(Image: Samuel Morse, source Wikipedia)

Sometime today the following blurb was sent to the book publishing trade press:

Author of The Search, co-founder of Wired, founder of Federated Media, Inc., and Executive Producer of the Web 2.0 Summit, John Battelle’s WHAT WE HATH WROUGHT will give us a forecast of the interconnected world in 2040, then work backwards to explain how the personal, economic, political, and technological strands of this human narrative have evolved from the pivotal moment in which we find ourselves now. Based on thorough analysis and hundreds of interviews with political, technological, and cultural leaders, as well as a deep understanding of this story’s colorful history, Battelle will work with Dominick Anfuso and Hilary Redmon at Free Press (World) and Esther Newberg at ICM to bring this visionary tale to life. The book is scheduled to arrive in early 2013.

Apparently the announcement was picked up as the first item in a publication called Publishers’ Marketplace, but I can’t link to it, because it’s subscription only. Ah, the publishing world. I can’t believe I’m jumping back in. But more on that in a future post.

The new book announcement blurb is a staple of that world, it’s funny how short and dense they are, given they are attempting to describe what will probably be a 400 or so page tome once all is said and done. I suppose it makes sense in a way – as the author, I’m not really sure what path this book will take, and to be honest with you I’m more than a bit terrified by the scale and scope of this project.

Which is why I decided to do it.

So a bit more on what it is, and why I’m doing it now.

Those of you who visit regularly will be familiar with my annual predictions, which are a popular feature of the site. For the past four or so years, I’ve predicted that I’ll finally get around to starting work on my next book. (For those of you who are new to Searchblog, the site started as a way to bounce ideas around in public as I wrote my first book, The Search, way back in 2003. That book came out in 2005.)

In my 2010 predictions, for example, I wrote this: “I’ll figure out what I want to do with my book. SOGOTP, so to speak. Three years of predicting that I’ll start it is getting a bit old, eh? I feel good about branching back out into more contemplative fields, with FM in a strong position and our economy coming out from its defensive crouch.” Well, by the end of the year, I had figured out, broadly, what I wanted to do, but I had not given it a name, nor had I written a proposal or gotten my work life in a space that would allow me to actually execute the reporting and writing necessary to do justice to the topic I had chosen. A year later, in 2011, I didn’t even bother writing about the book in my predictions, because I knew I’d be working on it by mid year.

And here we are. It’s been a long process, getting ready to work on this book. FM was born at the same time as my last book, and for a while, I was both a startup CEO, new author (with 26 international editions and a lot of publicity support to do), as well as the Executive Producer of a new conference, the Web 2.0 Summit. For the next four years, my main focus was Federated, with a side of Web 2. But the new book was calling me the entire time. I knew I had to get back to writing, because when I did, I knew I’d be more engaged, much smarter about the world I love, and frankly, a more valuable asset to the company I founded. Back in September of 2009, I hired Deanna Brown as President and COO of Federated Media. Early this year, I promoted her to CEO, and took the title of Executive Chair. Deanna has been doing an extraordinary job, and I feel, after 18 months of preparation, that I can finally take the time to tackle this next big project. My commitment to FM remains, but now I have the time to dig into this new project.

So what is it? Well, settle in. This is my first attempt at describing the book in public, and I’m not sure where it’ll go. I’ll start with the title, which is a play on the first words sent over American telegraph wires by Samuel Morse in May of 1844. On the occasion of opening an experimental telegraph line between Baltimore and Washington, DC, Morse decided to send a Biblical quote comprised of these words: “What Hath God Wrought.” There’s a longer story as to why those words were chosen, but I find them compelling for a number of reasons. Morse, an artist by trade, was attempting to describe, in as few words as possible, the magnitude and potential of the moment. Here was man transmitting his thoughts, his intentions, his very words across time and space. (Were such an invention extant when Morse’s wife had died, he’d have had time to be by her side, for example). Such a concept was so foreign to that era that its impact could really only be ascribed to God.

Fast forward 167 years or so, and we can see what hath been wrought – but by man, not God. Morse’s first public telegram – a prehistoric tweet, if you will – begat a wave of communications and computational innovation that is only quickening. And as an observer and occasional journalist covering this field, I’m struck by the current moment – a time where the average consumer and citizen creates terabytes of data, and the average company or government is rapidly reorganizing itself to capitalize on that fact. In short, we’ve built a platform capable of totally rewiring how our society works. What, I wonder, will we make of it?

That is the driving question of the book. As I wrote in my proposal:

The world is captivated by stories of the Internet’s expanding power. Revolution sweeps across Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and beyond – powered by Facebook and Twitter. A café owner in Oregon tries out a new promotional service called Groupon and finds herself overwhelmed with hundreds of new customers – and nearly out of business. Terrorism in Moscow, murder in Tehran, and madness in Hollywood are broadcast for all to view on YouTube – as we watch, we are transformed.

But how will that transformation look a generation from now?

In less than five years, more than 600 million of us have committed our identities to Facebook, a service whose story is already an Academy Award-winning film. Every move by Apple has become a cultural event, and the company is credited with revolutionizing not just the music industry, but the communications and computing industries as well. And the fastest growing company in history, Google, recently ceded that title to yet another Internet phenomenon – the social commerce site Groupon.

In the decade since search redefined how we consume information, we have learned to make the world a game and the game our world, to ask and answer “what’s happening,” “what’s on your mind,” and “where are you?” Each purchase, search, status update, and check-in layers our world with data. Billions of times each day, we pattern a world collectively created by Twitter, Zynga, Facebook, Tencent, Foursquare, Google, Tumblr, Baidu, and thousands of other services. The Database of Intentions, first described in The Search, is far larger than even I imagined, and it is scaling to nearly incomprehensible size and power.

As we learn to leverage this ever-shifting platform called the Internet, we are at once renegotiating our social, economic, and cultural relationships – and we’re doing it in real time. How we interact with each other, how we engage with our government, how we conduct business, and even how we understand our place in the world – all has changed in the short fifteen years since the dawn of the commercial Internet. The pace only quickens. How might we understand where this is all headed?

Predictions of the future are tiresome – they lack detail, narrative, and staying power. But what if we could report the future? That sounds like a pretty good story. What We Hath Wrought will tell the story of the Web one generation from now.

To tell that story, I’m going to have to do a lot of reporting. I’ll need to talk to technologists, leaders of major corporations, marketers, politicians, academics, authors, artists, and yes, futurists as well. My goal is to steep myself in what’s happening now, and play the trends out one generation. I know, it’s an ambitious and even presumptuous goal. But it’s what keeps me up at night. And it’s also what we did at Wired for the five wonderful years while I was there – our goal was the report the future by playing out trends we could see right now.

One generation ago, I started as a cub reporter covering this industry. In the mid 1980s, personal computers were a novelty, the Internet was a research project, and phones sat on desks and tables, many with rotary dials. Who then could have predicted Google, or the iPhone, or Facebook?

Well, turns out a lot of folks wrote about the future back then, and many of them got a lot of things right (more got stuff wrong, of course). I’ve got a reading list of books that numbers in the hundreds, just for starters, and a source list that’s even longer. And I’m just getting started. Over the course of the next year I’ll be attacking the reporting of this book, and sketching up what I learn right here on this site, just as I did for The Search. And if I get half the feedback for this book that I got for the last one, I’ll consider myself a lucky man.

In a future post, I’ll outline how I plan to approach the reporting and writing of the book, in terms of structure. In short, I see four major narrative storylines. First is how the individual interacts with others – the social and cultural self. Second is how the individual interacts as a citizen – self to government – and how governments interact with each other. That’s the political and geopolitical narrative. Third is how the individual interacts with the economy – that’s the commercial narrative (and the one in which I’m the most versed as a journalist, certainly). Lastly, there’s the technological narrative – a description of the extraordinary tapestry of processors, bandwidth, and data we’ve built, and how it might evolve.

It’s my hope What We Hath Wrought will read like narrative journalism, playing 15 years of Internet history out into the future, describing that future as it came to exist, based on a number of clear storylines already in progress.

One last thing I’d like to say. Any narrative needs tension, and key actors. I can’t disclose who the actors might be, because honestly I have not decided. But I can frame the tension driving the story, and in short, it’s this: I believe we are in a critical moment in our civilization’s development, one where we will face a number of fateful decisions about how we interact with each other, with business, and with government. The decisions we make during this period will frame the kind of world we’ll leave to future generations. Who will control the data we create? What access will we allow citizens to the machinations of government? What kind of people will we become when every single one of us is deeply connected to a socially aware platform like Facebook? Are we building systems – in healthcare, energy, finance – that are too complicated for any of us to understand, much less control?

In short, can we handle what we are creating? Thirty or so years from now, will we be questioning ourselves – “Lord, what hath we wrought?” Or will we look upon what we hath wrought, and be pleased? I think the answer lies in exploring where we are, right now, and laying out the implications of our actions today. (And yes, I’m an optimist, which is why I moved the “hath” over one position in the title…)

To say I approach this book with trepidation is to understate my case. But I’ve never really done anything knowing with certainty where it’s going to end up. I hope you’ll join me on this journey. I’ll need the company!

PS – I’ve been tweeting stories that fit the book’s theme on the #wwhw hashtag. At some point, it might make more sense to just do a roundup of those stories here on Searchblog, instead, we’ll see. I’ll be easing into the work on this book this summer, and really be at it by the time Web 2 is over in the mid Fall. Meanwhile, the theme of Web 2 is directly related to the book, of course….

Over at the Federated Media site, I’ve posted an appreciation of the company I started in a garage six years ago this week. FM came about because of my work on my first book – it was through the study of search’s impact on media and markets that I came up with the idea in the first place. Which means, in a pretty direct way, it was attributable in part to the musings here on Searchblog, and to your responses to those musings. 

FM is great success by any metric now, so I wanted to briefly say thank you to all of you who still read me here, and know that I will be writing a lot more in the next year or so, thanks to a new book project soon to be announced. 

From my post on FM’s six year anniversary:

FM was the first company that I built from scratch – no initial corporate parent (as I had with The Industry Standard), no initial set of partners (as I had with Wired or Web 2), just an idea and equal measures of optimism and trepidation…..

…When Twitter took off in 2008, FM was there, creating the first brand integration, with our partner Microsoft. And when the world’s largest publishing platform, WordPress – long a friend to the company – was ready to explore monetization, FM again was the partner of choice…

Over the past three decades, I’ve been at the center of a few amazing companies – two of which have passed 500 employees in girth. Wired, which still lives on, was the first. The Industry Standard, which lives on in a few markets outside the US, was the other. But FM is my proudest and most cherished accomplishment – with just 175 or so extraordinary employees, we’ve managed to deliver more than $100 million back to the creators of the Independent web over the past six years. That means that thousands of independent voices have rung out true, in part because FM and its partnesr were there to help them pay the bills.

I can’t really put in words how proud that makes me feel.

Earlier today I moderated a panel at an energetic and well-attended event called the “Newfront,” produced by Digitas, an innovative agency which counts American Express, Kraft, P&G, and GM as clients.

I say energetic because it was highly produced and very considered (and this from a guy who carefully produces live events for a living, among other things). A lot of flash, and deep consideration of lighting, music, and red carpet treatment of star guests (there were many). In short, the place was lovingly festooned with the kind of attention to detail that makes people feel special, just for being there.

Since I was a speaker, I got whisked past the lines and through the photo pit into the backstage lounge, where I commenced to review the work ahead of me: To lead what might have been the most practical discussion of the entire day: a conversation about how real brands leveraged content as marketing. Now, this is a subject with which I have a fair bit of familiarity, and all the panelists were clients of Federated Media (and no, I didn’t pick them). Susan Sobbott, the President of American Express OPEN, for example. Beth Comstock, the CMO of GE. And Susan Kopper, SVP Marketing at SAP. My job was to get them talking for a full hour in front of 500 or so folks who had just heard Ashton Kutcher rant about how he disliked advertising, and who, after we were finished, were eagerly awaiting a discussion with Tori Spelling.

No, I am not making that up.

Thanks in the main to my panelists, the conversation went quite well. I’d write it up, but the whole thing was livestreamed, and honestly, after six hours on the tarmac at JFK (again, not kidding), I want to tell a different story.

And yes, the six hours on the tarmac is part of it.

So during our conversation onstage, I asked my panelists if they considered the back and forth between a brand and its customers on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook as “content,” and if the answer was yes, then if they considered themselves publishers of that content. The consensus was that yes, brands in fact are publishers of conversations (finally, my 2007 ideas are happening…). “But,” one of my panelists pointed out, “if you are going to become a publisher, then you have to actually be listening and responding to the conversations out there.” Indeed. I nodded (sagely, of course) from my moderator’s chair. Then without thinking, I quipped that brands, in the main, have not proven to be so hot at listening. (Here’s proof.)

And for reasons I can’t explain, I had to call at least one brand out to prove my point. And who came to mind? Well, honestly, it was United Airlines.

Now, this is the very company that has held my mortal coil in its aluminum wrapper for the past seven and a half hours, and, as far as I can tell, is responsible for either my long delayed reunion with my loved ones in five or so hours, or, should it fail miserably, will be…well, I’d rather not think about what else might happen. I am, as I write this, 35,000 feet in the air, after all.

But thanks to the wifi on the flight, I can tell you about all this. Not that the wifi was free….

But I digress as usual. Back to my story. I looked over the audience and asked “how many of you have lodged a customer complaint over Twitter?” About 15 percent of the hands went up. I then asked how many of them felt like they had been heard. About half the hands went down.

That will and must change.

I then called out the aforementioned @united as a personal example of a company I’ve repeatedly reached out to on Twitter, a company that purports to be active on the service, but so far has failed to really “be” on Twitter, at least the way ATT, Comcast, GE, Amex, or any number of other major brands are.

All well and good. The panel continued, folks seemed to enjoy it, from what I could tell, and after saying hello to far too many old friends, I headed to the airport. I was in a good mood – after four days on the road (including leading a successful CM Summit), it was time to go home.

And while there was traffic on the way to JFK (tweet), I made it in time for my plane. I got through security and settled in, ready for the six-or-so-hour journey home.

As I often do when home is tantalizingly close, my seatbelt is securely fastened, and the plane is about to take off, I dozed off in anticipation of the upward lift which comprises a transcontinental journey’s opening act.

As I nodded off, a daydream of sorts came to me. I imagined a world, not so distant, where our social utterances have impact….

It’s hard to explain without a fair amount of literary license, but if you are this far into my story, what the hell, right?

OK, so I imagined that as I called @united out onstage today, and that call out was amplified (via Twitter) by various folks in the audience, there was, in fact, someone at United listening. Further, I imagined that that person had access to all the touchpoints with United that I have as a customer.

In short, I imagined that United was listening to me, even though I was speaking at what, to United, was a pretty random conference in lower Manhattan. I mean, it’s rather presumptuous of me to assume that a brand might catch wind of my calling them out, right? After all, it happens all the time, all over the world, no?

Or is it?

What if the world were wired in such a way that every utterance that each of made had real meaning, and, further, that we as the creators of that utterance understood that fact?

In other words, what might happen if I knew that United was listening when I spoke those words on stage at the NewFront?

Well, as I dozed, I did imagine it. After all, at the moment I was on United Flight 863, which was slowly pulling out of Terminal 7 at JFK, purportedly on its way to San Francisco.

So here’s what came to mind.

As I entered JFK and checked in at the United counter, the man behind the counter addressed me by name – before I even handed him my ID – and apologized for United’s lack of responsiveness. “We missed your call out at that conference,” he said. “Hate to make excuses, but our Twitter guy was offline with a personal issue. I wish our UA team had texted you with an apology but we only have your email. Did you get our message?”

Well…no, I hadn’t checked my email in the car, because I was on the phone. I looked at my phone and indeed, there was a mail from United, apologizing for its past inattention to such a loyal customer, and promising to do better. Not to mention that the mail promised a free upgrade on my upcoming flight – flight 863, which was on time. Given the time and my current location (gleaned from my phone, which automatically broadcasts my location to every brand with which I’ve indicated I have a trusted relationship), I must be on my way, no? The email continued – click this link to accept the upgrade, choose my seat, order a special meal….you get the picture.

I give the counter attendant my mobile number so United can text me in the future, and after clearing security, I’m on the plane. And… As I often do when home is tantalizingly close, my seatbelt is securely fastened, and the plane is about to take off, I dozed off in anticipation of the upward lift which comprises a transcontinental journey’s opening act.

OK, daydream over. Might this actually happen? And not just for me, the dude with the “Internet influencer” designation, but for everyone?

Damn right it will.

Now, what really happened …. well, I checked in (the gate attendants were very pleasant), and I got on the plane (so were the flight attendants), and I settled in. And yes, I did fall asleep. No one at United knew who I was, or that I had just called the company out in front of 500 people (or tens of thousands repeatedly on Twitter over the past two years)…regardless, what did happen next is that I woke up.

And we were on the tarmac. And it was raining. And as I regained consciousness after my social media daydream, I heard the pilot apologizing – turns out the weather was not cooperating, and we’d have to turn off the engines. And wait.

Not United’s fault. I mean, who controls the weather, after all?

Six hours and one trip back to the gate later (see, I told you I’d get to that), United Flight 863 took off. I expect to land at SFO by 2.15 am, PST, fates willing.

But the whole experience got me thinking about what it might mean if a brand really had a relationship with each of its customers, leveraged over customer data, social nuance, and intelligent platform technology, and what it might mean if we, collectively as a culture, simply assumed this to be true.

And it struck me it’d be a lot like living in a small town – where everyone knows everyone’s business, all the time. And if that were true, well, maybe I wouldn’t have called out United in the first place, because that would have just been unfriendly. Especially if I knew United was listening.

And having never really lived in such a place, I wondered – is that a good thing? Or might we, as a society, be on a path where we learn to integrate the best parts of a small town – intimacy, connection, responsiveness – with the best of big city living – anonymity on demand, control over identity, privacy?

I think we’re about to find out. As I think all of you who made it to the end of this story know, we live in a time of great cultural change. It’s a story that fascinates me, and I hope I can spend a lot more time telling it.

As I wrote last month, I’m working with a team of folks to redesign the Web 2 Points of Control map along the lines of this year’s theme: “The Data Frame.” In the past few weeks I’ve been talking to scores of interesting people, including CEOs of data-driven start ups (TrialPay and Corda, for example), academics in the public dataspace, policy folks, and VCs. Along the way I’ve solidified my thinking about how best to visualize the “data layer” we’ll be adding to the map, and I wanted to bounce it off all of you. So here, in my best narrative voice, is what I’m thinking.

First, of course, some data.

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On the left hand side are eight major players in the Internet Economy, along with two categories of players who are critical, but who I’ve lumped together – payment players such as Visa, Amex, and Mastercard, and carriers or ISP players such as Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon.

I’ve given each company my own “finger in the air” score for seven major data categories, which are shown across the top (I don’t claim these are correct, rather, clay on the wheel for an ongoing dialog). The first six scores are in essence percentages, answering the question “What percentage of this company’s holdings are in this type of data.” The seventh, which I’ve called Wildcard data, is a 1-10 ranking of the potency of that company’s “wildcard” data that it’s not currently leveraging, but might in the future. I’ll get to more detail on each data category later.

Toward the far right, I’ve noted each company’s overall global uniques (from Doubleclick, for now, save the carriers and payment guys – I’ve proxied their size with the reach of Google). There is also an “engagement” score (again, more on that soon). The final score is a very rough tabulation computing engagement over uniques against the sum of the data scores. There are pivots to be built from this data around each of the scores for various types of data, but I’ll leave that for later. This is meant to be a relatively simple introduction to my rough thinking about the data layer. Hopefully, it’ll spark some input from you.

Now, before you rip it apart, which I fully invite (especially those of you who are data quants, because I am clearly not, and I am likely mixing some apples and watermelons here), allow me to continue to narrate what I’m trying to visualize here.

As you know, the map is a metaphor, showing key territories as “points of control.” The companies I’ve highlighted in the chart all have “home territories” where they dominate a sector – Google in search, Facebook in social, Amazon and eBay in commerce, etc. What I plan to do is create a layer based on the data in the chart that, when activated, shows those companies’ relative size and strength.

But how?

Well, the best idea we’ve come up with so far is to show each as a small city of sorts, where the relative height of the buildings is determined by a corresponding data point. So Twitter, for example, will have a tall building in the middle of its city, representing “Interest data.” Google’s tallest building will be search. Facebook’s, social, and so on. And of course the cities can’t be all on the same scale, hence our use of total global uniques, and total engagement. Yahoo may be nearly as big as Facebook, but it doesn’t have nearly the engagement per user. So its city will be smaller, relatively, than Facebook’s.

What is interesting about this approach is that each company’s “cityscape” emerges as distinct. Microsoft’s is wide but not tall – they have a lot of data in a number of areas. It will probably end up looking like a suburban office park – funnily enough, that’s what Microsoft really looks like, for the most part. Amazon and eBay will have high towers of payment data, with a smattering of shorter buildings. And so on. I don’t have a good visualization of this yet, but the designers at Blend, who I’m working with, have sketched out a very rough early version just so you can get the idea. The structures will be more whimsical, and of course be keyed with color. But I think you get the idea.

I’m even thinking of adding other features, like “openness” – ie can you access, gain copies of, share, and mash up the data controlled by each company? If so, the city won’t be walled. Apple, on the other hand, may well end up a walled city, with a moat, on top of a hill.

Now, a bit more detail on the data categories. You all gave me a lot of really good input on my earlier post, where I posited these original categories. But I’ve kept them the same, save the addition of the wildcard data. Why? Because I think each can be interpreted as larger buckets containing a lot of other data. I’ll go through each briefly in turn:

Purchase Data: This is information about who buys what, in essence. But it’s also who *almost* buys what (abandoned carts), *when* they buy, in what context, and so on.

Search Data: The original database of intentions – query data, path from query data, “intent” data, and tons more search signals.

Social Data: Social graph, but also identity data. Not to mention how people interact inside their graphs, etc.

Interest Data: This is data that describes what is generally called “the interest graph” – declarations of what people are interested in. It’s related to content, but it’s not just content consumption. It includes active production of interest datapoints – like tweets, status updates, checkins, etc.

Location Data: This is data about where people are, to be sure, but also data about how often we are there, and other correlated data – ie what apps we use in location context, who else is there and when, etc.

Content Data: Content is still a king in our world, and knowing patterns of content consumption is a powerful signal. This is data about who reads/watches/consumes what, when, and in what patterns.

Wildcard Data: This is data that is uncategorized, but could have huge implications. For example, Microsoft knows how people interact with their applications and OS. Microsoft and Google have a ton of language data (phonemes, etc.). Carriers see just about everything that passes across their servers, though their ability to use it might be regulated. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have tons of email interaction data. And so on….

Now, of course all these data categories get more powerful as they are leveraged one against the other, and of course, I’ve left tons of really big data players off the map entirely (Tons of small startups like Tynt, Quora, or Sharethis have massive amounts of data, as do very large companies like Nielsen, Quantcast, etc.). But you have to make choices to make something like this work.

So, that’s where we are with the Web 2 Summit map data layer. Naturally, once the data layer is live, it will be driven by a database, so we can tweak the size and scope of the cities and buildings based on the collective intelligence of the map users’ feedback. What do you think? What’s your input? We’ll be building this over the next two months, and I’d love your feedback before we get too far down the line. Thanks!

One of the curveball sessions I’m most looking forward to at next week’s CM Summit is with filmmaker Tiffany Shlain, whose recent documentary features “Connected” was selected for inclusion at Sundance (and many other prestigious festivals.) Today I jumped on the phone with Shlain, who has been a fellow traveler since the days when I started The Industry Standard and she founded The Webbys. We’ve both moved on from those heady days, but find our work is once again interconnecting – “Connected” is an essentially optimistic but cautious story of Tiffany’s own life, work, and passions, in particular as it relates to her relationship with her father, a renown physician and author who spent much of his life searching for patterns in human behavior which transcended traditional boundaries of academic pursuit.

In short, the film is a call for all of us to move past our current frame of thinking, and to leverage the moment we are in to embrace a new philosophy – that of interdependence. The axis of this movement is the Internet, Shlain argues, and we have it within our grasp to leverage digital networks to solve the extraordinary problems we’ve collectively created through, well, collective creation.

Shlain was in a good mood as we began our conversation – she had recently learned her film had been picked up for national theatrical distribution in the Fall. That’s a big deal for a committed independent filmmaker, to be certain, but it’s also something of a quandry – theatrical distribution is “how films are normally done” and Shlain has plenty of unique ideas about how to get her work out into the world.

We’ll be talking about some of those ideas, which range from using Facebook to drive local screenings, to a mobile app specifically for the film, to continuing the film as a conversation across the web through the creation of three-minute “follow-up” films, the first of which will be crowdsourced through YouTube.

As I asked earlier about Bill Nguyen, why have Shlain at a digital marketing conference? Well, “Connected” is certainly about the impact of the Internet on our lives. But also because, as Tiffany says in her film, “emotional connection drives everything we do.” Marketers need to be reminded of this from time to time, in particular in the context of the constant, real time connections for which all brands are now the stewards. It struck me as somehow appropriate to have an artist grace our stage, and I’m thrilled Tiffany has agreed to join us.

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The CM Summit is just one week away….so register today before we sell out.

Special thanks to our sponsors: Blackberry, AT&T, Google, Quantcast, Demand Media, Facebook, Outbrain, Pandora, Pixazza, R2integrated, Slideshare, Yahoo!, AOL, American Express OPEN, Balloon, BriefLogic, Evidon, Marketing Evolution/Telmar, Mobile Roadie, Spiceworks, and Ustream. And a shout out to our partners at IAB, Mashable, paidContent, ReadWriteWeb, SMAC, and TechZulu.

In preparation for our short onstage discussion at CM Summit next week, I recently hopped on the phone with Color founder and CEO Bill Nguyen. Color, ostensibly a social-photo app, is backed by big money and saddled with huge expectations. It launched with great fanfare in March. I wrote glowingly of its potential here. I got a fair amount of sh*t for being too rosy in my estimation of the service’s potential. By April, Color had been written off as a failed effort by much of the blogosphere, and folks moved on to the next shiny object.

None of this seems to bother Nguyen, who’s been around the block a few times more than your average startup bear. He sees a wave rising in the distance, and he’s building Color to ride it. Whether or not others see the wave is not particularly interesting to him. As far as he’s concerned, it’s coming. Folks will get on board when the time is right.

So what is the wave? It’s a pivot in the fundamental organizing principle of how social networks work. He wants to move social past the friend network. Nguyen is certain that Facebook, for all its power, is stuck in a limited model – a poorly instrumented friend graph that you set up once, then run forever. I’ve called this the “instrumentation problem” of Facebook – it simply does not allow the nuance of true social interaction.

To Nguyen’s mind, the next wave of social will be driven by proximity. By that, he means by people who are near other people. If you’ve ever seen that famous video of a festival flash dance, you know how quickly human beings can create social groups. Color is meant to be an app that understands this essential human nature, “appify it”, and add value to it in various ways. His first choice was photos, but that’s really just a proxy for any number of things folks might want to share and relate to as a group (and as members of that group even when not together). Over time, these shared social group objects become intermingled with physical locations, and all sorts of goodness ensues.

However, if you’re going to make an essentially social service, as Color is, you can’t ignore Facebook. Color 1.0 did just that. I expect the next version will not. Facebook is the oxygen in today’s social web. Unless you plan on beating Facebook head to head, it’s best to beat it by joining it.

Nguyen’s goals for Color are very, very big, and getting there will require a lot of work, a lot of capital, and a lot of assumptions that will have to prove out over time. One of them is that Facebook won’t add Color-like features to its service. But while Nguyen told me adding proximity features to Facebook should be “mission critical,” he doesn’t see the social networking giant focusing on it in the near term. He’s probably right.

So why have Color and Nguyen at a conference about digital marketing? Because I see one of our jobs at FM as pushing all of us to think about how the world of human relationships might look three to five years out. Remember, five years ago, Facebook was a curiosity. It pays to pay attention to very smart folks building tools they don’t expect will be fully scaled till the year 2015 or so. Nguyen is one of those folks.

Oh, and at scale, Color would be one hell of a marketing channel. Bill’s got a few thoughts about that as well.

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(NB: Much has been written and said on this topic, and this post is in no way complete. We’ll be exploring this issue and many others related to data at the Web 2 Summit this Fall).

Perhaps the largest problem blocking our industry today is the retardation of consumer-driven data sharing. We’re all familiar with the three-year standoff between Google and Facebook over crawling and social graph data. Given the rise of valuable mobile data streams (and subsequent and rather blinkered hand wringing about samesaid) this issue is getting far worse.

Every major (and even every minor) player realizes that “data is the next Intel inside,” and has, for the most part, taken a hoarder’s approach to the stuff. Apple, for example, ain’t letting data out of the iUniverse to third parties except in very limited circumstances. Same for Facebook and even Google, which has made hay claiming its open philosophy over the years.

And this trend is not limited to the large players. I currently have 302 photos locked up in a service called Twitpic. I’d very much like to export them into my iPhoto library, so I can mange them as part of the rest of my photo library. But the only way to do that is to “right click” on each and every one of those photos, copying them to my desktop. That’s several hours of work that most folks simply won’t do. When an enterprising coder wrote an automated script that exported photos from Twitpic to another service called Posterous, Twitpic blocked the program. That was about the time I stopped using Twitpic.

This trend, I predict, will become the petard upon which our industry will hoist itself over the next couple of years. Very well intentioned projects like DataPortability.org and others are working on this issue, but it’s largely hidden from public view and debate, because that debate has been framed as “Us versus Them”, where the “Them” are presumably evil and profit-driven companies who want to leverage our data for their own gain. (See the entire WSJ series as exhibit A in this debate).

So far, the approach companies seem to be taking boils down to this: The data we have is too valuable to let our customers understand it, manage it, and ultimately, do whatever they want with it. We’ll say soothing things, and we’ll let our users take some actions with their data – Facebook will let you authenticate using Facebook Connect on third party sites, for example – but we won’t let you take the data you’ve created on our services, put it in your own pocket (so to speak), and hand it over to other services and platforms such that those platforms can add value to your daily life.

In other words, if information is truly currency in today’s economy, so far the coins in your pocket are all from different countries, and there’s no global exchange mechanism. They’re only worth something in the nation in which they’ve been minted.

For example, you can’t pass your Facebook identity to a third party site so as to enable that site to serve you a better advertising experience. While Facebook insists that your Facebook data is, in fact, *yours*, it turns out it’s not yours if you want to use it to help a third party make money. In other words, it’s not really yours if it has true value to a third party. Which, in essence, means it’s only yours if it’s not valuable to anyone but you. But value is most often a social concept – something has value because a third person values it.

If the true value of the economy we are building is to be unlocked, that value has to flow unchecked from one party to another. Were this to be true, differentiation of services would migrate to a higher level of the stack, so to speak. Services would be considered valuable for what they did with data given to them by consumers, rather than by their ability to lock consumer’s data into their proprietary platform. New models would emerge to reward those services for adding that value, and those models would be both more robust, and far larger than the “one ring to rule them all” model currently at play.

As things stand today, our industry’s practices are gaining the attention of dead-serious regulators, spurred to potentially early lock down of how data is used based on an incomplete understanding of how value will flow through future economic models yet to be invented. (More on this in another post).

A generation from now our industry’s approach to data collection and control will seem outdated and laughable. The most valuable digital services and companies will be rewarded for what they do with openly shareable data, not by how much data they hoard and control.

Now, I live in the real world, and I understand why companies are doing what they are doing at the moment. Facebook doesn’t want third party services creating advertising networks that leverage Facebook’s social graph – that’s clearly on Facebook’s roadmap to create in the coming year or so (Twitter has taken essentially the same approach). But if you are a publisher (and caveat, I am), I want the right to interpret a data token handed to me by my reader in any way I chose. If my interpretation is poor, that reader will leave. If it adds value, the reader stays, perhaps for a bit longer, and value is created for all. If that token comes from Facebook, Facebook also gets value.

Imagine, for example, if back in the early search days, Google decided to hoard search refer data – the information that tells a site what the search term was which led a visitor to click on a particular URL. Think of how that would have retarded the web’s growth over the past decade.

Scores of new services are emerging that hope to enable a consumer-driven ecosystem of data. Let’s not lock down data early. Let’s trust that what we’re best at doing is adding value, not hoarding it.   

More on this in my 2007 post The Data Bill of Rights, not to be confused with the “Commercial Data Privacy Bill of Rights,” introduced last week. While well intentioned, this bill does not consider data ownership and portability.

If you’ve been reading my musings these past few months, you may have noticed an increasing fascination with data. Who owns it (the creator, the service, both? Who has access to it – ISPs? Device makers? Marketers? The government? And how are we as an industry leveraging data to create entirely new classes of services?

Well, expect a lot more musing here, because (finally!) we’re ready to announce the theme for the Web 2 Summit, 2011, and it’s this: The Data Frame. From my overview, just posted on the site:

For Summit 2010, we noted that the Web ecosystem had shifted into something of a battlefield, with both major players and upstarts jockeying for lead positions around key “Points of Control.” Looking back at our theme one year later, it’s clear the game is still in its early phases – most of the major players have held their ground and continue to press into new territory. Meanwhile, the cycle of startup creation has intensified and compressed.

Given all this, we’re tempted to simply declare 2011 “Points of Control, The Sequel.” But we’ve noticed a constant uniting nearly all the battles around these strategic regions. That constant? How companies (and their customers) leverage data.

In our original Web 2.0 opening talk, as well as in Tim’s subsequent paper “What is Web 2.0,” we outlined our short list of key elements defining the emergent web economy. Smack in the middle of that list is this statement: “Data Is the Next Intel Inside.” At the time, most of us only vaguely understood the importance of this concept. Three years ago we noted the role of data when “Web Meets World,” and two years ago, we enlarged upon it with “WebSquared.”

This year, data has taken center stage in the networked economy. We live in a world clothed in data, and as we interact with it, we create more – data is not only the web’s core resource, it is at once both renewable and infinite. No longer tethered to the PC, each of us bathes in a continuous stream of data, in real time, nearly everywhere we go.

In the decade since search redefined how we consume information, we have learned to make the world a game and the game our world, to ask and answer “what’s happening,” “what’s on your mind,” and “where are you?” Each purchase, search, status update, and check-in layers our world with data. Billions of times each day, we pattern a world collectively created by Twitter, Zynga, Facebook, Tencent, Foursquare, Google, Tumblr, Baidu, and thousands of other services. The Database of Intentions is scaling to nearly incomprehensible size and power.

Of course, this fact raises serious issues of consumer privacy, corporate trust, and our governments’ approach to balancing the two. As we learn to leverage this ever-shifting platform called the Internet, we are at once renegotiating our social, economic, and cultural relationships – and we’re doing it in real time. How we interact with each other, how we engage with our government, how we conduct business, and even how we understand our place in the world – all has changed in the short two decades since the dawn of the commercial Internet. And all of this is described through a matrix of data, the power of which our culture is only beginning to recognize.

At the Web 2 Summit 2011, we’ll use data as a framing device to understand the state of the web. We know that those who best leverage data will win. So who’s winning, and how? Who’s behind? In each of our key points of control such as location, mobile platforms, gaming, content, social – who is innovating, and where are the opportunities? What new classes of services and platforms are emerging, and what difficult policy questions loom? And what of the consumer – will users become their own “point of control,” and start to understand the power of their own data?

These are some of the questions we’ll be asking and answering at the 8^th annual Web 2 Summit. We look forward to exploring them together.

Web 2 Summit 2011

The Palace Hotel San Francisco

Oct. 17-19, 2011

* And yes, we’ll be updating our “Points of Control” Map with a new layer – the Data layer, naturally.

One of my first “big books” out of college was James Gleick’s Chaos: Making a New Science and it still resonates with me, though it’s been so long I think I’m due for a re-read. In any case, the next book up in my ongoing self-education is Gleick’s The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. It’s long. It’s dense. It’s good, so far. In fact, there’s already a passage, a quote from Plato, that has struck me as germane to the ongoing threads I attempt to weave here on this site (even if all I’m really making is a lame friendship bracelet – pun intended, as you will see).

Early in the book, Gleick narrates the birth of the written word, which if you think about it (and he certainly has), is quite an extraordinary event. Turns out Plato, who was literate (and therefore quotable today), was not a fan of the written word. His mentor Socrates, Gleick reminds us, was illiterate. Well, OK, that’s not fair. Socrates wasn’t illiterate, he was, in Gleick’s words, a “nonwriter.” In any case, the passage that struck me is Plato speaking about the written word, quoted in “The Information”:

For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them .You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.

Nicholas Carr would be proud of Plato. But both would be wrong.

Definitions of wisdom shift as cultures shift. Now, of course, to be wise is to be literate. Then, to be wise was to commit knowledge to memory. Now, it’s to the ability to lookup (to search, to find, to divine patterns). I’ve called this search literacy in the past, but I think we’re moving toward something larger.

Consider the same passage, liberally edited to be a critique of the new medium of Facebook and social networking, rather than the new medium of the written word.

For this invention will produce disconnection in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice true relationships between people. Their trust in Facebook, produced by external connections which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own ability to maintain relationships.You have invented an elixir not of relationships, but of reminding one of relationship; and you offer your pupils the appearance of connection, not true connection.

When writing was new, it was strange, and it was hard to imagine a society based on the written word. At the dawn of digital connectivity, the same holds true. Are digital relationships real? Is the grammar of Facebook robust enough to hold all the nuance of true connection?

Probably not yet. But I for one am happy Plato learned to write. And I can also imagine a time – well after these words sink deeply into the sediments of history – when Plato and Facebook are united in a new technology of memory, relationship, and communication that eclipses anything we might debate today.

Last night I had the pleasure of interviewing Steven Levy, and old colleague from Wired, on the subject of his new book: In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. The venue was the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, and I think they’ll have the audio link up soon.

Steven’s interview was a lot like his book – full of previously untold anecdotes and stories that rounded out pieces of Google’s history that many of us only dreamt of knowing about. When I was reporting my book,The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture, I had limited access to folks at Google, and *really* limited access to Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Levy had the opposite, spending more than two years inside the company and seeing any number of things that journalists would have killed to see in years past.

The result is a lively and very detailed piece of reporting about the inner workings of Google. But I was a bit disappointed with the book in that Steven didn’t take all that new knowledge and pull back to give us his own analysis of what it all meant. I asked him about this, and he said he made the conscious decision to not editorialize, but rather lay it all out there and let the reader draw his or her own conclusions. I respect that, but I also know Steven has really informed opinions, and I wish he’d give them to us.

What I took away from In the Plex was a renewed respect for the awesome size and scope of Google’s infrastructure, as well as its ambition. Sometimes we forget that Google is more likely than not the largest manufacturer of computers in the world, and runs the largest single instance of computing power in the world. It’s also one of the largest collectors and analyzers of data in the world. All of this has drawn serious scrutiny, but I don’t think even the regulators really grok how significant Google’s assets are. They should all read Steven’s book.

Levy only grazes the surface of Google’s social blindness, unfortunately, and due to timing could only mention Page’s ascendancy to CEO in his epilogue. But his reporting on how the China issue played out is captivating, as are the many details he fills out in Google’s early history. If you’re fascinated by Google, you’ve got to add this one to your library.