governors, to an educational community - do I have something to say that is better enabled by the constraint of that limited audience? Not sure that I do - so not sure that the National College of Teaching and Leadership has really enabled the capability for reasons much beyond 'because we can'...
One thing is clear though: The amount of content being published across the globe is increasing at an exponential rate, as the tools mature to the point that it's become a trivially easy activity. And a likely response to that is increased sophistication in the tools that do the job of finding content of relevance and delivering it to the individual - not based on self-selection, in the way that RSS and portal technology dealt with the issue in the past, but based on a contextual understanding of the individual's preferences, role, habits, location... psyche, emotions, purchasing preferences... It just isn't possible for a person to manage this effectively - and it is possible for algorithms to do a much better job. Commercial organisations are already exploiting this capability... how do you think Amazon works out what to entice you with? And did you know that it may adjust the price of that irresistible DVD box-set based on what it knows about you?
Science-fiction writers have been depicting a world where the machines have taken over since the Industrial Revolution. No desire to spoil anyone's Sunday lunch - but we need to come to terms with something: They already have.
One thing is clear though: The amount of content being published across the globe is increasing at an exponential rate, as the tools mature to the point that it's become a trivially easy activity. And a likely response to that is increased sophistication in the tools that do the job of finding content of relevance and delivering it to the individual - not based on self-selection, in the way that RSS and portal technology dealt with the issue in the past, but based on a contextual understanding of the individual's preferences, role, habits, location... psyche, emotions, purchasing preferences... It just isn't possible for a person to manage this effectively - and it is possible for algorithms to do a much better job. Commercial organisations are already exploiting this capability... how do you think Amazon works out what to entice you with? And did you know that it may adjust the price of that irresistible DVD box-set based on what it knows about you?
Science-fiction writers have been depicting a world where the machines have taken over since the Industrial Revolution. No desire to spoil anyone's Sunday lunch - but we need to come to terms with something: They already have.
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