EPIC 2015

Salah satu artikel majalah tentang Google yang pernah saya baca menyebutkan “EPIC 2014”. Sebuah film animasi (flash) ber durasi 8 menit yang dibuat Robin Sloan dan Matt Thompson di sekitar bulan November 2004. Clip ini membahas tentang cerita fiksi tahun 2014 yang diawali dengan sejarah internet yang mempengaruhi media berita dan perkembangan berita secara online.

Video yang saya embedded dari (lagi-lagi) YouTube ini versi update dengan judul EPIC 2015 (rolling 1 tahunan) yang di release pada bulan Januari 2005 dengan tambahan bahasan tentang peran podcasting, GPS dan layanan peta web seperti Google Maps. Saya belum tahu, untuk tahun 2007 ini apa sudah ada revisi EPIC 2017.



Berikut ini cuplikan transcript dari versi original yang mulai mengulas fiksi masa depan (dibayangkan 3 tahun lalu). Di bagian akhir mulai digambarkan EPIC

2004 would be remembered as the year that everything began.
Reason Magazine sends subscribers an issue with a satellite photo of their houses on the cover and information custom-tailored to each subscriber inside. Sony and Philips unveil the world’s first mass-produced electronic paper. Google unveils GMail, with a gigabyte of free space for every user. Microsoft unveils Newsbot, a social news filter. Amazon unveils A9, a search engine built on Google’s technology that also incorporates Amazon’s trademark recommendations. And then, Google goes public. Awash in new capital, the company makes a major acquisition. Google buys TiVo.

2005 – In response to Google’s recent moves, Microsoft buys Friendster.

2006 – Google combines all of its services - TiVo, Blogger, GMail, GoogleNews and all of its searches into the Google Grid, a universal platform that provides a functionally limitless amount of storage space and bandwidth to store and share media of all kinds. Always online, accessible from anywhere. Each user selects her own level of privacy. She can store her content securely on the Google Grid, or publish it for all to see. It has never been easier for anyone, everyone to create as well as consume media.

2007 – Microsoft responds to Google’s mounting challenge with Newsbotster, a social news network and participatory journalism platform. Newsbotster ranks and sorts news, based on what each user’s friends and colleagues are reading and viewing and it allows everyone to comment on what they see.
Sony’s ePaper is cheaper than real paper this year. It’s the medium of choice for Newsbotster.

Sampai periode ini seharusnya kita bisa koreksi dari kondisi yang benar-benar terjadi… tapi teu gampang juga, ada komentar ?

2008 sees the alliance that will challenge Microsoft’s ambitions. Google and Amazon join forces to form Googlezon. Google supplies the Google Grid and unparalled search technology. Amazon supplies the social recommendation engine and its huge commercial infrastructure. Together, they use their detailed knowledge of every user’s social network, demographics, consumption habits and interests to provide total customization of content - and advertising.

The News Wars of 2010 are notable for the fact that no actual news organizations take part.
Googlezon finally checkmates Microsoft with features the software giant cannot match. Using a new algorithm, Googlezon’s computers construct news stories dynamically, stripping sentences and facts from all content sources and recombining them. The computer writes a news story for every user.

In 2011, the slumbering Fourth Estate awakes to make its first and final stand. The New York Times Company sues Googlezon, claiming that the company’s fact-stripping robots are a violation of copyright law. The case goes all the way to the Supreme Court, which on August 4, 2011 decides in favour of Googlezon.

On Sunday, March 9 2014, Googlezon unleashes EPIC.

Bagian ini mulai membahas konsepsi EPIC.

Welcome to our world.

The ‘Evolving Personalized Information Construct’ is the system by which our sprawling, chaotic mediascape is filtered, ordered and delivered. Everyone contributes now – from blog entries, to phone-cam images, to video reports, to full investigations. Many people get paid too – a tiny cut of Googlezon’s immense advertising revenue, proportional to the popularity of their contributions.

EPIC produces a custom contents package for each user, using his choices, his consumption habits, his interests, his demographics, his social network – to shape the product.

A new generation of freelance editors has sprung up, people who sell their ability to connect, filter and prioritize the contents of EPIC.

We all subscribe to many Editors; EPIC allows us to mix and match their choices however we like. At its best, edited for the savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world – deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before.