• No Wonder There’s a Financial Crisis — Adventures at the Apple Store | ElementalMom
  this is one of the best, well, descriptions of a situation that's both absurd and explains a lot!
  (tags: financial apple crisis laureen stupidity macbook money)

• xkcd – A Webcomic – Dreams
  A very important message to the world…
  (tags: xkcd cartoon philosophy life dreams)
• GoodRelations Annotator
  hm, not sure how this works…
  (tags: business semanticweb generator rdf VRM)

• dana centre – event – Rewired Teens?
  might be worth going to
  (tags: brain children online computers trends psychology events science)
• Hot New Video Game Consists Solely Of Shooting People Point-Blank In The Face | The Onion – America's Finest News Source
  yep, what's the world coming to.
  (tags: funny video humour culture games theonion)
• Neupert On Health : The Truth About Health IT Standards – There’s No Good Reason to Delay Data Liquidity and Information Sharing
  good article on the topic
  (tags: health healthcare software microsoft standards interoperability dataportability data medicalrecords)
• Siloed, Tethered PHRs are a Dead-end « Chilmark Research
  (tags: data silos medicalrecords patients dataportabilty healthcare health)
• Neupert On Health : Tear Down the Walls and Liberate the Data
  (tags: data dataportability healthcare health medicalrecords software)
• Dreaming of Flexible, Simple, Sloppy, Tolerant in Healthcare IT | Bob on Medical Device Software
  (tags: healthcare health medicalrecords patients software design data)
• Data Liquidity or how we can use ARRA’s $19 Billion wisely « Adam Bosworth’s Weblog
  (tags: healthcare data dataportability medicalrecords)
• WebMink – tripit destroyed my account
  this really sucks. also a reminder of how not to do 'intuitive' design. No matter how many times you write it somewhere, people will still click and do whatever they think are doing or want to do, not what is written around the buttons. And that is dangerous, both for the user and for the web app. Hope Simon's account gets recovered soon.
  (tags: tripit design UI usability failure)
• The McKinsey Quarterly: The Online Journal of McKinsey & Co.
  (tags: design innovation mckinsey inspiration italian alessi collaboration)
• If Homer's Odyssey Was Written On Twitter | www.holytaco.com
  one of the funniest things I have seen for a long time. made me weep with laughter.
  (tags: funny odyssey twitter history homer)

• Highland Capital Partners: Digital Media Insights (RWW Interview) – ReadWriteWeb
  (tags: business media advertising VC readwriteweb)
• ProjectVRM Blog » Is VRM radical?
  (tags: VRM revolution docsearls advertising academia businessmodels)
• Garfield: 'Chaos Scenario' Has Arrived for Media, Marketing – Advertising Age – News
  (tags: web2.0 advertising marketing internet trends future economics newspapers economy business bobgarfield)
• Radiohead to Testify Against the RIAA | TorrentFreak
  (tags: copyright music p2p law piracy filesharing RIAA court radiohead)

• xkcd – A Webcomic – Security Question
  (tags: security technology geek humor comics xkcd government)
• Scribd
  (tags: web2.0 tools online collaboration books storage sharing publishing)
• VRM Hub Open Space – Post event thoughts « Serious Simplicity
  (tags: vrm vrmhub events london open)
• newspapers are the only means
  (tags: newspapers journalism trends future)
• Readability – An Arc90 Lab Experiment
  (tags: web2.0 tools internet design usability browser reading typography text)

• Murdoch Says Newspapers Must Charge For Online Content | WebProNews
  i understand why he is saying what he's saying but ultimately got the wrong end of the stick. I no longer want to read newspapers, I just want to read news.
  (tags: newspapers journalism businessmodels media web online)

• Introducing Media Cloud: A new tool to track how news gets covered » Nieman Journalism Lab
  fascinating. was thinking about this kind of thing being possible some time ago, glad to see it realised
  (tags: data tools media trends blogging journalism cloud visualization analysis resources tracking mediacloud berkman)
• Backbone Magazine – Defining Web 3.0
  based on an interview a couple of months ago…
  (tags: web3.0 online software Mine! VRM)
• Listbox.com: Your Mailing List Solution
  there is truth to that, apart from the fact that ultimately it was the government underwriting those 'bonds' or debt and this goes back all the way to Freddy Mac and Fannie Mae. But that's not so easy to bash, is it?
  (tags: crisis finance banking government)
• iPods, First Sale, President Obama, and the Queen of England | Electronic Frontier Foundation
  (tags: copyright politics music UK IP ipod digital obama interesting)

My friend Brian has a marvellous rant about advertising, with a respectful nod towards my anti-advertising rants that he has had to listen to for years now.

And if it [an advert] is targetted at me, then to hell with it. If someone is only saying this to me, then I’m almost certainly not interested. What I want to know about is what someone rich thinks it worth his while to say to everybody. It is exactly the untargetted nature of old-fashioned adverts, Real Adverts in Real Advert Space, that makes them so useful and amusing to me. Untargetted adverts are Real Adverts. Targetted adverts are visual spam.

An interesting perspected on tragetted or behavioural advertising based on the assumption that Real Adverts, as Brian calls offline advertising, worked because it implied that a) many people may think this is worthwhile to buy and b) someone had enough money to pay for the ads.

He also makes a very important distinction that I haven’t seen elsewhere about the offline advertising happening in a public space whereas the internet and especially one’s web surfing is de facto (if not de jure, as it were) a private space.

Advertising still works, in Real Advert Space, in such places as the Underground or Trafalgar Square or an airport or beside the motorway – in the sense, as I say, that it does not induce active hostility. But the internet is not a “public space”. It is my personal space, or something, or I don’t quite know what. Whatever it is exactly, the internet is certainly not a giant collection of Undergrounds and Trafalgar Squares. What works on the internet is someone talking to me, or writing talkatively for me, in a manner that I can easily switch off and can choose to go on listening to.

There is no doubt what Brian thinks about ‘targetted’ advertising.

What absolutely does not work is some hired twat dripping with insincerity, whom I know nothing about except this, standing right next to me and the person who is now talking with me so amusingly, and shouting into my ear – because the hired twat has “targetted” me.

That’s what Adblock Plus is for…

Bonus link: Political Blogs’ Double Whammy: Post-Election, Deep Recession

• Why Consumers — Not Companies — Should Make Health Care Decisions – Knowledge@Wharton
  vaguely interesting but missing the fundamental point about 'consumers'
  (tags: health wharton trends healthcare insurance consumer)
• Owning your own data | The Industry Standard
  much confusion about 'data' and 'ownership'. as usual
  (tags: mydata ownership data vrm mine! datastore personaldata)

Talking to Doc earlier this week, I tried to explain my unease with various interpretations of VRM that come thick and fast as the concepts gain traction by identifying the fundamental problem.*

It is the assumption that “the individual needs to be provided for” that I see everywhere other than on the social (or live) web where the demand side can, and often does, supply itself, where users can and often do become creators, where the audiences have become distributors, and intermediaries of all kinds are melting away from decentralised networks and direct connections. Alas, even on the web, it’s not all P2P roses – my online existence is scattered across many platforms, Google, WordPress, Flickr, Dopplr, Twitter, and many more.

Most VRM approaches or implementations I have seen involve a third party as a provider. I believe we first need to focus on changing the relationships between individuals and companies or institutions. First comes redressing the balance – manually, as it were – by helping individuals relate to companies in ways that change companies’ behaviour.

Most of all, I want to avoid using technology to address a non-technology problem, using automation or aggregation for the aspects of relationships which should be processed by a human mind. I want to avoid jumping straight into ‘industrial’ processing of data treasures found on the customer side. We need a more balanced relationships with vendors and institutions, with different tools and possibly rules of interaction. Then we can look at ways to rationalise the technology and processes that help us create and maintain those relationships.

The most common solutions for providing individuals with online services are based around centralised databases or platforms. They are suspect on security and privacy grounds even though they may be created by a trustworthy party. So, any framework or structure provided by a third party that is meant to provide a place for individuals to create, gather, manage and share data as well as allowing a degree of aggregation, connectivity, will have to have in-built checks and balances as it may ultimately expose individuals to potential data-mining (whether the more private among us like it or not!). The challenge is to separate the data storage provider and a services/application provider. If I let someone store or back up my data – reluctantly admitting it may still be necessary for now – I would want them to store my data only, and not push or even provide any other apps based on that data. I should then be able to choose and apply whatever application I want, to my data, at my convenience.

Jason Scott of ASCII has a juicy way of putting this:

This is about your data. This is about your work. This is about you using your time so that you make things and work on things and you trust a location to do “the rest” and guess what, here is what we have learned:

• If you lose your shit, the technogeeks will not help you. They will giggle at you and make fun of your not understanding the fundamental principles and engineering of client-server models. This is kind of like firemen sitting around giggling at you because you weren’t aware of the inherent lightning-strike danger of improperly bonded CSST.
• Since the dawn of time, companies have hired people whose entire job is to tell you everything is all right and you can completely trust them and the company is as stable as a rock, and to do so until they, themselves are fired because the company is out of business.
• You are going to have to sit down and ask yourself some very tough questions because the time where you could get away without asking very tough questions with regard to your online presence and data are gone.

And his advice further into the wonderful rant is even juicier:

• Insult, berate and make fun of any company that offers you something like a “sharing” site that makes you push stuff in that you can’t make copies out of or which you can’t export stuff out of. They will burble about technology issues. They are fucking lying. They might go off further about business models. They are fucking stupid. Make fun of these people, and their shitty little Cloud Cities running on low-grade cooking fat and dreams. They will die and they will take your stuff into the hole. Don’t let them.

…but is no less sound for it!

Please, let’s have more of enabling and less of mere providing.

* as described in the paper A VRM journey.

cross-posted from VRM Hub