Monday 11 July 2011

How not to draw a map

A great example of how breaking a trusted convention can make things a tad confusing. Maybe it is just me, but I spend at least 20 seconds staring at this wondering what country I was looking at.

Friday 8 July 2011

Data Mines

By the end of the decade data mines will be common place and like the great gold rush of the 1850's people will flock to this industry. A combination of luck and hard work will allow some to earn a living and a few to make a fortune.

We're rapidly digitising and moving every aspect of our work and personal lives into the cloud.
Over time our ability to organise and control this information will become increasingly challenged.

Over the years you can guarantee a proportion of this information
will be lost, discarded or simply forgotten, but the nice thing with digital information is it is rarely physically destroyed. Just the ability to access it is lost.

The vast majority of this inaccessible information will be rubbish, old documents, photos and general digital junk, but some will be valuable and some might well be worth a fortune.

In the next decade we will reach a tipping point, when it becomes worth mining this rubbish to find the nuggets of digital gold hidden within.

And then sell them back to their owners or more likely the highest bidder.