Life, mashed up

February 13th, 2009 by mhjones

I live for moments of clarity, when all those passing thoughts and observations suddenly collide and create something new. And this time it was during a chance encounter on ustream.tv, the free video channel community.

One of my twitter buddies had linked to a test broadcast by ABC personality James Valentine. He was in a radio studio with an engineer (off air) and trying to figure out how to possible weave a live video feed into his radio show.

And here we were, some 92 people who had caught wind of the experiment and buzzed by to see what the fuss was about. James was engaging directly with the assembled onlookers. He wanted to get the sound working. Technical stuff. As an aside, it was fun to discover one of the ustream participants was an old friend who I’d not seen for years – the online equivalent of bumping into someone in the street.

Meanwhile, I had other stuff happening while ustream’s live comments unfolded. I was glancing at my twitter stream (you can find me here, btw), reading email, doing some online research ahead of a social media workshop I was to host the following day, synching my ipod and smartphone. Just your regular Joe with an digital attention deficit disorder.

And so amid all this digital noise, my thoughts randomly turned to this abstract idea they call the semantic web. In simplistic terms, theory says online tools and services are maturing to give us a sophisticated layer of services that automate common functions, and fill in the blanks when we have to do stuff.

An example: Google Calendar now automatically creates a map when you create an appointment and plug the location address details into the “where” field. Simple, but very useful. But my digital multitasking scenario is even simpler (in theory). The semantic web has a long road ahead before it’s considered “mainstream”. In the meantime, we have us - you and me.

We are the aggregators, the gatekeepers, live human services that take streams of data that represent life and mash them up. Sometimes we share the product of our digital mashing in the form of blogs, tweets and facebook entries. At other times we sit back from our digital TV screen, sorry, “computer monitor”, and simply muse.

This, I suggest, is what real life on the web looks like for many of us. Ordinary folk take digital content, unconciously treat it as liquid and mash it up. And guess what, sometimes it tastes incredible. Other times you gag and spit it out. A lot like life itself really.

Tagged: Aussie media, New media, Social media, Twitter
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