It's just one revolutionary interface after another......

When last we looked in on the Internet-era magazine Fast Company, it was 2005 and the Gruner + Jahr division of Bertelsmann was unloading it.  And we do mean “unload”:  According to the New York Times archives, Chicago’s own Joe Mansueto (Morningstar Inc.) picked up both Fast Company and Inc. for $35 million, leaving G+J with a return of -93% on the $571 million it spent to buy them (from separate owners).

There’s quite a bit more to say about the old Fast Company, but today I’m focusing on the new one because my fellow North Park University trustee Chuck Eklund (@ChazEk on Twitter, if you’re scoring at home) pointed me to this piece:

With newspapers’ traditional business model in free fall, the top media minds at global design firm IDEO (designer of the Apple mouse, consultant to Fortune 500 companies) were asked to imagine: How will we get our news after the traditional model falls apart? Here’s their answer.

via News Flash From the Future: What Will Journalism Look Like? | Fast Company.

Some of what you’ll find at the link are paragraphs that exist largely to live next to the eye-catching art from IDEO (“The next four pages showcase two environments that put the future of news in the context of our daily lives,” says the text cheerfully).  Others of its assertions seem just flat wrong already.  But more than a few of the ideas are more than pie in the sky; they’re actually news flashes from … the present.

Exhibit A: “By analyzing the frequency and content of online conversations, advanced social network analysis tools will help give newshounds access to unlikely networks of experts on the most obscure subjects in the strangest of places.”

Computer scientists are doing this today by analyzing the Twitterstream, for instance.  The output may not be entirely harnessed yet, but the tools are emerging, and I can already see that places like Northwestern’s Intelligent Information Lab have the will – and the hunger to turn data into knowledge – that is required. You can dis, if you like, the recent Harvard study of 300,000 Twitter users that said the median number of tweets for the sample was, ahem, 1 [one], but on the other hand, think about the ease with which 300,000 users can suddenly be not just counted, but analyzed.  Heck, it’s why John McCarthy invented artificial intelligence, right?  (Or was it Charles Babbage? I digress.)

Exhibit B: “Predictive analysis follows us everywhere, and it’s created by more than the major data crunchers … Every time you trash a restaurant or alert the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition about an accident, you contribute to the collective foresight.”

Again, this is happening already thanks to completely routine technology implementations.  Think Mobile Millennium, the project at UC Berkeley that is engaged in getting real-time traffic data from volunteers’ cellphones; think  Skyhook, the service that combines “the unique benefits of GPS, Cell Tower triangulation and Wi-Fi Positioning” and is used by Apple in the iPhone and iPod Touch.  Sure, you may not want to let your friendly neighborhood burglar effortlessly predict that you are going on an extended vacation. But wouldn’t you like to know that nobody is going to a particular restaurant nowadays because it’s too crowded?

It would take the proverbial infinite number of monkeys to retype, let alone blog about, all of the articles and posts on the future of journalism these days.  Indeed, it would take a fairly high percentage of the simian typists just to catalog the thoughtful ones (here’s another one from Mark Potts, by the way).

But let’s not spend so much time imagining the future that we fail to notice what the past has become: the data around which we construct the present, and through which we understand the company we keep.

You may now resume your wait for iPhone 3.0.