Five Ideas That Matter

We’re interested in ways of gleaning new insights from online data, and also in new ways of delivering those insights. So, our ears pricked up when we heard about a recently-launched iPhone application – called “Outbreaks Near Me” – based on MIT’s HealthMap resource.

From HealthMap.com

HealthMap monitors and maps semantic references to various illnesses through news reports and social media channels, giving users a potential early warning of outbreaks. It’s one among a number of interesting health data mashups that have cropped up, including Google Flu Trends – a similar initiative, which bases its findings on search trends, rather than media or blog comment.

Some are sceptical about the utility of these initiatives as standalone tools – false positives are an issue for example in both comment monitoring and search data. This scepticism is often justified, but we’re mainly interested in their contribution to metatrend analysis. Their value really becomes apparent when you look at combining the outputs from many different data sources together.

We can measure flu trends now by a combination of social media listening and aggregated search trends, but what else can we add to the mix? There have been successful attempts in the past to identify outbreaks through pharmacy sales data, and in the future technologies like FLIR (forward looking infrared cameras) might also have a contribution to make. More data, tighter insights, better value.

We want to work out whether people in the developed economies and maybe also in not so developed economies have moved so far away the idea of democratisation as a motivating factor, that we might as well drop the term.

A yes or a no to that question is equally interesting.  Below is our first stab at understanding it. We know, we know, we have a long way to go but every journey starts with…..

We see democratisation in web conversations as very much as an emerging meme that may not actually pass the emergent phase.

The long term trend towards a more democratic way of conducting relationships (Government to citizen, business to customer) is an established part of the intellectual fabric.

The first surprise, looked at from a Meta-trend standpoint, however is that ideas around democratisation get very little currency within the blogosphere and only limited currency on Google. This is particularly the case with changes to work hierarchies. The flattening of hierarchy, and with it the development of a more democratic workplace, is surprisingly under-played on the web, despite being a buzz in academic business literature.

A search phrase like “democratizing work” , though it gets approximately 250 Technorati returns for the past three months, are not at all relevant to the workplace but are more likely to cover “making democratisation work” rather than “democratizing work”. Technorati returned no posts that used the tag “democratization of work” in the past three months.

The idea that gets real traction on the web is the idea of collaboration. Ranging from inter-firm collaboration. industry-wide collaboration and University-industry collaboration and collaboration tools, collaboration has considerable purchase on the minds of people in business (strangely once again it is Singapore and India that lead in collaboration search terms in the short term – the past 12 months). On the Timeline, references to collaboration during the past decade outnumber all previous references by a factor of 4:1, though this is obviously in part because the density of data is also increasing.

Nonetheless, when you look at trends, the way that democratisation is making sense to people, the way they are absorbing and exchanging ideas around it, is through the language of collaboration.