• Does children's television matter?
  (tags: advertising history tv children)

Yesterday at one of my client workshops I was explaining the benefits of Twitter – I use the term ’synchronicity maximised’ to describe the ad hoc organisation of encounters, connectivity and sharing that makes Twitter so useful and addictive. I mentioned an example of twittering my location – let’s say I am in New York having brunch with a friend and I let the ‘world’ know about it. One of the attendees remarked how creepy this seemed to her. And here we have the ‘creepiness factor’ – which usually refers to someone not necessarily violating our privacy legally but to the ability of others to gather our public details (as private data would be a privacy violation), piece together data and information about us that allow them to act in ways we don’t expect. It is the realisation that someone knows so much about us by deliberately gathering information and using to behave in a way that implies familiarity. It feel like a violation of autonomy and privacy, even though existence of either is a delusion in our mind.

There is a difference between me ‘broadcasting’ on Twitter that I am having brunch with a friend plus the exact location, and learning the hard way that someone is ’scraping’ or gleaning such information from places that I, probably very foolishly, consider private or even semi-private, such as Facebook. It comes down to me knowing what happens to my data. The creepiness comes from realising that someone is gathering and piecing together information about me for purposes that don’t directly involve me and/or are not in my interest. Twittering my location is not a problem if I am doing it with awareness of my network and audience.

Sometimes it seem that the vision of web of document turning into web of people has gone the other way around. It is turning the web of people into the web of information about those people without their ability to do much about it.

And of course, all this contributes to all the talk about privacy. And the view that the web is eroding it and that the younger generation don’t appreciate or value it or give it away and, and, and… I have a different view. I am a privacy freak myself and value my privacy highly although I have considerable online presence. That is because privacy is behaviour according to your own preferences – it’s a policy, not a system.

Below is my response to an overly legal approach to privacy on the project VRM mail list thread, where privacy was seen as a legal agreement and to be guaranteed by a contract. Here is what I said:

Yes, the whole legal thing is not addressing or even originating from the way people interact. Bemoaning the fact and trying to build systems, processes or tools that force people to ‘behave in their best interest’ or to ‘protect their privacy’ is not going to work and/or deal with the problem.

Privacy is a policy, not a system. ToS is a creature of systems, platforms and silos not of the individual/user/customer.

I, as an autonomous individual, am the best judge of my privacy requirements. When I talk to my friends, I know what to tell them and what not to share – and if I mess up, I suffer the consequences and learn not to gossip with those who betray confidences.

In a larger context, beyond my immediate social circles and when money or reputation or other value is at stake, in order to manage my privacy I need to understand the context and consequences of information I share or other have about me. But if my privacy is not up to me to manage, there can be no reasons or demand for such knowledge to be available or for me to find out easily. Hence, many people have no idea about how their data is used and abused. So that will is part of the challenge in which the web has helped enormously – it is now possible for a dedicated or persistent person to find out what’s going on most of time.

But there is little they can do to act on that knowledge – and I have said this elsewhere many times before – our privacy options are rather binary. Either you participate in transactions, exchanges, communities, etc and you give up some of your privacy or you don’t. However unacceptable I find the former, the latter is not the way to live either.

The best ‘privacy settings’ are in my head, but I need ways/tools that help me to ‘execute’ my privacy policy. And as it’s been pointed out these are not necessarily of the legal world. It helps not to assume it and start building tools that help individuals manage their data and help them to determine their privacy behaviour themselves.

• Irving Wladawsky-Berger: What is Cloud Computing, Anyway?
  (tags: internet cloudcomputing IBM SaaS web)
• Blogger Buzz: Your blog, your data
  the more ways of getting at my data, the merrier
  (tags: blogging data export mydata Mine! open)
• Marc’s Voice » Blog Archive » Facebook officially tries to take over the Web
  it's not about Open Web but about FB all over the web
  (tags: open facebook identity marccanter web)
• The Facebook Blog | Facebook
  hm, the roach motels goes travelling….
  (tags: internet facebook socialmedia identity dataportability connect mydata)
• Mind Map: Identity: The Benefits of FB Connect vs. OpenID – MindMeister
  (tags: facebook openID reference mindmap)
• 8 Experts Predict How Web 2.0 Will Evolve In 2009 | Radical Tech | Fast Company
  Mary Hodder comes closest. but I'd say that what with working on Mine!
  (tags: web2.0 internet trends fastcompany prediction)
• Zawinski's Law
  Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.
  (tags: social software programming email law geek)
• SAUNATRUCK
  One of wintertimes must-haves!
  (tags: sauna winter weather funny)
• Freezing cold, no internet, boring: it's a French web 2.0 conference! | Technology | guardian.co.uk
  Brilliant!
  (tags: web2.0 leweb3 rant guardian conference funny events)
• Google’s Gatekeepers – NYTimes.com
  (tags: google privacy security censorship government internet legal)
• BBC NEWS | Business | German ridicule for UK policies
  quote: UK's switch from financial prudence to heavy borrowing was both "crass" and "breathtaking". Well, that would be dandy but what financial prudence, I ask!!!
  (tags: financial crisis creditcrunch UK economics stupid)

David Cushman asked for my thoughts on his post about finding a way to express our id and metadata outwardly just as broadly and effectively as your email account can collate it centrally.

My first impression was that the question might be about logins or GUID* management based on this:

So if I asked you to write a list detailing what and where, you wouldn’t be able to complete one. And if I asked you to confirm your username and password for each of these – you’d struggle even more.

For the sake of order, let me run through some implications of using email as your GUID to log on everywhere.

1. your email accesses all web services a la google, which allows me to use gmail to sign in to greader, gdocs etc with the same email/password combo. That’s possible because it comes from the same provider and relatively safer. Obviously, this can’t easily be scaled to other providers of web services or platforms.
2. I could use my gmail/email as a handle for single sign-on a la OpenID but unless I have a similar infrastructure as OpenID (i.e. a bit of magic in the URL, with my password management under my control) I’d still have passwords stored on other sites and would be back to the same problem as now – too many usernames and passwords… apart from the fact that we eliminate usernames (and have just email instead) and have (potentially) just too many passwords.

But I think David might be trying to get at something else here. I am not sure I see email as my identity or identifier in the sense he describes. It’s certainly a store of my communications and important information from my contacts etc. But to paraphrase an ubergeek: “all applications progress to the point where they can send e-mail”. Danny O’Brien talked about this in the first lifehacking presentation and he had the corollary that people use e-mail for everything, including to-do lists, and even as virtual hard-drives. Resources get used for other than their intention – so looking at e-mail as a “hub”, some sort of nexus of your information might be wrong way around. Instead it’s a resource and it exhibits properties that are useful for many tasks. Your e-mail repository is no more a badge of your identity than is your car or your house.

The closest thing to my ‘identity’ is a mesh of my blogs/blog posts/flickr photos/twitter/dopplr/friendfeed/socnet de jour etc etc. Alas, this ‘identity’ is all fractured across many platforms and in my view needs a unifying point. And those who read my blog already know what my solution to the problem is.

I am not sure a handle (whether URL, username or email) would fundamentally fix my online identity as it’s the stuff I create and distribute that is my identity. I see usernames/passwords/handles/GUID in general as meta-identity or shortcuts to my identity. Just like passport or driving license is not my identity, merely a proxy for it vis-a-vis a particular kind of system or record.

And finally, there seems to be an implicit assumption in what David (and not just him I hasten to add) is saying and that is that my existence on the internet requires a GUID. I don’t think that’s necessarily true but that’s a topic for another post…

*GUID = global unique identifier

• VIP Bloggers & Wellness Experts
  get special treatment if you are one of the 50 bloggers to sign up first. No, this is not an advert, but I do know the founder. You might want to get whatever they have to offer.
  (tags: bloggers health)
• Alex Leo: Five Sexist Trends the Advertising World Just Can't Shake
  (tags: advertising feminism)
• The Last Page of the Internet
  beaudiful
  (tags: internet humour funny)

• Three Ways to Beat Burnout – Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek
  scarily relevant and spot on article.
  (tags: psychology productivity management personal lifehacks business burnout)
• The Twitter Gold Mine & Beating Google to the Semantic Web – O'Reilly Radar
  this would be a nightmare! just like 'joined-up' government. I don't want anyone mining my stuff, I'd rather do that myself, thank you very much, and share it with the world the way I feel comfortable. Keep away from my 'data/life stream'.
  (tags: privacy advertising web2.0 social businessmodel semanticweb datamining stupid)
• Social CRM – Leveraging the Power of Unstructured Conversations « Bernaisesource
  yawn
  (tags: socialnetworking CRM social customer)

• How to Stop Checking E-mail on the Evenings and Weekends
  good suggestions
  (tags: tips email productivity howto lifehacks gtd)
• Fishburn Hedges caused weeks of bad publicity for TV Licensing :: Alex Singleton
  industrial PR is not a pretty sight. Lucrative contract with the BBC, probably passing on the general attitude towards fee payers as rabble. Remember, the BBC Don'tWorkForYou, even though it's the taxpayer that keeps them afloat.
  (tags: PR publicrelations BBC license journalism stupid publicsector)

In the last two years I have discovered that the idea of VRM appeals to most on an instinctive level. People respond in different ways and with different ideas and interpretations of what VRM means and how to go about making it happen. This means people get involved, which is good. It also means people bring their more or less complete understanding, which is sometimes challenging.

I thought it would be useful to spend some time exploring what VRM means to each of us. So I decided to dedicate the January VRM Hub meeting to discovering together the various aspects of what VRM means to people who rally behind it. It might help us explain it better to others, and collaborate more effectively together on how to make it happen.

We are going to take a playful approach to this and many thanks to
Johnnie Moore for agreeing to facilitate/run the game, and to GfK NOP for providing the venue. Johnnie works with all sorts of companies on collaboration and is going to use one of two of his favourite games to help us explore ideas together. He warns there’s a serious risk of having a few laughs and some danger of unexpected learning.

Sign up here, as usual.

Reminder: VRM Hub Christmas drinks will be on 15th December at Crosskeys pub in Chelsea.

• What is this OpenID Everyone Speaks Of? – FriendFeed
  a rare insight into users' attitude to openID. I must say I also find it very clunky and unusuable. I don't like passwords either but from usability point of view they both suck.
  (tags: openID users password usability discussion)
• NESTA Connect: Connecting Dots and Valuing Networks
  (tags: business socialnetworks innovation relationships NESTA networks)
• Pepsi Apologized to Me for Its Suicide Ads – Global Idea Network – Advertising Age
  (tags: advertising twitter Pepsi socialgaffe socialmedia crisis)
• Why I Love Twitter – O'Reilly Radar
  excellent analysis of twitter and its impact on social web
  (tags: web2.0 tools internet twitter socialweb o'reilly socialgraph data)
• Open Source: The Model Is Broken – BusinessWeek
  open source hasn't come out of business need. business can benefit but not directly. when will they ever learn?
  (tags: business opensource software innovation businessmodel community collaboration FOSS)
• PeopleBrowsr
  (tags: socialmedia identity twitter search people visualization browser startup)

• The Open Source Definition | Open Source Initiative
  (tags: opensource copyright software FOSS reference license definition)
• The Day The Web Went Dead – Forbes.com
  very interesting. keep regulation away from the net!
  (tags: internet infrastructure regulation utility peering)
• Riot 4 Austerity » Blog Archive » Why Credit Cards Matter So Much
  a sure sign of depression, people paying by credit cards at McDonals.
  (tags: recession creditcard creditcrunch economy crisis financial)
• Google Earth Blog: Ancient Rome in 3D for Google Earth
  fantastic! this is what technology is for!
  (tags: google technology history architecture googleearth 3d research rome)

• Bad Science » You are 80% less likely to die from a meteor landing on your head if you wear a bicycle helmet all day.
  fascinating. yet another reason to give people the raw data so they can present it to themselves in way they want. not everyone will but that's not the point.
  (tags: healthcare Marketing science statistics psychology objectivity stupidity medicine drugs choice data)
• Advertising – Web Marketing That Hopes to Learn What Attracts a Click – NYTimes.com
  interesting insights into how the ad sausage is made. why do I keep thinking about deck chairs, titanic and the art of rearragement?
  (tags: advertising measurement metrics web)
• Richard Branson ~ Business Stripped Bare | Richard Branson’s Official Website & Blog » My 2000th Twitter follower
  never understood such arrogance – sending a signed poster to someone who just adds you as contact on twitter. It's the celeb/marketers knee-jerk reaction, to reward what is essentially a social gesture. How about a normal social gesture.. but that woud be putting yourself on the same 'social' level. Sending trinkets is more 'superior'.
  (tags: virgin twitter social marketing gesture)
• GLUE conference – Home
  (tags: events technology web web-design)
• Main Page – Health 2.0
  (tags: health2.0 medical reference collaboration wiki research community healthcare health)
• Gartner Says Worldwide Customer Relationship Management Market Grew 23 Percent in 2007
  CRM is big (and useless). note how social web is having impact, they say, and how they all want to 'harness it. Good-bloody-luck!
  (tags: research CRM VRM market analysts)
• Mumbai attacks: Twitter and Flickr used to break news, Bombay India – Telegraph
  another of slightly off-key interpretation of the web/people/social media by journalist.
  (tags: twitter communications socialmedia politics news reporting india mumbai)

Oscar Wilde would have loved the Internets – ‘It is a very sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information’.
- Andy Coughlan via Twitter