It’s that time of year again when we peruse the Best Of Technology lists and see what rated.  This one stayed with me: CNN’s Top 10 Tech Trends of 2009.  (Go read it and return; I’ll wait.)  While one of the better tech pieces I’ve read this month, mostly because it mentions a lot of the tools that impacted us in 2009, it doesn’t delve into what truly makes or breaks that technology beyond the surface of the device itself.  This bothers me given CNN’s huge readership and the things people take for granted.

Technology is not just gadgetry.  It is also content.  A smartphone is great hardware but what you see in there – email, mobile websites, maps, books, videos, games and numerous apps – works with the smartphone to make the gadget useful.  Without this content, and millions of folks who work everyday to keep it accurate and accessible, your phone is a nice paperweight.  An eReader with access control placed on content will one day make an expensive brick.  In other words, what’s in the package, who put it there, how correct it is and how quickly and easily you can get it are as important, if not more, as the beauty and speed of the package itself.  Pay attention to it and ask for it all.

Hello! Maps!

One of the most important  aspects of smartphonery and search is geography.  That integration of positioning technologies allows you to hold your phone up to a cellphone signal and a Google or Bing map shows you where you are.  That advances in real-time 3D graphics give you 3D map navigation on any browser.  Moreover, how many social applications – from Foursquare to Yelp and Flickr to Twitter – have you used that aren’t location-based?

Take a step back.  How do we geospatial technologists create and improve digital maps in the first place? Advances in satellite imaging, photogrammetry, GIS, data conversion and data verification make this possible.  It’s not enough for you to know where you are any more but to trust where where is.  Some preparation and a general geographical common sense help to a certain extent, but in the absence of a trustworthy interactive map, accurate navigation, event/emergency mapping, marketing and social geo-location are out the window.  So, yes, the smartphone craze and search engine wars were big this year, but nothing was as interesting as the Map Wars.   2009, folks, is when we went from this to this and this!  And it doesn’t warrant mention in a so-called year-end technology roundup?  Google, Microsoft, MapQuest, Yahoo! all fell and are still falling over themselves to get you hooked to subscribe and, while there were some gross mistakes, the state of the map is better for it.

This revolution and competition in maps and maps at your fingertips, this content, is fundamental to the existence of a smart phone and search technology.  With that in mind, I issue this warning: While the one-stop shops of Google Stack , My Yahoo! and MSN Passport (or whatever it’s called today) are tempting, brand loyalty will get you nowhere except left behind.  Go where the best content is.

Open, Private and Neutral

Another major player this year was open data.  Open Street Maps (and its licensing struggle) and Britain’s Ordnance Survey take the cake.  As Gary Gale writes, “The people behind OpenStreetMap believe in open data, the people behind the Ordnance Survey want to believe in open data and I believe in the GeoVation Challenge … 2009 seemed to be less about technology and more about communities and people, and that means a lot of belief.”  If you think that’s a load of hooey, call me the next time your Garmin dumps you in a lake.  Real, open communities foster good content.

Further geo-enabling the web, the Open Geospatial Consortium’s OpenGIS matured, with almost 400 global governments, companies and schools coming together to enhance publicly-available standards and interoperable solutions.

Personal data privacy and net neutrality were tested by the biggies this year.  In a recent post on the Facebook privacy settings brouhaha and Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s privacy-slamming comments on cable television, I said, “Online privacy is really about keeping intimate knowledge about ourselves from marketers, scammers, spammers and just plain psychos, and Schmidt knows this.”  Adam Raff writes in a great NYTimes op-ed on internet and search neutrality:

Today, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s new Bing have become the Internet’s gatekeepers, and the crucial role they play in directing users to Web sites means they are now as essential a component of its infrastructure as the physical network itself. The F.C.C. needs to look beyond network neutrality and include “search neutrality”: the principle that search engines should have no editorial policies other than that their results be comprehensive, impartial and based solely on relevance.

The need for search neutrality is particularly pressing because so much market power lies in the hands of one company: Google.

Beware the Googlization Of Everything.

Books

“Oh, I see, books are deemed going digital only if they come with expensive delivery mechanisms,” was all I could think and tweet when I saw the CNN article’s section entitled Books Go Digital, thanks to the Kindle and Nook.  To which Tom Reestman replied, “Apparently the iPhone, Stanza and Project Gutenberg are off their radar.”  Exactly.  Electronic books (eBooks) and electronic readers (eReaders) have been around for years and copyright- and DRM-free books are widely available for download to non-esoteric machines like a smartphone, Netbook or, heaven forbid, a cellphone, desktop or laptop owned by someone who does not have the disposable income for the latest disposable fad. As Preston Austin reminded me, “Funny that a business linked to disruptive deflationary innovation (publishing) has redefined innovation as technology to protect their business.”

To make matters worse and prove that they are sadly losing that journalistic touch, NPR ran a segment this morning called How eBooks Will Change Reading And Writing.  In it, writer Nicholas Carr opines, “… as we move to the new technology of the screen … it has a very different effect, an almost opposite effect, and you will see a retreat from the sophistication and eloquence that characterized the printed page.”  Really?  There’s more.  “… tendency not to linger on the language also affects the way people react to a book when they are deciding whether to buy it: More purchases will be based on brief excerpts … the challenge will be to use this powerfully narrative form, this pulpy kind of mode, to say important things,” says Lev Grossman.  Say what?!  If this is the future of electronic publishing, count me out!

But, it’s not.  These are some guys creating a false dichotomy between “sophisticated and eloquent” print and “pulpy” eBooks, and NPR ought to know better.  Did music change substantially when we stopped using phonographs or cassette tapes?  Similarly, the quality of books and the way they are written need never be sacrificed to a new medium.  If that is the case, explain why the top three books downloaded from Project Gutenberg yesterday were A Christmas Carol, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Pride & Prejudice.  Tell me why authors like Cory Doctorow publish great things like Little Brother with little more than a Creative Commons license and make money.  Figure out why the very next NPR piece was on Radiohead’s self-marketed, online-only In Rainbows, which made the band more money than all their previous albums put together and contained some amazing numbers to boot.

It’s because people want good content downloaded to their specific device and don’t want to spend a small fortune on getting to it.  Publishers and industry navel-gazers don’t get to determine what goes in a book based on its delivery mechanism.  The author does, and also in some measure the consumer.  Let’s be better, more sophisticated customers and not let the quality of our books be dictated to us because it comes wrapped in a must-have, futuristic doodad that we don’t yet understand.  Let’s always err on the side of the content.

**

What does the average globalized customer want the most?  Choice, quality, price, not necessarily in that order.  But, there are many more people out there who simply want access to maps, books, music, data and that is the real imperative upon revolutionary, disruptive technologies.  We cannot swallow the eReader marketing pill or that of unreliable map content just because it’s handed to us and, in our obsolescence-inducing plenty, unwittingly set data standards for the rest of the world. Consumers going into the second decade of the 21st century must focus on content and delivery – useful content in an accessible and understandable format on a relatively fast and ubiquitous machine – as their technology drivers. Open data, better communication and scrutinizing intent in this day and age of Twitter and other social media will make this happen.  But, so will awareness, responsibility and active participation.  In 2010, I ask us to be mindless consumers less and nurturing communities more.  Tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.

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