One more powerful piece on the lack of foresight and sensitivities exhibited by the current healthcare professionals and patients when it come to dying. The practice of needlessly and fruitlessly pre-longing terminal patients’ lives with no regard for the quality of lives was also covered here.

The UK is more than capable of making good drama series. Although some self-reflection is never a bad thing.

What the Kosovo recognition means for other restive regions in the world.

Moving in the opposite direction as its Atlantic cousin: Britain looks to decentralize health care.

Milestone for Russia indeed. A town looks past his skin colour and elects a black mayor.

All those knowledge, skills and war stories, what happens once people retire? Not everyone can nor want to go into teaching, how do we capture and aggregate the knowledge?

Japan does love a craze.

Applying the type-A vigilance and zeal to parenting has created a whole industry that’s come up with the kind of ingenious products that warms up baby wipes.

UAE basically declares BlackBerry enemy of the state.

A generation of Little Emperors now part of the Ant Tribe, what does it mean for China’s future?

The most over-represented nationalities on Twitter are the Brazilian and the Japanese.  And over a quarter of Twitter users in the US is African American.  Our world isn’t flat, it’s just more densely interconnected in certain parts than others.

The writer makes the argument that more security doesn’t necessarily make us safer.  But doing nothing will most certainly make us less safe, because inaction is not an option, right?

Chop Chop Square in Riyadh. This is how public beheadings are done in Saudi Arabia.

The man behind Ryanair. Some of his bright food for thought include: fat people should pay for their seats if it wasn’t for the long time it’d take to weigh them, and business-class customers would receive oral sex.

Downturns discourage new flows of migrants but does not spur the mass return of existing ones.

Would’ve been a good piece to read before watching The Last Station. Tolstoy’s death resulted in one of the first mass media frenzies.

Some life strategies.

Is this really any surprise given what we already know about North Korea?

Business
Facebook doesn’t have privacy problems. It has positioning risks.
blog.edgeideas.com- The recent brouhaha around Facebook’s privacy policies — the complications, the simplifications, the push, and the push-back — is a side-story. The real issue is positioning. …
All you need to know about the precious metal from UBS
Zero Hedge- The market consensus expects China to increase its gold holdings over the coming years. …
Auburn U. plans engineering campus in China
chronicle.com- Auburn University has begun making preliminary plans to open an engineering campus in China, with a goal of developing a full-fledged branch campus that would serve undergraduate and graduate students. …
Does the world need more than one Twitter?
gigaom.com- Can one company do what Twitter is trying to do? Could one company handle all the email in the world? …

Finance & econ
It is time for Asia to rewrite the rules of capitalism
FT- Suggesting a future in which economic policy is framed around limits, restraint and restrictions is to invite controversy, but Asian governments must start down this road. They have no choice. …
The average investor is his own worst enemy
forbes.com- Humans seem to be hardwired to expect success and to regard themselves as above average. …
European growth is not sustainable so get used to higher unemployment rates
bondvigilantes.co.uk- It looks like Europe is going to have to get used to a period of high unemployment, sub-trend consumption and weak economic growth. …
Implicit compensation
blogs.law.harvard.edu- Executives whose trading freedom is increased experience reductions in other forms of pay to offset the potential gains from trading. …
Why plans for early fiscal tightening carry global risks
FT- Far from being stabilising, premature fiscal retrenchment threatens destabilisation of the world economy, should be seen as an act of mercantilist warfare upon the US. …

Rest of the good stuff
How to keep someone with you forever
issendai.livejournal.com- Your lover or employee will stay only as long as she wants to under those systems, and you want to keep her even when she doesn’t want to stay. How do you pin her to your side, irrevocably, permanently, and perfectly legally? You create a sick system. …
Red-hot robots
spectrum.ieee.org- Roxxxy and Rocky, the world’s first sex robots, are ready to leave the lab. …
Football: A dear friend to capitalism
The Guardian- Like some austere religious faith, the game determines what you wear, whom you associate with, what anthems you sing and what shrine of transcendent truth you worship at. …
Legislation won’t close gender gap in sciences
NY Times- Given all the progress made in math by girls, who now take more math and science classes than boys and get better grades, differences in aptitude are not the primary cause of the gender gap in academic science. …

I’m cross-posting a pretty link-rich post from our corporate blog, in case you are interested in the Shanghai World Expo and want more info.

Short background: it’s a 6-month long extravaganza kicking off May 1st in Shanghai.  It’s  such a big deal inside the country that citizens of Shanghai are getting a few days off work as a way of clearing people off the street and channeling all resources into maintaining order and ensuring smooth running of the event.
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All week here on Viewsflow, we are following the 2010 World Expo in China.

• Beginners’ guide to Shanghai by CNN: 51 things you don’t know yet about the city, and the best Expo opening parties!

• Flickr photostreams of various Pavilions are here, and the official Expo site introduces five themes of the exhibition.

• First impressions on the ground from the Shanghaiist: Pure mayhem and madness, see what a lined up crowd looks like, and Little Mermaid big draw for Denmark.

• Pavilion overview from ChinaSmack: Computer generated graphics of what various pavilions look like.  Walk through one, and walk through two.

• Pictures of when trial runs turn away crowds courtesy of LostLaowai.

• Here are some of the news outlets covering the Expo: NPR World Expo, ABC News, CNN Go Asia, Shanghai Daily, XinhuaNet, SINA.com, CCTV, Shanghaiiist

And don’t forget to follow our Twitter account as we update you with real time links all week on the Expo, and follow our Twitter Expo list too!

The Economist explores the world of social networking in a special issue, everything from Twitter to Yammer.

When I’m not blogging, my day job is at Viewsflow – a startup that aggregates economic and financial analysis.  We also have an impressive technology platform behind it that obsessively tracks all those that dare to leave their footprints in blogs and the Twitter-sphere.

Impressed yet?  Or maybe just a bit scared?

Anyway, with all that Apple iPad madness and all, at Viewsflow, we’ve decided to give away an Apple iPad in the coming three weeks.

I’m pretty sure working for Viewsflow will disqualify me from ever winning, so readers of my blog, go forth and snatch the prize!  Seriously, I am giving up my wages for this, go get it!

Seriously.

Here’s the link where you can find another link to sign up for daily our newsletter (or just click and sign up here directly), which is what you gotta do to quality.

Here’s more about Viewsflow.  And, against all odds, we are actually based in London.

Many have argued that content aggregation is the way to go for the internet.  Some have gone so far as to claim “aggregate, or be aggregated”.  So far, no one’s disputing the inevitability of such a future.  Under the radar, WSJ owns All Things Digital, and NTY runs Blogrunner.  Both are experimenting with those ventures to hopefully work out some kind of business model.

This is done, despite venom spouted in the background that claim those aggregators tapeworms or parasite, siphoning off the hard labour of old media whose only mistake is playing by the rules.  Aggregators in the meantime, have taken off.

Digg started the trend off, by promoting a system of voter-sourced news that is real time, streaming, and democratic. A slew came on board soon after.  Stumbleupon, Reddit, Sphinn, and many topic and industry-specific Diggs have sprung up to varying degrees of success.  In the last few years, Twitter – broadcasted in 140 characters or less, is the service that keeps on giving.  It is now becoming the tool people turn to break news, do status updates, and my favourite use: alternative social bookmarking service.

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The news media is now scrambling to find a feasible business plan that could replace its print readers, and to stop the cannibalization of its content, indexed and marketed by Google, without any monetary compensation.  Media moguls have blasted everything from Google, bloggers, to those aggregators for egregious use of their content.  The proponents have told those old guards to bugger off. Those old men retorted by threatening to cut access.

This carries about as little weight as the paper it’s printed on. People that used to make a decent living from writing and reporting, have of course, been squeezed between a rock and a hard place.  No one likes to talk to themselves. So the goal of any self-respecting reporter is to get exposure, and engage with readers.  Blogging has taken much of the prestige of reporting away. Nowadays, anyone who has the patience to sit down and write may win a sizeable audience in due course.

Reporters write to spread ideas, to inform, to shock, to educate, and to communicate.  To threaten to barricade their writings behind a paid wall does little to solve the problem, as most will sooner have their breadline cut off, than their reputation and influence diminished, to which the accessibility of their work is based upon.  The world of blogging has opened a floodgate to give voice to academics and those previously toiling behind closed doors, whose impact has been so profound that the CSM has bravely argued that without special skills, reporters are not worth the high pay that many had taken for granted.

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Having grown up in the digital age, I take the spread of the information and all that is intangible online – from downloads of every possible kind, to the free and somewhat socialist dissemination of information on the web, for granted.  For the same reason that anti-piracy campaigns have largely failed to resonate with my generation and ones that follow mine, to even suggest the idea of paying for online activities, no matter how crucial it might be (i.e. Facebook), is blasphemy. So the subscription model is pretty much out, unless you pedal the kind of information that people would be willing to pay for its timeliness and exclusivity (i.e. real time financial news).

That is, of course, where ingenuity comes in. Since the start of web 2.0, various parties have been exploring and experimenting with feasibilities of various business models.  The most popular and successful ones: the freemium models exercised by a lucky few, and the ad-supported model by the rest.

For most newspapers, the freemium model was first attempted, before most relented and opened the flood gate.  The thing with information is that its relevance and value is inversely proportional to its time on the market, and directly proportional to its reach.  The more time lapses, the less valuable the information becomes.  And the less people that reach it, the less relevance it holds.  Thus for any serious disseminator of information, it makes no sense to fence people off from the work of your talented writers.  Alternatively, they figured the advertising dollars they will get for eyeballs will eventually make up for the loss in subscription revenue.  After all, newspapers have always gotten bybased on the triangular relationship amongst the publishers, its readers, and the advertisers.

As economy soured, this heavily advertising reliant model got strenuously tested, and many will not survive. Some also doubted the long-term sustainability of a business model whose survival depends on (sometimes) highly intrusive messages that readers disdain. A new generation of advertisers have found limited results from interrupting people’s online presence. Many are now spending their dollars to establish their own online presence, instead of depending on media publications to disseminate its messages.

Now back to the idea of content aggregation and how they are supposed to save media. The idea is simple: nobody, not even the NYT, WSJ, or Washington Post, can come up with close to 5% of what one individual might want to consume in any given day.  Our taste of media must be tailored, targeted, and fitting with our individual taste and preferences.  Thus the age of RSS feeds and personalizable start pages emerged.  Everything from Netvines to Streamy to Skygrid have emerged to provide streaming, personalized information.

But is this a fair system?  And more importantly, is this a sustainable system? Aggregators work with the assumption that there will always be those that will produce the content available for aggregation – an assumption not altogether unrealistic in the short run. But should content providers become financially frustrated and either get out of the business of news reporting or join the aggregation party in the not so far off future, the value chain may become ever so constrained. So will we be left with the scenario of bare bone newswire services, an army of amateur and professional bloggers relying on advertising money for their livelihood, and endowments and grants for the more labour and dollar intensive investigative reports?

If and when aggregators find a feasible path to profitability, then surely, the content providers that collectively contribute to the success of such services will demand a piece of the action.  A way to fairly and equitably distribute the gains will hopefully emerge by then.

picture source: myvictoriansecret

In 1966, the Harvard Business Review introduced the idea of “paperless clearing houses”, in reference to the emergence of digital data storage. Since then, the microprocessor industry emerged, personal computers were introduced, and before we knew it, everyone is connected by the web. The delivery and the digitization of data is no longer a fantasy.

But the implementation and eventual realization of this inevitable “paperless” world, however, is taking longer than expected. Ten years ago, we were told that every participant in the information age is marching towards the digital world in more or less uniformity. But despite the obvious technological leaps, we are still far from a paperless world.

Paperless for some

So far, we have managed to scrape a layer off of perfunctory bookkeeping. In areas such as online tax filing and the digitization of our numerous monthly financial statements, the quick and convenient source-to-records applications have surely saved both cost and time for all parties involved. In the case of communication, personal letters are replaced by the superior email deliveries. In those cases, paper as the medium of communication has been eliminated.

Now with various access points for information, cheap storage devices, accessible scanners and various other forms of affordable technology, all of which are competing to drive paper out of our lives for good, what is the outlook for paper?

Professional uses

The term “paper-pusher” was coined for a reason. Knowing that, it should not be surprising that paper is far from disappearing, particularly within some of the older professions. In legal and business communities, for example, cyber security risks, as well as legal concerns still mandate paper record-keeping for a period of time.

From my own experience in a corporate setting, printing is not something you can move away from quickly. Most businesses operate from desktops, thus short of sharing your desktop – which many more tech savvy businesses do on a regular basis, one need to print off documents in order to discuss and demonstrate. Plus, even when performing numbers-related tasks, where computer applications are assets, printing documents for review is deemed mandatory as a last check-up.

Portability of paper and paper-related products

Papers cannot die because they are portable and cheap to discard. You can carry around pages without worrying about scratching an expensive device or drawing unwanted attention, or marking the pages up and down while doodling on them. You can also make printed copies of paper and distribute them at a meeting, without worrying about whether everyone has a device on hand through which they can retrieve the information.

Holding something tangible in your hands

Smart Board got big because they capitalized on our need to create something from scratch, and the ability to transport that creation into something instantly digitized, shared and easily transferrable. It captured the appeal and convenience of an old-fashioned whiteboard, while transforming it into something fitting for the 21^st century business environment.

Sociologists think our attachment to more antiquated products such as whiteboards and paper is a generational issue. And they are convinced that the up-and-coming generations will increasingly rely on none-traditional sources of media that disseminate information. Yet in the case of digital environments that attempt to replace paper, personal experiences and observations tell me that certain activities are not best performed in front of a computer.

We are visually driven on the net

The internet started off with text, but it probably won’t end with text. The traditional newspaper industry has demonstrated its ignorance by simply moving their offline contents online. It doesn’t work that way, because readers cannot effectively consume a large portion of that information online.

The internet is a visual medium. And that explains why businesses from pornography and YouTube, to the slew of lolcat-esque visually stimulating sites have taken off. Norwegian newspapers have taken advantage of this fact to largely recession-proof their online business models.

The rise of blogging

The business of blogs is now mainstream, and the trend of micro-blogging via Twitter and Facebook is becoming an unstoppable force. It seems that information is best delivered through the online medium in snippets. Bloggers are told to follow the formula of keeping posts short, for fear of losing their audiences. The cultural snobs are huddled in a corner, decrying the dummification effect of the web, and the damaging impact it has on the devolution of our attention span.

Contents that gain traction through the online space feed on our escapism (gossip blogs and entertainment blogs do extraordinarily well), or to satisfy our need for breaking news. So now all the techies are off the race, developing the next Twitter-based platform or hacking some API to break the breaking news.

We are text averse on the net

Kindle realizes that reading, particularly something as long and involved as a book, is not something you can do while hunched over the glaring screens of a device that is hardly friendly to the eyes. For most users, net-supported devices are best at delivering information that is instantly digestible, and for the most part, highly perishable. It provides the means through which we communicate and share.

But reading and thinking have traditionally been solitary and contemplative activities. Many people have decried the ways that technology has robbed us of our patience, and subsequently our ability to concentrate and tackle more involved ideas and thoughts. It is not true. As human beings, we are just as prone to philosophizing as generations past. It’s just that the form of media presented to us have done little to facilitate such activities.

Just because we can doesn’t mean we should

So perhaps the transitory process that we are going through right now will end up segmenting the ways through which information is delivered. While some are best consumed online, whether through a computer terminal or a mobile device in a just-in-time manner, there are materials best appreciated through a medium that is slower placed.

Much of Starbucks’ appeal lie in the way it packages premium coffee consumption as an experience above all else. As consumers of information, we will have to decide soon whether we want to consume the lengthier pieces of information in the form of a McDonald drive-through (that is, digitally), or savour the content in a Starbucks-like setting (in its paper, video, or audio incarnation).

Or maybe information will be sold just like the clothes. You can buy clothes through secondhand stores or Saks, and all will serve its primary function – keeping one clothed. But the fit, quality and ease of purchase differ tremendously. Instead of having quality or brands as the differentiating factor, the mode of content delivery may become the differentiating point when it comes to information products.

Just because technology has made information available to us at a marginal price of almost zero, doesn’t mean that it is the best form through which we should choose to consume it.

Follow more discussion on this post here.

picture source: vim-alex

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