MIT’s Technology Review just published it’s list of 10 Emerging Technologies for 2008. The one piece that resonated with me is Sandy Pentland’s exploration into Reality Mining especially in relation to social networking, new media and interactive.

Reality mining “is all about paying attention to patterns in life and using that information to help [with] things like setting privacy patterns, sharing things with people, notifying people–basically, to help you live your life.”

This becomes a hot topic for a few reasons. First and foremost is, once again, privacy issues. Data capture is part of our daily lives – credit card usage, cookies on sites, social network profiles, company swipe cards – and as technology continues to slowly infiltrate more of our lives, we become more tolerant and accepting of what information is divulged and distributed. Everyone has see the movies with the FBI trying to trace the criminals phone call with the criminal hanging up just before being caught. However, most people don’t think about that even with mobile phones being on all the time A simple Google search on his/her name would surprise a lot of people.

Reality Mining has been a reality for years. And as mobile phones become more prevalent with WI-FI, Bluetooth and GPS-type systems (ala iPhone,) in addition to the laptops we carry around and use, the continual social network is our daily life. And as mobile technology advances, our blip on the grid becomes more prominent. The Human Cyborg ideal continues to press forward. Professor Kevin Warwick first started research into this in 1998 by planting microchips in his arm for recognition of systems in his lab.

The major benefit of Reality Mining is from an anthropological standpoint. How people interact, where they are and when they are. Tying this information into disease outbreaks, advertising models (when a person sees an ad, what do they do right afterwards?) and general healthcare and “human maintenance.” Smartex in Italy is working on clothing that does just that.

It’s a bit of the God factor (being omnipotent and omniscient) that is also fascinating. Knowing where your friends are at any time, knowing what they’re doing, where to get the food your phone knows your craving. It’s bringing the idea of Facebook, Google Maps, Dodgeball and other sites into the physical space. The ultimate social network. Maybe even a step closer to SkyNet.

Real-time in real-time. Very meta.

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The ad:tech 2007 Awards Finalists were announced today.

A breakdown of the top 5 agencies by number of finalist entries:

Ogilvy: 6
AKQA: 5
Deep Focus: 4
GSD&M: 3
R/GA: 3

The 2007 awards ceremony will take place at ad:tech San Francisco, on Wednesday, April 25th.

Note to ad:tech: Lose the Rovion InPerson talking shmoes that periodically appear on the conference website. Holy cow, that’s annoying.

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It’s official, according to this press release. Read all you want, but here are the important takeaways:

There will be a site at the center of all this, but it’s unnamed as of yet.

What’s the rush in announcing then? Name the thing, hotshots.

AOL, MSN, Yahoo, and MySpace will be the new site’s initial distribution partners. The 4 properties have a combined reach of 96% of the internet audience.
This is of no consequence here other than letting us know that those sites are very very big.

Peter Chernin, COO NewsCorp: “…for the first time, consumers will get what they want — professionally produced video delivered on the sites where they live.”

You left out the “with commercials” part. Now I know people like clips from TV shows and all, but ad-supported clips cut by someone else? I need to see it to believe that mass adoption will take hold. If done right, however, it’s certainly possible.

“Each distribution partner will feature the site’s content in an embedded player customized with a look and feel consistent with each site, making the offering organic to each destination. The new company will offer innovative advertising sales propositions by being able to sell cross-platform — on-air and on-line.”

Read: Lots and lots of pre-roll, and even more of the same :30 spots we’re already ignoring on television. I hope there are plans to explore other, more integrated forms of advertising into these players and videos.

What’s going to be interesting here is to see how not only Google/YouTube responds, but how the other big media companies not involved in this play respond as well. What does Disney do? What does Time Warner (who currently owns AOL, one of this new site’s distribution partners) do?

Any guesses?

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So NBCU and NewsCorp are really going to do it apparently. Sometime on Thursday, they will likely announce a YouTube rival.

According to PaidContent:

“The distribution of the videos will be on MySpace, MSN and Yahoo, from what we know; NBBC, NBCU’s digital marketplace, is another possibility. And we have heard conflicting reports about whether there will be a destination site, or just a specialized media player that will syndicate this content. The content players would get a majority of the ad revenues in one variation we heard about, with a window of exclusivity built in for licensing the original content.”

The LA Times also has more on this story.

Once details of the announcement are released, hang tight for some thoughts, commentary, and skepticism.

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This is the first of many posts to this blog that will hopefully be read by more people other than, well, me.

I’ve decided to take on the challenge of creating a blog that is an entertaining open forum for discussion, dissects the worlds of advertising and marketing (from an interactive perspective), explores what we should be doing better or differently, and generally comments on things that I think you should think are important.

The other challenge is to do this while running Deep Focus, of course.

You may be asking yourself, is this going to be another watered-down, interactive-marketing-for-beginners, PR-approved agency blog? If you’re not, I just did.

The answer is a big, resounding, NO.

Deep Focus used to have an ‘official’ agency blog that had the same problem that most, if not all other agency blogs suffer from — an inability to express opinions.

And when it comes to blogging, that’s a major issue.

Instead, what you’ll find here are unadulterated, unabashed points of view that aren’t necessarily agency ‘positions’on any one thing. They’re my positions. Well, at least at the moment I’ll be writing them they are. Some posts might be insight into decisions I’ve made as CEO of the agency. Some posts might be criticisms of the industry. But you will always be invited to comment on each and every one of them.

Admittedly, this is an experiment. Can an agency CEO really maintain a blog that has integrity? Will it be worth reading? Will it improve your life?

I aim to make the answer to all those questions a big, resounding, YES.

So stay tuned. Stay alert. And stay connected. Comments are ON, baby.

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