2011 Predictions Of Interest (Link List)

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The end of the year is always a good time for people and institutions who are in the business of taking a look at the year ahead.  Here are a few lists of predictions that might be of interest to readers of SAM:

Next Year's Wars.  A joint effort of Foreign Policy magazine and the International Crisis Group (and first spotted by the always helpful US Army INTLST...), this list provides some initial insight into 16 possible new crises predicted to erupt in 2011.  The list includes no-brainers such as Iraq and Sudan but also includes some surprises.

Forecast 2011:  Conflict Hotspots.  The International Relations and Security Network has put together an interesting end of year report that highlights Tajikistan, Pakistan and the North Caucasus as places to watch in 2011 among its fairly extensive list of reports and primary resources.

7 Technologies That Will Rock 2011.  Technology is not only of general interest to all of us but of specific interest to intelligence professionals.  One new tool, Quora, discussed in this list by TechCrunch, deserves a special look.

Virtual Worlds Predictions.  I know, I know; virtual worlds seem so ... 2009.  That is pretty much where you would expect them to be given the 2010 Gartner Hype Cycle, though.  It is worth taking a look at this list if only for the government and R and D aspects of this technology.

All these predictions tend to increase uncertainty about the future (well, my uncertainty, at least).  If it does the same for you , take a look at Wired magazine's recent essay on the Uncertainty Effect.  It might not help you feel less uncertain but it may well help you understand your own biases a bit better.

Got other lists worth looking at?  Leave 'em in the comments!

Muslim Social Network Site To Build Virtual World (Muxlim via TechCrunch)

Muxlim.com, which bills itself as the Muslim world's largest online community, has recently announced plans to build a muslim-oriented virtual world similar to Second Life according to TechCrunch. The intent behind the world would be to tap into Muslim-focused advertising revenues for a medium, i.e. virtual worlds, that is blocked in many Islamic countries due to "objectionable" content.

The current Muxlim social network site is also fairly robust with options to post and share videos, files, blog posts, polls and forums. Much of what I saw was in English and the site has offices in Finland and the UK. Below is an advert for Muxlim that gives a sense of the style of the site.

Is Keyword Searching Dead? (Radar Networks Via TechCrunch)

TechCrunch points to a very interesting presentation on the future of search on the web. The article, quoting extensively from a Radar Networks presentation (see below) on the future of finding stuff on the web, makes some very interesting points. Both the article and the slides below are worth the time to read them.

Britannica Free For Bloggers (Britannica Via Techcrunch)

I saw on TechCrunch today that the Encyclopedia Britannica was making all its online content free to any blogger who "qualified". More than that, by signing up I would also be able to direct any of my readers to full content versions of articles on Britannica's website for free as well (no more stubs!). The catch, of course, is that the hyperlinks in the free article (the one I send you to) will only then take the reader to the Britannica stubs unless the reader is a subscriber. I guess the concept is that if a reader sees how great a Britannica article really is, they will want to pay the 70 bucks for a year long subscription...or something like that.

Anyway, I wasn't sure if I would qualify but I submitted SAM to be scrutinized by our British friends (sign-up was dead easy) and, surprise, surprise, they "accepted" me. Very decent of them, I must say.

Anyway, let's try it out. By clicking this link you should be able to go to the full text version of Britannica's article on intelligence. Or by clicking the word intelligence (as hyperlinked here). If it doesn't work, drop a comment or an email.

I like being able to tap into Britannica's arguably more authoritative data set. I generally link to Wikipedia articles for terms I think might be unfamiliar to readers if I think the Wikipedia article seems accurate enough. The Britannica option allows me to share some of Britannica's admittedly top quality articles with my readers as well. What can I say? Thanks, Britannica!

They also have this nifty widget that allows you to put a short definition or bit of info about a topic into a blog post as well. Here I have put in a widget with Britannica's short take on the CIA.
OK. You are correct. It did not take you to the entry on the CIA. You have to click on the "All Articles" button which will take you to a list of articles which are alphabetically arranged but only sometimes start at the beginning of the alphabet (you have to see it to understand that this must be a bug ... and the fact that I had to go to Wikipedia to get the hyperlink for "bug" in the sense of a software bug tells you that there is still room on the planet for at least two encyclopedias).

Scroll down and then find CIA and it will give you the short take on the CIA. I guess I could have just hyperlinked to the full CIA article. It would have been neat, however, to have the widget start where I wanted it to start but also have all the other hyperlinks from the intelligence article available to the curious reader, just in case they wanted to go exploring. Right now it seems to be generating random entires from the list which means that something wholly inappropriate might pop up when a reader hits the site. I don't want that. This result is magnified by the fact that the title for the random entry is in large black text while the word "intelligence" is in white and slightly smaller text in the green bar at the top of the box. The net effect is to make the reader think the box is about the random entry and not that the random entry is somehow subordinated to the word "intelligence". Picky, picky, I know, but it seems to me that it would take just as much effort to do it right. I also can't place the widget feature where I want to put it on the page without messing with the html code. All in all, the widget feature is nice but not something I will likely use that much.

TechCrunch seems to think that EB is going the way of the dinosaur and that this move is just slowing the comet down, not stopping it from hitting the earth. I am not so sure about that. It seems like a classic loss leader move by Britannica to get bloggers to introduce people to the quality of the Britannica content. Some of the newly introduced will inevitably become subscribers. If Britannica can work a little harder to make their content blog friendly (add a few pictures, guys!), I think it might work.

Denial, Deception And Elicitation In Web 2.0

A couple of interesting posts have come my way over the last several days where the authors are talking about classic intelligence skills without acknowledging their connection to intelligence. I am not saying that I expected these authors to point out the connection and am certainly not surprised that they didn't make the connection. I think it is interesting to note nonetheless.

The first such article is the "Secret Strategies Behind Many Viral Videos" published at TechCrunch. The article makes the claim that videos, at a time when 10's of thousands of videos are posted each day, do not go viral by themselves -- they get help and lots of it from guys like the author, Dan Ackerman Greenberg. This "help" includes but is not limited to paying bloggers to post the video, using fake headlines and initiating "comment wars" with yourself through the use of multiple fake accounts. The whole article reads like a web 2.0 version of a chapter from The Art Of War.

Closely related (at least in some respects) is another article over on WiseBread that talks about how to "cold-read" like a psychic. The author, Paul Michael, outlines the many tricks that so-called psychics use to cold-read a person. Cold-reading is when a psychic uses his or her understanding of the unconscious signals a person is sending -- body language or the way they talk -- to understand what that person is thinking or the kind of situation they are in. Some of these "secrets" are the kinds of tricks that spies use to elicit information (some are obviously only appropriate for staged settings). The best single compendium of elicitation techniques is contained in John Nolan's Confidential but the article here points out some that could be used in the field as well.

Social Psychology And Intelligence Analysis (TechCrunch, New Scientist and PsyBlog)

Social psychology -- or how groups impact what individuals do -- is incredibly important to intelligence analysis. If you are unfamiliar with the research findings of this particular branch of psychology (and it always amazes me how few people have heard of the Milgram experiments, for example...) then PsyBlog has done a very good job of collecting 10 of the most interesting here.

To piggyback on this, TechCrunch quotes a New Scientist post concerning how social psychology helps explain "comment trolls", people who make rude or irrelevant comments on blogs. Not something I am looking forward to, but apparently it goes with the territory.