Marshall McLuhan very often provides an instructive reference point for how we understand our changing world. As I wrote in my Chapter 1 of Living Networks:

The brilliant visionary Marshall McLuhan accurately described the media as an extension of our senses. Your eyes can see what’s happening in your immediate vicinity, your ears can hear what people are saying in the same...

Below is a brief interview I did when I spoke at TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam recently.

Some of the points I cover:

* In the face of a highly uncertain future increasingly driven by extraordinary technologies, we have a choice whether to be optimists or pessimists. This choice shapes how actively we seek and create opportunities...

[This post first appeared on the Getting Results From Crowds book website]

Over the last two weeks I have delivered 8 keynotes or workshops on crowdsourcing across Western Europe. Most of them have been highly interactive sessions, bringing out new ideas or highlighting common issues or concerns. Part of the intent has been...

TheNextWeb produced a good quality video of my keynote at TheNextWeb Conference 2012, shown below.

It doesn’t show all of my full motion graphics presentation, though it frequently cuts to show segments of the visuals through my keynote. I will create and share a full video of my motion graphics presentation along with the audio of me speaking, however as I’...

Internet dystopian Andrew Keen, author most recently of Digital Vertigo, has just spoken at TheNextWeb Summit and Conference. 

He and his arguments are intensely annoying because his case is blindly and obtusely one-sided, though it is useful to have his voice to provide a counterpoint to digital utopianism. 

Part of his argument is that we are...

On April 28, immediately after my keynote at TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam, I will travel to Cologne to run a workshop on the Future of Crowdsourcing. Unfortunately I will miss what looks like an excellent Crowdsourcing Summit on April 27 as I will be speaking in Amsterdam that day.

I’ve made a...

Yesterday I ran Getting Results From Crowds and Crowd Business Models workshops in Sydney, the first in a global series of crowdsourcing workshops.

In opening the Crowd Business Models...

In Chapter 2 of Getting Results From Crowds on The Rise of Crowdsourcing we included a Crowdsourcing Timeline, showing a selection of some of the important events in the world of crowds over the last couple of hundred years.

Tapping crowds has a long and illustrious past, with of course an acceleration over the last 15 years as humanity has becoming connected, vastly broadening the scope of crowd participation...

This evening I spoke at the Crowdfunding for Change event run by Avis Mulhall‘s Think Act Change. The event kicked off with a presentations by Adam Chapnick, head of business development at seminal creative crowdfunding platform IndieGogo...

This morning I appeared on Channel 7′s The Morning Show talking about the world 10 years from now.

A few of the things I mentioned in the interview include:

Customised medicines: Doctors will use our DNA profiles to create a drug specifically for us.

Thought interfaces: We will be able to control our computers (to a limited degree) with...