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Crowdsourcing in the broadest sense will be one of the fundamental platforms of the emerging network economy. As such it’s pleasing to see that Australia is becoming a hub for a number of the most significant crowdsourcing platforms globally.

I caught up with Alec Lynch of DesignCrowd yesterday for an interesting conversation about the crowdsourcing space and thought it was worth giving a quick pointer to the three main platforms run out of Australia (though all are global in scope).

Freelancer.com, was founded in Sweden as getafreelancer.com in 2004. I first wrote about it in 2005 in an overview of the space. For many years it was the dominant online services exchange in Europe, and one of the top three globally. In May 2009 it was bought by Australian company Ignition Networks, which also acquired the domain Freelancer.com. The company is run by veteran tech entrepreneur Matt Barrie, who most recently founded and ran specialty processor firm Sensory Networks Inc.

When I walked out from seeing Avatar 3D in December, I tweeted: "$300 million very well spent!"

Movie theaters can create extraordinary experiences, but the cost of production is ever greater.

On the other hand, movies can be made for extremely low cost, using HD cameras, digital editing, and volunteer labor.

At Media 2010 Suzanne Stefanac pointed to Escape to City 17, a machinima movie that had been made with a budget of less than $500, mainly for the costumes. It looks pretty good considering how little was spent.

Expect both increasing film budgets at the top end, and lowering film budgets at the bottom end.

Last year I kicked off a strategy session of a major infrastructure company with a presentation to the executive team on the world in 2030. This used a set of four scenarios to provoke new thinking about the world moving forward.

I wrote about these in The World in 2030: Four scenarios for long-term planning and strategy, providing some of the background to the scenarios and presentation.

We've now created a flash piece to make it easier to navigate and interact with the scenarios. Please play with the interactive piece.

A few months ago I wrote about The shift from corporate brands to personal brands, referencing Jeremiah Owyang's move from Forrester to the newly-founded Altimeter Group with former colleagues.

This is a long-term secular trend - in fact last week when I spoke at the Online Marketing by Design event I pointed to it as one of the three most important trends for this year. I was discussing it in the context of marketing, where companies must recognize that trust resides in individuals not institutions, and use this to shape their external engagement. However it is just as important in the context of attracting and retaining talented people. I wrote:

Now, as personal brands grow in relative strength, corporations need to consider how they can best reflect and tap the influence of the individuals working for them. As Jeremiah notes, social media means that personal brands are immensely portable, as are personal networks.

This is about power to the worker, absolutely, but those companies that understand this and tap this shift can do extremely well. They can attract those with strong personal brands and create immense value from their influence, simply by focusing on building the brands of their key staff as much as they do their corporate brand.

In this context, I find it striking that Forrester Group has decided to ban personally-branded research blogs by its staff, as reported by analyst-watchers SageCircle. It says:

Last week the ABC's 7:30 Report spent the entire week looking at the drivers of Australia’s long-term future. The fourth program, on The social impact of the population boom, was an excellent examination of the diverse issues and perspectives on the implications of rapid population growth, including interviews with a diverse range of politicians, demographers, analysts, and myself as the lone futurist.

It’s well worth seeing the video of the full program along with the transcript on the ABC's website. A video of the program’s introduction and excerpts from my comments are below.

The program examined Australia’s demographic and social future, however the issues raised are absolutely relevant in all developed countries, where low immigration inevitably means a rapidly aging population, with all of the associated challenges.

Last December I wrote about the driving trends and uncertainties in Australia’s population growth, pointing to the recent dramatic increase in the 2050 forecast for Australia’s population from 28 million to 35 million. This revised forecast had a powerful impact, resulting in heated discussion about the social, ecological, and economic implications of what would be the fastest population growth of any developed country in the world.

When I wrote my recent article Creating the Future of Media: 4 Driving Forces, 4 Strategic Issues, 4 Essential Capabilities for Media Titles magazine, they kindly offered Future Exploration Network a full page ad in the magazine.

The ad provides a nice overview of our current work with media organizations that are having to develop and implement strategies on the fly as the industry landscape shifts.

Click on the ad image for a larger version, or the key offerings are described below. If you're interested in finding out more, some of the strategy tools we think are particularly useful in the current environment are described in our Future of Media: Strategy Tools framework.

For the last few years Richard Watson of NowandNext has created annual trend maps based on city subway maps. This year he has been more ambitious, creating a highly detailed map with five time zones, ranging from 2010-2015 out to 2035-2050.

For the previous three trend maps (shown at the bottom) I collaborated with Richard and we co-branded them with Future Exploration Network, however time pressures this year meant that I haven't directly contributed to the 2010 map. It is still as rich and glorious as ever - spend some time delving into the trends ahead!

MEGATRENDS OF THE TREND MAP
- Ageing
- Power shift Eastwards
- Globalisation
- Localisation
- Digitalisation
- Personalisation
- Volatility
- Individualism
- Environmental change
- Sustainability
- Debt
- Urbanisation

In his excellent book The Meaning of the 21st Century, James Martin asks when in human history you would most like to be alive.

For me there is no question that it is now. The coming decade will be the most exciting in human history. The very challenging year of 2009 that we are preparing to bid farewell to helped to tear up the fairly linear progress of the first decade of the century. Now, technological and social change are poised to accelerate far beyond what we have become accustomed to.

A critical uncertainty is how well we will respond to this extraordinary pace of change, both as individuals and as societies. Will we be able to adapt and change, or will severe dysfunctions emerge? Just one dimension is the manifold ethical dilemmas that are raised by gaining extraordinary technological capabilities.

Here are the ten trends that I believe will be most fundamental to the decade ahead. I hope to present these and associated trends in an interactive visual format before long. For now, here are the 10 trends for 2010.

1. Information Intensity
We will soon consume more media than there are waking hours, by virtue of multi-channeling at most times. Billions of people and places will be media producers, including video streaming from most points of view on the world. We are just at the dawn of an incomprehensible daily onslaught of news and information – some valuable, much useless.

Other 2009 summary posts
Top blog posts of 2009: 6 on Twitter and the media
Top blog posts of 2009: Enterprise 2.0 and organizational effectiveness
Top blog posts of 2009: The future

Fourth in my series of summary blog posts from 2009 is selected presentations and videos from keynote speeches I've delivered this year (plus, at the end, my list of speaking topics for 2010).

My usual disclaimer: My presentation slides are highly visual and designed to accompany my speeches, and are NOT intended to be meaningful by themselves. The main reason I provide them on my blog is for the audience at my keynotes who want to look at the slides later. However it seems that others find the slides useful - in fact some have been viewed over 10,000 times on Slideshare.

I should also note that this list just includes a selection of the more interesting public keynotes I have given. I do not post slides for the presentations I frequently make for company in-house events such as divisional conferences and strategy off-sites.

Below are the links to the original blog posts which have the context and background for each presentation, with the embedded presentations below.

1. Video excerpts of keynote speech for Sun Microsystems Partner Executive Forum: The Future of the Network Economy

Other 2009 summary posts
Top blog posts of 2009: 6 on Twitter and the media
Top blog posts of 2009: Enterprise 2.0 and organizational effectiveness
Top keynote speech presentations/ videos of 2009

Third in my series of my blog posts that have attracted the most interest this year, on the general topic of the future. (I haven't included any of my presentations - I'll select some of these to put in another post.)

1. Wealth Adaptation Syndrome (WAS): a defining malaise of our times and the opportunities that stem from it
A syndrome to help understand society in 2009

2. Why traditional conferences are dying and how unconferences and audience participation are the future of events
Why events will always be important but they are starting to look very different from before

Other 2009 summary posts
Top blog posts of 2009: 6 on Twitter and the media
Top blog posts of 2009: The future
Top keynote speech presentations/ videos of 2009

Continuing my series of my blog posts that have attracted the most interest in 2009, here is my selection of 10 posts on Enterprise 2.0 and organizational effectiveness.

1. Why ‘critical mass’ is intensely relevant to Enterprise 2.0 user adoption
What the diffusion curve means for Enterprise 2.0 adoption initiatives.

2. Enterprise 2.0: Competitive differentiation occurs at the intersection of technology and culture
The harder it is to implement Enterprise 2.0, the greater the potential for competitive differentiation.

To anticipate what will shape 2010, we need to understand the TENsions that will define the opening year of the TENsions decade. The TENsions that are most prominent will evolve during the course of the decade. However the accelerating pace of change means that TENsions will inevitably define the decade, in myriad forms.

These are the 10 TENsions for 2010, the opening year of the TENsions.

1. Optimism - Fear
Many companies and workers are now daring to be optimistic as they put 2009 behind them, look forward to opportunities, and worry about getting left behind if things improve rapidly. Yet with the shock of the onset of the financial crisis still fresh, any optimism is subject to being shattered, resulting in wild swings in confidence.

2. Institutional work – Independent work
While many lost their jobs in 2009, sparking a rise in home-based work such as direct selling, many others gave up self-employment to return to the workforce. Over the long term more people are making the shift to work independently, by desire or necessity. However the temptations of self-employment can be replaced by desire for a steady pay packet, pulling people both ways.

We have had a fantastic global uptake of the translations of our Social Media Strategy Framework into 12 languages.

As such, we intend to translate a lot more of the content created by Advanced Human Technologies and Future Exploration Network, starting with our Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Framework, which plays a central role in my book Implementing Enterprise 2.0.

Here is the framework in Spanish.

Click on the image to download the pdf

Please share this with any Spanish speakers who would be interested.

Also be sure to let me know if you can suggest any improvements to the translation.

The Institute for the Future has shared its Future of Video project using the presentation platform Prezi. This is a great way of giving access to the rich visual frameworks that are the trademark of IFTF - it's well worth a browse just to see part of what Prezi can do.

The presentation wraps up with some nice videos from Microsoft and Sixth Sense showing visions and demonstrations of the role of video in how we interface with the external world and information. Which illustrates how man-machine interfaces - one of the primary mechanisms for the birth of the living networks - are in fact largely driven by video.

The trends that are highlighted in the presentation are:

- From scarcity to abundance of digital video
- From passive to hyperlinked, interactive video
- From keypad to gestural and tangible interaction
- From limited to ubiquitous video interactions
- From camera-captured to synthetic CG video
- From 2D to immersive HD, 4KHD, and 3D video

I was interviewed yesterday on Sky Business about plans by Rupert Murdoch and others to charge for online news and content – the video is below. We discussed plans to charge for content, whether the news aggregators can be charged or blocked, and differences in the Australian news media landscape.

In the interview I mentioned in passing the application of game theory to media strategy. Below is an excerpt from our Future of Media: Strategy Tools framework , which gives an overview of a number of strategy tools for the media industry. In essence, game theory is about mapping how players might respond to each others’ moves.