Paradigm shifting tools

The world is changing. I really enjoy finding or identifying tools, trends, etc. that I think will effect the rate of change. Finding those things that have the potential to cause global paradigm shifts.

I saw several this morning. All in a 20 minute talk by Hans Rosling.

1. The obvious one was the topic of his talk. How money and political leaders have changed and are changing the health of their countries. Making the public aware of these trends is a great first step towards making changes.

2. Less obvious: new software (at least new to me) can be used to present complex information in easy to follow and understand formats. I had never seen animated graphs like his before. He used it to show global trends, but it won't be long before it will be used in K-12 classrooms to show how much food is wasted in the cafeteria.

3. He concludes his talk about freeing and making understandable the information that is paid for by the public. This requires that the information be ANIMATED, LIBERATED and SEARCHABLE. Gapminder and Google are working towards this end. Reminiscent of Kevin's article "Open Access In Scientific Publishing".

4. PowerPoint presentations (or Google Presentations) will become better (less boring and more infomative) in the future (woo hoo!!!)

5. Social networking tools work. I found out about this when reading my RSS feeds (subscribed to rconlon's del.icio.us feed) You are discovering it by reading this blog directly at http://blog.johndorner.com/ in your own feed reader or it might have been delivered to your email by FeedBurner or other similar service. Those who aren't using at least some of the new social networking tools are getting left behind.

What's really cool - is that you can play with the same software and dataset that Hans Rosling used in his presentation at: http://tools.google.com/gapminder/.