Transparency Camp West: Observations

(image by Beth Kanter)

First, Kaliya Hamlin has written a great post on how to manage an unconference so that participants get the most from the event, and feel connected to the topic and solving a particular problem set as well as make stronger social relationships for future potential workings (in this case Transparency Camp West, held yesterday in Charlie's old cafe plus a few small conference rooms at Google in Mountain View).

I attended Transparency Camp West (#TCamp09) from Saturday Afternoon through Sunday's brief closing. It was structured more like a BarCamp or FooCamp (with minimal facilitation) than an unconference using the Open Space method (pdf) (which has a bit more social and activity facilitation and structure). I attended TCamp because I'm interested in, as well as want to help with, Transparency which I feel strongly is a very good thing for government to engage in.

The first Barcamp was formed as an alternative to FooCamp, O'Reillly's "friends of oreilly" camp held at their headquarters annually (note I have attended FOO and really enjoyed it.) That first Barcamp had the social cohesion that forms around the shared hurts which many there felt as insult and exclusion, because of an unfortunate and ill-worded blog post about FooCamp inclusion. So that particular Barcamp's lack of facilitation wasn't an issue. (Note that I didn't personally feel the insult because I know the people who run FooCamp and knew it wasn't directed at me personally. Yet I felt it for the other young folks there who couldn't understand whether they were the ones being called out as unworthy to attend Foocamp and therefore felt hurt. I spent a fair amount of time that first and second day of the first Barcamp consoling young developers, explaining that I didn't think they were the targets of that Foocamp blog post either.. but they were hurt anyway. And hurts do bring a certain cohesion.)

But subsequent Barcamps have suffered from the lack of a Beginning and Ending. They have a start and a finish, but they don't really begin in any formal way, where a facilitator helps the event process and participants to plan the event agenda, announce each session proposal, and then push for documentation of learnings, nor do they have an ending where the participants are brought back together to share learnings and insights, and close properly as a social group who may, hopefully want to see each other again one day. Barcamps often just start. Organizer announces a wall. And that's it. Dive in. Left socially flapping in the breeze.

When I've attended Barcamps in NYC or Austin or SF or other local barcamp styled events, I've alternately been pleased to see everyone show up and many present something interesting, and yet dismayed by the lack of social cohesion or shared learning and evolving that I know from experience is possible at an open space style unconference. This is especially true for the wall-rushing of the Bar/Foo style, which is great if your 22 and male, and want to dive head first into a pile of bodies to get your slot. But if you're not (and say female or not 22) then you would likely really enjoy the ability to announce one at a time your session without having to dive ass in the air into the sweaty bodies just to get your slot. Filtering agenda creation through that process has nothing to do with whether a session will be any good, and everything to do with 22 y old male "f-u" culture.

But think about an unconference as a story: there is a beginning, a middle and an ending when it's done well.

Open Space unconferences provide that social structure, without filling in the content. The participants do that. It's still an unconference but it's got social support in a way that Barcamps don't.

So why does it matter that Transparency Camp was more Barcamp than Open Space? Because it felt like they squandered the opportunity to get the most out of the participants brainstorming solutions and connecting socially around the tough problems that many, most notably the Sunlight Foundation are attacking. In fact, I didn't realize until the end of the event that there was any particular leader leading the event (I missed the beginning because I thought it would be really hard to get in but in fact the event was in a huge cavernous space with tons of room and comparably few people.. sparse even.. though the break out rooms which were tiny were often packed -- that said, I missed their beginning and only heard it later). At the brief ending, when the leader said, "Anybody have anything to say, or any criticisms?" to that giant cavernous room with a few people milling about at the end, it felt so awkward. No.. I'm never going to share anything under those circumstances. Certainly not criticisms.

::shudder::

I think he was a little out of his depth in terms of facilitation experience. Though I did love the singing he did to call everyone back into the ending time.

One thing the FooCamp/BarCamp method sets as an expectation is that everyone will "come present something amazing." Well, not everyone has something amazing to present. Or is an expert. But what TCamp had was a bunch of smart people in the room interested in a particular problem set: transparency of data.

I did work for a congressman long ago for 4.5 yrs, 1.5 of which was in Washington, but I'm a technologist now. I work with hopefully-structured data and make algorithms and create systems and interfaces.. I don't work in government currently -- hate bureaucracy -- but I do want transparency in government and so I'm strongly aligned with the Sunlight Foundation's mission. In other words, I gave TCamp a day and a half of my time as a non-expert in current government transparency to try to help as a civic gesture, not because I do it for a living.

So why not instead use Open Space, which sets the expectation that some will present amazing things, but the rest will attack a problem from different angles in a discussion format? This is a subtle, but very important social distinction about session formats. However, including both session formats requires an Open Space facilitation method to get people thinking in the direction of question and answer, not presentation broadcast and competition, so that they are socially aligned to work together, but also not so structured that it takes the life out of the budding, thoughtful ideas these participants might come up with around the problem-set.

In other words, it's a balance: structure and openness. This balance is cultivated in the Open Space, camp process where there is a real opening and closing plus announced sessions. Also important is the social evening event between the two days, where all organizers of the event should attend to give even the this time heft and importance as an integral part of the communal event, as well as to receive informal feedback on how things are going. Aside: when I walked into the TCamp evening event and saw none of the organizers there, and a sea of people I mostly didn't know, I though.. oh it's not that important to be here and I'm tired and want to go home and eat something simple and light and just chill. But before I saw that, I was fully prepared to spend the evening continuing to socialize around the Transparency Camp problem-set.

(image by Joseph Boyle)

I really enjoyed Dan Gillmor's session on governmental dissemination of information in an open, and individuated media world. Dan is thoughtful and sincere in his desire to chronicle and assist with the transformation from broadcast to social and individual media as we navigate this new world, especially around government data. I also liked the session on Lobbyists which was hilariously and spontaneously focused on how to understand and better map their activities. The session on transparent data, by Natalie Fonseca of Techpolicy, and how far should it go in exposing personal, governmental and corporate data was great.. though the strides were likely lost to Twitter's short horizon of maintained tweets. I do hope someone took notes about what we discussed and posts them. And Esther Dyson's session on genetic data sociality and exposure was terrific, if not totally on topic about government data transparency.

One last thing, overall I enjoyed TCamp and would attend again. But there were a number of incidents where I saw people puffing themselves up as they presented things (sometimes great, sometimes ill conceived) or otherwise talked in sessions (the amount of reactionary eye rolling confirmed for me that I wasn't the only one surprised and dismayed by this behavior across sessions). It may be that in order to be a technologist / player in Washington or other governmental locals, that being pompous is a job requirement in order that the old guard in WDC or California take you seriously. But considering the problem set: transparency for the common man, I felt there was some irony in this behavior. And since some of it came from Sunlight folks, it made me worried for them. I know we could do the typical Silicon Valley thing where some engage in something stupid, and we all don't say anything and two years later they fail. But Sunlight and these other orgs don't have two years to figure out that this behavior is counterproductive. They are non-profits and there is a public good to what they do, and they need to deal with this now, not figure it out in two years after no-one has said anything.

Thankfully Sunlight has people like the extraordinary Ellen Miller and the very thoughtful Esther Dyson, whom I hope can help school these youngsters in the idea that self-puffery gets you nowhere in Silicon Valley, or for that matter outside the Beltway or Sacramento. Not to mention it makes it very difficult to listen well. Simply presenting something without your own ego inserted in front of the presentation or your contributory statement is the best way to get us all to say: WOW, what a great idea.. I want to help too! And since what you are presenting is interesting, you must be smart too!

That said, I was very impressed with Sunlight's Policy Director, John Wonderlich, who was thoughtful, socially pleasant, listened well and didn't seem to have any personal agenda to advance his own ego and stature. Maybe he even pets small children and dogs on the head and helps little old ladies cross the road as he walks to work each day too, I don't know, but Sunlight could use more people like him because he really added to every session in which I encountered him, both in terms of smart thoughts and socially to make people feel comfortable with the thoughts and ideas being passed around.

Celebrity Worship in the Post-Modern Internet

Doc Searls in a post on celebrity, black holes and productivity comments on celebrity as a form of coasting. Below is my reaction. I think there is more to it. Let me know what you think.

I've been talking about celebrity a lot since Thurs afternoon re: MJ, FF, EM, etc. Doc and I discussed this a month ago in depth too. I've been trying to figured out for the past year what the hyperdrive of microcelebrity is on Twitter that so many run after. And then the real celebrities hit twitter en masse and the hyperdrive of real celebrity is there as well. That drive diminishes at times one's ability to have a real conversation because some of those diving into conversations have agendas like trying to get the attention of the perceived AList (whatever that is.. oh yes.. the high follower counts, goosed by the twitter suggested follower list, provide us with a definitive answer... thank the gods).

But the triple-hit celebrity death match on Thursday drove me to my thought which is that most people need to follow, most people need something to worship, and most people have given up serious religion (of the type where you spend like 20 hours a week in church and the pope or the ayatollah or the supreme leader or whoever is your celebrity representative communicates with god for you and leads you and makes the decisions and you worship him to get to god because you can't talk to him yourself).

Michael Jackson and other celebs are the replacement for that sort of seriously time consuming difficult religion, because media and post-modernism make it easy (where premodern means god is above man, modern has everything equal: god, man, nature, and post-modern means nothing is more important than you). If nothing is more important than the individual, but he/she needs to follow something bigger than the self out of insecurity or whatever and there is very little ritual left post-old-style-religion to set people on their own course of confidence, productivity and humility in the world, and you have the media machine the past 100 years that now includes internet and self-publicity on things like twitter, well.. you have the perfect primordial soup to grow the MJ, etc worship replacing organized religion we see now. And of course, the celebrity version is so much easier and more fun, kind of like fast food.

Doc is right, celebrity worship is a tremendous form of distraction, but I would argue most don't have the confidence, discipline, or for that matter the interest in spending their time on more constructive things. While most are capable of much more, there is safety in worship. That's why the church/temple/mosque of old was so effective. It filled the rest of your time after work and set the order that god was first, then the supreme leader as the physical manifestation, then puny you, so you would worship up the hierarchy. Oh, and you were given a structure to think about life and death. Which is frightening to many. And there was a structure for work and discipline, however messed up these organized religions have been over the centuries.

In Post-Modernity, celebs fill the worship channel, effortlessly, where the celeb hierarchy is the order and the media connects you. Microcelebs are the long tail of this channel. Nothing going on with the top? Well.. there is always Guy Kawasaki or iJustine. And if you as the worshiper can get nearer to the celeb so much the better. People used to say: god is my savior. Now they say, "I remember exactly where I was when I heard MJ died." It's a way of placing yourself close to the worshiped thing.

Not to mention that you don't have to think about death if you go with the celebrity distraction mechanism, except when Farrah and Michael and Ed McMahon leave us, at which point people seem to just increase the worship but don't really have to face facts about their own lives.

It's utterly silly, and of course the internet and socialmedia send this tendency and need an order of magnitude higher than before. But I think it's a rat-brain need for the masses to worship something, and celebrity is the post-modern fast-food solution.

Opiates anyone?

The Life of a Tweet

Twitter (and the ISchool -- or one of my poor brethern -- I have a masters from UCBerkeley's iSchool) seem to be in the tweetsphere over one ill-found tweet tossed off by a student and found by her summer internship employer likely via search.twitter.com. For background, you can see this: FattyCisco.com. The poor girl is likely humiliated and horrified over what she thought was an innocent and also, likely, a fleeting thought that didn't really reflect how she felt overall.

We've all had those momentary thoughts where when we are ambivalent, we toss something out of our mouths and once it's out there, we think, wow, that doesn't even ring true or, it did for a nanosecond, and now it's changed, or gee, that's about 5% of the way I actually feel about this. But out of mouth, truly ephemeral (unless recorded in some form) is different than written down and searchable in the grand database of the Googlezon and search at twitter. Or maybe it's just a joke.

This is one of the problems with online communities and specifically twitter:

You don't know who's listening, and because of search tools, you are findable beyond your follower list
or your "community" of known tweeters (ppl you @ with or read) unless your account is private.

I don't think we have at all sussed out what it means to tweet in the long term, or what the power of the tweet is, or where the tweet goes and what sort of life it has beyond the first few minutes or hours of it's life in the Twitter / client context.

This is another example of something that happened recently:

A PR exec going to Memphis to meet with a client, Fed Ex, insulted the client on the way to the meeting. The clients wrote a letter to the PR company and him, his bosses, and cc'd everyone at Fed Ex as well. Ooops.

The problem is, tweets go to those paying attention at the moment, those who may save tweets in clients (i leave my twitter client open and check it now and then as I have time -- right now I have 15k tweets from the past couple of days), those pivoting on a single user, those searching for key words, those looking a related conversations.

But when you tweet, in your head, you're often just thinking about those you expect to read it, like only a few your followers paying attention at the time. What happens with some tweets (some reading by some followers) is not what can happen with all tweets.

The interface and interaction at Twitter's website doesn't lead you to believe that what happens most often there will happen in incendiary examples. And different twitter clients (an android or Iphone app for example) don't lead you to understand the permanent nature of tweets, through use, that say, search.twitter.com might, as you see something you deleted appear there anyway.

It takes experience with all these different modalities to inform you because there is no advance disclosure or warning of the elasticity of a single tweet.

What is most interesting is this pushes me to think harder about what the interface of "aged information" online looks like (and I don't mean google search results that move from page 1 to page 3 over time).

And I have to ask myself what it would mean to have what Judith Donath discussed on the panel, Is Privacy Dead or Just Very Confused, moderated Saturday at SXSW by danah boyd. Judith discussed having some kind of a "mirror" for you of your digital self that would reflect all your online presentation and communications and expression... just so you might get a sense of what you show people and what you project at a moment in time. Right now it's really hard to gather that sense of yourself. Right now, you don't really see it in any sort of complete way. But others see pieces of you digitally represented at different times. It would be like re-disclosing for yourself what you've done, discovering how others view you, in slices or on the whole, in order to see the effect you have. It would probably be helpful to know what had reach and where, and what was for now at least, forgotten.

But frankly, the privacy implications of that are huge as well. So, I'm thinking. No answers on that one yet.

She's Geeky

Hey.. She's Geeky is a few days away, and you can still sign up.

The list of great women attending is here: She's Geeky Attendees and Registration

Really looking forward to interacting with all those awesome girl geeks on Friday and Saturday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View!

She's Geeky Again! Jan 30-31, 2009

The second She's Geeky will happen at the end of this month! The first was held 14 months ago in Mountain View at the Computer History Museum, and this year it will happen there again.

Here are all the important links to get you going:

Website: http://www.shegeeky.org
BLOG: http://shesgeeky.org/sg/blog/
WIKI: http://shesgeeky.org/wiki/

Registration:
on site: http://shesgeeky.org/sg/register/
on eventbrite: http://shesgeekybayarea.eventbrite.com/

Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=5010135719
Event on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=53885344492
LinkedIn Group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=39189

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/shesgeeky

PLEASE be sure to register for one day $59 or two days $108 and get the early bird price.

Let's face it, this conference is just covering costs with those prices... if you are only able to come on a weekday, you'll be able to come Friday, and if weekends are all you can do, Saturday is it, or even better, come both days!

Also, check out this totally great video shot at the last She's Geeky:

Trashing Our Social Relationships (with Porn) to Get Your Numbers Up

Ok, there's a lot in that title. Let me explain (though I did blog about this earlier).

First, yesterday at the Supernova / Wharton event, in Jerry Michalski's session on business and social media (can't remember exact title) we spent much of the time talking privacy, online communication, games and social networks (er, social graphs but i really hate the fad where we make up a new word for something that is already working just so we can dink around with a new set of conferences, etc. but I digress. Though I would point out that one friend who attended SGP said the women at the event all seemed to get it, and then men all wanted to run calculations on our "social graphs" entirely missing the point. Oh well.)

At the end, Jeff Clavier, who apparently was at the Social Graphing conf/camp in San Diego earlier this week, gave a wrapping up of what happened. He mixed in a little of his perspective due to his investing in apps on Facebook, and threw in some perspective on the Stanford class that did some experiments on Facebook apps and their results. One example Jeff gave was about an app maker from the class had gotten 5 million people to click into his app (though they all immediately disappeared just after) in 5 weeks (correction, not 5 days -- as Jeff said to me later, correcting this, "damned French accent" because many of us heard "5 days").

I had to wonder, why would five million people do that? What's the benefit to them? Apparently the app maker, some young guy, is thrilled (and it sounded like Jeff might want to work with him or even invest). His experiment (with all of us, the greater Facebook community, as guinea pigs) worked for him, though I'd guess it wasted 5 million people's time, for a couple of minutes each.

I commented about the aspects of Facebook applications inadvertently trashing our relationships, at times, in order to get their numbers up, and using deceptive practices and features to do it, and said it thought it was really uncool. But there wasn't time to explain what I really thought, or the background of why I think this, and so, here we go:

Ok, imagine you get some sort of email message from a friend in Facebook. This is a real friend, someone you do business with and/or socialize with and maybe have known for a long time (as in, a lot longer than Mark Zuckerberg has been out of his teens and been (on paper) counted as a billionaire). Or maybe it's someone you work with (note that there's a lot of caselaw around sexual harassment.. so accidentally sending porn spam to people you work with or work for you, or you work for, doesn't seem like the greatest thing you would want to do either).

The message asks you to click into Facebook, at which point, you are asked to "install an app" (and, why? Just to read a message do I have to install an App? Oh yeah, this is about getting the applications numbers up ... so you do it, because you want to see your "real" friend's message). Then, once installed, you are taken to Slide's Fun Wall App, which shows you some porn, and says, "Click Foward to see what happen."

See this screen shot of the first round of porn spam I got (NSFW btw so be careful opening it).

I almost clicked "forward", but scrolled around past the fold. Turns out, if i'd clicked the "forward" button, Slide would have forwarded that spam to EVERYONE I KNOW in Facebook. All 500+ of them.

Now, let me explain who everyone is. Yes, of my 500 or so contacts, maybe 300 are in the tech community (and as such, expect early-adoptor screw ups and experimentation). But 200 are not. About 10 of these people are people I grew up with (we've been together as friends since nursery school). They don't know what the "tech community" is, much less care. Some of these people are religious and I would venture have never seen porn before or it's very rare in their lives. They aren't early adoptors. They expect that any communications are going to be real, and not some tech community experiment to figure out some thing that later promotes some business/VC investment, in order to see how the world of advertising can advance.

Or, take all the people I do business with, or the people who I work with, or work for me, or I work for. It would be just great to send them some porn spam. Or my brother and sister. They would luv to get porn spam from me. Not. Or how about my extended relatives in Europe? I think they are ripe for a little porn spam. No?

So.. I unchecked all 500+ contacts that Slide had checked, and wasn't able to view the message further (what was going to come next after I was asked to hit the "forward" button). So I figured out one profile I could link to who was a friend, and then forwarded the message there, "...to see what happen."

Well, guess what? Nothing "happen." Except that the message was forwarded to the one person I left checked. In other words. It's trick porn spam, features courtesy of Facebook and Slide.

So I sent in complaints to both companies (neither have contacted me back after a month -- guys, it's a social network, you know how to reach me.. give it a try!!)

After a while, I called people in each company that I knew through the tech comany. And was appalled at the responses I got. Now, these are people I know socially, and they gave me the real answers, but with the expectation that I would not attribute to them. However, I am confident that their answers reflect the culture and real value sets within these companies.

Facebook pointed the finger at Slide (the app maker in this case), and said, "There is nothing we can do. We have no control over the apps people make or the stuff they send." Oh, and if I wanted Facebook to change the rules for apps makers? I'd have to get say, 80k of my closest Facebook friends to sign on a petition or group, and then they might look at the way they have allowed porn spam to trick people into forwarding, but until then, there would be no feature review.

Slide said that they thought Facebook was the problem, because as the "governing" body, Facebook makes the rules and "Slide wouldn't be competitive if they changed what they do, and their competitors weren't forced to as well." In other words, Slides competitors use the same features to get more users (or trick more users as the case may be) and Slide didn't want to lose out on getting more users with similar features, regardless of the effect the features have on us and our relationships.

Also both companies told me that blogging doesn't affect them, because they don't read blogs. The only thing they pay attention to are Facebook groups. Because they don't look at problems that a single person discovers.

So in other words, a person with a legitimate complaint needs to have massive agreement and numbers in a Facebook group before these companies will even discuss a problem.

And, Slide and Facebook are willing to trash our relationships (real relationships) in order to get more numbers.

Now, note that many of the folks who sent the various porn spam (not just the ones in the photos above) sent very apologetic notes, because they were mortified that they had send their contacts porn spam.

Think about that. Your social networking / application software tricks you into doing something terribly socially embarrassing and you have to apologize? Wo. That's really messed up.

In other words, your social networking software / applications are, gasp, anti-social.

One guy in the Supernova / Wharton session yesterday asked how many people were in my Facebook list, and when I said 500, implied that most regular people have say, 50-100, and therefore it's not a bad problem. Well, I'd say each relationship is probably pretty important and this is an appalling justification for these applications and social network's feature sets and behaviors.

So I have to ask, if these young boys (Zuckerberg, the app makers in the class at Stanford, etc) are so clueless about relationships and social protocols, that they would build apps and a system that promotes bad behavior like this, where are their mentors? Where are their funders (who presumably have some input and sway into what's going on)? Why aren't Peter Thiel and Dave McClure or even Jeff Clavier (who sounded like he was trying to or has invested in some of the guys from the apps class at Stanford) advising these people that while they are experimenting, that these are real established relationships, and Facebook is now mainstream, and therefore the apps can't do this to people? I mean, it seems logical (and has happened in cultures around the world for millennia) that older, wiser men would advise young, clueless hormone driven boys how to act in the community. And what of Max Levechin? I mean, he's kind of in the middle, age wise, but shouldn't he know better than this?

Is the desperation for fame and money so great, that people would simply eschew social concerns in favor of ratings which then equal higher company valuations, and more billions on paper? Or do you want your claim to fame to be: "At least 15 million minutes wasted" from your experiments on Facebook (as I would imagine the Stanford student described above could claim)?

I guess the answer is yes, and so my response is, I can't trust Slide, or Facebook. Nor do I have respect for their founders if this is the way they handle themselves and their companies.

And where are the advertisers who might put pressure? The ones on the page I show above (not all the porn spam trickery I got, but the first batch) are Toyota and Gartner?

I deleted all my Slide apps after my last blog post, a month ago, and since heard from maybe 20 people in person that after reading my post, they'd done the same. But I guess we don't count, since we only have a few people concerned.

I hope the folks who attended the session yesterday at Wharton have a better idea as to why I find this upsetting, and upon hearing that more "experiments" with Facebook apps are happening, why I might get worried and distrust the process, the results and the motivations behind them.

Note: I am aware that Facebook did recently force apps makers to default turn "off" the checked names in forward (as far as I can tell from my own analysis of Facebook and via other blogs explanations). But I have yet to receive replies to my original support notes to these companies, and feel confused about an unspoken, barely there response. It's as though after barely changing one thing aspect of a feature, in order to mitigate the problem, they want to sweep it all under the rug. But I don't feel confident that these companies either care about the spam problem, the porn problem or the social abuse problems they are allowing.

For now, the answer for me is to use Facebook minimally and Slide not at all. Interestingly, at recent social gatherings I've mentioned these issues. At almost every one, people have said they are getting off Facebook and not going back, for precisely the reasons I mention above.

I guess that's the only way to make an impression on Facebook and Slide. Shut down your own use.

Chaos, In Pakistan and Silicon Valley

Today are the Pakistani elections. Why do I say chaos? And why also in Silicon Valley? And how are they at all connected?

As Amra Tareen, who is in Pakistan covering the event, says in her report about the elections:

As the day progressed more people started to show [to the polling stations], people were staying back home enjoying their morning off and due to concerns of violence. In the last 24 hours gunmen in Lahore and surrounding areas have killed 8 people and injured 40.

Check out this ballot from Pakistan, which Amra explains:

For example PML-Q (Musharraf's party) has the symbol cycle, PML-N (Nawaz's party) is represented by the symbol Tiger or a Lion and PPP (Benazir's party) is represented by the arrow. People caste their vote by placing a fingerprint and a seal over the symbol.

I've been helping Amra, a friend in the Silicon Valley for 4 years, with her company All Voices. Amra is from Pakistan, though she spent some of her educational years in Australia, including getting an engineering degree, and then went to Harvard for an MBA. She was also a VC in Silicon Valley for 6 years. Now she has founded All Voices with Erik Sundelof and the help of a great team of engineers and other folks.

I'm still working on Dabble, but I just find what is happening at All Voices so compelling, that I wanted to help her do this. She's raised VC money for a news and a conversation site that is meant to foster discussion from people around news events.

And how many Silicon Valley founders go to Pakistan to cover the elections, to kick off their companies?!?!

That's incredibly unusual, and to me, shows tremendous passion and guts about both the company, and her desire to see Americans and Middle Easterners talk about what goes on in their world. Anyone can talk, but she specifically wants to see these two groups getting to know each other on a more personal level, as opposed to say, an AP report.

So what is the chaos in Silicon Valley? Well, it's not on par with the Pakistani Elections, but the alpha All Voices is out, and people are commenting, talking about the election (finding a few bugs too!), making events, posting videos and photos, and it's the first big exposure the team has dealt with.

The site is pretty simple, really. The idea is that events happen in the world, and an event within AllVoices can then be assembled by pulling in news stories, photos and videos by news sources or blogs and say, creative common's licensed Flickr photos.

But you can also make an event, which is really more factual in nature, than opinion, about whatever has happened in their world. Then you might blog or add photos or videos to your own event, or you could add those elements to events made by others or the system. For example, Amra has put video here and here and here of the people in Pakistan talking about the election, onto the event she made noting election coverage. After you make your event, the system will match blog posts, articles, images and video to it, and more folks can come along and share eyewitness stories, comment, ask questions, etc.

All this gets put onto the map and front page which lists recent and active events.

So when others come to the site, they can find your stuff based on where it happens as well as by searching or by finding your list of activities via your profile. Amra's election reporting is, of course, located in Pakistan on the map.

The sites definitely is an alpha, where there are bugs and things. Her engineers have been working on this for about 6 months, and it's really great to see what they've done.

As I said, I've helped with a little consulting on the side. Normally, I wouldn't blog about things I offer consulting for, and normally I'm too busy with Dabble, but I think this site and Amra's work has the potential for so much social good, I'm breaking my own rule.

So take what I say with a grain of salt due to my work and bias. Go visit the site yourself and decide if you think it's worthwhile. But more than anything, I encourage you to get involved in supporting Pakistan as it hold its election. Pay attention, comment, blog, make a stink, but support democracy and the people of Pakistan as they stake a claim for their future!

Rickrolling.. not quite but worse, from Slide's Funwall

Getting rickrolled is when you get tricked into watching a video, thinking you are going to watch something else. (A Rick Astley video was the one that rickrolling was named after.)

I've been thinking Facebook and Slide had jumped the shark a long time ago, though I use Facebook daily to get in touch with distant contacts I don't have email for, and then we typically jump off Facebook. Sometimes Facebook is fun, but most of my "feed" reflecting my contacts activities is just from the few self-promoters trying to tell me how great the latest thing they just did is. Not really fun for me.

But Slide apps on Facebook have lately been Spam and Bacon filled crap, where even when I say to them after filling out some silly thing or posting something to an app *not *to contact all my contacts, they do it anyway. It's not just slide though, other apps do this as well. May be a bug but they all seem to do it, and since the value of that bug is so high to them, I tend to think it's really a *feature* of the worst spammy bacon-filled kind.

Well the last 24 hour takes the cake. This porn image (posted here: View image by clicking, but it's NSFW, for sure) has been forwarded to me by no less than ten people, including 2 VCs, 3 high level east coast media execs, 2 PR people, plus 3 others. All of whom must be embarrassed as all get out that they've forwarded me and all their other contacts this porno spam by mistake because Slide says "Forward" to find out what happens next in the picture. Except the Forward button takes them to nothing, except a big thanks for letting Slide spam your friends

Evil. It was only a matter of time before apps like Slide and others did something like this to up their use numbers. Even if someone is hacking Slide, Slide built the tools that allow this to happen. And whoever did this is preying on people's curiosity about what they would see next, since the image says "click Forward to see what happen next (sic)." In fact, the app is really spamming everyone in the person's contact list with porn, and that's what happens next.

What bothers me so much about this is that the features are built to disregard the user's relationships, their personal and professional connections, for the sake of the app maker's desire to get more users and make money. It's wrong.

I'm deleting all my Slide and other spammy Facebook apps today. This is really bad. So does this mean we need a new term, like getting Sliderolled, as in, you got tricked into spamming your friends with porn?

Social Information Overload

My first overload was with online news. Hundreds of sites to visit and later to pull into an RSS reader. Then I cut down the feeling of overload with the decision to simply read things filtered by bloggers.

Second was blogger and by extension, news overload, where there were hundreds of bloggers to read, and all the news articles they pointed to. Then I cut that down by topic filter searches that were pulled into my news reader.

Third was photo and video overload, where I had tons of sites to look at photos and videos and was spending hours a day seeking out whatever was going on. Then I cut that down by using 1001 for photos and using people to filter videos, by hand selecting a few each day in either topic areas or for things that were just interesting. I use Dabble a lot for this.

Fourth, and I'm not sure how I'm going to cut this one down is social network info overload. Upcoming, Facebook, Myspace (less so but still!), Dopplr (travel YASN), Linked In, plus every wiki I'm in for different events and groups, as well as all my Google and Yahoo groups, plus groups at Magnify, Vodpod and Flickr, maillists that have grown much more around social interaction than they were in the past where they appeared more as information I could take or leave. There are the games and mobile groups I'm in, Twitter, and I'm sure there's more but I just can think of it all. In other words, the social interaction and information overload has become high pressure.

I'm looking for some filter to go through and just grab what I need and not have to know about or read or watch the rest, or reply to it, unless I want to and it fits in with an event or need or desire.

In the past, I've just gone skipping around, and at other times been immersive, but it's all so random right now, there is so much, I'm feeling anxious all over again, as I watch it all scroll by.

I don't know the answer, but the question might be, what happens when you have Social Information Overload? What is it, how do you manage it, and what can you use to filter it? Don't tell me use my bloated RSS reader which I abandoned when it had 450,000 unread (no exaggeration.. I can't open it) items. There must be something to solve this.

I was at a talk two weeks ago, where the speaker said that 5 years ago, 3 percent of online activity was at social sites, and now 31 percent is. I can say that I spend at least if not much more than 31 percent of my activity online in social spaces. That doesn't include the games and mobile stuff.

So.. how can I be informed, but not rude, comfortable without anxious worry about missing things, immersive but only when it's fun? What is the answer?

US Internet Speeds are Really Slow..

Via Dave Farber's IP list from Press Etc:

Average broadband download speed in the US is 1.9 Mbps. It is 61 Mbps in Japan, 45 Mbps in South Korea, 18 Mbps in Sweden, 17 Mpbs in France, and 7 Mbps in Canada.

I've talked about this before.

Americans are falling further and further behind, in socializing with technologies like high speed interent access as well as cell phone tools and service that are much more dynamic than the rest of the world has. This is due to terrible public policies around these technologies and selfish companies who provide the services in monopolisitic ways.

Two to four years after I first talked about this, we are further behind than ever. It's appalling but you can read about the $200 billion scam on the US by Verizon, QWest and the Bell companies here.

Online Community Map

Don't know who did it, but I like it.

Update: Justin (in comments) points out the original version. And Kevin Marks points out that they forgot Gaia and Club Penguin.

Facebook: Socially Awkward Network (At Times)

So the Facebook bruhaha has been interesting.

One thing I think is fascinating is how many people, who aren't in Facebook, are willing to comment on the problem where Facebook (two days ago) turned on a feature to create feeds of everything you do, with time stamps.

Last night, I was talking to the founder of a big blog search company, and he was going on about how this was no big deal, and the Facebook change was all just the same as in Linked In, where when you change your profile, your contacts get notification. But Facebook's changes are much more than that. Every change you make everywhere is default set to "on" for sharing with a timestamp. And it encourages people who are not connected to you to see what you do, if you leave it turned on, because everyone who visits your profile can see your feed.

As of this morning, you can change your privacy setting. Facebook announced that they had coded up something over the past two days so that users could set up the exposure of different actions and the timestamps associated with them. But when I went to the privacy area, every setting was turned on for full sharing. By default. I had to turn things off to make things more private.

What that means is that other Facebook users you are connected to can see a lot of what you do, in a feed, with dates and times. At least that's what I thought at first. But then I realized everyone, whether we were connected or not, could see this kind of information about my activities. In other words, if you are looking for plausible deniability that you were busy, not there or otherwise engaged, and someone sees that you've done something like uploaded a photo or commented in a group, well, you are in deep s-t as you try to explain why you didn't do something else during that time. Or as one Facebook user (a recent UCLA grad) told me today after explaining that he had turned everything off, that for the two days his actions were turned on and available, his girlfriend was really mad because he'd posted on the walls of other friends who happened to be girls, and now she could see it. So he was very relieved to get the thing shut off.

Here is the default set of privacy choices:

In the discussion forums on Facebook, some want the exposure feature gone, some are satisfied with their new ability to turn everything off with the new granular privacy settings page, and some like all the new features and sharing everything, and have no problem with the default settings exposing everything in one place.

One person I discussed this with this morning at the office told me that yesterday she looked at an acquaintance's Facebook profile, where that friend had just changed her relationship status with her boyfriend from "open" to "in a relationship." My friend didn't know her well and felt this was really weird. She didn't want to know they had an open relationship. And I went to the page and I could see it all too, where each change was documented and timed. It's odd to me because I don't know this person making the relationship changes at all.

The problem is that default settings end up being left in the default state by something like 80% of users, on average. And then people get mad when those settings come back to bite them because they forget about them. Putting the default settings on "share" mode means that most people will be sharing, even with the publicity this week.

Many people don't want their every small move tracked by others... it's the definition of totalitarian. They start changing their behavior when they can't be anonymous or have plausible deniability and some incident makes it clear people are stalking. And this new feed feature removes my ability to deny, in social settings, that I was around, and therefore didn't do something someone wanted, etc. unless I make the change to turn off the exposure.

Also, with this exposure of user's activity combined with the defaults at opt-in, if people don't change them causing everything to be open and available, I might prevent others from seeing when I add people and they add me back, but others will see the interaction on the other party's timeline. The problem with this is that if I don't want others to see that I've added another person, or I've removed someone, but those actions are viewed by others elsewhere in the network, it's still very socially awkward for me to manage.

So I've unchecked almost everything, so that I'm not in the position of sharing the data myself about what I do, but I also have to remember that others can see interactions with me elsewhere and manage that.

I understand the desire in Facebook to react to the dustup by coding up the new privacy screen up above which is responsive to users' concerns. But I think I'm leaning more toward defaults for privacy that don't share everything, where the users have to opt-in to share the detrius of their lives, not opt-out as the non-default action. It probably would have been better if they'd talked with users before they made these changes, so that the feeds and privacy screens all came out at once, but it's rare that companies do this. I understand why, but I think we need to think harder about asking users to help with this, rather than ploping it in their laps after everything is all decided. Usability can help with this, even if Facebook or others need to keep this all a big secret. There are other options.

LAN Nails: If only it was wifi

The past few years I've been wanting a pedicure salon with wifi, because I can only justify the time if i can work done at the same time. That's because these places are only open during the work day.

So when I saw LAN Nails, I was psyched. But they aren't a local area network, they are long acrylic nails, some such other thing.

So, it turns out that there is also a nail salon below my office, and they pick up our open wifi network. Because I provide the wifi, I've gotten what I wanted elsewhere. It's not a bad solution. But a great combo would be wifi in every salon. After all, you just have to sit there while everything dries and you might as well get things done.

Thought Fashion: Are You In or Out?

It's true. I peeked.

Yes, I downloaded the AOL files. And I peeked. Why? Because I wanted to write this blog post and I wanted to see for myself what sort of gestures people were making as they searched for porn or socks or how to bury their pet birds or wives they'd just killed. I also needed to see the form the data was in. And I'm a voyeur just like everyone else in and around this story, and I wanted to rubberneck my way into other's private intellectual spaces.

But it's not right. The part where I and every news outlet, blogger, reader and looky-loo has been engaging in, judging people by their searches, making assumptions and behaving as if we ourselves have never made any searches or expressed any thoughts that would not look funny to someone else.

It's also not right because the data is personally identifying. Reporters have been tracking down people based upon their searches. It's not that hard, if you yourself are a good searcher.

What was it Bob Blakely said? About how "dragging all human behavior into the public is literally totalitarian." He is the chief security and privacy scientist for IBM's Tivoli Systems. "If you erode privacy, you erode liberty, because people don't tolerate things going on in front of them that they don't approve of." I was struck by how succinctly he answered the question that is always asked of people who object to the government or some other large and powerful entity as compared with you: What do you have to hide? If you're not doing anything wrong?

Every article on AOL's mess up that says something like AOL's Disturbing Glimpse Into Users' Lives is buying into this whether they know it or not. Thank you CNet for reaffirming our intolerance.

Let's get clear on the definition of "aggregated" data. For us geeks, we use this term often, as we reassure those whose data we work with that aggregation means we are removing anything personally identifying, and placing it with other user's data, so that it's just a pile of anonymized data that could never be distinguished by the person. An example might be the aggregation of all the searches on "dog," where who did them is removed but we know that 38 people searched on that term during a particular hour and day.

But users don't think that way. They hear the word, aggregated, and they think the data handlers are aggregating everything the system may know about just them, specifically and personally, and lumping it all together. Talk about miscommunication. And it terrifies the non-geeks.

What we really should be saying is that the data is "anonymized" and therefore you are safe. AOL's data was not safe because it was not anonymized, and for users, it was their definition of aggregated.

The AOL data which lumped each user's searches together with a user ID over three months, making profiling and finding them easy, meant that AOL provided enough data in some cases to indicate a lot about who the data related to very specifically. Leading to judgments by the rest of us. About the people who do or think things on the edges of society.

And why is this wrong? Because it hurts people. It makes them feel defensive about their own thoughts and ideas.

So, well, if you aren't doing anything wrong, what *do* you have to hide? Well, everyone has something they do or think about that would be an edge thought or that in one context would be in the middle, but in another, must be defended as it resides on the edge. And that would be disapproved by someone. Something the rest of society might not tolerate.

Intolerance leads to the totalitarian. We, the human race, have been intolerant since the beginning of time. What we are intolerant of is a moving target depending on the fashion of the day. In the 30's in some places it was fashionable to be intolerant of Jews and gays. In the 40's it was Germans and the Japanese, and in the 50's communists and socialists. In the 60's it was civil rights proponents and hippies and in the 70's liberals. In the 80's we were back to communists, and in the 90's it was Hispanics (remember all the state propositions outlawing them from medical care?). And what is it today? Islam? Are thoughts you think today and the cultural references associated with them that are in the middle going to fall to the edges in the next decade?

We have used the fear of all these intolerable people and their thoughts as excuses to hunt for more proof of their intolerableness by surveilling everyone in society and searching through all the detritus of our lives. With digital data more available, we think we can find the proof we need in these edge thoughts. And then we will persecute the people having them. And what better way to do it now that the internet, ISPs and heavily used search systems can provide one or another level of very personal, thought data. Search terms, or a database of intentions as John Battelle has talked about so much, are one slice of your data that tell a lot about you. And if we can get it in a neat little file, machine readable and searchable and quantifiable, then well, why not?

If you believe that sacrificing freedom to keep freedom is the way to go, then you probably don't see any problem with demonizing people who have thoughts you don't like. Especially if those thoughts are in the form of passing gestures such as search terms plugged into a browser.

But until we decide (or default) into a Minority Report society (and change our constitution), we are not yet convicting people for thinking things. Everyone has had the thought that they'd like to kill someone once or twice in their lives. But people, the vast vast majority, don't do it. The idea that we demonize someone for searching on this, which is a gesture I would put into the fleeting thought category for almost everyone, is taking an edge thought, which we all have from time to time, and putting it firmly under the scrutiny of the middle. I believe we really only want to find people who make serious plans to hurt others, or actually carry it out. That is what our law it based on, and the premise of our society. But to track everyone, their searches, their every digital gesture, and expose it in one or another ways is going to be troublesome. And it begs a question I've asked before: is your digital identity your personal intellectual property? Is your Google identity yours or someone else's? And by extension, is your clickstream a personal expression (carefully chosen and shaped by you)? In other words, can you copyright your clickstream and exert ownership?

There are at least two choices. One of them is to do what we are doing now: have ISPs and search services collect this data, and when asked by the government, have it turned over. But that means the data is still in many ways secret. Of course the companies don't want the data getting out because it is proprietary. And neither does the government, because they don't want anyone to know quite how much is out there about you, in case you are trying to cover your tracks or you want to defend yourself. But having all the data, the government has the upper hand. And secrets are powerful. How do you show, if you are being accused of something based upon your searches, that everyone else searches on those same things too? That it's actually a social norm? If you can only ask for your own searches to defend a case against you, and not everyone else's, in order to compare yourself to it, you won't be able to argue social norms which judges rely heavily on when making decisions.

But there is another choice. And that brings up the Attention Trust premise (I'm a Board Member) which is that people own a copy of their own data, no matter where they do things: Amazon.com purchases, Google searches, or AOL clickstreams, or anywhere else you might land in a browser on your computer. As a co-owner of your data, you can take it anywhere and do what you wish. There could be many business models built upon this data controlled and shared by users. Google takes all the data they collect and plugs it into AdSense. If lots of users took their own data and made it available voluntarily, a new and more 'open source' style AdSense could be created.

But much more importantly, something like Steve Gillmor's Gesture Bank, where users opt-in their clickstream information, in an anonymous form, exists to open up this kind of data. The Bank will make the aggregation of anonymized data available to anyone for any purpose. While this may lead to businesses working from this pool of searches and clicks, it also means that a growing pool of data is there to show the edge thoughts and potentially unpopular ideas people may exhibit. The pool can be used to defend against totalitarian efforts to single out in secret those who are out of fashion politically. Which may turn out to be you. Or someone who uses your computer.

That I think is far more important than an open source AdSense, though a business built upon this data would likely justify and make a better case for us to have a Gesture Bank of ideas and thoughts that support political freedom.

Seth Goldstein and Steve Gillmor already offer Root. net users the opportunity to put their data into the Gesture Bank if they wish, though any person can contribute to this anonymous pool of user data. And for that matter, attention streams can be sent to multiple services.

And, at the October 4 Attention Conference, Steve and Seth will announce Attention Soft. Stay tuned.

Core Values at Bloggercon

Mike Arrington is doing the next Core Values session at Bloggercon IV. I want to wish him well, and note the information from the Core Values session at Bloggercon III that I led, because I think that session was extraordinarily productive.

In fact afterward, many people kindly said that they felt it was most useful and interesting, because they left with something tangible (the list) and they really liked that rather than me telling them what the values are I see online, or that I feel are important myself, I just asked questions, and let them come to the conclusions about the values they share and the controls they felt should exist to support those values. They appreciated the light touch guiding them to find and develop their own conclusions.

Here the list the group of 80 made during the session, of what they feel are core values for the blogosphere:

Things we value:
Democracy
Non-exclusivity
Attribution
Transparency – disclosure
Innovation
Personalization
Accessibility
Honesty
Creativity
Knowing who people are
Editorial Independence
Connectedness
Anonymity

Things we devalue:
Power law economics
Lack of Attribution
Anonymity
Wuffie-hoarding
Links for money

Good luck Mike! I'm sure you'll take us to the next level. I hope the last sessions list is useful as a starting point.

Respecting Open Space

Open space, in the camp conference style, requires some key elements to work well. I'm noticing after watching two different events develop that they may be missing what is important about Open Space.

A couple of months ago, I attended a conference on the east coast. The organizer told me he wanted to do an Open Space day, the day after his event. That day arrived, he bailed, and there were six of us who actually attended. And he insisted that I go, even though I really have a lot of other things to do. The Open Space day was meant to brainstorm ways to organize Net Neutrality support.

After the event, others who attended it suggested that Bar Camp a failure. Well.. I totally disagreed. They thought that somehow, calling an open day "Bar Camp" would make it happen.

They had a wiki with about 22 names on it, and a stellar group of people slated to attend. They had great space, in a lovely lawfirm with wifi, and everything we might need. What they didn't have was a leader to organize the space. Although one person who attended in the middle of the event suggested that if things weren't working, he could vote with his feet. And he would if he wanted to do so. Though considering there were six people in the room, it sounded more like a threat: you don't do what I want to today, or I'll leave. So everyone started doing what he wanted. The point of course of "the law of two feet" is that you don't stay somewhere where you aren't learning. But that applies to Open Space where there are maybe say 100 people, and multiple rooms where you can move and not be disruptive, not six people where you are an integral part of deciding what is happening. But with such a little group, that misapplication of that particular Open Space principle further caused the day to deteriorate as a camp. What little emerging leadership was happening was killed right there, though he wasn't wiling to lead. He just wanted everyone to do things his way.

Without a clear leader, supporting a basic framework for a day of sessions or some kind of plan, just didn't work. It wasn't the concept of Bar Camp that failed. It was a failure of the people proposing it and carrying it out.

Anyway, I'm wondering how Open Space is going to work at the Identity conference at Harvard, where today and tomorrow are regular top down conference days, where the broadcast model is followed. On Wednesday, there will be an Open Space day, led by Kaliya Hamlin and Jon Ramer. (I'm not attending this event, as I have too much work to do, but I'm noticing a trend here....)

I know the Open Space day is happening, more due to the Identity list I'm on, than the event web pages. After there was discussion on the list, I asked about the lack of information supporting the Open Space day on the website, and Paul Trevithick and John Clippinger did add a little information about the day on the session page, to let people know it was even happening. However, I had suggested on the email list that they make a page for the attendees to show that they were attending and add the speakers to the schedule and speaker's page. They did not.

The point I'm making is that I think people who do top down, broadcast style conferences are interested in what's happening with camps and Open Space, but they don't understand the dynamics of them or Open Space sensibility, and so in applying top down controls and information styles to their camps, they potentially harm the good that can come from the camp. And since the leaders of the camp are not traditional speakers, the organizers of the larger top down conference probably think they don't need to list the camp or Open Space leaders as speakers on the larger conference site because the camp facilitators aren't speaking in a traditional way. But this is not true. Listing them is critical to fostering the process of the day.

For example, we know from past successful camps that having a page where attendees say they are coming is key, because the agenda is made the day of the camp. Therefore, people choose to attend because other interesting people will be in the room, not based upon pre-arranged sessions. Secondly, the leaders of the day are key. They have to balance the right amount of support for the Open Space while leading just a little so that attendees make the agenda the morning of, and that things are pulled together at the end of the day. People choose to come, or not, based on who will be leading.

Currently, the leaders of the identity Open Space day are not on Harvard'sthe speaker list, nor does Harvard's the schedule note them, even though speakers the previous two days are listed on the schedule with their corresponding sessions.

I believe the Open Space day will go well due to Kaliya's and Jon's attention, because at least Kaliya has done this before (I don't know about Jon's work with Open Space) and understands well the dynamic needed to make this kind of day work. But the fact that the Open Space day at Harvard's Identity Conference has not been adequately supported with proper information at the event website shows the lack of respect for the dynamics of this kind of event. Since there is no sign up page, they will likely have a vastly diminished attendance compared to the broadcast conference days. A signup page might have actually brought in more people if they'd opened it up to more than just the attendees the first two days. In fact, bringing in new people to understand Identity in technology development is very important and this is a missed opportunity as well.

I do wish them good luck with it, but I wish that the Paul and John, with control of the conference website, understood better why what they have done with both the attendees of the open space day and the leaders may not help the day succeed as well as it should have. They can't blame the camp style for this, but rather themselves. If they day succeeds, it will be in spite of these problems, and due to Jon's and Kaliya's personal networking and leadership for the day.

idmashup06

Net Neutrality for the Little Guys

USA Today interviewed me and some other folks the other day. The article is here:

Internet Fast Lane Plan Worries Small Companies by Michelle Kessler.

Basically, it's that part of AT&T's and the other telco's new internet pricing plan, where they would charge the provider of the material to send their material through to subscribers, that is the problem.

As I've said before, we didn't make the internet to turn it back into cable tv.

The Conversational Middle: Maturing of the Blogosphere

On Saturday at Kinnernet, the last session I attended before leaving was led by an Israeli guy named Uri Baruchin who asserted that something had changed in the blogosphere, and we were starting to have a problem because a meme (my word, not his, and it's what I called it as I disagreed in the session) would not spread so fast in the blogosphere now that A-list bloggers were waning in link counts (a popularity scale because it uses a single digital social gesture, the link, and does not weigh at all the many other conversational gestures of a blog over time -- that would require multiple digital social gestures and a much more complex "algorithm" than just counting links). He was worried that the number of smaller discussions required to spread news would make the blogosphere as a whole less effective in broadcasting news, and somehow this meant there was some loss of power bloggers had been holding and was now waning.

I disagreed with his thesis, and gave some obvious statistics but also some ideas. First, I said that the blogosphere's purpose was not singular. This goes for both individual bloggers and on the whole, if there can be a "unified purpose," which I don't think there is because there are too many different kinds of blogging. Remember blogs are tools, and each person takes it and uses it in whatever way makes sense, which probably means there are 33+ million slightly different to extremely different variations of blogs now.

Anyway, back to disagreeing with the "unified purpose" idea. So, if you look at this from one view -- through the State of the Blogosphere reports put forth a in October 2004, where counts for the NY Times and MSNBC were in the neighborhood of 17 or 18 thousand links, and top 100 bloggers like Boing Boing and Instapundit had 6 or so thousand links.

At that point in time, Technorati tracked 4 million blogs and 400 million links, and now, a year and a half later, Technroati tracks 33+ million blogs and 2.2 billion links. In January, 2006, the NY Times has 55,000+ links and CNN has around 53,000+ but Boing Boing has 18,000+ and Instapundit has 5,600 links (the are no longer the number 2 blog, as that position is now held by Engadget at 15,600+ links) you can see that while the blogosphere has grown 7x and the links 5.5x, the inbound link counts of the top blogs and media has grown 3x.

Also, take into account that Technorati changed its methods of link counting last August, after several things occurred (Robert Scoble complained about its link counts in comparison to Bloglines which counts every link since it started counting, and I had reported on how link counting worked across 5 services and then other's reports of frustration with the Top 100 and A-list counts where sparce posters' links were favored over frequent posters' links). So Technorati changed from counting just links on the top pages of a blog (those posts that linked but dropped off the front pages were dropped from link counts) to any link that had occurred in the past 6 months. Technorati still counts one link only per blog, no matter it's location on the blog posts or blogroll, no matter how many links come from one blog, but all link types age out after 6 months. So these statistics for the later time frame are different and not exactly comparable, but let's do it for the sake of argument here.

So, what does this mean? Well, since there are 5.5 times more links in this 1.5 year time frame, I believe it means that there are more links made to non-A-list bloggers than bloggers further down the power law curve about , that are in what I call the "conversation middle of the power law curve" (the curve for specifically link counts), than those A-listers at the top are receiving. It means to me that while a year and a half ago, when I explained the conversational middle to people like Peter Hirshberg and Francis Piscani and thought it was far more interesting than what most people were discussing then (the top of the power law, or the existence of the power law curve at all), that now there is some evidence that as the blogosphere goes main stream, it is moving more to the middle, at least as link counts go, to more personal conversations rather than pointers to a few top media sites or the blogs that are act more like broadcasters. The broadcast model for links in blogs means that many more links went to a top blog, than they were able to link back to, because it was just physically impossible. Those top bloggers are 1-to-thousands in their distribution, and yet for inbound links counts, they have thousands of inbound links as opposed to far fewer outbound links to others.

From February 2003, here is one distribution curve showing bloggers inbound link counts in the Shirky article on power law curves:

But the conversational middle, then, and now, is both say, 12-to-12 for distribution and receiving links, or 50-to-50, or for larger blogs, maybe 500-to-200, depending on the size of the conversation verses those listening and linking back. And now the mainstreaming of the blogosphere supports this hypothesis more.

As modified from Chris Anderson's Long Tail article here is a representation of what I'm postulating:

The top of the power law curve has been referred to as the A-list, and certainly last summer, when Blogher discussions erupted at the last and well packed session of the day, and so many women expressed extreme anger and frustration at Technorati's link counting methods and particularly the there was a lot of interest in figuring out ways to reveal topic communities lower down that power law curve.

At Blogher, I suggested we work on something that would show not just a few bloggers in topic areas that were at the top, but rather sift the entire blogosphere, using as many as 22 different metrics, though some are not currently available but tool builders were welcome to build some of these out, to show "conversationalness" and "influence over time" instead of the "popularity" of link counts as the Top 100 or Top 500 that was subsequently built by Feedster, currently shows. Lots of people responded with lots of interesting ideas on the subject of how to approach this. A system like this could more accurately reveal the conversational middle, to make it much easier for more than just the participants in smaller communities of say 50, to find and expose their interests and conversations. This would also, for some of the women at Blogher, make them feel more validated or exposed as leaders in their topic areas (not politics or tech stuff), or if that was not their interest, make the Top 100 less validating and congratulatory of those who by virtue of being on the list seemed dominant, which clearly was their desire.

The idea that bloggers are not passing memes as effectively because there is less influence by broadcast style bloggers, even though more small conversations are experiencing more links going blogger-to-blogger, further down the power law curve, is silly. If people are genuinely interested in something, and have something to say, they'll blog it. These conversations occurring in the middle pass and discuss memes just as before, but the linking and diffusion of the conversation is evidence of a more mature, and interesting use of the internet, not less so. And now, if a meme crosses lots of blogs in the blogosphere, I believe it's a sign of far more interest by people, than under the earlier broadcast mode of meme spreading in the older, more early adopter blogosphere. And this certainly isn't a problem. The internet as a medium is more supportive of spread, edge conversation, than the amassing of top down broadcast distribution. The act of blogging is the act of subverting old broadcast methods of communication.

The maturing of the blogosphere with less broadcast distribution and more conversation between people spread far and wide is a welcome and more democratic way of bringing together people who want to discuss like interests. Certainly there are still bloggers who are more highly read with more inbound links that resemble broadcasters in some ways, and who PR people will continue to try to manipulate, but still, there is a shift to conversation with more symmetric linking, and that is positive overall.

Our next challenge now is how to see how small conversational communities and the attendant tools that sift these conversations can use more than one or two digital gestures, and create topic awareness of blogger groups with more than just the early adopter or blog-tool favoring metrics that post categories or tag indicators do now. These metrics too are subject to power law curves and the current uses of them one or two at at time only reflect top bloggers, or early adopters, just as link counts did before, emphasizing them over the conversational middle. When the tools of exposure change, the conversational middle will become accessible and apparent not just to those in and around a particular conversation but to those outside it.

Attention or Eyeballs.. Attention or Intention.. Attention or Identity

"The eyes are the window to the soul." - Unknown
"If the eye is a window to the soul, then, the heart is the doorway to love." - Unknown.
"The world only exists in your eyes. You can make it as big or as small as you want." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

What's the difference between the static web and the live web?
Participation.

What's the difference between consumers and users/amateurs?
Participation.

What's the difference between attention and eyeballs?
Participation.

What is attention? Lot's of people have discussed it, including Nick Bradbury, Steve Gillmor and Seth Goldstein, all of the Attention Trust. I'm on the board too, but my interest in joining it was a little different, though I believe in the core idea just as they do. To quote Seth's blog: "Attention is the substance of focus." The idea for the Attention Trust is that "users own a copy of their data" or attention stream or intention stream or whatever you want to call it. I'm going to leave the intention debate to others because while I agree with John Battelle, that these kinds of recordings can form a sort of 'database of intention' it's not my interest in this post to pick that apart.

Caterina Fake also blogged about this idea of users owning their data.

Etech's theme this past week was attention, though I don't think anyone there except maybe Michael Goldhaber really got anywhere near the idea that the difference between the eyeballs of old (10 years ago) and the attention question is really about participation, at least as far as users collecting it on themselves and reusing it, or sharing it as they desire. Not to mention the digital social gestures that people can now make, and collect, through participatory media online that go much further than the simple mouse over or clicks that were all that could be collected before. Now the aggregate of both, clicks and gestures that are much more participatory in nature are richer and much more meaningful, and quite a bit different than "eyeballs".

And what is participation? As far as the AT, it's about user control and choice, and an absolute right to participate. Or not.

Surprisingly enough, since last August, when the AT was formed and announced, it's been just so easily accepted by anyone asked, from the top to the bottom of those "database of intention" makers, that you should own a copy of your data. They own one copy of course, but we really thought it would be much harder to gain acceptance of this ideal. And yet, here we are. Pretty much everyone has said, "...er, yes, users own a copy of their data." The hard part is, how, how much, when, in what way, will all these companies share a user's data with the users.

So the reason I joined the AT board was because I feel strongly that users should own a copy of their data. But I also feel strongly that users should be able to keep that data private, have complete control over their copy, and shared control over other copies depending on circumstances, and those users have the absolute, unequivocal right not to participate in the attention economy, at least as far as sharing their own data goes, if they are asked to by some vendor or company or other entity. No question.

If Visa wakes up one day and decides to tell me I must give them my attention stream or kiss my credit card good bye, well.. the AT would need to step into the middle of that one pronto. I cannot abide by that sort of coercion, and so, my real interest in the AT is making sure that it's as much an advocacy organization for user's privacy and security from coercion, as it is for making a place for people to come to learn about how to own and user their own data and possibly interact with entities that might trade them for it, or share the rewards of turning over leads for marketing.

Omidyar, the foundation established by Pierre Omidyar to fund both for profit and non-profit ideas, has given the Attention Trust its support to explore this idea of having a non-profit, independent group supporting user's rights.

I'm also going to work with EFF (and hopefully EPIC and Markel) to make sure the AT work and the recorder tools are the most user-friendly and affirmative of user-control, privacy and security as possible. I would also appreciate any help from people in covering this as well, so if you have thoughts, please send them to me in email to mary at hodder dot org .... or comment below.

Tonight there is a talk on attention, at SD Forum if you want to come check out some attention ideas. I encourage you to attend if you are interested and in the area.

Notes from James Surowiecki's Talk at Intelligent Television

Intelligent Television conference info here.

1. Openness bridges all of these mechanisms: open source, p2p, shared work.
2. Intelligence is distributed rather than centralized: the knowledge is spread out in many locations
3. Bottom up works better than command and control mechanisms
-- people are better at understanding their own needs than the top
4. We are better off casting wide rather than narrow
-- don't know where the info is much of the time
5. Open access to creativity, knowledge -- benefits are greater the more people are involved
-- when people learn more, we learn more.. it's anti-rivalrous
6. Be very hesitant to filter who belongs to community
-- don't keep people out
7. People act better the more info they have

8. The internet allows us to become technically able to do so much more
-- distributed info and aggregation are so much more powerful
-- possibilities are immense

9. Different ways to tap into open systems
--obviously people using open systems to make money
-- Innocentive.. people go to register as a 'solver' where 10. You then get access to a problem set
----- if you solve a problem, you get a prize, but he company owns your solution

11. Systems that allow people to give ideas and innovation a piece at a time are interesting, because lots of people contribute. Prediction markets and prices work this way.

12. Can profit from an open content system.. leave everything open and free and then make money from talking about this stuff..

13. People find pleasure from the value of competition
-- from contributing to the growth of the pool of knowledge

14. Many of these systems are inefficient, because in a strict sense, they are redundant..
but the point is that even though this is the case, if we expand our ideas of efficiency, it's tremendously efficient.

15. What are the challenges to these systems?

Internal
-- problem with model in that a network or self organized model, it's difficult for individuals to contribute due to echo chamber effects...army ants .. work in ways where they do just what the ant is doing ahead of them.. if they start walking in a circle.. they actually die.. worry that if humans imitate others.. we will degrade because nothing new happens.. group loses collective intelligence.. drawing knowledge from just a few
-- challenge is to keep the ties in the networks loose.. and open and flowing

External
-- profound counter to our most deep seated ideas around authority, knowledge and expertise -- people have a fundamental desire to pick "the expert"
-- traditional need to develop a product, and then show it after it's out.. instead of working with people all along..
-- traditional needs to develop IP are challenged

16. Arthur Miller in the Harvard Law Review just wrote an article saying that what we need now is 'common law' for ideas.

17. Tom Bergeron -- host of dancing with the stars on why people like this.. because it is about
"wholeheartedly uniting our skills is the basis for all human interaction"

18. Collective systems may work better when there is an answer people think they can find, verses when a lead user or expert may be better at finding the right thing.

19.. Our imagining of the 'genius' is the failure to see that works of art are actually based on others ideas ... works of art always borrow from other works of art.

Mash Up Camp Progress

So, Mashup Camp is moving along. To recap...

Dec 15, David Berlind said the idea in a meeting we were in, and later Doc Searls and I agreed to help.

Dec 22 David wrote about it on his blog, announcing it. Lot's of folks blogged about it and very very interested.

Jan 9 The domain was purchased and website set up with lots of help from Ross Mayfield.

Jan 13 After much discussion and coordination with very helpful people like Ross Mayfield and Lauren Gellman, of Stanford's Center for Internet and Society, I managed to get the Computer History Museum (thanks to Peter Hirshberg too!). To date, without a venue or time, we had 245 people out of 250 spots signed up.

On Jan 16, we "sold out" and started a wait list.

I think this is the fastest organized event I've seen, with this breadth of people and concerns. There is a fantastic group of people, including all the mashup developers and folks from big API provider companies like Apple, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, etc.

Now David and Doug are working on getting lunches and the evening event paid for, the site details and costs worked out (big thanks to the Museum for donating the site at a non profit rate, since this is a community event and costs $0 to attend -- consider joining the Museum here). Others are helping to get some hotels lined up for out of towners, and people are thinking about sessions they might lead and dinners.

Dave McClure's Top Ten Reasons Why Web 2.0 is Like Disco

The Top 10 Reasons Why Web 2.0 is Like Disco:

#1: Feels great, but don't want any pictures caught doing it.
#2: Nobody quite sure what it is, but everyone wants to try.
#3: First learned how to do it at [foo | bar | summer] camp.
#4: Lots of parties, alcohol, and women with big hair.
#5: Can fool most people if you can just do [ajax | the hustle].
#6: More about having fun than doing something useful.
#7: Open source, free love, & fashion from the 70's.
#8: People are remixing it all the time.
#9: More popular it gets, more people trash it, more popular it gets.

and last but not least:

#10: Done best when you don't give a damn what anyone else thinks.

Symposium on Social Architecture

Update: I changed the name of the post to reflect the actual title of the event and Stowe's comments below.

Next month (in three weeks actually) the Symposium on Social Architecture will take place at Harvard. Stowe Boyd and David Weinberger have been working hard on this event, which is intended to be a fairly high level discussion about social spaces online. Terrific folks are coming, and the program includes Kevin Marks and me talking about Engines of Meaning: How Will We Scale Our Understanding:

"Ultimately no human brain, no planet full of human brains, can possibly catalog the dark, expanding ocean of data we spew. In a future of information auto-organized by folksonomy, we may not even have words for the kinds of sorting that will be going on; like mathematical proofs with 30,000 steps, they may be beyond comprehension. But they'll enable searches that are vast and eerily powerful. We won't be surfing with search engines any more. We'll be trawling with engines of meaning." – Bruce Sterling

How will we keep up with the "dark, expanding ocean of data we spew"? Algorithms? Social filters? Faster memex-like gadgets? Do we need open algorithms in future search, so that each person can tweak their own preferences? Will we become dependent on social networks to filter the world for us, and if so, are the current representations of social relations too coarse? Will we be spending more and more time creating explicit metadata, like tags, in order to help channel the "expanding ocean"? What does it mean to be smart, today?

Kevin and I are planning to work from an brief framing of the issues with a short outline for a led discussion. If you have any ideas, please comment below. Would love to hear your ideas.

Also, if you are interested in attending, there is a registration form here.

symposium+on+social+architecture

Favorite and not so Favorite Things about Web 2.0

Meeting Ward Cunningham. Creator of the wiki. He's really awesome.

And meeting Chris Locke, whose blog is caustic, but I still enjoy it. And yet in person, lovely man.

And sitting next to Bob Metcalfe last night at dinner for a couple of hours. Telling me stories about his place in Maine and the social structure from a local's point of view, his food-historian triathlon running wife, comparing notes on places we've traveled (Barcelona is really high on both lists), and on how much we both enjoy making things, how time can stop when you are making something that engages you. And how he can't communicate with his kids without IM. Charming. And very sweet.

My least favorite part? Well, there are only 6 women speakers out of 106, and there are very few women here at all. In fact, I have to say, there are very few women entrepreneurs, and we must do something about this. Women are naturally very good at the things this kind of work requires, and yet, we don't do take it up very much. Why? Obviously, much more than a speakr wiki is required and yet the wiki points to many of the problems here: women are afraid to sign up because they see other more accomplished people and find that intimidating, instead of realizing everyone starts without much and builds up (whatever: talks, experience, education.. it's a process and there is nothing wrong with having less.. in fact, I think there is a huge opportunity there to show something new!) But we really have to do better and conferences like Web 2.0 really point to the problems in this area. Because we build things for the whole human race, as software developers, and yet if we don't engage women, we are losing experience, perspective and opportunity to balance our products and make better experience.

Yes, I get the irony that I've mentioned only men above. But there really are very few women at this conference. And I've met them all before. Those above are the new people I've met that were fun for me. As I said, we must do better. And I'm no exception. I did a workshop on video, and invited three men. But I don't know any women in video who are entrepreneurs. So I checked the wiki, and couldn't find any others. So we had three guys. Hitting my own wall in the speaker wiki isn't fun, but it's helping me see some of the issues from a conference organizer's point of view. There is a lot of work to do there: getting people to sign up, working on categories, working on search, working on getting more women into areas they want to be in, to be successful and visible if they want to be.

Metrics for Weighing Blogs

Last week I spoke at Bill Flitter's eBig monthly meeting on Blogs and RSS. My talk was about metrics and weighing blogs. Shel Holtz recorded my talk (thanks!) which is here (warning, giant mp3 follows that link) or see it here at the Hobson and Holtz Report.

The Digital Media Exposure Scale

I'm at Always On, and there are interesting hallway conversations going on. Dave Sifry and I were talking about exposure, or, how much you expose online the people you come into contact with in person. The other night in the EFF panel discussion, I said that if I know someone is online in a medium, I have no problem putting them online on my blog or using Flickr or whatever the appropriate thing is. In other words, if someone is online in text, I will talk about them by name on my blog in text. If someone puts themselves online in pictures, I will too, by name. Same with rich text. If they aren't online, I might put them up, but not attach their full names or information that would make it possible to find them.

Additionally, I noted that people think of media reuse differently depending on the type of media. Text is least likely to be a problem if cut and pasted, photo reuse is a little more of an issue, but sound and video is most concerning for those putting their media online. And so using some judgment around the ways we reuse each other's media. However, I also think this will shift as we see more examples of remixing, and get comfortable with having our stuff remixed, even in ways we don't like, and realize the remix is a reflection of those remixing, and not those who made the original media, and cease to care so much. In other words, the richer the media, the more we are concerned about our own images or how other's reuse our media.

This came up because Dave walked up and we chatted about some of the AO sessions, and he shot a little video of me describing a point from a session yesterday. And we talked about how we each assume that we can do this with the other, because we are already online and put ourselves out there.

Dave made an interesting point that those of us with companies doing social media need to think about what we will do, what happens when we have our first big scare. Some stalker does something bad with the information we put up online, using some service put up by these companies, to do something uncool that is scary for people. As more people beyond the early adopter crowd take to blogging, social photo sharing, vlogging, podcasting, etc., we are more exposed. The good part is, people in these companies are all are pretty connected to each other, so we can quickly talk about it, and hopefully adjust for the bad actor behavior to solve the problem. But we haven't had our first big scare yet, and that will happen, and cause us to rethink our online behaviors and the services that are out there helping us filter information. It will even out, but we are still early and naive in this business, and we need to be sensative to these issues.

Panels are Dead

For me that is.

I'm sitting here at a conference that I flew all the way to Paris for.. for two days, and damned if it isn't full of panels, broadcast mode all the way, telling the audience how it is. And well.. it's so freaking undynamic. Because it's not a discussion. These are bloggers. They know a lot. They know what it is. These 300 people make media every day on their blogs and yet, panels are here giving us time to email the office, our cats or the mailman about a critical lost postcard.

This audience is creative, bright, thoughtful and our brains are being numbed to death by one-way talk about how blogs are about losing legacy control and we're all taking it back. Somewhere there is a tragi-comedy in here. It's time for a revolt. Please, please, please can we do all conferences from now on differently? For the love of transparency, aliveness, I hope we can.

Proposed:

1. Ditch the panels.
2. One leader per room.. moderating an active discussion by everyone in the room by, asking questions and interacting.
3. IF we do panels, any time there are more people lined up at the mic, than are on the panel, the panel and the people at the mic have to switch places.

Please note, I do appreciate all the work that goes in to making a conference like this, and thank the people who put it on. But they are doing a format we all have done for a long time. And we need a change. This doesn't work, and it needs to stop.

"...the uncontrolled desires of people can be a very unpleasant thing" - Ed Castronova

This was said in relation to online community systems and games. I was at this conference at NY Law School a week ago last Friday and Saturday... The State of Play. Heard a great panel called Intellectual Property/Digial Property, with David Johnson (New York Law School) moderating with Yochai Benkler (Yale Law School), Edward Castronova (Indiana University, Bloomington), Cory Ondrejka (Vice President of Product Development, Linden Lab, creators of Second Life) and David Post (Temple University Law School).

Yochai Benker talked about "second generation creativity" where users make one thing and then others modify... also talking about the logic behind why creative commons did not allow people to prohibit attribution...

I listened a lot and didn't take very good notes... because it was the first time I'd been online and been able to really do stuff in about four days, uninterupted.

Cool folks were there either speaking, posting papers or just taking in the ideas: Ernie Miller, James Grimmelman, Eddan Katz, Jack Balkin, Susan Crawford... lots of gamers, lawyers, some engineers. The conference wasn't just about gaming, but also about the future of online expression in other media, and the ways to control behavior with law, social norms, technical controls, or system architectures.

Core Values of the Web Discussion Ideas for Bloggercon

(Cross posted on the Bloggercon III blog.)

In thinking more about core values we believe ought to be brought to our online dealings—either as a practice, as guideline or in theory—I wanted to understand more about instances where people have trouble with certain behaviors. I wanted to look at why we are concerned and what we want or need in order to create trust and value with each other.

I'm interested in these things: Why we value information online; What context or peripheral information cause information to be more trusted; Why we respect people; and What we need to see visually to trust information we find online, if that is possible or desirable. We appreciate it when people help us with information we need, share insights we hadn't thought of, or give us new windows into previously closed systems or institutions.. Those types of information, presented in a particular format, largely explain why blogging is so popular and appears to be so persistent. (I’m specifically referring here to topic blogging, versus say journaling, though depending on the relationships between reader and writer, what appears to strictly be a journal to some may actually provide insight for others....)

We also appreciate it when people are honest with us. We like it when they share their motivation for publishing, or at least lead us to believe that we know what their motivation is, based on their blog's content. And we like it when we feel we can trust that they're telling us about ethical issues we can't see. The blogosphere has a history of outrage over blogs that have been less than honest about their origins, identity or economic relationships in an attempt to fool readers and linkers into believing things are other than they actually are. However, we cannot force disclosure. We rely on and trust people to tell us the truth about their economic or other relationships.

One thing we've enjoyed the past few years in the blogosphere is a relatively pure state, where people are motivated to blog, link, and connect for many reasons other than money. This is partly because it's been difficult to make money with most blogs. It's the reason that “money and blogging” have been discussion topics at previous events, and at this one, because some bloggers do want to figure out how to make money with their blogs in ways that don't conflict with readers’ sense of ethics, so that they can keep their readers. It has also been possible to blog for profit or other hidden reasons, and therefore online communities have reacted strongly when these examples were discovered.

Many blogs exist without any advertising support, and readers have expressed respect and appreciation for the idea that these blogs are as pure as possible. Because there is no monetary support for the writer, these writers are simply expressing themselves for their love of getting out opinions and ideas. Or because they love to connect with people, and to iterate ideas and talk back to media or other institutions that used to be difficult for individuals to talk back to due to the high transaction costs of mass publishing. Whether this is actually true, or real, it has been people's perception, and supporters of blogging have held up this kind of not-for-profit blogging as laudable, showing examples of how blogging has changed things for the better.

Another model, a slight variation on the one above, has also developed. In this case bloggers who otherwise appear to be operating under the intentions, ideals, and principles of the pure blog model, have taken ads that are unconnected to who or what the blog writer is, how the writing is done, or (mostly) what the subject is. This kind of blogging has been perceived as mostly pure. And those well-schooled in the cues of online communication have believed they could differentiate between when some economic or other benefit has gone to the blogger for her writing versus when an algorithm randomly placed an ad on her blog via some program. AdSense, Blogads, and many self-negotiated ads and sponsors are present on some blogs, but we see them and believe that some sense of integrity has prevailed where the blogger is not paid directly for writing, either writing a certain way, or for writing anything at all. Rather, the ads have often been dependent on readers clicking through, and thus, we haven't seen that ad model as inherently corrupt. Most bloggers I know make between $10 and $100 a month with ads, though I know a few who make thousands of dollars. However, because we can watch the quality of the blogging and because it appears to us that that is not influenced by the ad relationship, we believe we are still seeing the bloggers’ unadulterated voice, opinion, and link referrals—which is the reason we want to read blogs.

Some people may be upset about the monetizing of blogs because they feel that if bloggers have any economic interest in what they write as it is tied to a business model that rewards sales of say, a product they have written about, or if they are paid to write at all, bloggers will be less free to say what they want or believe, because their motivations for writing change. People have gotten a taste of something that didn’t easily exist before: mass distributed and searchable publishing with individual voice, and they don’t want to give that up, even if it isn’t as pure as they perceive.

Others think writers who profit from more than randomly placed ads may be steering themselves and some part of the blogosphere back to top-down media model. They don’t want to see blogs dependent on and beholden to the business side of things, as large media organizations are with other interests than just finding some measure or kind of pure truth, or having biases in ways that purport to show one view when in fact they show another, among other criticisms.

We could label blogs without any ads, sponsors or other monetization as being the pure blogs as ‘angelic,’ the ones with AdSense, etc on the side as slightly ‘heathenish,’ and the ones with actual business models as ‘devilish.’ This sort of labeling construct at times seems to underlay criticisms about blogs that make money, but I think it is unconstructive. Although it is important to bring it to the surface, to make it explicit and discuss it, if only to make clear that it's there. For those who get to define the labels, labeling values and behaviors is powerful, but purity or devilishness only reflect one set of values. People, like the blogosphere, are much more dynamic and varied than those few labels, and therefore they need more dynamic cues in online systems to tell what sort of actions are taking place so that they can make up their own minds about whom to trust and read.

Other value systems that could be applied to blogs without ad systems versus blogs that make money of some sort, could be that of a protestant work ethic or a capitalist ethic, where earning money is much admired, if done relatively honestly. Therefore, money-making blogs that explicitly tell us they do so are the heross of that framework. Or there’s the communitarian value system that values those who promote and enrich the community, those who promote the good work of others, those who share credit, those who collaborate well, etc..., There is also the leadership value system, where those who ferret out good information or push memes or are especially innovative are valued.

Another thing to consider with value systems such as these applied to what is specifically seen on a blog is that they don't take into account other ways authors benefit from blogging. This is because they only consider the direct act of blogging and not the secondary effects outside of the blogosphere inn the author's life or work. I know many bloggers who have found opportunities due to their blogs. I myself have been offered jobs, have been asked to edit books, have been asked to dinner with interesting people that I didn't know but who read my blogs, have been asked on dates, and have generally been treated very differently and much more invitingly in a wide variety of situations because of my blogs, than if I didn't have them. But because these opportunities are not openly apparent on my blog, unless I write about them, readers are not aware of these secondary opportunities. Yet they happen regularly, and have been an extremely positive benefit of blogging, though I didn't start blogging for this reason, and I don't write anything in particular to make anything happen. However, this second degree of reward is potentially corrupting, depending on the circumstances. A blogger who takes a different job might find the blog more highly scrutinized, or that there is pressure to write differently by the new boss. Jeremy Zawodny recently wrote about this after moving back to the search division within Yahoo.

So what values do we use to understand online communication and communities? How are we going to show information about our activities, so that people with different value systems can make their own decisions about our blogs and the information they come across?

Also, are the acts and cues to understand online information presented with these core values different if blogs make money in some way, versus if they do not?

I'm interested in making a list of the values we believe are necessary for blogging or are open questions to discuss in the Core Values of the Web session. I'll start it here:

1. transparency of relationships and motivations for writing and linking
2. transparency of identity, including pseudonymous writing
3. excellence of content—by which I mean writers honestly writing what they believe, even if it turns out to be untrue in the iterative process, versus publishing known untruths
4. editorial independence
5. linking for attribution of ideas

Please add to this list via comments below or bring ideas to the session Saturday.

Ebay Gets Closer to Blogging

Look at this... it's for the sale of 2 (3 more were added) invites to a wedding in England... since the wedding dress sale last April on Ebay, where the seller of that dress was only allowed about 5 entries, this new sale has 7 entries, and there are comments. For the record, the seller of the wedding invite doesn't want to attend because she doesn't like the bride and hasn't seen the groom since he started seeing the bride two years before. Turns out a number of other invitees saw the listing and threw in their invites for the same reason, so thats why the offer has gone up to 5 spots.

Funny stuff, but more importantly, Ebay has gone bloggy!

Is Blogging Like Being In A Civic Club? At Least As Far As Value Is Concerned?

You know, I like what Doc is saying about his Bloggercon III session. Because to me, blogging is not about an equivalency (eg, I do this and get that). Blogs can direct value in a way, for example, with corporate blogging, in the sense that information is more transparent and humanly accessible, than before someone at the company blogged. And blogs can display ads and make some money, but most blogs don't and won't make real money. Overall, generalized, I think blogging is an action and practice that is about something else. A different sort of value than money or direct economic value.

Trying to quantify economic value doesn't work for blogging, or a lot of other online information activities. It is comparable to conversation in this way: people talk to each other, and they rarely expect to monitize the direct conversation. They don't walk up to someone at a party, say something, and expect to make some value in the words; people would think they were creepy and weird if they did.

It reminds me of when I was growing up and my father was in a civic club. He was in it because locally, he wanted to help the community, meet others who wanted to do the same, collaborate on projects that were interesting or fun for the community (very little of his business work applied to many of the civic club members there directly, though other locals did go for business networking of an indirect sort) and learn things because they had weekly speakers. And the fact that people in the community had regular contact also had the added benefit of putting a personal face and interaction on what otherwise would just be a business or institution that might feel distant and not accessible or human.

But it turns out that when it came time for him to work on getting the health non-profit he was CEO of set up in countries around the world, the network of men and women in that club around the world opened amazing doors for him, because he had participated in the place we lived and they saw that, it queued them to listen to and trust him, and they wanted to help. Their contacts and time were donations to a non-profit they believed in, run by people they liked. (In fact my parents are still friends with most of them, and they visit each often in retirement). The civic club was absolutely key to getting the non-profit into the networks of people who knew how to efficiently deal with each country's local government regulations, health networks, and navigating the bureaucracies. There was no money changing hands, no promise of economic gain. And his community work didn't set out to create a direct effect. But there was a connection and an indirect effect.

It feels odd to say this, in reference to what the question is that Doc poses, which is about a kind of information economics and value of online information and action, but it seems to me that there is a spiritual or karmic quality to this. People participate, share information, collaborate, help each other, discover things, for reasons that compel them, and it just doesn't seem to be about money. In fact, money would probably kill the desire to blog if it was some direct thing for most people. It's a desire to make something useful, helpful, or even if it's a statement, it might be a question they ponder. And for corporate or other more formal blogs, it's an opportunity to converse with customers more humanly, to share information that might later result in a sale, but isn't directly about selling the words.

Blogging is about participating, saying what you believe, changing the information possibilities. People don't always blog specific things for the best reasons, but regardless, it seems like this kind of sharing overall is similar to the civic club interactions my father used to go to for connecting, sharing, helping and discovery. I think blogging is closer to that old civic club sort of model than anything else I can think of at this moment, as far as any direct value is concerned.

Webnotes Notes

Here is a Webnotes page on this graffiti-like thing that's been happening since posting on Webnotes yesterday. danah posted on it, then Will, who made the page I found first and linked to, responded in his blog about the activity occuring on his webnotes page because he saw people adding notes to his site, via his Bloglines page (through the RSS feed of changes)....

Webnotes reminds me a little of 3rd Voice, kind of like post-it notes, which people used to put around the web.... Kevin Marks mentioned that people would put porn ads on the front page of Yahoo... but it died off. This new toy is much more fun, because you make changes and additions like a wiki, going back to earlier versions if need be, and yet each little box is somewhat like a blog post, but also a note on another note, or a blog comment on another post or comment, and also because collaborative thoughts and overlaying words and presentation make things more about the group than any individual or single though, as danah notes.

I would like to be able to search Webnotes though, to find pages on topics, or by author, or title or links. And I want to post images and put little notes on those together with the other boxed notes. But I love the feed of changes. Never used e-quill though so I'm not sure how it worked.

Social Media Article

Rachel Barron/East Bay Business Times did an article on social media and the BlogOn Conference. The print edition featured a box on BlogOn that is not online. But the article frames my thoughts on social media, as well as Jerry Michalski's, and features many examples of kinds of social media, companies using it as well as difficulties that have come up from not understanding it.

I really appreciate Rachel's work on this, and her featuring me so much, but more importantly, it is one of the first articles I've seen that tries to define social media as a media issue, a technology, and an interaction between people across the web. We need more of that!

Hilarius

Last night when I was walking home, a bus went by with one of those ads on the side. I never read them but for some reason, it caught my eye.

Washington Mutual. Sign up on line for Free checking. Your chances for success are much higher than with online dating.

Or something to that effect (not sure if those were the exact words, but you get the point). I laughed all the way home. Anyway, I've heard from a couple of people that online dating sites are seeded with women's profiles, because there are so many more men than women. Is this true? The most reliable person who told me works for a company that has a huge site, multiple dating sites, actually, but they don't work in that division. So I'm not sure. I'd love to hear from people though as to whether this is true.

danah boyd on social technologies and metaphor

danah, who is speaking on one of the BlogOn panels, has written an excellent piece (but then they are always excellent) about how "blogging is trapped in a metaphor."

Sociable technologies are all built on metaphors. They are often an attempt to model a set of practices already known in everyday life. Yet, as models, the technologies are not the same as the metaphors on which they are based. The result is an entirely new form that encourages entirely new practices....

My frustration with academics, press and conference organizers exists because the primary way to handle these new technologies is to address them in metaphoric terms. This perspective comes from a distanced vantage point.

What is special (and magnificently more frustrating) about blogs is that they stem from many metaphors, including newspapers/magazines, journals/diaries, and log notebooks. No wonder people are up in arms screaming that it's not like a newspaper, it's like a diary! or vice versa. They're both right and wrong. If you're stuck in a metaphoric understanding of blogging, the conflicting metaphors are problematic and discount your approach to the system....

This is precisely why it's bloody hard to study/discuss these technologies without being a practitioner. Distance is valuable as a researcher, but it's also limiting. You need to engage with the culture at a deep level in order to study it. Because digital technology cultures are so peculiar, you need to be involved at an intimate level. Being a lurker is just not the same. It is the practice of engaging with these technologies that makes you able to move beyond the metaphor.

Okay, I've practically quoted the whole thing, but you get the idea. You should really read her whole post, as it's the usual insightful social-technical observation from her. And it's why we are having the bootcamp at the BlogOn Conference. Because you can't sit around talking about "rss" or "blogs" or "social networks" as terms when you don't use them, don't know what it means to interact with people through them, don't see personally that by acting one way, or another, what the implications are for those actions.

In fact, I spent two hours on the phone with a business reporter yesterday, explaining what social media is, giving examples, frameworks, exposing to this woman what to her is invisible activity on the web, and yet, upon exposure, she suddenly got a little of it. I was also laying out why companies need to engage with social media so they can converse with the people formerly known as their customers, but the main thing I kept coming back to about the conference was that if you are going to have a business with social media, you must engage personally, and not from a distance.

There is using a social technology to see how the technology works (blog as a tool, social network as a tool, etc) as well as how the interaction is (blog as interaction, social network as interaction between people). They are just tools in a way, but the word, "blog" for example, gets used to describe the tool, the output of a single blogger, the writing within a post, the interaction across blogs, and on and on. The happens because people who are engaging in it, as well as those who are not, need a common word to describe the tool and activity and interaction and output. But blog represents all these very different things, and then of course, what is in a blog user's head, as a framework for the tool and activity and interaction and output is very different than the framework in the head of a non-engager, a lurker who is distanced and unfamiliar with all the aspects "blog" represents.

So the bootcamp is an attempt to get a few people using the tools, interacting with each other in the room through the tools, interacting with those outside the room, and seeing the results. It comes from my belief that using is imperative to understanding the many aspects of these technologies, and from my experience that seeing how exciting the interaction is only comes from using.

Orkut Linking and FOAF Messages

So, this is facinating! Folks, bloggers, who read me? (I'm guessing and have sent them email to find out) are asking to link to me in Orkut. I haven't met them but they are Iranian bloggers. Now that we are linked, due to Orkut's messaging system, I'm getting messages asking me to travel to Iran, or things like this:

subject: peyvand ba kudakihayeman goruh hay e zir baray e in manzur tashkil shode ast.be anha bepeyvandid: http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=87138 http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=87141 in gruh ham baray e iraniyan e moghim e alman: http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=84027 movafagh bashid

to join Orkut communities (though I have to admit, not speaking the language, I don't really know what I'd be joining, so I'm not going to do so because I don't want to just be a lurker).

But how absolutely cool to have the friend of a friend and community messages broadened by the new linking. I love it!

BlogOn -- A Conf I'm Organizing at UCB

Folks I'm working with include Chris Shipley, Susan Mernit, Ross Mayfield and Mike Sigal. It's about social media, which I sort of defined earlier by describing what social media I play with. But there's more to it than that. It includes blogs, which right now are probably the most known of the social medias, but it also includes other kinds of tools and interactions that people connect with, in communities of interest. We are trying to highlight all the media we can and all the ways people mess with them, and push and pull things to each other.

The conference proposes to address what the business cases are for social media and look at some of the latest experiments companies are having conversating with users, making interesting interactive technologies and figuring out how users are pushing media with blogosphere filtering and RSS (that goes for radio and video, not just news).

BlogOn is being held at Haas Business School, and is supported by the Journalism School and the School of Information Management, as well as the Center for New Media and the Managment of Technology consortiums, which are made up of several graduate schools at UCB. Companies like Microsoft and Six Apart and Knight Ridder Digital are also helping to underwrite the costs with sponsorship.

We are admitting bloggers at a reduced rate, and also will shortly start taking apps for scholarships, for those who can't afford the costs. We'd like to make sure that people who really want to go have a chance to be there.

What Social Media is in My Pocket?

That would be social media of the technological sort. This list is sort of the equivalent of what gadgets do I have in my pocket. Push me, pull me. I don't care which.

Blogs:: Read 'em and write 'em.
Moblogs:: Love the immediacy of seeing someone's experience.
Audioblogs, Videoblogs:: Not as much, but do like them. Time consuming.
Webcasting:: My personal favorite is when I get an illicit feed of some event, where the event people don't have a clue it's going on. Love it.
Blog search tools Technorati, for the link cosmos. High quality info.
RSS:: In and outgoing. So there are aggregators that I use for the computers and the phone.
Social Networks:: Orkut, Friendster, Linked In. Consider them baseball cards however, unless I want to research someone. Don't use them too often as they aren't otherwise useful.
IM:: All the time.
Chat-IM:: Often.
Forums and chatrooms:: Only for occasional research. Low quality of info. Never post.
Online games:: Camera phone game, etc. Now and then. Fun.
Text messaging:: Constantly. Couldn't live without it. And it works often when the phone doesn't get reception. Or you're in a meeting and you can't talk. Or a no-cell zone. A godsend.
SMS:: Now and then, you have to send a photo. Like when a guy hits your car, and you calmly get out, snap a few photos, and his insurance co calls you 30 minutes later, and you email the photos from the phone.
Web on the phone:: Now and then, you have to get something critical. Or you're bored out of your mind in some analog line and it's an opportunity to check up on whatever Jeff Jarvis has thought about in the last 15 minutes.
Email:: spamminess is next to godliness.
Fax:: Yes. Would somebody please get rid of this network. I got rid of the fax machine years ago, and yet people still ask for them. So I'm forced back into the network.
Phone:: Yes, still need/like/want them. Even the ones nailed to the wall. There's nothing like chatting at 2am with someone in a gravely low voice that you like.
Wiki:: Use them for small groups over a long period, to collaborate. Or with a million people over a short period, to collaborate. Could use some iterations, but I still love em.
P2P:: Bittorrent, iTunes, Rhapsody, and more I can't think of now. It's periodic but oh so instant.
Flashmobs:: Went to one a long time ago. Died out. Them came back here and there. 2nd generation is much more interesting.
Craig's List:: Who could live without it. If nothing else, totally entertaining.
Meetups:: Once a month.
MoveOn:: Half the time yes, half no. Depends.

Social Networks Get Strange

First they were cute, then slighly annoying. Then I ignored them. Then Orkut came along and we collected baseball cards. Then I ignored Orkut. Then Orkut spammed the people I invited, but hadn't responded to my first invite, but didn't ask me if I wanted everyone re-spammed. Then they sent me notes telling me how many people had joined my network, post-spam, and how many had joined my friend's lists, etc. Then I started getting "requests" to accept people's invitations to link to them on Orkut, but the personal notes they typed into the email were coercive, and kind of heavy handed, especially since I'd never met them, didn't know them, and wouldn't link to them normally.

So what now? We know that explicit linking is problematic, because people link for various "soft" reasons, to people they may not know, because they don't want to cut off future potential relationships, or they know of them, or they all have different definitions of what it means to "know" someone, etc. But does this mean we add the category of being forced into it? I mean, I could say no to those people, but is that inviting a lot of bad blood? Geez. It was just for fun, people.

Revisiting Virtual Communities

This panel just finished, and here are a few noteworthy remarks:

Susan Mernit was live blogging from the panel, during the panel. Markos Moulitsas (Kos), Craig Newmark (there is a new documentary about craigslist called "24 hours on craigslist.org" and Fortune just did a story on them) and Mark Pincus of Tribe.

Mernit: Tools and technology adoption are key to what's happening with people and technology. Online communities are about people and people in turn drive technology development to support themselves and their communities.

Newmark: We've collectively managed to reach a few million people between social networks, blogs etc. but how do you get past that echo chamber.... When you grow up as a nerd, you learn what it feels like to feel left out, and when you gow up, you think about it and figure out how to include people, which is what craigslist is working on now.

Pincus: All leads aren't the same -- just like search results were too much on alta vista in the beginning, as we deal with each other now on social networking sites, we need filters and ways to qualify information so that we get better info. We also choose to expose ourselves to each other and we want to get good things back, not bad. The network is the database -- tell the network who we are and then automagically, the network will help us find a group that we could be a part of... the genesis of tribe was political - though I have no interest in public interest job. The process is the platform.

Kos: There is no fair and balanced media -- I think everyone has bias and it seeps into coverage. Fox has viewers for a reason, ABC, NBC and CBS are boring -- and newspapers lose readers for a reason, but newspapers in England are a lot more lively.

Pincus: Google has proven that if you put things in context, and clearly identify things people like it. They did tests, and people said they liked craigslist because it had no ads, but actually it's all ads, but the ads are content and they are where people expect the ads to be. If I see an ad before a movie, I'm annoyed, but I want to see them in the right categories on craigslist. We are in an age of "utility media" that moves away from "entertainment media", where it's like a free cab ride in Mexico to the time share, but then you have to listen to this ad.... Craig has proven that it's sustainable, Tribe hasn't proven it yet, but there is no reason to have it be an adversarial relationship.

Blogging and Social Networking on Ebay

By now, 2 hours and 24 minutes before the close of horseplaypublishing's auction, and 4.8 million page views later, this wedding dress has a bid price of $15,100.00 (pdf or htm). Yesterday at noon there were about 683k page views and the price was $690. The guy selling it (he's also modeling it) has written commentary as well as additional information about the auction responses, including media interviews and tons of email, after the initial post on the dress itself. His motivations for selling? His wife left him and he found the dress in the move, and he wants to get money for Mariner's tickets as well as some beer -- noble goals for any eBay seller.

I'm waiting for eBay to set up comments, trackback, and of course, links to this post from other bloggers. Actual online social networking here. And his website will be coming soon. Hopefully he does a blog himself because the writing is so funny. Though horseplaypublishing does report that, "EBay has graciously allowed me to update this page once more. So I will keep it brief." EBay has something on their hands that they may not understand the extent of, or if they do, it's not reflected on their site, but it's incredibly cool. Let users play and they'll come up with something really interesting.

Dodgeball? Your Stalkers Can Kick Back and Take it Easy

"It's like Friendster for your mobile phone."

But do I really want Dick who is a friend of my friend Jane's dog Spot to know that I'm standing at the corner of 24th and 3rd right now, blogging this? I mean, I guess that anyone reading this on their web phone could run over, but then I'm choosing to blog this info, and of course, my friends can call me because I've given them my number, and the can see when I'm on IM. But I choose that too. I let it happen because they are my friends and I know them. But everyone on Friendster three degrees out? That was the last time I checked in the hundreds of thousands.

I'm thinking dodging the ball seems like the right metaphor. I can see it now, people suddenly realize that so and so can "see" them, turn off their phone/web access and make for the nearest unlikely location (I just discovered the Hell's Angel's SF house a block away from here... I bet you wouldn't suspect I'd be there, right? And they are probably a whole lot nicer than that stalker you're running away from....) Okay, I probably wouldn't run away, but geez man, get over this YASNs/FOAF+something thing already. I don't want to be tracked everywhere, even if I am boring and go to the same places most of the time -- work, school, home.... I like it when I serendipitously run into people, love it, happens a fair amount, but it would drive me crazy if dodgeball were behind it.

Flashmob Supercomputing at USF Now

The project came up in a class around 6 weeks ago, where John Wichel, a grad student at USF, asked why not? By the end of class after a little arguing, they figured it was possible and put out a call for 1200 systems. Today they are flash-testing whether they can make a supercomputer that can compete with the top 500th biggest computer in the world which cost around $25 million. But this one is essentially free, because it's made up of 600+ computers lent to the project by students, faculty and the community. Mostly over the last month, he said they, the students in the class this project originated in, have been trying to figure out how to architect the software, to get all the computers connected. Some students were up all night last night still writing code. They did a lot of small scale testing the past couple of weeks until yesterday when they tested about 100 computers.

It's "super computing in a flash," says Andrew Bolles, hired documentarian for this project. A media science undergrad, he's been filming, tagging along behind the makers of this supercomputer for a month. He's doing all the editing and storyboarding too, and will make a documentary so that the makers of this project can show people what they did to pull this event and supercomputer together.

The idea has been out there for a long time, and one example is the SETI@Home program, which I've been doing for the last 5 years. Users donate their systems when not in use to SETI which harnesses the processors using highspeed bandwidth connections across the internet. The Flashmob Supercomputer in the middle of Koret Gym is doing the same thing today, all at once but all in the same location.

At the end, the project makers want to hand out CDs to laptop donators and post an image of the software to the web so that people can do the same thing with small groups of computers at home, etc. Also, they are licensing it open source so that people can modify and improve it.

On Orkut: Social Network as Sport

Kevin Marks says "We're just collecting baseball cards here...".
I say, "this is like a video game for social networks... how many people can you click...." Doc's got 99 and danah's got 101, but Joi has 200! Doc is the only guy in a tie on Orkut. Cool.

A Thought About Orkut, Privacy and Google

Free Cell Phone For All

Building a Social Network in 48 Hours

Orkut popped up on John Battelle's blog on Friday, and by Friday afternoon there were invites in my inbox (though as I mentioned, I was doing flowers for a wedding, and so missed them until late Friday night). Had many more invites late last night when I got home, and today, invited some others myself, and joined a few communities. Apparently, people were primed for a good social network after the soc-shill faux pas of Friendster, which is primarily for dating, and makes the mistake of thinking that A=B and B=C so therefore A=C. Social relationships aren't transitive, and yet people do want other interesting ways to communicate information amongst people interested in the same things, and ways to look at what others with similar understandings are looking at. Orkut seems to have answered the call.

Apparently, it was developed and tested internally at Google, so many of the first users are Google employees, but now, it's taken the cognoscenti by storm. I wonder, as this is a cool target group, how long this mecca will last before some spammer/marketer gets an account, sending unwanted messages to communities, inviting himself into Orkut multiple times, to keep the spam alive (presumably, they will kick out abusers but they could always invite themselves with new email addresses). Or how will it go for people who might unintentionally do the wrong thing, disturb someone or make a ruckus, causing upset? The people I know personally on this understand online communications, knowing that there are different ways to be online than in the analog world (as Christian Crumlish told me earlier today, who wants to walk around with their fly unzipped while everyone looks on?), though there have been a few blanket posts to all users, which is a little odd. These are issues online social network systems need to work on, some of which are interface issues, and some are architectural.

I hope this succeeds and users find the system useful and nuanced enough to satisfy, but interesting enough to be worth the time and effort such social networking requires (and not too trendy, or too harsh in their posting policies, closing off the network, etc. as Liz Lawley reports). I am excited, and amazed that in 48 hours, Orkut has made something that could engage some many so fast. Though I would point out that this afternoon, they seem to be taking a break, maybe due to their newfound popularity....

UPDATE 1/25/04: Joe Hall makes a good point in the comments about online social networks, where people he didn't know invited him to link to them. This is a problem in many online communities as people have different ideas about how far out in one's experience the linking should go (my friends and closer business relationships, or everyone I know, or everyone including those whose blogs I read and therefore feel like I know, even if we've never met...). Earlier today when Christian and I met to talk about online communications, we reviewed what was happening with Orkut, and he asked me about whether I used the star system to denote a "fan" (you can -- I guess this is the term -- rate your connections). I replied that I did, and in fact, feel like a fan of all my friends and those I'd linked to or invited (I had only gone so far as the "my friends and closer business relationships" category and I do really like them, or appreciate their work, in some way, in every case). He mentioned that this might lead to a stilted relationship where I was subservient, but to me, I wasn't subservient at all. I was simply saying that I think each of these people is fantastic and I feel strongly about that. They all do amazing things, are amazing people, and I want them to know that I think they are great.

But in that regard, others with other conceptions of how wide to cast their network, or how deeply, might characterize only those they are subservient to, with a "fan" star, or might star everyone, even those they don't know, to suck up. You know, all this in a way represents the playground at school, where our social interactions took on different meanings for each of us, and we had to work it out. Orkut is similar, though the manifestations in the digital world are different, counter-intuitive, and we will have to navigate it all over again.

Privacy and New Technology: System Openness, User Control and Good Interface are Key to Making Users Feel More Comfortable, But So Would Blanket Privacy Policy

Ross Mayfield has a really interesting discussion roundup on his site, about users driving policy. As the discussions around various blogs became more specific, much of it centered around privacy and social norms issues, particularly mismatched expectations between users and a system's designers. Design issues at the development level are key to narrowing these, giving users control and notice, as well as a good interface to easily understand and make good choices that suit their privacy needs and intentions with their information or system expectations. But I keep returning to the feeling that, regarding privacy, we really need a blanket privacy policy to make users feel comfortable as they interact in the digital world, and on the internet. This cannot be resolved with better interfaces, user control and system openness alone, though those are key to making information technologies work well and giving users what they want on a system level, leading to more informed users, and integrity in the relationships between systems and users and their data.

Systems and companies may make some relatively small amount of money now by using collected information from and about users, for purposes other than the users intended, for use outside of their relationships with those specific companies. But instances like those discussed below cause users to feel worried and sometimes outright scared, where they then refuse to participate in a system or with a company at all, or find themselves shocked after the fact by the results of their interactions with a company or entity. Unless people feel comfortable and protected, those profits resulting from systems currently selling or manipulating user data in ways the user doesn't intend will remain small in comparison to the tremendous amount of money to be made in web services, social networks, and with all sorts of other information technologies were most users to participate because they felt safe.

Most users will not now participate in information technology systems that require a lot of personal data unless there is something they get in return, and even then, it's a subset of the total internet user population. If users really trusted that they were in control of their own data, so they knew when their data went beyond those specific company systems and relationships, and could decide when and where to participate, instead of operating in a state of uninformed fear as companies currently now offer with no or little privacy policies, and little in the way of overall government protection, those companies (and many new ones based on new technologies) using exactly this kind of personal user data could make many times over what they do now. It is short term greed that keeps companies operating as they do, which keeps users from participating, which leads to few participants out of the whole of those using the internet. And yet, one company's policy to the next is confusing and unreliable, and not something people can or want to keep track of, and the resulting confusion also contributes to far less participation. I believe the only route to real information technology development with personal data and the profits that will follow is a blanket policy that every company will have to follow assuring customers of their own data privacy. Users would feel secure and many many more would participate, and those companies would make far more than they have seen under the current (no) privacy regime.

The discussion Ross catalogued partly centered around this: Danah Boyd responded to Wendy Seltzer (responding to Cory Doctorow saying that the last twenty years have been about technology and the next twenty will be about policy). Wendy suggested that originally, she thought that technology developments bringing about privacy tensions might ease as people became more sophisticated users, but instead she saw the gap as a critical mass of users would always lag behind technology developments as they learned a new information technology well enough to overcome, accept, steer away from or rearrange the privacy breaches, and so social norms developed as a result of these new technologies lag behind. Danah replied that social norms weren't falling behind, they are instead going in one direction while technologies are developed in another, and it baffles the social norms trying to cope.

I think in a way they are both right (both scenarios can exist with the same technology depending on use and result); it's not only lagging user competency and then the attendant reactions from users that will adjust, making some mental calculation with a new technology in order to get the amount of privacy or control they need, and it's not just diverging social norms, but also other issues on the design and development end that might solve this, like notice, good interface and user control, that allow for users to know immediately, and then deal with the privacy issues as they use the new technology, instead of finding out about their loss of privacy when it's too late, that will counter these kinds of issues. Technologists can do much better with design, as could corporate policies for privacy be much better, as could users in learning new technologies and protecting their own privacy as needed. But for most people and companies, the benefits will come when users know they are protected, understand a basic structure of privacy across companies and websites, which all interested can rely on, leading to users releasing information. Interesting uses of people's data will follow while still maintaining privacy and user control.

And yet instances of technology development seem to move in exactly the opposite direction at times, leading to scares with users, resulting in less participation with systems that might benefit us all if many participated, and well designed, with privacy built into the architecture, and privacy as a given right between users and the entities with whom they deal.

John Battelle points to a particularly disconcerting social and privacy issue brought up by a new web service, Cardbrowser. Apparently, they have 17,000 (and counting) business cards they've collected from some major conferences, with no privacy policy posted and little information about whether they let those giving the cards (presumably for the purposes of making a new contact person to person, not being entered into a web-searchable database for the whole internet to search, though this is unknown because they publish nothing about their data or privacy policies) know that the cards would end up there, or allowing users to be in control of their own information, or for that matter whether the companies on those cards know. Also, what about the idea that without your approval, Cardbrowser is linking and distributing your name, title, company name, phone numbers and location, attendance record, and dates, which is information that together with other personal information in publically available databases, might lead to even greater matching and sifting of personal digital identities that people don't want out there for just anyone to see without some reason or a warrant or some kind of permission and reciprocity (as our current analog social norms often dictate).

Similar issues exist with your cell phone keeping tabs on you. There's good and there's bad in systems like that, where some users want to keep track of their kids, which may not be objectionable, but others including the companies that buy the phones for their employees may do it for reasons that are totally unacceptable. These kinds of information technologies can allow uses that previously didn't exist, and therefore, there is a lag before a critical mass of users understands what is happening and does something about it, or at least has notice that the shift has occured and can then make choices about when to allow it, or self-censor.

In the case of the tracking phones, it becomes a matter of each user knowing when the tracking is turned on, and having control over that tracking. It's a matter of notice, and a matter of interface. A good interface, on any system that tracks your behavior, your movements, your private, semi-private, semi-public and public behavior, would show the tracking, and give control choices at the time of use. But well designed systems are rare today, and it's the invisible nature of the tracking, and our relationship to the data from the tracking, that causes consternation and upset. A blanket privacy policy would alleviate many fears and open up many new information technology development possibilities as well as many customers for companies to development relationships.

Privacy and New Technology: System Openness, User Control and Good Interface are Key to Making Users Feel More Comfortable, But So Would Blanket Privacy Policy

Ross Mayfield has a really interesting discussion roundup on his site, about users driving policy. As the discussions around various blogs became more specific, much of it centered around privacy and social norms issues, particularly mismatched expectations between users and a system's designers. Design issues at the development level are key to narrowing these, giving users control and notice, as well as a good interface to easily understand and make good choices that suit their privacy needs and intentions with their information or system expectations. But I keep returning to the feeling that, regarding privacy, we really need a blanket privacy policy to make users feel comfortable as they interact in the digital world, and on the internet. This cannot be resolved with better interfaces, user control and system openness alone, though those are key to making information technologies work well and giving users what they want on a system level, leading to more informed users, and integrity in the relationships between systems and users and their data.

Systems and companies may make some relatively small amount of money now by using collected information from and about users, for purposes other than the users intended, for use outside of their relationships with those specific companies. But instances like those discussed below cause users to feel worried and sometimes outright scared, where they then refuse to participate in a system or with a company at all, or find themselves shocked after the fact by the results of their interactions with a company or entity. Unless people feel comfortable and protected, those profits resulting from systems currently selling or manipulating user data in ways the user doesn't intend will remain small in comparison to the tremendous amount of money to be made in web services, social networks, and with all sorts of other information technologies were most users to participate because they felt safe.

Most users will not now participate in information technology systems that require a lot of personal data unless there is something they get in return, and even then, it's a subset of the total internet user population. If users really trusted that they were in control of their own data, so they knew when their data went beyond those specific company systems and relationships, and could decide when and where to participate, instead of operating in a state of uninformed fear as companies currently now offer with no or little privacy policies, and little in the way of overall government protection, those companies (and many new ones based on new technologies) using exactly this kind of personal user data could make many times over what they do now. It is short term greed that keeps companies operating as they do, which keeps users from participating, which leads to few participants out of the whole of those using the internet. And yet, one company's policy to the next is confusing and unreliable, and not something people can or want to keep track of, and the resulting confusion also contributes to far less participation. I believe the only route to real information technology development with personal data and the profits that will follow is a blanket policy that every company will have to follow assuring customers of their own data privacy. Users would feel secure and many many more would participate, and those companies would make far more than they have seen under the current (no) privacy regime.

The discussion Ross catalogued partly centered around this: Danah Boyd responded to Wendy Seltzer (responding to Cory Doctorow saying that the last twenty years have been about technology and the next twenty will be about policy). Wendy suggested that originally, she thought that technology developments bringing about privacy tensions might ease as people became more sophisticated users, but instead she saw the gap as a critical mass of users would always lag behind technology developments as they learned a new information technology well enough to overcome, accept, steer away from or rearrange the privacy breaches, and so social norms developed as a result of these new technologies lag behind. Danah replied that social norms weren't falling behind, they are instead going in one direction while technologies are developed in another, and it baffles the social norms trying to cope.

I think in a way they are both right (both scenarios can exist with the same technology depending on use and result); it's not only lagging user competency and then the attendant reactions from users that will adjust, making some mental calculation with a new technology in order to get the amount of privacy or control they need, and it's not just diverging social norms, but also other issues on the design and development end that might solve this, like notice, good interface and user control, that allow for users to know immediately, and then deal with the privacy issues as they use the new technology, instead of finding out about their loss of privacy when it's too late, that will counter these kinds of issues. Technologists can do much better with design, as could corporate policies for privacy be much better, as could users in learning new technologies and protecting their own privacy as needed. But for most people and companies, the benefits will come when users know they are protected, understand a basic structure of privacy across companies and websites, which all interested can rely on, leading to users releasing information. Interesting uses of people's data will follow while still maintaining privacy and user control.

And yet instances of technology development seem to move in exactly the opposite direction at times, leading to scares with users, resulting in less participation with systems that might benefit us all if many participated, and well designed, with privacy built into the architecture, and privacy as a given right between users and the entities with whom they deal.

John Battelle points to a particularly disconcerting social and privacy issue brought up by a new web service, Cardbrowser. Apparently, they have 17,000 (and counting) business cards they've collected from some major conferences, with no privacy policy posted and little information about whether they let those giving the cards (presumably for the purposes of making a new contact person to person, not being entered into a web-searchable database for the whole internet to search, though this is unknown because they publish nothing about their data or privacy policies) know that the cards would end up there, or allowing users to be in control of their own information, or for that matter whether the companies on those cards know. Also, what about the idea that without your approval, Cardbrowser is linking and distributing your name, title, company name, phone numbers and location, attendance record, and dates, which is information that together with other personal information in publically available databases, might lead to even greater matching and sifting of personal digital identities that people don't want out there for just anyone to see without some reason or a warrant or some kind of permission and reciprocity (as our current analog social norms often dictate).

Similar issues exist with your cell phone keeping tabs on you. There's good and there's bad in systems like that, where some users want to keep track of their kids, which may not be objectionable, but others including the companies that buy the phones for their employees may do it for reasons that are totally unacceptable. These kinds of information technologies can allow uses that previously didn't exist, and therefore, there is a lag before a critical mass of users understands what is happening and does something about it, or at least has notice that the shift has occured and can then make choices about when to allow it, or self-censor.

In the case of the tracking phones, it becomes a matter of each user knowing when the tracking is turned on, and having control over that tracking. It's a matter of notice, and a matter of interface. A good interface, on any system that tracks your behavior, your movements, your private, semi-private, semi-public and public behavior, would show the tracking, and give control choices at the time of use. But well designed systems are rare today, and it's the invisible nature of the tracking, and our relationship to the data from the tracking, that causes consternation and upset. A blanket privacy policy would alleviate many fears and open up many new information technology development possibilities as well as many customers for companies to development relationships.

Privacy and New Technology: System Openness, User Control and Good Interface are Key to Making Users Feel More Comfortable, But So Would Blanket Privacy Policy

Ross Mayfield has a really interesting discussion roundup on his site, about users driving policy. As the discussions around various blogs became more specific, much of it centered around privacy and social norms issues, particularly mismatched expectations between users and a system's designers. Design issues at the development level are key to narrowing these, giving users control and notice, as well as a good interface to easily understand and make good choices that suit their privacy needs and intentions with their information or system expectations. But I keep returning to the feeling that, regarding privacy, we really need a blanket privacy policy to make users feel comfortable as they interact in the digital world, and on the internet. This cannot be resolved with better interfaces, user control and system openness alone, though those are key to making information technologies work well and giving users what they want on a system level, leading to more informed users, and integrity in the relationships between systems and users and their data.

Systems and companies may make some relatively small amount of money now by using collected information from and about users, for purposes other than the users intended, for use outside of their relationships with those specific companies. But instances like those discussed below cause users to feel worried and sometimes outright scared, where they then refuse to participate in a system or with a company at all, or find themselves shocked after the fact by the results of their interactions with a company or entity. Unless people feel comfortable and protected, those profits resulting from systems currently selling or manipulating user data in ways the user doesn't intend will remain small in comparison to the tremendous amount of money to be made in web services, social networks, and with all sorts of other information technologies were most users to participate because they felt safe.

Most users will not now participate in information technology systems that require a lot of personal data unless there is something they get in return, and even then, it's a subset of the total internet user population. If users really trusted that they were in control of their own data, so they knew when their data went beyond those specific company systems and relationships, and could decide when and where to participate, instead of operating in a state of uninformed fear as companies currently now offer with no or little privacy policies, and little in the way of overall government protection, those companies (and many new ones based on new technologies) using exactly this kind of personal user data could make many times over what they do now. It is short term greed that keeps companies operating as they do, which keeps users from participating, which leads to few participants out of the whole of those using the internet. And yet, one company's policy to the next is confusing and unreliable, and not something people can or want to keep track of, and the resulting confusion also contributes to far less participation. I believe the only route to real information technology development with personal data and the profits that will follow is a blanket policy that every company will have to follow assuring customers of their own data privacy. Users would feel secure and many many more would participate, and those companies would make far more than they have seen under the current (no) privacy regime.

The discussion Ross catalogued partly centered around this: Danah Boyd responded to Wendy Seltzer (responding to Cory Doctorow saying that the last twenty years have been about technology and the next twenty will be about policy). Wendy suggested that originally, she thought that technology developments bringing about privacy tensions might ease as people became more sophisticated users, but instead she saw the gap as a critical mass of users would always lag behind technology developments as they learned a new information technology well enough to overcome, accept, steer away from or rearrange the privacy breaches, and so social norms developed as a result of these new technologies lag behind. Danah replied that social norms weren't falling behind, they are instead going in one direction while technologies are developed in another, and it baffles the social norms trying to cope.

I think in a way they are both right (both scenarios can exist with the same technology depending on use and result); it's not only lagging user competency and then the attendant reactions from users that will adjust, making some mental calculation with a new technology in order to get the amount of privacy or control they need, and it's not just diverging social norms, but also other issues on the design and development end that might solve this, like notice, good interface and user control, that allow for users to know immediately, and then deal with the privacy issues as they use the new technology, instead of finding out about their loss of privacy when it's too late, that will counter these kinds of issues. Technologists can do much better with design, as could corporate policies for privacy be much better, as could users in learning new technologies and protecting their own privacy as needed. But for most people and companies, the benefits will come when users know they are protected, understand a basic structure of privacy across companies and websites, which all interested can rely on, leading to users releasing information. Interesting uses of people's data will follow while still maintaining privacy and user control.

And yet instances of technology development seem to move in exactly the opposite direction at times, leading to scares with users, resulting in less participation with systems that might benefit us all if many participated, and well designed, with privacy built into the architecture, and privacy as a given right between users and the entities with whom they deal.

John Battelle points to a particularly disconcerting social and privacy issue brought up by a new web service, Cardbrowser. Apparently, they have 17,000 (and counting) business cards they've collected from some major conferences, with no privacy policy posted and little information about whether they let those giving the cards (presumably for the purposes of making a new contact person to person, not being entered into a web-searchable database for the whole internet to search, though this is unknown because they publish nothing about their data or privacy policies) know that the cards would end up there, or allowing users to be in control of their own information, or for that matter whether the companies on those cards know. Also, what about the idea that without your approval, Cardbrowser is linking and distributing your name, title, company name, phone numbers and location, attendance record, and dates, which is information that together with other personal information in publically available databases, might lead to even greater matching and sifting of personal digital identities that people don't want out there for just anyone to see without some reason or a warrant or some kind of permission and reciprocity (as our current analog social norms often dictate).

Similar issues exist with your cell phone keeping tabs on you. There's good and there's bad in systems like that, where some users want to keep track of their kids, which may not be objectionable, but others including the companies that buy the phones for their employees may do it for reasons that are totally unacceptable. These kinds of information technologies can allow uses that previously didn't exist, and therefore, there is a lag before a critical mass of users understands what is happening and does something about it, or at least has notice that the shift has occured and can then make choices about when to allow it, or self-censor.

In the case of the tracking phones, it becomes a matter of each user knowing when the tracking is turned on, and having control over that tracking. It's a matter of notice, and a matter of interface. A good interface, on any system that tracks your behavior, your movements, your private, semi-private, semi-public and public behavior, would show the tracking, and give control choices at the time of use. But well designed systems are rare today, and it's the invisible nature of the tracking, and our relationship to the data from the tracking, that causes consternation and upset. A blanket privacy policy would alleviate many fears and open up many new information technology development possibilities as well as many customers for companies to development relationships.

Trends According to PR Newswire

Are here.

Though I wouldn't normally mention something like this, because these predictions of trends are usually rather silly, futurology (it's like astrology for tech), they did mention an interesting social trend, among the pronouncements about blogging and localism and eWear (clothing with special spots for your gadgets), which is the result of technology disrupting the analog social barriers we have known in the past that keep people with differences physically further apart than the closeness they can achieve now with internet technology:

- Us vs. Them: The flip side of going local is a greater sensitivity to what's not local -- in other words, a stronger sense of Us and Them. Globalization and interactive technologies have brought a lot of people around the world closer together and furthered international trade, but, contrary to hopes and expectations, greater exposure has come to mean more scope for negative perceptions to develop. In some parts of the world, the coming year is likely to see deeper divisions across existing fault lines-Muslim/non-Muslim, conservative/liberal, urban/rural, pro-life/pro-choice, pro-gay/anti-gay.

This is a "trend" that has been happening for years, where TV shows like Dynasty, got exported to poor areas of the world, where the result is often hatred for wasteful, self-indulgent lifestyles of the American's shown. More recently in the last 10 years, the internet has allowed people to get closer. An example might be what has happened with online social networks, like Friendster, where in the past few months, white-supremacists have targeted racial minorities with hate speech, and those targeted have simply jumped off Friendster (no links, this has not been reported that I know of in the media, but is something I was told from a person who is connected with the company). Other examples might be those in poor areas react to the wealth apparent in other locations with their associated internet sites, or those who are of one belief-system react negatively to those who show activities on the internet that are in conflict, resulting in discord.

Course sort of thing, this also works in reverse where those in wealthier areas see things in less wealthy areas that are upsetting. Example: when American's find out that Indians can get unlimited data through Hutchison/Orange for $2.00/mo (99 rupees/mo), they may want to place their data cell service in India, and then use their VoIP software to use their American phone number over that data connection.

In this case with phone prices, however, those who pay expensive prices for information services, and see cheaper services offered in other countries are more likely to get upset with American companies charging the high prices, than with the people themselves in the poorer countries. Whereas the Us - Them situation in the first paragraph has to do with people in one area upset with people in another, which is different and more socially discordant across regions. In otherwords, the situations between people seeing information across the internet about others, and getting upset due to this new information is symmetrical, but who they are upset with as a result not necessarily symmetrical.

The napsterization of the phone biz continues as does the disruption to the analog social barriers that kept us from finding out about each other as intimately as we can with the internet, across social groups and around the globe. While generally breaking these barriers down is a good thing, because we get more direct experiential information about things happening in other places, there is a darkside, and we need to be sensitive to this aspect.

Trends According to PR Newswire

Are here.

Though I wouldn't normally mention something like this, because these predictions of trends are usually rather silly, futurology (it's like astrology for tech), they did mention an interesting social trend, among the pronouncements about blogging and localism and eWear (clothing with special spots for your gadgets), which is the result of technology disrupting the analog social barriers we have known in the past that keep people with differences physically further apart than the closeness they can achieve now with internet technology:

- Us vs. Them: The flip side of going local is a greater sensitivity to what's not local -- in other words, a stronger sense of Us and Them. Globalization and interactive technologies have brought a lot of people around the world closer together and furthered international trade, but, contrary to hopes and expectations, greater exposure has come to mean more scope for negative perceptions to develop. In some parts of the world, the coming year is likely to see deeper divisions across existing fault lines-Muslim/non-Muslim, conservative/liberal, urban/rural, pro-life/pro-choice, pro-gay/anti-gay.

This is a "trend" that has been happening for years, where TV shows like Dynasty, got exported to poor areas of the world, where the result is often hatred for wasteful, self-indulgent lifestyles of the American's shown. More recently in the last 10 years, the internet has allowed people to get closer. An example might be what has happened with online social networks, like Friendster, where in the past few months, white-supremacists have targeted racial minorities with hate speech, and those targeted have simply jumped off Friendster (no links, this has not been reported that I know of in the media, but is something I was told from a person who is connected with the company). Other examples might be those in poor areas react to the wealth apparent in other locations with their associated internet sites, or those who are of one belief-system react negatively to those who show activities on the internet that are in conflict, resulting in discord.

Course sort of thing, this also works in reverse where those in wealthier areas see things in less wealthy areas that are upsetting. Example: when American's find out that Indians can get unlimited data through Hutchison/Orange for $2.00/mo (99 rupees/mo), they may want to place their data cell service in India, and then use their VoIP software to use their American phone number over that data connection.

In this case with phone prices, however, those who pay expensive prices for information services, and see cheaper services offered in other countries are more likely to get upset with American companies charging the high prices, than with the people themselves in the poorer countries. Whereas the Us - Them situation in the first paragraph has to do with people in one area upset with people in another, which is different and more socially discordant across regions. In otherwords, the situations between people seeing information across the internet about others, and getting upset due to this new information is symmetrical, but who they are upset with as a result not necessarily symmetrical.

The napsterization of the phone biz continues as does the disruption to the analog social barriers that kept us from finding out about each other as intimately as we can with the internet, across social groups and around the globe. While generally breaking these barriers down is a good thing, because we get more direct experiential information about things happening in other places, there is a darkside, and we need to be sensitive to this aspect.

Trends According to PR Newswire

Are here.

Though I wouldn't normally mention something like this, because these predictions of trends are usually rather silly, futurology (it's like astrology for tech), they did mention an interesting social trend, among the pronouncements about blogging and localism and eWear (clothing with special spots for your gadgets), which is the result of technology disrupting the analog social barriers we have known in the past that keep people with differences physically further apart than the closeness they can achieve now with internet technology:

- Us vs. Them: The flip side of going local is a greater sensitivity to what's not local -- in other words, a stronger sense of Us and Them. Globalization and interactive technologies have brought a lot of people around the world closer together and furthered international trade, but, contrary to hopes and expectations, greater exposure has come to mean more scope for negative perceptions to develop. In some parts of the world, the coming year is likely to see deeper divisions across existing fault lines-Muslim/non-Muslim, conservative/liberal, urban/rural, pro-life/pro-choice, pro-gay/anti-gay.

This is a "trend" that has been happening for years, where TV shows like Dynasty, got exported to poor areas of the world, where the result is often hatred for wasteful, self-indulgent lifestyles of the American's shown. More recently in the last 10 years, the internet has allowed people to get closer. An example might be what has happened with online social networks, like Friendster, where in the past few months, white-supremacists have targeted racial minorities with hate speech, and those targeted have simply jumped off Friendster (no links, this has not been reported that I know of in the media, but is something I was told from a person who is connected with the company). Other examples might be those in poor areas react to the wealth apparent in other locations with their associated internet sites, or those who are of one belief-system react negatively to those who show activities on the internet that are in conflict, resulting in discord.

Course sort of thing, this also works in reverse where those in wealthier areas see things in less wealthy areas that are upsetting. Example: when American's find out that Indians can get unlimited data through Hutchison/Orange for $2.00/mo (99 rupees/mo), they may want to place their data cell service in India, and then use their VoIP software to use their American phone number over that data connection.

In this case with phone prices, however, those who pay expensive prices for information services, and see cheaper services offered in other countries are more likely to get upset with American companies charging the high prices, than with the people themselves in the poorer countries. Whereas the Us - Them situation in the first paragraph has to do with people in one area upset with people in another, which is different and more socially discordant across regions. In otherwords, the situations between people seeing information across the internet about others, and getting upset due to this new information is symmetrical, but who they are upset with as a result not necessarily symmetrical.

The napsterization of the phone biz continues as does the disruption to the analog social barriers that kept us from finding out about each other as intimately as we can with the internet, across social groups and around the globe. While generally breaking these barriers down is a good thing, because we get more direct experiential information about things happening in other places, there is a darkside, and we need to be sensitive to this aspect.

Digital v. Analog Cameras, or Why We Must Think More Explicitly About Public and Private Social Spaces

The NYTimes today has an op-ed piece on cell phone's with digital cameras. They totally don't get it. Yes, these phones can be invasive, but any camera could take the kinds of pictures they are complaining about. The real issue is that each time a new disruptive, and often digital, technology arrives, we, the slow moving humans who need time to adapt, have to adjust our social norms. And a critical mass of this adjustment needs to happen before most people are on the same page, in this case making a distinction between public and private places where is either is appropriate, or not, to take photos that may violate people's privacy.

In other words, a gym changing room is a private space. We don't take pictures there now, so why would we do it with a phone camera? A sidewalk is a public space, so if a picture is taken, well, you were out in public. I realize these phone/cameras make it so much easier to take pictures, etc. but the real controversy is whether people get to control the pictures taken of them. Right now, the law says the picture taker owns the picture. Paparazzi anyone? However, do we now regulate this in private spaces, such as workspaces, private business spaces such as gyms and gym locker rooms, offices and homes? Verses say, the street, the park, the city council meeting, the little league game? Some privace spaces are regulated simply because some people are kept out, becasue they represent private property, workplaces restrict certain behaviors, etc.

Without thinking about it, we humans wander in and out of private, semi-private and public spaces, and now the phone/camera is confronting us in a few cases by violating the implicit social norms we were used to before, without realizing it. My suggestion? Rather than regulating, we use peer pressure to acclimate people to respect the differences between these spaces, so that people understand explicitly why some behaviors are anti-social and inappropriate in particular kinds of spaces.

Update 12/15/03: Digital vs. Analog Photography

Glenn Reynolds has a comparison of digital verses analog photography regarding quality of the images and flexibility of use. He also suggests that if Ansel Adams had had Photoshop, he would have used it.

Digital v. Analog Cameras, or Why We Must Think More Explicitly About Public and Private Social Spaces

The NYTimes today has an op-ed piece on cell phone's with digital cameras. They totally don't get it. Yes, these phones can be invasive, but any camera could take the kinds of pictures they are complaining about. The real issue is that each time a new disruptive, and often digital, technology arrives, we, the slow moving humans who need time to adapt, have to adjust our social norms. And a critical mass of this adjustment needs to happen before most people are on the same page, in this case making a distinction between public and private places where is either is appropriate, or not, to take photos that may violate people's privacy.

In other words, a gym changing room is a private space. We don't take pictures there now, so why would we do it with a phone camera? A sidewalk is a public space, so if a picture is taken, well, you were out in public. I realize these phone/cameras make it so much easier to take pictures, etc. but the real controversy is whether people get to control the pictures taken of them. Right now, the law says the picture taker owns the picture. Paparazzi anyone? However, do we now regulate this in private spaces, such as workspaces, private business spaces such as gyms and gym locker rooms, offices and homes? Verses say, the street, the park, the city council meeting, the little league game? Some privace spaces are regulated simply because some people are kept out, becasue they represent private property, workplaces restrict certain behaviors, etc.

Without thinking about it, we humans wander in and out of private, semi-private and public spaces, and now the phone/camera is confronting us in a few cases by violating the implicit social norms we were used to before, without realizing it. My suggestion? Rather than regulating, we use peer pressure to acclimate people to respect the differences between these spaces, so that people understand explicitly why some behaviors are anti-social and inappropriate in particular kinds of spaces.

Update 12/15/03: Digital vs. Analog Photography

Glenn Reynolds has a comparison of digital verses analog photography regarding quality of the images and flexibility of use. He also suggests that if Ansel Adams had had Photoshop, he would have used it.

Digital v. Analog Cameras, or Why We Must Think More Explicitly About Public and Private Social Spaces

The NYTimes today has an op-ed piece on cell phone's with digital cameras. They totally don't get it. Yes, these phones can be invasive, but any camera could take the kinds of pictures they are complaining about. The real issue is that each time a new disruptive, and often digital, technology arrives, we, the slow moving humans who need time to adapt, have to adjust our social norms. And a critical mass of this adjustment needs to happen before most people are on the same page, in this case making a distinction between public and private places where is either is appropriate, or not, to take photos that may violate people's privacy.

In other words, a gym changing room is a private space. We don't take pictures there now, so why would we do it with a phone camera? A sidewalk is a public space, so if a picture is taken, well, you were out in public. I realize these phone/cameras make it so much easier to take pictures, etc. but the real controversy is whether people get to control the pictures taken of them. Right now, the law says the picture taker owns the picture. Paparazzi anyone? However, do we now regulate this in private spaces, such as workspaces, private business spaces such as gyms and gym locker rooms, offices and homes? Verses say, the street, the park, the city council meeting, the little league game? Some privace spaces are regulated simply because some people are kept out, becasue they represent private property, workplaces restrict certain behaviors, etc.

Without thinking about it, we humans wander in and out of private, semi-private and public spaces, and now the phone/camera is confronting us in a few cases by violating the implicit social norms we were used to before, without realizing it. My suggestion? Rather than regulating, we use peer pressure to acclimate people to respect the differences between these spaces, so that people understand explicitly why some behaviors are anti-social and inappropriate in particular kinds of spaces.

Update 12/15/03: Digital vs. Analog Photography

Glenn Reynolds has a comparison of digital verses analog photography regarding quality of the images and flexibility of use. He also suggests that if Ansel Adams had had Photoshop, he would have used it.

NEWS: Telling The Story, Getting It Out There, In Unconventional Ways, No Matter What...

Reporting in nontraditional ways, relying on digital media and new technologies for gathering the information and conveying the messages, that we don't see elsewhere is happening all over -- there are supposedly 100,000 bloggers in Iraq alone. Jeff Jarvis has this and this on Zeyad's reporting of the Iraqi anti-terrorism demonstrations in Baghdad (held earlier today).

Three albums of photos by Zeyad are here, here and here. To date, the 192 comments on his post have many Americans thanking him for his work reporting these issues. Jeff sent him the camera last week, FedEx, and it took about a week to get from NJ to Iraq. Others helped before that to get the blog set up. He's been reporting for a few months on his experiences that are often different than what American reporters show in mainstream media. Or in this case, non-existent, at least so far.

Update: Canada is apparently reporting it this evening on CTV. And the NYTimes has now done a story. As the Rocky Mountain News has also.

Update 12/15/03: The Weekly Standard has used Zeyad's reporting of the Iraq demonstration including photos. Glenn Reynolds says this incident and the ensuing reporting by bloggers and the Weekly Standard shows that this is the end of big media stranglehold over news. Also, check out Zeyad's report on capturing Saddam. Yet another scoop over big media, and the difference in reporting between that, and the NYTimes, is huge.

The difference in viewpoints between bloggers like Zeyad, who communicate that this is a huge difference over the last year where the demonstrators would have been putting their lived into their hands by demonstrating, compared to traditional media, like those mentioned above, who just referred to this as a small gathering of men, is pronouced. Different perspectives by alternate sources to traditional media through forms of personal journalism, blogging in this case, with digital camera and other tools to get those perspectives out, means disruption to traditional media outlets. And better information, choice of a range of perspectives, for those in the audience/readership is the key to this disruption. People want choice, and these technologies lead to choice of information and loss of editorial control for big media.

Iraqi Women Against Terrorism:

NEWS: Telling The Story, Getting It Out There, In Unconventional Ways, No Matter What...

Reporting in nontraditional ways, relying on digital media and new technologies for gathering the information and conveying the messages, that we don't see elsewhere is happening all over -- there are supposedly 100,000 bloggers in Iraq alone. Jeff Jarvis has this and this on Zeyad's reporting of the Iraqi anti-terrorism demonstrations in Baghdad (held earlier today).

Three albums of photos by Zeyad are here, here and here. To date, the 192 comments on his post have many Americans thanking him for his work reporting these issues. Jeff sent him the camera last week, FedEx, and it took about a week to get from NJ to Iraq. Others helped before that to get the blog set up. He's been reporting for a few months on his experiences that are often different than what American reporters show in mainstream media. Or in this case, non-existent, at least so far.

Update: Canada is apparently reporting it this evening on CTV. And the NYTimes has now done a story. As the Rocky Mountain News has also.

Update 12/15/03: The Weekly Standard has used Zeyad's reporting of the Iraq demonstration including photos. Glenn Reynolds says this incident and the ensuing reporting by bloggers and the Weekly Standard shows that this is the end of big media stranglehold over news. Also, check out Zeyad's report on capturing Saddam. Yet another scoop over big media, and the difference in reporting between that, and the NYTimes, is huge.

The difference in viewpoints between bloggers like Zeyad, who communicate that this is a huge difference over the last year where the demonstrators would have been putting their lived into their hands by demonstrating, compared to traditional media, like those mentioned above, who just referred to this as a small gathering of men, is pronouced. Different perspectives by alternate sources to traditional media through forms of personal journalism, blogging in this case, with digital camera and other tools to get those perspectives out, means disruption to traditional media outlets. And better information, choice of a range of perspectives, for those in the audience/readership is the key to this disruption. People want choice, and these technologies lead to choice of information and loss of editorial control for big media.

Iraqi Women Against Terrorism:

NEWS: Telling The Story, Getting It Out There, In Unconventional Ways, No Matter What...

Reporting in nontraditional ways, relying on digital media and new technologies for gathering the information and conveying the messages, that we don't see elsewhere is happening all over -- there are supposedly 100,000 bloggers in Iraq alone. Jeff Jarvis has this and this on Zeyad's reporting of the Iraqi anti-terrorism demonstrations in Baghdad (held earlier today).

Three albums of photos by Zeyad are here, here and here. To date, the 192 comments on his post have many Americans thanking him for his work reporting these issues. Jeff sent him the camera last week, FedEx, and it took about a week to get from NJ to Iraq. Others helped before that to get the blog set up. He's been reporting for a few months on his experiences that are often different than what American reporters show in mainstream media. Or in this case, non-existent, at least so far.

Update: Canada is apparently reporting it this evening on CTV. And the NYTimes has now done a story. As the Rocky Mountain News has also.

Update 12/15/03: The Weekly Standard has used Zeyad's reporting of the Iraq demonstration including photos. Glenn Reynolds says this incident and the ensuing reporting by bloggers and the Weekly Standard shows that this is the end of big media stranglehold over news. Also, check out Zeyad's report on capturing Saddam. Yet another scoop over big media, and the difference in reporting between that, and the NYTimes, is huge.

The difference in viewpoints between bloggers like Zeyad, who communicate that this is a huge difference over the last year where the demonstrators would have been putting their lived into their hands by demonstrating, compared to traditional media, like those mentioned above, who just referred to this as a small gathering of men, is pronouced. Different perspectives by alternate sources to traditional media through forms of personal journalism, blogging in this case, with digital camera and other tools to get those perspectives out, means disruption to traditional media outlets. And better information, choice of a range of perspectives, for those in the audience/readership is the key to this disruption. People want choice, and these technologies lead to choice of information and loss of editorial control for big media.

Iraqi Women Against Terrorism: