Archive for Society and Culture
by Isabel Hilborn
March 28, 2008 at 4:55 am · Filed under
Law and Policy, Social Platforms, Society and Culture, Supernova08
In the one-girl’s-trash-is-another-girl’s-treasure category, Microsoft announced a deal to allow LinkedIn, Facebook and some other lesser-known social networks to scrape Hotmail address books to look for friends.
Some for-profit industry commentators went along with Microsoft’s PR hype, like OnlineMedia Daily. Others, like ZDNet’s Steve O’Hear, were more skeptical.
In other news, Google is bringing the issue of protecting human rights at the cost of the company’s market share to a shareholder vote - adequately reported by Joseph Hunkins at WebGuild. The two proposals up for a vote are that Google would strictly control censorship and data sharing to protect human rights, and that Google would establish a Human Rights Committee to monitor these issues. Google recommends no to both proposals, and they’ll be able to point to the fact that their shareholders voted these proposals down as an excuse for not doing them.
The approach is an attempt to justify Google’s capitulation to anti-democratic policy from countries like China - behavior that they’ve been called to task for engaging in because of their “do no evil” mantra. The sad thing, to me, is that giving a question like this to shareholders: “Should we do the right thing even though it means making less money?” is giving it to the wrong party to decide. Shareholders don’t say no to profits.
It’s the users who should be asked, and the users who can decide to abandon the Google ship if they see objectionable, hypocritical behavior. Insofar as a choice to deny human rights may alienate Google users, the stock prices could fall on a “no” vote — but most of the time issues like human rights in far-away countries can’t compete with great technology and brand. An effective boycott is unlikely, a yes vote is unlikely. Perhaps “do no evil” and “make money in China” are fundamentally incompatible. Perhaps a mantra change to “do no evil except in countries led by repressive dictators” is in order?
by Howard Greenstein
March 26, 2008 at 2:37 am · Filed under
Infrastructure and Communications, Society and Culture, Supernova08
I had been taking it for granted that programs to get computers to the developing world, such as One Laptop Per Child, were a great thing. And, certainly they are. I’ve also been taking for granted that people who want to learn about what I’m writing could read this blog, or my personal one. However, there are millions of people in the world that are illiterate, or visually impaired, but could benefit from more and easier access to information.
This morning at a panel at the “UN meets Web 2.0” event, I’m learning more about the challenges of connecting people all over the world. More blog posts on that to follow, I hope, but this morning I wanted to call out one item I heard from Mr. Emdad Khan, CEO, of InternetSpeech.com. I heard him discuss “Net Echo,” a system that allows browsing of the net, accessing email and even getting news via a voice interface over the phone.
Mr. Kahn said “Information is “money”, and the largest source of information is Internet, but a lack of computer or computer skills can be a barrier to people obtaining the information they need.” He says that PDAs an computers can’t bridge the digital divide in some cases, because those devices don’t reach the very bottom of the pyramid. Here’s a statistic - only 15% of global phone users have Internet access, and there are 500MM computers vs 3 billion phones.
Net Echo, which I only saw as a demo, allows audio-based browsing of major portals such as Yahoo and MSN, reading (and dictation of) email, and news alerts, all via a voice interface.
In addition to the developing world, the elderly, the visually impaired, and others could benefit from this system. I’m even thinking that this might be a way to get information when you’re on the go (though not when driving, that could be really dangerous!)
I’m looking forward to learning more about this system, and where in the world it’s being used to help distribute information via voice when text and words aren’t enough.
by Howard Greenstein
March 21, 2008 at 2:55 am · Filed under
Infrastructure and Communications, Society and Culture, Supernova08
Greetings, I’m Howard Greenstein, and I’m glad to be back here posting on the Conversation Hub, as I did last year before Supernova. I’m a social media and social network consultant, and have been in the internet and online world from the late 80s. Today’s post from me is a literal response to the theme of Supernova being “Challenges to the Network Age.”
I was recently thinking that in the 20 years I’ve been in business I’ve been hearing promises made about technologies that are just around the corner to connect everyone with everything. With Wi-Fi in every laptop, cell phones on almost every hip, and the promise of smarter smart phones and everywhere-you-need-it network access in every cell phone commercial, I was starting to believe the hype about connectedness. It’s going to be a Jetson’s type world, very soon!
Then reality hit me in the face. Today I’m working in a “business center” that blocks access to my outgoing mail server, instant messaging, and Voice over IP. They also block virtual private networking software that would allow me to get around their restrictions. (I used to have a phone that allowed me to use it as a modem to get around this kind of stuff, but since I went iPhone Apple and AT+T let you do that.) Also, the business center didn’t have an AT+T cell signal. No VOIP on my computer. No Cell Phone. So I’m in a business center where I…can’t do business.
This is not a rant about how I can’t get online. I hope you’ll see that, even for me, a “road warrior” who is “always connected” and “constantly on the network” it isn’t even close to easy some days to do what you want to do.
The current networking promises on the horizon include 700Mhz Cell networks where we can bring our own devices, WiMAX networks in our cities to replace or supplement wired broadband, and even more.
Some of the things I’m hoping to learn at Supernova are
- What’s working for others to help them do business in the networked world?
-
- How close are we to some of these promised innovations? and
- What’s not on my radar yet that I can wonder about for the next few years?
Like, for example, “where’s my flying car?”
by Isabel Hilborn
March 11, 2008 at 9:20 am · Filed under
Marketing and Relationships, Monetization, Social Platforms, Society and Culture, Supernova08
An article in today’s New York Times ends by saying that 85% of California adults think sites should not track around-the-web behavior for the purpose of ad targeting. The rest of the article describes how many of the major commercial web companies do just that.
There’s a comScore graphic that shows how many times a month companies collect user data: Yahoo collects twice as often as Fox, which collects twice as often as AOL. Google (not including DoubleClick) comes up 4th.
This data, however, doesn’t include information entered on MySpace’s social network pages, and the article doesn’t cover Facebook. Even if web companies aren’t putting two and two together yet, they will be soon.
If we’re not already, we’ll be seeing ads that come to us thanks to a delectable combination of which causes we join on Facebook, which people we befriend on MySpace, which keywords we use on search sites, and what products we buy online… combined of course with our offline data: which magazines we subscribe to, what we buy at the grocery store, and what we put on our credit cards. Is this OK?
Many a social network user’s holy grail is to see social networks aggregated - to quote Jeremiah Owyang,
A movement has been started to allow these relationships to be transplanted from one social network to another. The goal? reduce inefficient adding of relationships, improving the accuracy of the network, and providing users with control and management of their relationship data.
I spent some time several years ago working at Sxip pursuing one aspect of this dream. Kaliya Hamlin of Open ID, the folks who started FOAF, and many others (feel free to help me out by listing in comments) have continued the crusade.
Here’s my question: Is the fight to look at this problem from the user’s perspective a losing battle? When it happens, perhaps it will be the provider’s profit motive that drives it, and the advertisers that benefit. Jeremiah suggests that the benefit to the social network is “increase their number of users”. But isn’t the real benefit “finally make real money by selling user data to the highest bidder to make more targeted ads”?
Can users really retain control of their data, or has the horse already left the barn? Maybe we want to keep our social networks separate after all.
Interested to hear your thoughts.
