A Carnegie Mellon study suggests that shoppers are willing to pay more if they are re-assured about privacy. The premium mentioned is about $0.60 (30p) on goods worth $15 (£7). This is good news. Privacy is one of the ‘goods’ with benefit distributed over time and like security you wish you had it most only when you discover you have none. Usually not in circumstances of your choosing.

The heartening point about the report is that before many studies were showing that despite peoples fears about what happens to their data, they continued to surrender it in exchange for low prices.

Lorrie Cranor, director of the Usable Privacy and Security Lab at Carnegie Mellon and lead author on the study:

Our suspicion was that people care about their privacy,
but that it’s often difficult for them to get information about a
website’s privacy policies.

So if users are happy to pay a bit extra for re-assurances that privacy of their information is respected, perhaps they would be equally willing to use tools that give them control and ownership over that data. Of course, there are issues with that, especially with the current state of online security and lack of more flexible and selective privacy. However, there are people already looking into this so I might start holding my breath.

If you travel a fair bit (more than 5 trips a year) and are into social networking, you might find use for Dopplr. If you would like to an invite to a private beta, leave a comment (don’t forget to fill in the email field, which is not visible to others) or send me an email.

Dopplr enables you to keep track of your trips – complete with Web 2.0 interface and Google maps functionality of course! – to see if and how they coincide with your friends and contacts trips. It’s a serendipitous meetings maximiser.

For those facing information overload and RSS fatigue…

via O’Flaherty’s blog

Johnnie is in good form today commenting on the new logo for the 2012 Olympics:

Actually far from being innovative, this is brand-wank as usual,
these quotes bearing all the hallmarks of PR consultants and not the
sort of thing anyone believes for a nanosecond in the real world.

For the record, the logo reminds me of Fruit Salads, one of my
favourite sweets as a kid, but not much to do with sport and still less
all those other high ideals.

He has an alternative logo sent in by Tony Goodson.

Here is why the internet is not a wild-eyed visionary’s wet dream but an absolute necessity.

…the systemic flaws are far from minor. They apply the constraints of
the physical to our ideas and knowledge, and they give rise to a system
of authority that likewise limits knowledge. The old system cannot
manage the volume and complexity of information in the new world.

Absolutely and David Weinberger just put his finger on the source of frustration with the old system and the slow pace of the ‘reboot’ for people like me. It is less about a utopia and a dawn of the new age, whatever that may be, and a lot more about getting on with things, life, knowledge, business, conversations in more free ways. Or perhaps that is a utopia judging from so many spectacular misunderstandings of this simple point…

THIS IS ABSOLUTELY A CLASS STRUGGLE! But this isn’t just the union
wanting a seat at the table. This is the revenge of the have-not nerds.
But they don’t just want access to the library. In the name of
"democratization," they want to raid it spray-paint cans in hand. They
want to pee on the carpets, tag the walls and carry out what loot’s
left over.

Oh dear. So the Cluetrain crowd are the have-not nerds. Their ideas have resonated with the likes of Google, YouTube and many of those making their living online. Whatever you may think of them, they are certainly not the have-nots. Nerds possibly. If you are lucky, for they come up with some pretty cool stuff.

We already have access to the library and it has proven inadequate. We want to add to it and make it easier to find stuff. That is neither democracy nor chaos. Interestingly, David deals with ‘chaos’ in his post:

Overall, I like what’s happening, but not because I love “chaos.”
Rather, the new principles and processes allow us to get so much more
order — and meaning — from of the oceans of information we’re
generating.

as well as in a post by Johnnie who makes a great point in favour of it.Well, almost.

People often use words like chaos to refer to, for instance, some
people disagreeing with each other in a meeting. As if it will be like
the streets of Paris in 1968. The orgins of the word suggest that
actually chaos was the preamble to the creation of the cosmos but the
creative potential is not what people usually mean.

Given my political views (as little government interference as possible) and my views on systems and structures (I cherish being called a corporate anarchist) I have to field questions about chaos and anarchy on a regular basis. My answer is that just because people don’t recognise the familiar structures and predictable order in the internet’s workings, it does not follow there aren’t any. What some of the ‘cock-eyed web optimists’ have realised is that the existing flawed systems can be supplanted without having to first destroy them. At least that’s what’s in it for me…

The good news is that for the first time in history
the internet is a place where we can create viable alternatives without
having to blow up the existing ways. The internet has provided a
relatively undisturbed environment in which
people can play and build stuff that works – for them as well as
others. They don’t have to waste time undermining or dismantling an
already dysfunctional system to show how new ways could work. They can
experiment instead of having to ‘fight for the cause’. They can get on
with chatting, connecting, networking, squabbling, playing with ideas and technology that are now scaring the media and
businesses. Bypassing a system by building a better one elsewhere is proving to be far more powerful than
blowing it up.

Just as houses all over America are full of
chairs
that are, without
the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed
250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work
are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of
the attitudes of people who’ve done great things.
- Paul Graham in How to Do What You Love

thanks to Jackie

An unforeseen (by the industry) example of the demand supplying itself.