Are online consumers killing online creativity? « Lee Simons, Bizmology

Perhaps the dark horse of this year’s SXSW Interactive conference: Andrew Keen stands apart among the droves of techies who, truth be told, are jockeying to consumerize their online wares. Entrepreneur, broadcaster, and writer of the 2007 tome Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is killing our culture, Keen is not as stoked about the potential of online consumerism as everyone else here is.

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13 free tools to analyze, display data from the Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference: BusinessJournalism.org

The annual Computer-Assisted Reporting Conference that concluded in Raleigh, N.C., on Sunday was extraordinarily rich in useful free tool for all sorts of data analysis and visualization, thanks to invitations accepted by computer scientists from Google, MIT, Stanford and the like. Here are links to 13 of these free tools that I found to be particularly useful for data analysis in journalism:

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The Story of Storify - Ralph Kerle, the Creative Leadership Forum

Diigo Group on Web 2.0 Tools moderated by Helen Baxter, Producer of the g33k show is a constant weekly source of insight into how and at what pace the web is really developing. I have been able to become a BETA tester in all sorts of new and wonderful Web 2.0 apps ranging from one of the most wonderful new music downloading programmes that was shut down two weeks after it launched obviously because of its extraordinary ability to find every obscure and known music track on the Web within 30 seconds to the launch of Googles new plug-in for for the Office suite. For me though the most fascinating new web 2.0 tool has been Storify - an on-line application that "makes stories from the social Web, finding moments to remember in the real-time stream".

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IT growth and global change: Ray Kurzweil interview - McKinsey Quarterly - Business Technology - Strategy

The inventor, businessman, and author Ray Kurzweil explains how the exponential growth of technologies will transform industries and pose new opportunities—and hurdles—for business and society. Every executive recognizes the fast pace of technological development but grapples with the billion-dollar question: what happens next, and when? Ray Kurzweil has precise answers based on his thesis that information technology will continue to develop exponentially, leading to a not-so-distant future when artificial intelligence dominates our daily lives, genes can be reprogrammed away from cancer, and solar power can provide the world with all the energy it needs.

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