I took a half-day from the business to extend a weekend away. The Wife and myself stopped at Country Choice in Nenagh at ten to six last Friday. We needed a meal to cook that evening. I was not expecting to get a great lesson about doing business in the Digital Age.

Country Choice is an award winning delicatessen that has been run by Peter Ward for as long as I can remember. My Nenagh memories go back about 25 years now, ever since my first visit to the Wife’s parents, back in her pre-Wife days. A very helpful lady served us. All the while, Peter, stood to the side, made us feel very welcome and suggested things that would make our meal that bit better. The conversation was wide ranging, talking about Hereford Beef, social media (particularly Pat Whelan’s use of Twitter), Parmesan cheese and wines from southern France. We left with more than we had intended buying and with an invitation to visit his outlet in Limerick’s Milk Market the following day.

The Milk Market on Saturday morning was buzzing and we spent a very enjoyable couple of hours amongst the stalls and shops. Pat welcomed us and made us feel very important, this despite his shop having a queue out the door. He left us to greet other customers and seemed to have plenty of time and advice for everyone. He got me thinking and learning. The lesson is a simple one but a very powerful one.

Quality product, a real interest in the customer and excellent service on every level sets the benchmark. Social media can then amplify the good work and spreads the good news. It is the new word-of-mouth.

We see in the business many companies working hard and failing at social media. The underlying message is that without a great business with a customer-focussed attitude, no amount of social media activity will move the needle. In fact, it will find you out and expose you to all. Get the business right then social will work wonders for you.

To extend the bad astronomical analogy; it's kind of like deciding never to leave your house due to the risk of being hit by a meteorite. Tragically, over the last few years, much of the country has become smothered (and consequently paralysed) by an all-pervasive fug of negativity.

Refusing to be dragged into this national Nega-Fest are the good folk behind Hireland (Lucy Masterson, Kingsley Aikins et al please take a bow). These guys have determined that Irish business, and more specifically Irish SMEs, can and will have a major role in the process of job creation and national recovery, and that we should all be made a hell of a lot more aware of this.

Any fragment of good news about our economy is cause for celebration, so recent announcements from Enterprise Ireland and the IDA about new sources of FDI, additional jobs and record export growth are certainly encouraging. 

But conversely these 'BIG' PR announcements also serve as a dramatic counterpoint to the utter dearth of positivity about the domestic economy in general, and the SME sector in particular. It can seem as if Ireland is simply closed for business. The tacit implication of this ‘good news vacuum’ being that we should shut-up-shop, find a dark corner and rock back and forth while sucking our collective thumb.

Granted things are remarkably tough, but there are still plenty of determined and focused people 'doing stuff'. Whatever that particular stuff is, many of them are seeking to expand prudently, making very considered investments in capital and labour, helping to create livelihoods and shape a better the future for us all.

Hireland is a simple idea executed with elegance and admirable conviction. By providing a website where individual Irish businesses can pledge to take on new staff and provide details of available positions for those seeking to work, Hireland delivers a badly needed positivity infusion.

This is important. Both nature and the media abhor a vacuum. The Irish media have tended to fill ours with a tsunami of negativity with which we’ve been relentlessly pummeled for almost four years now. It is therefore particularly encouraging to hear how the media industry have helped publicise the project by providing significant amounts of free print coverage and radio airtime, and, as a consequence, some badly needed perspective.

We’d do well to remember that each pledge from each business represents a real job for a real person, and hopefully a real step forward into a better future for us all. Remarkably, as I publish this blog, the number of job pledges has just crept above the one thousand mark. The decision to expand is presently one that no sane businessperson is going to take lightly. This is why every single Hireland pledge, including our own here at First, is such a big deal.

So well done Hireland. Unquestionably a case of thumbs-up rather than thumb-suck.

Such mutterings have a unique place in the customer service cosmos. Traditionally, these are things too low-level for someone to get on to the helpline and bend someones ear about, but annoying enough to poison their perception of your brand and spread bad juju through the noosphere. In the past, such ambient unhappiness went unnoticed, muttered under the breath down the pub or in the ear of an estranged spouse over dinner. Sometimes this moaning escalated to full blown complaining, and when it reached this critical mass was treated with the sweet salve of PR until it calmed down. But this didn’t really deal with the underlying problem, it just removed the symptoms.

But now, thanks to the exciting 21st century technology of Twitter, you can tune into people’s moaning about your brand 24/7. Let me illustrate why this is a good thing by way of an anecdote.

While idling on the Luas during my morning commute, I saw an advert for touchscreen compatible gloves called AGloves. With the winter months closing in, and being hopelessly addicted to social media apps on my iDevices, this seemed like a sensible purchase. So I pulled out my iPhone and checked out the website www.agloves.com to see how much they cost, with thoughts to buy if it was reasonable. While the site worked, I was stunned to discover the store page required Adobe Flash in order to buy.

For those unfamiliar with the technical problems of having a Flash based store aimed in large part at iPhone users, this is like running a clothes store for tall people, but having a front door that is only four foot high. Considering that mobile commerce has exploded over the last year, with iPad conversion rates being twice as high as desktops, it seemed staggering to make such a schoolboy error when such users are a huge part of their target market. I fell into a micro-rage, and shortly after tweeted my displeasure, copying in the twitter address of the company behind it, @AglovesUKI.

Then my ADD kicked in, and I got on with my life.

Shortly thereafter the person at @AglovesUKI got in touch with me saying “Thanks for the feedback, please bear with us, we hope to have this fixed in the next few days.” We engaged in a brief exchange, and I told them that the idea to advertise to commuters was a great idea, but that iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch incompatibility was probably costing them business.

I didn’t honestly expect anything to come of it, for rebuilding an eCommerce site is no small task and many companies would shrink in horror at having to redo it. But six days later, @AglovesUKI tweeted me back to say their new store was up, and asked me for feedback. I offered a critique, and they offered me free shipping if I was still interested in buying, which only seemed right given that they really did take on board feedback and were speedy to resolve the issue.

The moral of the story? AGloves have a great product and a good advertising strategy, but were let down by the weakest link - their website. However, this was saved by having a good social media policy and taking decisive steps to address this shortcoming. Worth thinking about the next time you hear somebody question the ROI of social media or investing in user testing.  

If the phrase “Responsive Web Design” (RWD) makes a question mark materialise over your head, you are not alone. In the world of web design however it is something of a hot topic. Industry evangelists and thought leaders are promoting it as no less than the future of web design. Industry guru Jeffrey Zeldman describes it as “an evolutionary milestone in the development of web and interaction design as a practice and as an industry.” While designer and pundit Andy Clark - in a fit of hyperbole - even suggests that if you don’t use such techniques you’re not a “real” web designer.

So what exactly is it? Basically it is a method of having the layout of your website appear differently depending on the dimensions of the screen it is viewed on, for instance, making everything fit into a single column on iPhones, or have large text when viewed on a giant screen. My initial reaction was one of nerdy glee, because to be honest, it is pretty cool. The poster child of RWD practices is the Boston Globe, try resizing your browser and you can see the site morph accordingly. Cool no? Web designers made wonderful use of the technology on their portfolio pages, demonstrating how we could have not one, but three or four layouts for a single website.

However, the thrifty among you will have already noticed the the fatal flaw in this approach. Three or four layouts also implies three or four designs, not to mention the added development expenses. Which all adds up to the overall cost of a website. A cost, that ultimately, must be passed on to the client. In these frugal times the crucial question is ultimately - from a business perspective - is it worth it?

While I believe that each project should be tackled from a case-by-case basis, for the most part, I’ve not found the economic arguments for RWD compelling, and here is why.  

1) Smartphones have largely solved the mobile web problem

The “mobile web” was long prohesised by industry commentators. Although we have technically speaking had it for over a decade, it was largely rubbish; held prisoner inside poor connections and the infuriating Kafkaesque interfaces of “feature phones”. Then came the iPhone and multi-touch, and changed everything; precisely because in the words of the late Steve Jobs it could view the “real” Internet.  

People haven't voted with their pocketbooks to sign up for video on their phones. These phones aren't capable of taking advantage of it. You've used the internet on your phone, it's terrible! You get the baby Internet, or the mobile Internet -- people want the real Internet on their phone. We are going to deliver that. We're going to take advantage of some of these investments in bandwidth.

People voted for the “real” Internet in their millions. And while not all websites work elegantly on smartphones  - notably ones built in Flash - for the most part if the site is well thought through to begin with, the contents of them are quite accessible with a few taps and pinches.

Meanwhile, the plans for media queries (the technology RWD is rooted in) date back over a decade to early 2001 - before even the iPod was released and the iPhone was even on the drawing board - when the mobile web was a much different place and its future was highly speculative. Although there have been a number of redrafts of the media queries specification since then, not a great deal has changed in the fundamental approach, and media queries have been left, to an extent, as a solution to a problem that doesn't exist the way it once did.

2) If there is a business case for supporting mobiles, it may justify an entirely exclusive mobile site.

When formulating any online strategy we like to look at the numbers. Interestingly, while most of our clients have an steady average of 4.5% of visitors from mobiles - including iPads, others have as much as 25% of their visitors from smartphones. Clearly, enough to justify a mobile specific solution.

So what is the best approach in this case? If you look at the research of usability guru Jacob Nielsen you can find some solid research and recommendations on how to tackle mobile websites. His latest recommendations are, designing a separate mobile site with limited features, having tighter content, and offering the users a choice to go to the desktop version of the site (which is not the case with Responsive Design).

Responsive Web Design also advocates a “mobile first” approach, meaning your desktop website is developed with mobile in mind. This seems to make sense, given the rise in mobile access, but in actual fact, it places limitations on what can be achieved on a desktop website. That does not seem prudent when your site only gets 4.5% of their traffic from mobiles.

Also, if you take a closer look at Nielsen’s research, the usability gulf between “mobile” sites and “desktop” is not as big as many would think. In Neilsen's research the success rates for achieving tasks on mobile and desktop sites on phones are:

• Mobile site success rate: 64%
• Desktop site success rate: 58%

This is compared to an average of 84% on desktops and 76% success rate for Apps.

So a 6% difference in usability success. As mentioned before, generally speaking only around 4.5% of our client’s traffic is from mobiles, that means an overall 0.27% increase in usability. Is this really worth a significant increase in budget? For a separate mobile sites or for Responsive Web Design? Most designers would not see these figures compelling if this discussion were about supporting the hated Internet Explorer 6.

In instances where our clients do get significant traffic from mobiles, a 6% usability increase is a number worth worrying about. In such cases we can also identify the pages users are looking at. So far, this has indicated that the site needs an entirely new emphasis on mobile, not just a new layout, and we would look at developing mobile only websites with a distinct UI, from which the user can “veto” and view the desktop version if they so wish. Perhaps an App may even be a more sensible way to invest resources. Perhaps both. 

The lesson I take away from the stats is that some sites by their very nature draw mobile traffic, and that others simply do not, and it will not grow proportionately in line with mobile web access. The context not just of the user (such as physical location, levels of attention etc) but also of the site itself must be taken into account.

3) No matter how much we want it to be true, people don’t browse the web on their TV.

The other side of Responsive Design is the ability to have a website display differently on large screens, such as HD Televisions. However much like the mobile web, internet access from  TV has been with us for a number of years, to consumer indifference. This is possibly down to popular platforms such as Playstation 3’s and Wii’s having interfaces that are totally inadequate for browsing websites. Some of you will know the pain of of trying to navigate a website using something designed to play first-person shooters. If this situation ever changes, and we find users suddenly flocking to access sites on their TV, I will wager it is because of a technological leap akin to multitouch and the App store. We'll be designing interfaces in 3D for Kinect 2's or something, meaning a need for a whole new type of UI again, not just a new layout.

You could also argue that Internet on the TV is already alive and well, its just in the form of xBox Live and PSN. The thing is, its primarily used for watching movies on Netflix and pwning n00bs in Call of Duty, not perusing B2B websites or reading your blog.  Again, the social context of the site is important.

Even with technological leaps, I suspect it is unlikely anyone would ever want to view written content on the TV. In many ways, text on the TV is a step back to the days of Ceefax, and users are unlike to go for it unless it is for a specific service like football scores or the weather (also available on your smartphone or tablet). Unless of course its a video blog, in which case we're talking things like Google TV as a content distributor, which is again a whole other animal.  

Just because we can design for televisions, doesn’t mean we should.

4) Tablet-like devices may come to dominate the mobile web

The sudden use of tablets (a euphemism for “the iPad”) for browsing the mobile web has exploded in the last year. Mashable report that “Approximately two-thirds of that 6.8% [of Internet traffic in the US] came from mobile phones, while the remaining third came from tablet devices” a figure that will only grow, given the enormous and continued success of these devices.  

Tablets exist in a weird quantum state where they both are and aren’t representative of the mobile web. They are lumped with iPhones and Blackberry’s in Google Analytics because they are - in ontological terms “mobile” - but they can display the “real” web with considerable ease. Arguably, easier than on a desktop computer or laptop. It seems like a Black Swan the pundit’s did not see coming. What if the lions share of the growth of the mobile web is in the tablet market, not smartphones? What then for RWD or mobile sites?

For the above reasons, and other technical issues regarding loading times too dry to cover here, I am skeptical of the ROI of Responsive Web Design as a blanket approach to dealing with the mobile Internet. And in their rush to be the first to roll out responsive sites, some have not thought about the consequences for, say, how responsive sites will fit alongside heatmap analytics, which need a fixed layout in order to be effective.  

Such misgivings have not stopped us from experimenting with the technology for times when it is needed. It is interesting technology, and certainly slick, but despite the growth of the mobile web it has for me not yet made the case to become a standard feature. My gut feeling is that while RWD undoubtedly has its place in the web developers toolbox, the fervour with which industry thought leaders are promoting it feels oddly like the way hardware companies are selling 3D Televisions. From a certain perspective its a "natural evolution" of the medium, but on the other hand its expensive, a bit of a pain to implement, and feels like it is just there to have something new to sell.

Thom Noble, European MD of NeuroFocus, the Nielsen subsidiarity that deals with Neuromarketing says that "up to 98% of our thoughts and actions are driven by our Sub-Conscious. Traditional research relies on eliciting responses at a post-rational stage. Unavoidably, such responses are filtered and distorted by the very act of thinking about the response! What we need is the means to measure response before the brain engages in post-rationalisation"

In plain English, the key insight in Neuromaketing is identifying how we really feel about things before they are parsed through the rational part of the brain. In practical terms, the mistakes we make in advertising occur when we appeal soley to the thinking brain instead of the emotional brain.

The technology behind it is not as sophisticated as one might think. The research is carried out on test subjects using an electroencephalogram (EEG), a brain scan that enables researchers to monitor electrical impulses within the brain. The real magic comes when this is coupled with pixel-­level eye tracking, at a rate of two thousand times a second. Test subjects can then be exposed to various packages, ads, images, messages, and so forth. Neurofocus measures what they deem to be the three key parameters: attention, emotional engagement, and memory retention. A typical sample group comprises 15-24 volunteers, whose reactions to certain brands are gauged in order to deduce if that brand (and its marketing strategy) strikes a chord within their subconscious.

The Sweet Spot

The real power of this technique is seeing where emotional engagement overlaps with conscious attention. Once data is gathered, adverts can be overlaid with three sets of circles, one indicating where our eyes go, with pupil dilation indicating the part of the ad they are are thinking about, the EEG measuring our simultaneous level of emotional engagement. When we are thinking about something but our emotional levels flatline, this is known as “disconnect”, because without emotion, they are unlikely to remember it. Often this can be a logo, trite copy or something we can recall, but have no emotional connection to.

Our emotional attention on the other hand peaks when presented with different stimuli, the usual suspects anyone in the ad industry will recognise. Food, pretty faces, emotive words and so forth. However, when the cognitive and emotional circles overlap we hit the sweet spot. Association between emotional engagement and conscious attention results in memory retention. The trick in Neuromarkeing is making sure the thing that people remember, is the message you want them to take away.

Such insights led to the changes in the iconic Campbell Soup can, in which the spoon was removed and the bowl made bigger and steamier, after research indicated this ignites happy memories of hot soup.

NeuroFocus founder AK Pradeep tells the story of how they helped one mobile phone manufacturer decide how thin to design its next phone. “The general hypothesis was the thinner the phone, the sexier,” he recounts. NeuroFocus conducted tests of various phone dimensions and identified a point where consumers worried that the phone might be so thin that it was breakable.

Frito-Lay hired NeuroFocus to look into American junk-food staple Cheetos. They discovered that the icky coating triggers an unusually powerful response in the brain: a sense of giddy subversion that consumers enjoy over the messiness of the product. In other words, the sticky stuff is what makes those snacks such a sticky brand.

Magazine Cover design

Magazines have long used focus groups to tailor their package. New Scientist took another route for a recent issue, testing whether Neuromarketing could help make the magazine more appealing. NeuroFocus rated the results on a scale of 1 to 10, based on factors like memory activation and emotional engagement. The lowest scoring cover grated 6.5, with a shattered clock and the New Scientist logo in yellow. A cover with a complicated image and a red logo scored 7.5.The top-scoring cover had the logo in red and a single main image of space with a curve at the bottom split open to reveal fabric. The tagline read: “Has the fabric of the universe unravelled?” It scored 8.2.

According to Dr. A.K. Pradeep from Neurofocus, this cover showed some nice touches - "The red lettering is one, and using the word “fabric” and an image of fabric is another, as it provides a nice synchronicity. In addition, the subtle peek at the fabric provides candy for the brain. “The human brain loves to solve simple puzzles,” he said. “Anytime something is concealed and revealed, the brain rushes toward it.” But not all was ideal, the cover would have benefited from moving the text under the logo to the right side and the image to the left, as the brain will try to ignore the text and enjoy the image"

Media planning

It also has applications in determining reach & frequency. NeuroMetrics measures are taken during repeated exposures to an ad looking at wear-in (to effectively communicate message) and wear-out. So that we can optimizes Gross Ratings Points (GRP) buys to determine frequency and reach. They also look at TV commercial cut downs (e.g. from 30 seconds to 10 seconds ) where the commercial is optimised by selecting the most engaging sections.

As regard emotional engagement, research here has shows that YouTube has a higher level of engagement than TV, which is logical, given one is a quick burst medium, and the other is more passive. This also means, however, that people have higher expectations for online video, so they have to engage your attention within the first 3 to 5 seconds, or users will move to something else to sate their appetite for emotional engagement. Creatives are therefore under more pressure to create attention grabbing content.

This area is fast developing, and while many of the findings confirm good practice, it is important to have further research to support traditional methods and gut feelings. NeuroFocus' practitioners also acknowledge the limits of the research, as deducing the exact criteria that dictate consumer choice remains difficult, even with these developments. However, researchers maintain that Neuromarketing's primary applications include uncovering what marketing forms and advertisements are most effective for individual brands, thus serving to complement more orthodox forms of research.

There is consternation with the tragic Greeks and their seeming inability to get their fiscal act together. George Papandreou, his unpronounceable finance minister and the rest of his cabinet are hide bound by a country that does not want to change its ways. The trauma has spread to the rest of Europe as the realisation that “we are all in this together” takes hold. Even the Americans and Chinese are getting in on the act now, alarmed at the prospect of global recession deepening into a 1030s style depression. All fear a global Greek tragedy.

There are a lot of people worried about this, spending a lot of their spare mental capacity fearing for their future, their jobs, their pension and a whole bunch of other consequences of prolonged economic depression. Lots of people are thinking deeply about moving whatever assets they have into different currencies and fretting about where is safe. Is Sterling sterling? Should I yen for the Yen? Are the Swiss being frank?  Worry, worry, worry. We have lots to vex about with this going on.

STOP!

There are the best financial brains on earth trying to sort this crisis out. Most of us are on the outside of the financial system looking in. Your worry won’t make a whit of difference. Don’t spend your spare time discussing the Greek leader or his finance minister. You have better things to be doing. Focus on the areas you can control. Concentrate on being brilliant at what you do. Think about making a difference in your world today and every day. Use your spare mental capacity to make your business better. You will be a better person. You will be better able to deal with the things with which you should be concerned. We may not get through this. Don’t make it worse by using your spare mental energy uselessly fretting. That would also be a tragedy, Greek or otherwise.

The guy who was making horsewhips when the motorcar was invented knew that his business was in trouble. In the media and advertising business, there are a lot of horsewhip makers, they just don’t recognise it yet. Newspapers will become a thing of history. The only question is ‘When?’. I read them. My kids (now 19 and 21) don’t. The big shift will be from paper to digital media. The challenge for the newspaper industry is how to get advertising and subscription revenue from digital delivery.

When they have solved this one, they will be in the broadcasting industry, competing with ‘traditional’ TV and radio for share of our mind-space as they too become more ‘online’ in their behaviour. This will cause more significant change to the current norm.

The Internet has democratised communications. It will continue to change and evolve. Advertisers and their conduits have been struggling and will continue to struggle with this. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, the change requires a big shift in mindset for many. Secondly, the new opportunities can be difficult for intermediaries to effectively monetise.

Small groups and passionate individuals can quickly and inexpensively establish themselves and compete with big, long established media, the quality of their content and their delivery method being the only limit to success.

Social Media allow the smallest and most specialised of companies to communicate effectively and efficiently with their target markets. It facilitates wonderful customer service opportunities. It allows any company to really understand its customers. It also allows customers to really understand the company. It is causing a revolution in marketing thinking across the globe.

‘Traditional’ online advertising is proving to be less and less effective as browsers ignore online ads. For many, hyper-targeted communications are becoming more and more the norm. However, these run the risk of attracting regulatory constraints as the Internet pervades more and more of our lives.

Tomorrow, what we know today will be partly irrelevant and there will be a ‘new new thing’ that will be revolutionising our communications world.

The communications industry is tied to technological advancement. It is the nature of technological change that it happens exponentially. Our ability and the natural inclination of the human to adapt to change is not exponential. We have to accept that we need to keep adapting, changing and evolving at an ever-increasing pace.

We have to realise is that the only constant is change. Change will continue to accelerate and present opportunities. These are opportunities that we can’t see now because they haven’t been invented yet. That will not change. Love change, live it, or get left behind making horsewhips.

I have been thinking about this over the last couple of weeks. We have so much of which we can be proud. Here are a few to start:

Our rich literary heritage

James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Bram Stoker, Jonathan Swift, Synge, Yates, Summerville and Ross, the stalwart of England and the English - Oliver Goldsmith, Seamus Heaney, and too many more to laboriously list here. Our island has and continues to produce a vastly disproportionate number of the greatest writers in the English language. Take a break from watching the English soccer and do a bit of reading.

Agribusiness

We produce the best beef, lamb and dairy produce in the world. Others may argue the toss. I chose to have faith in what I know. We have grown some of the best food businesses in the world from really humble beginnings. One of the biggest (and best) food ingredients and flavourings business' on this planet is Kerry Group plc.

We are doing great things and can do lots more by adding more value to our fantastic raw ingredients.  

Rugby Football

One of the great joys in my life in recent years has been through Irish national and provincial rugby. I am lucky enough to have sung and cried in Croke Park at the first Ireland v England match in that historic ground. I was blown away in a sea of passion and excitement in Cardiff when Munster first raised the Heineken European Rugby Cup. Edinburg and a marauding Rocky Elsom gave me wonderful memories when Leinster achieved European glory two years ago. As I type, we have Leinster in the final of the Heineken European Rugby Cup and with any luck one of us will win the Magners League in 2011.

The European population is more than 500 million. Again we are disproportionately successful.

The IDA

The often unsung heroes of our overpopulated public service. The IDA has delivered and continues to deliver incredible quality and quantity of foreign direct investment into Ireland. We need it.  By the way, I read on the home page of the IDA that Ireland is ranked 11th out of 84 countries in the 2008 - 2012 Business Environment Ranking of the Economist Business Unit.

There's a couple to start. I have had my bellyful of the negative, media led, self destruction. Yes, we have had and continue to have real, deep economic problems. But, let's focus on the great stuff we have achieved, what we are achieving today and imagine what we can achieve in the future. Ultimately, it is the only way forward.

So, if you want to hear what I REALLY think is the problem with Ireland, it's just that we are focusing on the wrong stuff. Give it a bit of thought. There is so, so much good and positive going on. Focus on it. Be a force for positive good in your attitude and dealings.  In the words of a great Irishman, Lord Kitchener "Your country needs you". Yes, he was Irish.

But in strange inversion of this long held belief, we are inadvertently building a world that allows not our ancestors to watch us, but our descendants. Children born in and around the year 2000 (Millennials, in marketing-speak) will live the better part of a century in a world of ubiquitous recording technology.  We’ll leave behind a rich seam of hundreds of thousands of photos, videos and recordings harvested from decades of portable cameras, CCTVs and digitally archived phone calls (“this call may be recorded for training purposes”). 

As recording technology evolves and continues to invade physical space, it will hoover up exponentially more data about the real world, and as a consequence, more and more data about us and our activities. As such, the details of our lives will be stored in higher and higher resolution as we move through time. Broadcast quality HD cameras are already available for as little as a few thousand Euro. HD 3D video recorders, for instance, will likely be commonplace within our lifetimes. Likewise, a growth area in CCTV technology is that of Megapixel Cameras, video analytics and audio recording. Technology is gorging on data, and coming up with more ways to eat it. 

Mapped onto the audiovisual framework of our lives, we leave every idle thought and preference parsed through Twitter, Facebook and their successor services. Every blog, forgotten email and text message. Every downloaded file and image, every word or phrase you ever searched for. Intimate thoughts, recorded unwittingly through behaviour patterns. Archived GPS coordinates of everywhere you went  - and when - from the instant you got your first smart phone. In Physics what you’d call your entire world-line through four dimensional space. 

What we’ll leave behind is much more than a death mask. It is the fossil of an entire lifetime, petrified in the electronic strata of a planetary machine. 

At present, these pieces of information are floating about somewhere in the vastness of the Internet in diffuse, disconnected databases. Although much of it is publicly available, much else currently resides safely behind the walls of privacy policies or has been harvested in secret by state security organisations (such as the phone calls reportedly recorded by the controversial Echelon base in Yorkshire). But as author and thinker Steward Brand reminds us; “Information wants to be free”. Julian Assange would agree. 

In years to come, when issues of privacy regarding the deceased erodes, and technologies for exploring the oceans of data evolve, it seems highly likely these scattered pieces of information will coalesce. Advances in technologies such as the Semantic Web will make the merging of databases much easier. Biometrics technologies will also be used to scour audiovisual data for the unique identifiers of our voice, footsteps and even our typing rhythm. Physical biometrics will be used to pick your face from crowds from decades worth of archived footage and arrange it chronologically. 

Such technology is being pioneered by intelligence agencies around the world today, who are struggling to cope with the glut of data they are collecting through surveillance devices. Like the Internet itself, this will slowly seep into the public sphere to be commoditised, perhaps into Family Intranet systems where our data-fossils can be scanned and analysed in detail. 

As the 21st century unfolds, the work of genealogy will shift from treasure hunting for scraps of information - such as in wedding registers - to something more akin to data-mining. Whole new user interfaces will evolve to cope with the massive glut of ancestral data. They will be able to track trends in the density of specific phrases and words we used over our lifetimes. Our descendants will be able to see which of our friends and colleagues influenced us and why by analysing our behaviour patterns over time. Our entire existence will be browseable, searchable, and stored in holographic detail.  

Some of you may even have videos of you being born sitting on a digitised videotape somewhere; imagine the surreal sight of your great grandchildren being able to view your messy, screaming debut into the world before fast-forwarding to footage of your funeral. To steal a line from H.G Wells, they will study us “as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water”. Unlike the Romans, we will not be idealised memories mapped onto a clay death mask. We will be there in vivid HD detail, our every triumph and flaw there to be studied and dissected. We are haunted not by the spirits of our ancestors, as the Romans believed, but watched by the omnipresent eyes of generations yet to come. 

Such unspoken anxieties are behind recent moves by the EU to enact "right to be forgotten” laws in relation to digital media, and, one might argue, so are government attempts to have photographing police officers criminalised. Both are examples of a growing fear that things we do will be stored and archived indefinitely - perhaps held against us - as is the ongoing debate over consistent online identities vs online anonymity. While Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg argues that having several identities online shows a lack of integrity, 4chan founder Moot argues that anonymity is authenticity, because only when you avoid fear of social fallout can you say what you really think. Which is bad news when you consider Google CEO Erich Schmidt recent comments that there is no anonymity in the future of the web.

As the Great CCTV Camera of history bears down on us, it is worth pondering how our descendants might think about how we conducted ourselves in our day to day lives. Will they be proud of the forefathers and the parts we played at such a pivotal time of history? Will they like the men and women we became? Or will they be disgusted at how we evaded our responsibilities, lied, cheated and squandered our lives? Perhaps it will lead to a world where where we are no longer held up to unreasonably high standards. Or perhaps it will encourage us to raise the bar and become better people, knowing that someone, however distant in time, is watching us. 

Much like at a dinner party, if you allow yourself to be overserved, you can end up with a woozy head and a distorted view of reality.

One has to take responsibility for filling one’s own glass. If we each do this, we can choose how full the glass gets and more importantly, what gets poured in the first place. Recent research published by the Mayo Clinic indicates that positive people live longer, are happier and have better relationships. If you choose to pull the best out of every situation, rather than look for the worst, you will be better off in the long run. Here are a couple of things you can do to make a real difference:

1. Seek out positive people. Absorb some of their energy. It will do you good.

2. Laugh. You will feel better and those around you will too.

3. Never start a sentence with “The problem with that is….”

4. Try to see the positive in every situation. It “is” there. It is just not obvious sometimes.

The evidence is overwhelming. Be positive. When it’s your round, pour your own. Pour positivity. You will be all the better for it.