It's a sentence I pulled out of context from the recent Unity newsletter. It relates to a Mobile Generation Education Project, a project with a $250k giveaway to help students become the mobile innovators of tomorrow.

Now, when I was a student, we didn't have mobile phones, or the world wide web. And if we did, we'd have moved onto something else by now. Teachers point out that 60% of the jobs their students end up doing haven't been invented yet. I helped develop Risk Assessment software used by Walmart among others, five years later it's old technology. Everything moves so fast in this information age and it's accelerating.

I wonder how much of this social web technology that is perceived to have permanence will be around in ten years or even five. I'm starting to see an effect that could be best described as Dawinism applied to digital data, a process of selection that results in the useful data being retained (at least higher up the search tree) and copied. And this process snowballing with an ever increasing amount of new data.

With amazing concepts of collective information gathering such as Seadragon and Photosynth on the horizon, any guesses as to what the future holds in information mining are just that. If you don't know what Photosynth is then check the link and prepare to have your mind blown by possibilities of this and other forms of data.

It doesn't take academics to come up with these kinds of ways of looking at data, it takes a creative (and ever so clever) mind. Picasso said everyone is born an artist until it's taught out of them.

Right, that killed 10 minutes. I wonder if anyone will be referencing this blog entry when I'm gone from this world. I expect the URLs will have long since died

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