Lessig 23C3

Antony Mayfield's post linked to an interesting video by Mr Lessig who's some sort of law/internet/academic guru by the looks of this Wikipedia post. I've not watched the whole video yet, but he begins by showing some video mash-ups, and talking of a generation growing with a new literacy, the literacy of being able to manipulate, edit create and reorganise a staggering range of multimedia-content with great ease.

Most of what he shows in the first 10 mins is entertaining, but really just a glimpse of the creative outputs that remain barely harnessed globally and what these media editing/sharing tools can and will produce. I'm thinking here of a blog post I read (I'll link it in when I remember) that predicted medical search would drive the progress of search, at least the current algorithmic behemoths and their quality scores. This subject gained front-page press in the UK freesheets and tabloids late in 2006 - and the need for impartial and accurate SERPs will surely be driven forward when accuracy depends on the diagnosis of disease and preservation of human life, presuming that is that all results providers truly seek to "do no evil" - let's hope that is indeed so.

Google is a data fiend, a veritable whore of our data-linked lives. If you've used a selection of their services regularly at any point the usage patterns, behavioural, intellectual insights and propensity for creative interpretation and manipulation of data from Blogger, Google Search, YouTube, Maps, News, Analytics etc. is mind-boggling.

Anyhow, I'll comment further on Lessig's hour-long speech when I've got around to watching it all.