The LexisNexis deal is particularly intriguing. Back in 2003 a number of corporate social networking applications were launched, notably Spoke, VisiblePath, and Contact Network Corporation. I knew all the players well, and Spoke was in fact the Gold Sponsor of the Living Networks Forum I ran in New York in December 2003. At the time there was one other significant player which was in a similar space, which was InterAction CRM software, owned by Interface. The CRM software was primarily sold to legal firms, where it had a strong presence. Its functionality included a “who knows whom” function, so that lawyers could find out who in their firm knew people at client or prospect firms. As with all the other corporate social networking applications, this included a high degree of user choice on what personal contact information was made available.

In December 2004 LexisNexis, the largest provider of legal information, acquired Interface, making InterAction CRM part of its suite of offerings. Since then LexisNexis has very actively acquired software companies, notably VisualFiles in case management, Juris in pratice management, and Axxia in backoffice legal solutions, repositioning itself far beyond being an information provider.

Given the current pace of announcements from LinkedIn, we can expect them to be highly visible by business users across the web. This swathe of announcements is starting to widen the gap between how LinkedIn and Facebook are being perceived used. Certainly the demographics and uses of LinkedIn suggest it could become significantly more valuable than Facebook, if it indeed becomes entrenched into business applications. Last month’s fund-raising by LinkedIn valued the company at $1 billion, compared to a nominal valuation for Facebook of $15 billion (though anecdotally in off-market transactions closer to $5 billion).

More importantly, these kinds of steps are making professional social networking commonplace, beginning to bring in even some of the later adopters in the business world. There is immense value from effective professional social networking tools, and right now LinkedIn is definitely in the lead to take a large proportion of the value in this space. However leads can quickly erode. Facebook, by more aggressively segmenting its use into business and personal applications, could be a real contender, however this doesn’t seem to be its current strategic focus. This space will be extremely interesting to watch. We can expect that in a year or so from now that professional social networking applications start to become true platforms for business interaction.

Disclosure: LexisNexis is a client from my work as a professional speaker. I spoke at a LexisNexis function in London for IT Directors of large law firms on the future of professional services and technology. In the lead-up to the event, LexisNexis UK Managing Director Josh Bottomley and I co-wrote an article on Strategy in a networked world for professional service firms.

To provide some context, the Powerhouse is specifically branded as a science and design museum, implicitly being about technology and it's impact on people's lives. It's worth looking at the excellent online resources section of the Powerhouse Museum website, which provides value to many people who never visit the museum. I've previously written abouut the very interesting Web 2.0-style initiatives of the Museum (and listed them in the Top Australian Web 2.0 applications), which among other features enables user tagging of the museum's collection. In a number of cases visitors to the website have corrected or provided more detailed information on the museum's collection, exemplifying how to tap collective wisdom.

The session raised many interesting questions and thoughts for me. I haven't been significantly involved with museums in the past, and was struck by many of the issues raised. The points below represent my perspectives as well as reflections on issues raised by people at forum. While the issues below were raised in the context of museums in areas like science, technology, and design, I think they apply across most kinds of museum.

Below are fourteen key issues in the future of museums.

What is a museum?
On the face of it, a museum records and makes accessible artefacts the past that have cultural value. The curatorial process is one of showing people things that enrich them. Museums need to have a clear idea of why they exist. In most cases (in addition to any financial imperatives) the objective is to benefit society, by educating and creating culturally richer and more well-rounded members of society.

Entertainment vs. education and onto experience.
Entertainment and education are quite different intents, but they can be integrated to achieve both aims. Certainly the demand from younger people has shifted strongly to only paying attention if content is truly entertaining. Beyond that, museums are fundamentally about providing experiences. People will seek engaging and powerful experiences, and if museums can provide them, their can fulfil their roles.

Speed of response.
Exhibitions are a slow medium, often taking 6 months or far more to put together. This means that any exhibit will be historical rather than truly contemporary. As people grow used to a faster informational cycle, ways of bringing together information quickly in a meaningful way is often required to engage people.

Being credible and authoritative.
In a world of infinite information, people are looking for credible sources. The brand and identity of a museum can assist in being a preferred source of information.

Physical vs. Virtual.
A museum is in almost all cases a physical space with physical exhibits. Yet access can also be provided online, including in three dimensional worlds. It is not a question of choosing between them, or even doing both. Rather the issue is how to integrate both physical and virtual so they complement each other.

Potential for geolocational tagging.
As a specific form of integrating the physical and virtual, I think geolocation is a very useful technology. This can for example enable visitors to geo-tag exhibits, making their comments visible to others moving through the physical space. Video glasses or mobile devices can allow people to pick up on and add to conversations about what they are seeing and interacting with.

Engaging younger generations.
Today schoolchildren going on a museum visit often do their reports by typing notes and taking pictures on their mobile phone. However they are far from passive consumers, and unless you allow them to be active in engaging with content, you will lose them.

Getting museum experts to interface directly with users.
The existing interface between the knowledge of the museum staff and users is the exhibit. Social media and social networks are ways to enable this more direct connection, interaction, and knoweldge sharing.

Energizing the community.
Because museums touch so many schoolchildren, they have an opportunity to engage them far beyond their visits. MIT's ThinkCycle, which takes an open source approach to designing solutions to problems thaat touch many underprivileged people.

Helping people to answer new and important questions.
Therapeutical cloning, genetically modified food, embryonic genetic modification, are all new technologies that we as individuals and a society must work out how to respond. A museum can help people to understand these issues to help people to make up their own minds in an informed way.

Moving from gatekeepers to enabling access and building communities.
Not so long ago museums were essentially gatekeepers, choosing from all of the wonderful things they have access to, which will be on display. Now that access can be provided digitally, the issue becomes more one of making these valuable resources more accessible and visible, and building communities to share perspectives.

Museums as media organizations.
During the discussions it struck me that museums are basically media organizations, providing and editing (i.e. curating) content. Exactly the same issues apply, including that of whether to control or open out the editorial process.

From interacting with exhibits to interacting with people.
A great interactive exhibit is one that makes people visiting the museum to interact with each other. There are many fabulous technologies that can take the old push-button style of interactive exhibits into an entirely new dimension. However building live and asynchronous social networks on many levels is really where interactivity needs to go. Both stimulating and enabling conversations is where museum interactivity needs to go.

I think the issues facing museums are extremely interesting, and relevant across a far broader domain, as they fundamentally deal with the intersection of the virtual and physical in our experiences. Despite the rise of the virtual, there is extraordinary value in physical artefacts. To move into the future we absolutely need to understand and draw on our past. Physical objects are the crystallized manifestations of our collective thoughts and history. Museums are on an extraordinary journey which will see many thrive, and often look very different to how they do today.

The list will be launched on 19 June in BRW magazine together with feature stories on the relevance of the leading online applications to business, including on investment, corporate productivity, customer engagement and innovation. It will then be published online on the Future Exploration Network website and my own blog.

A lunch event on the same day at KPMG’s Sydney offices will formally launch the list, including showcases of some of the winners and a panel discussion by leading figures in the Australian scene. Full details of the lunch event, including registration, are coming soon. It will be in a similar format to our full capacity Web 2.0 in Australia last year, though open to everyone instead of invitation-only.

We are again looking for event sponsors. I’ve approached the obvious candidates in the last couple of days but we're open to interest from any organization. Download the event and sponsorship information here or by clicking on the image below.

We currently have over 125 candidates for the list. Please email me or comment below if there are relevant apps that you think I am not aware of. We have information on all of the apps listed last year and those that applied to Vishal Sharma’s Startup Carnival earlier this year and those featured on his startup blog (a great resource!).

I wrote last year about how the dominant platform in technology is shifting to social networks, and the inexorable trend to openness in social networks. It turns out the MySpace and Facebook announcements may not be quite all they seem. Chris Saad of the DataPortability Working Group writes:

Both moves have rightly been attributed as ‘Data Portability’ plays - but neither of them are true ‘DataPortability’ implementations… yet.

Over the coming months it will be our job, at the DataPortability project, to further refine and ratify the DataPortability Best Practices to provide a complete, end-to-end guide that Facebook, Myspace and others can follow. Once properly implemented, all applications on the web will essentially become part of a friction free inter-operable and two way data layer based on open standards.

It will be up to bloggers and other media outlets to keep the pressure on these players to continue to improve their offerings to achieve true compliance based on community recommendations made through the DataPortability project.
Given that DataPortability was only fully launched in January, I think the momentum so far – at least in the social networking space - is excellent. It would be fantastic and quite extraordinary if the major social networks were to have fully embraced the functionality and spirit of DataPortability by now, given the very closed strategies that were being adopted just one year ago.

It really is worth getting perspective on this set of announcements by comparing the landscape with a year ago. The fundamental attitudes and strategies of the social networks have changed, by necessity, driven by user demand. Since the social networks are increasingly the platforms for the entire ecosystem of individual online activities, this rapid shift towards openness (even if it has a further to go) will swiftly diffuse through other applications and across the Wide Open Web.

While the participation and endorsement of large vendors such as MySpace in the DataPortability project is a key part of our overall goals of industry wide user-centric data portability, we’d like to re-iterate that the project is an open, grass-roots initiative. This means that individuals, startups and medium scale companies are just as welcome to join the process and have just as much capacity to influence or even lead the discussions and the outcomes.

This year there will be many announcements of this kind, but this is a particularly important one, both through the visibility of the announcement, and even more importantly the value of what it enables. The millions who are using multiple platforms such as MySpace, Yahoo, Twitter and so on will be able to bring together their activities, and clearly see that we are transcending the closed web. People will begin to understand that the natural format of the web is open, with our activities naturally flowing across applications. Expectations will heighten, and the already rapid pace towards the Wide Open Web will accelerate.

Philip Parker, a professor at INSEAD, is probably doing more than anyone else to push this boundary. An article in the New York Times titled He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work) describes how he has automated the process of creating books and econometric reports, and has built a solid book business on top of this. A YouTube video by Parker (see below) reviews his patent on automated content creation, and describes in detail how this kind of report is automatically generated. It also shows how Parker is automating video and game creation, for example creating educational programs and interactive language teaching tools, which appear at first glance to be very good.

Part of the implication of this is that, if so much content creation can be automated, what will people need to do to create value moving forward? In Parker’s example, an industry forecast report of 250 pages is created in 13 minutes. He sells these kinds of reports for good money, and does well out of it. In many cases the market is too small to justify a person writing the report. However there is no question that a significant part of an analyst’s work can be automated. The boundaries of human value are being pushed further, and this is just the beginning.

We now all know that the economy revolves around conversations. The insights I got from my unstructured conversations with these people was immense. Yet the nature of conversations is that they are - largely - evanescent. At the same time, the extraordinary rise of social media means that the thoughts arising from millions of conversations are now available to the world at large. In fact, many bloggers say that they write mainly for themselves, in capturing some of the interesting things they are seeing and thinking. Trevor Cook is just one example of a blogger who writes notes from all of the conference sessions he attends (including his reflections on our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum) for his own sake, making his blog a repository for personal reference, by the by creating something that others can find useful.

The trouble was, I didn't find time in my intense travel schedule to blog about all of my interesting meetings and conversations. I will probably post a few thoughts on these meetings over the next week or two if I get the chance, but the reality is it's hard to do in a very packed schedule.

All of which brings me to what is I suppose a fairly obvious insight - that humans are more than ever information processing animals, with our evolutionary success dominated by how effective we are at this. We are now deluged with essentially infinite information, and we need to sort through it all, synthesize it, and work out what action to take as a result. Blogs and more instantaneous tools such as Twitter both provide us with far broader inputs than we had before, and also a ready output for what we have processed from these vast information inputs. They are mechanisms that allow us to be far more effective at creating value from information flows than the tools we had at the dawn of this decade.

In my early 20s I imagined that my life’s path might revolve around developing better ways of recording and applying thoughts. I suppose in some ways that’s becoming true. Certainly today I am focused on getting better myself at capturing insights from vast amounts of information, and making something worthwhile from it. In 1996 I wrote Eight Steps to Thriving on Information Overload, which when posted on this blog last year became one of the most popular articles I’ve written. Today I am more focused on the technologies that support better information processing, or perhaps more accurately, using these technologies well. For example, del.icio.us, used with judicious tagging, is a very powerful tool. Tools such as Evernote, TheBrain, Backpack and similar software definitely have an important role to play.

Certainly the new array of social media and Web 2.0 tools can make us far better at information processing, in helping us to create something valuable from our conversations and thoughts. Which means that those who use social media tools well are strongly advantaged. I’m particularly interested in working out effective approaches to capturing what’s most interesting from conversations I have, probably by in some form taking notes as I go that I can then post online, and reference in a variety of ways as I create frameworks and concepts. I’d love to hear how other people do it. For now, I’ll develop my own approaches and share them as I go.

In an economy where value is increasingly based on deep professional knowledge and relationships, it is increasingly valid to ask why professional firms exist. Why don’t professionals practice as individuals, and collaborate with other professionals simply as client situations require it? In fact there is currently a significant shift to professionals working independently or in very small groups. Of course there are a number of good answers to this. Most importantly, the existence of professional firms should facilitate different expertise to be brought together seamlessly to address clients’ issues and create uniquely valuable offerings.

However this is only valid if the firm is well connected internally. Professionals need to be aware of each others’ expertise, and actively bring that together in teams to meet client needs. I have described some of the key issues underlying that in my presentation Tapping Networks to Bring the Best of the Firm to Clients that I did at the Network Roundtable conference last November.

In other words, unless organizations are very well networked, having deep and broad enabling connections across the various practices and locations of the firm, their value can and should be questioned. The individual professionals could well be better off working independently. So the successful and surviving firms of the future will be those that are effectively networked, most likely drawing on social media tools.

[UPDATE:] This TV segment is also available on the NineMSN website in better quality.

While it makes for a nice fun TV segment, I actually think that there is something fundamentally important at work here. As a futurist, one of the most important issues I consider is the evolving relationship between people and technology. Throughout history, that relationship has often been problematic, with notably the Luddites smashing machines, and more recently just about everyone having experienced immense frustration with their computers not doing what they’re supposed to do.

Following the ground laid by Sony’s robotic dog Aibo, Pleo is the first generation of commercial robotic pets that acts so we can form genuine emotional ties with it. I’ve written before about emotional robots such as Paro the seal and been interviewed in Newsday on how emotional robots are used to great effect in therapy and aged care. Pleo has reached the threshold of being a fun and interactive “lifeform” (as the manufacturer Ugobe describes it), and also is highly affordable at US$350 (which may seem expensive for a toy, but is very cheap compared with for example visits to the vet for real live pets).

From this point we will see new generations of robot pets that are increasingly interactive and engaging. My niece Amy looks forward to when we have robot monkeys to swing around the room and play with. A real monkey might be a problem to keep at home, but it becomes feasible if you can switch it at the end of the day. There is still some way to go from animating a flat-footed dinosaur to creating a realistic primate, but we will get there.

Beyond this, robotic pets will be not be just to play with, but tutors, teaching children about the world around them. Those children who have these kinds of robot pets/ teachers in their lives will be advantaged. Of course there is never a substitute for human interaction and genuine love. But if that is complemented by other stimulating and engaging interaction, that’s all for the good.

On one level, this provides a quite staggering depth of visibility into what people are doing, and ultimately who they are as people. I’ve written before about the role of exhibitionism in allowing Web 2.0 to flourish, and this is evident once again in FriendFeed. Of course, it is supposed to be primarily about keeping track of your friends’ rather than strangers’ lives, and the reality is that all of this information is available anyway. It’s just that it has been brought about into one place. Not just that, it is a community itself, allowing comments and other ways to respond to people’s content directly, rather than going back to the source.

While there are other competitors in this space, including SocialThing! (see ReadWriteWeb’s comparison), the availability – and success – of these services is a fundamentally important transition in the online world. The reason why Facebook has been so successful is that it allows people a quick way of keeping in touch with what their friends are up to. Once either all the feeds are available from people’s current social network activities, or people start updating their profiles and activities in a more open format, social networks will be a completely different space.

This whole space is often called “lifestreaming”, describing how all of the information generated in people’s lives is streamed out to be made available. Just over a year ago I wrote about how Emily Chang had created an early implementation of a lifestream. I thought that:

For me, what this suggests is a world in which many people choose to expose all of their activities to the world. Del.icio.us is a great example. People used to favorite websites on their PC. Now many are happy to do it publicly, so other people can look at what they choose to make note of. Very importantly, this exposing of behaviors provides the foundation for Web 2.0, in that it provides input to allow collaborative filtering and the creation of “collective intelligence”. It seems that many people are thinking about and putting the mechanisms in place to expose all that we do, including our activities in socializing, entertainment, work, and more. Clearly not everyone will choose to expose their activities, yet many will – this has been proven over the last few years. From an enterprise perspective, implementing these kinds of exposing mechanisms inside organizations will allow far more effective knowledge work and business processes – but only after substantially new workflow and systems are put in place to synthesize this plethora of valuable information.

I can also see extraordinary implications for how this wealth of information can be used, not least in enabling a far richer degree of collaborative filtering, as I wrote above. Correlating people’s tastes across information, video, music, and more will absolutely help us to identify what will be most interesting to us in new and more powerful ways.