Making Globalization Work For You! January 7, 2010

So it was never my intention for this to turn into a blog on globalization but more a blog about the ‘state of the internet’ itself.

The concept of time is something we have created and it drives many of our lives, time management is considered an important skill and despite the best efforts of many wanna be scientists no one has managed to create a working time-travel capable Delorean.

The internet however does offer potential for us to capture and harness other peoples ‘free time’ for our own productivity.  There are millions of ‘Making money online’ schemes some are legitimate but most involve luring people to ads or a combination of pyramid type referral schemes that promise you’ll get rich if you recruit a certain amount of people.

Amazon.com’s Amazing Turk is a great online marketplace where you can essentially buy someone else’s spare time and have them work for you.  Think about it you could theoretically contract out your homework, essays, presentations by creating Human Intelligence Tasks and have them available for competitive bidding.  While the prospect of earning $2.00 might now appeal to a high browed American for those in developing countries $2.00 can be a lot of money.

So the question is, is it possible to copy this type of approach to the real world, think about the large proportion of people in the workforce who will soon be retiring, the value of their time will decrease significantly compared to those still working so if only we could recruit more of them to join Amazon Turk or a more practical offline version?

Welcome to the middle January 5, 2010

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In short the internet has evolved to become what I would call the most influential ‘hyper-globalizing’ invention since the printing press.

For 15 years now I’ve been surfing ‘the net’ watching it grow from the early days of text based browsers (Lynx) to the revolution in browsing webpages that included images (Netscape) and then seemingly overnight the sheer number of internet users seems to have multiplied exponentially.

I don’t think anyone could have predicted the spectacular way in which the internet as we know has evolved into a center for communication, commerce and even politics. The dot com boom created overnight millionaires and led thousands to snatch up domain names in the hope of one day cashing in.

Herbert Marshall McLuhan, a fellow Canadian coined the phrase ‘the medium is the message’ and wrote a book titled The Medium is the Message: An Inventory of Effects in 1967.

McLuhan adopted the term “message” to denote the effect each medium has on the human sensorium, taking inventory of the “effects” of numerous media in terms of how they “message” the sensorium.

If the medium is the message and the content is the audience then what does the internet say about our society?

This post is titled Welcome to the middle because essentially that is where we find ourselves, the early days of the internet have passed and we still don’t know where it will end (if it will at all) so that leaves us in the middle able only to speculate over what happens next.

PS. Google has unveiled it’s new Nexus One Phone today, anyone plan on buying one?

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