Charles Leadbeater talked about Cloud Culture at QUT by raising the question of who or what should control the clouds - of data that is.
If you leave it up to algorithms it's dicey.
Amazon's algorithms recently recommended he buy his own book,
We-Think. Facebook's algorithm started a rumour that he and his wife
were not on speaking terms because they hadn't written on each other's walls in so long - he
assures everyone that they are on more than speaking terms still.
He started out telling a room full of academics that he wasn't really one of them - he's a journalist. He worked for the Financial Times. He worked in Weekend TV.
Charles Leadbeater (left) with Stuart Cunningham (Creative Industries & Innovation centre of excellence director).
But when he started out nobody was asking him what his business model was and no one in the "traditional media" game wondered what their end-users were doing with the content they produced.
All that's changed in the past 10 years. He expects the rate of change to maintain its momentum for the next 10 years.
Basically, he thinks that the new business model may lie somewhere on a spectrum between aggregators and Apple - he actually thinks that a process is underway called Applizing.
He pointed to the fact that Google's new products - like Buzz - are failing while Apple's selling hundreds of thousands of iPads.
And he thinks Google's search function is second-rate - perhaps that's why Facebook has taken the search crown this year.
People tend to concentrate on the ferocious struggle between old and new media but it's the ferocious struggle between the new and newer and still newer media which will determine the landscape of the future.
So who does get to control the cloud?
He says it's obvious that governments would have a preference for doing deals with one or two players: Apple and Facebook? There's Apple again.
However, he says Facebook is "fatally compromised" because the more it goes commercial the less "social" it becomes - and there's a pesky issue of privacy.
While Apple is upfront about its dealings - it's commercial. It helps you to be cool. Thereby it serves you. (Them's aren't actually his words I'm just interpreting here)
And one of his big lines is that it's the renegades and the pirates - the guys who DON'T get government subsidies - who will be the game changers.
But there's room for all - at the moment anyway.
For instance, the UK's pollies spend many hours doing interviews with
netmums in this election campaign - which has only 600,000 members.
Clouds will come in many shapes and sizes and compositions - depending on how the governance issues pan out.
The users and creators of clouds will come from a "pebble beach" landscape (METAPHOR) - with large organisations such as aggregators, public institutions, universities, libraries, galleries being the "boulders".
They will replace the boulders of the industrial era - newspapers, TV etc.
And then there's the pebbles - amateur and professionals who blog, create, post, mash ... RT even.
Cloud capitalists and governments are possible enemies of cloud access and equity - governments because in an effort to control the cloud they will want to make deals with capitalists.
I asked Mr Leadbeater about this slight contradiction between consumption and supply - this carbon footprint problem of the technology revolution.
