Information - Man(agement) :: Data Mining :: Psychology :: Future

Naked we are
when we come to this world
A first photo is up
on name.blogger dot hot

Smart ass posts on
hack-forum dot gully dot net
is it wrong o_^? to express
your political bet?

Stupid groups joined on facebook
or on AbmahnVZ
Awkward feeling
explaining the profiles to Matt

Once in business
you hope,
work and think like a tank
Feet make steps,
steps form trails

…

Every doubleclick noted,
matched and sorted and stored
Yeah! Those harddisks indeed
never ever get bored!

Naked we are
yet again, once again
when we set off to go
that untraceable track

The last picture is taken
for forensics and stuff
Information can’t ever
be really ENOUGH!

What lasts is an image
yet blurry and gray
that gets sharper and flashy
once the heir gets the key

Google’s personal_healthcare_gmail_brainwave_ID
gets an upgrade to version Generation_2.b

(c) or something by Iwan Uswak

On Tuesday I attended a conference “Trendtag” which is hosted by “Trendbüro” a leading german trend (and future) research company. This years theme was “Karma-Capitalism _ Values instead of Prices”.

One of the speakers was Josephine Green - Head of the Trends and Strategy division at Philips Design. She spoke about the great impact that web 2.0 had on the industry. Since everybody can easily find information about products on the web and discuss them in an adequate community or network, the former consumer becomes a user of a product who gets involved into the production cycle and than becomes a co-producer.

Somewhere in the speech Ms. Green asked the audience to please come up with a better term for this new kind of “user co-producer” wich would not be burdened with the negative connotation which comes with the word consumer. In 1980 published book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler coined the term prosumer, but as you see it contains the unbeloved term consumer and can nowadays also be interpreted as professional consumer.
So I took the challange and after 5 minutes of thinking and writing I had the very simple but appealing idea of calling them us produser wich is apperantly a combination of producer and user and can not be confused with a professional user because of the “d” in between

In the 6th minute I got a little depressed because I recalled that we live in the age of google and sure there would be somebody who had the same idea before me. But anyway I thought the idea was good enough to go and speak about it with Ms. Green.
She liked it and maybe she’ll use it now in her speeches rather then such monstrous combinations like “user and co-producer”.

Here I’ve got to give credit to somebody who seems to be the first person who used the term produser on the net, Dr. Axel Bruns. Hm.. nice site. I’ll stay a little longer and explore ..

Sometimes it does pay off to visit some boring lectures. There you have alot of time to think of great ideas. Todays boring lecture resulted in a very amusing google-trends query.

Google trends for “uni” and “sex” in Germany

Pay attention to the peaks and anti-peaks around the new year. There is defintely a negative correlation between the number of searchqueries for “Sex” and “Uni” (Abbreviation for University)