Mike Butcher

At the recent Emerging Technologies 2002 conference in Santa Clara, California, some of the chatter in the halls among the delegates included the biological frameworks for computation (using ants’ brains), hackers beating entrepreneurs, and the future of ideas. The kinds of discussions that emerge from a gathering of intelligent and technologically savvy people who like thinking about the future.

But I’m afraid, dear reader, that I’m about to disabuse you of any suggestion that I was actually there. I wasn’t. So how do I know what went on outside the conference sessions; what the juicy gossip was over the lattes in the mid-morning break? One word: blogs.

Blogs are usually a Web page filled with someone’s thoughts, rattled out as if they were scribbling notes on paper while adding hyperlinks to Web sites of interest. Some blogs are about business. Some are personal. But blogging was largely popularised after New Yorkers with blogs posted their experiences during the September 11 tragedy.

Blogs are the most recognisable online manifestation of what has been described as a new movement, dubbed “Journalism 3.0” by the respected commentator Dan Gilmour of the San Jose Mercury News. He described how ’some day soon, there will be a major, newsworthy event in Japan and there will be 400 photos taken of it in the first minute by cam-equipped cellphones – and we will have 400 visual perspectives of that event from the ‘former audience’. How do I know he said that? I just flicked through a blog about it, put up by a delegate who heard him speak.

It’s this kind of delegate and speaker interplay which shows up ET2002 to be almost a model for the way not just future conferences will be run, but how loud the clamour of blogging has become.

With virtually every delegate carrying a laptop with a wireless LAN card, and most of them writing a daily blog, you couldn’t help but get almost immediate audience feedback. Even before a speaker has sat down, half the audience might blog some questions, which are replied to literally in minutes via the speaker’s own blog.

Of course, nothing can replace the good old-fashioned question from the floor. But the newest tech conferences, and blogging in general, could be said to be creating the kinds of conversation talked about in the Cluetrain Manifesto, the book that took business by storm when it was published in December 2000.

In it, markets were now ‘conversations’. The Internet meant broadcast, and PR could no longer rule the dialogue between consumers and business. In fact, you might say the conversational blog is now the manifestation of that prediction.

Are blogs by experts in market niches like technology, who offer their thoughts to the world for free, harbingers of a changing relationship between business and markets? Perhaps it’s too early to stamp the humble blog with the moniker ‘corporate giant-killer’.

But as blogs proliferate, the time is coming when many of us will be turning them before Bloomberg or the BBC.

The prize is a future of mass participation in the local affairs of the nation, instead of the lacklustre voter turnout that’s long become the norm. But although a world where we vote on everything from politics to monetary union with Europe via a PC, TV or mobile phone seems inevitable, society at large may have other ideas.

In this year’s local elections around seven areas will be testing different methods, including electronic voting via screens placed in public kiosks, text messaging, the Internet, and using the keypad on a normal phone line.

The trials are to address the alarming drop in voter turnout at last year’s general election, to less than 60%, the lowest since 1918. Worse still, in local elections just 31.2% voted in 1999. Robin Cook, chairman of the cabinet’s e-democracy committee, argues that the trials could lead to a way of making voting easier and more appealing to younger voters, who think the existing system primitive.

Already people are getting used to voting electronically. The huge polls for TV shows Pop Idol and

Big Brother are evidence that the public actually gets quite excited about e-voting, and has done so in massive numbers by telephone, SMS and online.

But outside the freer world of TV voting, several hurdles remain in the realm of digital democracy. Online voting would certainly attract ‘black-hat’ hackers interested, or perhaps even paid, to influence the results. And electronic systems have to be able to prevent and detect identity theft – harder when the voter is hidden from view on a PC at home. The Liverpool pilot, which is being run for the Government by the US firm Election.com, will attempt to get round this by using numbered passwords and PIN numbers sent in sealed envelopes to voters’ homes.

The problem throws-up the issue of digital identity, and hence the old and politically difficult problem of identity cards in general. In Europe it’s commonplace to carry an ID card. In Sweden you can’t even use your credit card without showing your ID. But in Britain we’ve never acquired the taste.

David Blunkett, the home secretary, is consulting on introducing an ‘entitlement card’ for people to gain access to public services, but this is bitterly opposed by civil rights campaigners. For the moment the jury is out on whether this would be a carrot big enough to persuade us to start carrying a card. Furthermore, the rise of the extreme right wing in politics may even put paid to e-voting if there’s even a hint of a chance that online voting could be easily manipulated.

But until the Government gets serious about ID cards, which are bound to have a digital ID aspect, it can’t get serious about e-voting. And that’s a political issue, not a technological one.

First published:

http://www.nma.co.uk/nmz/story.asp?id=234240