photo: house of sims

photo houseofsims

Dash Chang had written these five things in the comment section of this blog post. I asked if I could use what he said on my own blog, because every one of them got me thinking about the future of digital. Yes, it’s all shifting fast. Yes, it’s impossible to predict where things are going. But does that mean we shouldn’t try?  What does the future hold? I’m up for the challenge of trying to figure it out. Anyone want to join me?

The five things:

1. The web is morphing faster than anyone pundit can comprehend. Think blind men and the elephant. The Software Platforms supersite crowd-sources and tracks over 200 platforms like Google Apps, AJAXAPI, MapAPI, etc. That’s probably 10% of the available platforms on the web.

2. User attention is shifting fast. One report shows that social networks, with all its variations like Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, disqus, etc has passed email for user time and frequency.

3. Analytics quickly lose relevance. If you can’t see the whole, how can you program the algorithms to track what’s relevant?

4. Without relevant data, how do pundits forecast the future?

5. Intuition rules in this state of chaos. But with millions forecasting the future state of the web, the chances for anyone to be right declines. As a past econometrician, we had a saying. If you don’t know the answer, forecast often. If you’re right, tell the world. If you’re wrong, forecast again.

Comments, as always, are welcome.