NetDynam 2.0

i think this deserves to be shown to a potentially wider audience, especially since it supports my own ideas, and also has a few comments in which links to other lists also appear. the article, in Slate ‘magazine’, is called The joy of mailing lists, and well worth a read…

here’s a well-researched and lengthy article examining the issue of privacy, and the legalities surrounding the matter of ‘identity’ in the digital age – starting with instances of employers using online searches to determine whether or not employees should keep their jobs, or even be employed in the first place. alerted to this on the email list by one of our old hands, and well worth the read.

the discussion in the article is based on the fact that we have the ability now to keep permanent records of everything everyone has ever posted or written on the internet. the article also deals with the potential of web3.0 to search and find almost anything anyone might wish to track…using new technologies such as face recognition for example….

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html

one of the lectures i’ve been watching recently on the video lectures site (see blogroll for link to their homepage) features a young eastern european guy who’s been working in conceptualising the dynamics of the web, the evolution of networks/ links, and how ideas or topics spread through networks.
it’s one of several on the topic of social media and theorising or graphically representing social networks, sentiment analysis, and so on. they are not as professional as those on TED, featuring presentations from conferences all over the world, and so to some extent you need to check out the ratings given by other viewers to determine whether the lecture is going to be rivetting or not…
a good resource anyway.

(Pwn (below: Various pronunciations) is a leetspeak slang term derived from the verb “own”, as meaning to appropriate or to conquer to gain ownership. The term implies domination or humiliation of a rival, used primarily in the Internet-based video game culture to taunt an opponent who has just been soundly defeated (e.g., “You just got pwned!”). It was popular among Counter-Strike gamers before spreading through the more general Internet world. The past tense and past participle, pwned, may also be spelled pwnd, pwn’d, pwn3d, pwnt, poned, pawned, or powned. Source: Wikipedia )

Enterprising parodists on May 19 created a Twitter account and feed to mock BP, BPGlobalPR.

Chris Matyszczyk reports (5/26) from CNET,

CNN did contact BP and asked the company whether it might feel its image was being polluted by this rogue global PR force. BP reportedly said it had seen it, but was sure that people would realize it’s not really the company’s work.

Perhaps this underestimates people’s notions of what is and isn’t possible in today’s often ugly, cynical world.

Still, I know there will be sticklers among you who will attempt to invoke Twitter’s fake pages policy. It reads that impersonators “should not be the exact name of the subject of the parody, commentary, or fandom; to make it clearer, you should distinguish the account with a qualifier such as ‘not,’ ‘fake’ or ‘fan.’”

It’s unlikely Twitter will get too picky about this, given that it gets some nice PR (happy to help, as always, chaps) out of it all, and given that BP seems unlikely to complain. BP has made its first wise PR move in allowing this site to gush black humor while the nation’s beaches are threatened by a far more painful darkness.

90,000+ followers, and counting.

Sometime in the next few days, BPGlobalPR’s following will surpass in number BP’s number of employees worldwide.

BP America’s Twitter following? 8,000 or so.

Although the official feed doesn’t offer any black humor, it’s funny in a different way.

Following from my previous post about methods for learning more about people encountered on the internet, The New York Times today features an article The Tell-All Generation Learns to Keep Things Off-line (Laura M. Holson; NYT 5-8:2010).

While participation in social networks is still strong, a survey released last month by the University of California, Berkeley, found that more than half the young adults questioned had become more concerned about privacy than they were five years ago — mirroring the number of people their parent’s age or older with that worry.

They are more diligent than older adults, however, in trying to protect themselves. In a new study to be released this month, the Pew Internet Project has found that people in their 20s exert more control over their digital reputations than older adults, more vigorously deleting unwanted posts and limiting information about themselves. “Social networking requires vigilance, not only in what you post, but what your friends post about you,” said Mary Madden, a senior research specialist who oversaw the study by Pew, which examines online behavior. “Now you are responsible for everything.”

One interesting question raised by the article–but not addressed–concerns how investigations into online ‘reputation,’ are framed by investigators.

In this article from Septmeber 2009, How HR Professionals Analyze Your Facebook Profile, author Damian Davila Rojas mentions a key finding from a Harris Interactive poll of HR professionals,

The findings were more likely to get candidates rejected than hired: 35% of HR professionals said social networking content had caused them to eliminate a candidate, while only 18% reported deciding to employ someone based on a profile.

There’s a graphic presented to represent the negative reasons for rejecting a job candidate based in their online data.

Of more interest to me is the positive graphic because it begs the question of how positive data is framed.

Here are the top three categories:

50% Got a good feel for the candidate’s personality, could see a good fit within the company culture

39% Job candidate’s background information supported their professional qualifications for the job

39% Job candidate’s site conveyed a professional image

Item #2 is the only element subject to neutral verification. Whereas item #1 begs the question about framing and instrumental approach, and, item #3 does the same while pointing in the direction of normative practices. Also, item #3, with respect to Facebook, can only mean a professional image within the limitations set by Facebook. This includes all the data from friends which flows into the person’s Facebook home page.

Hiring practices vary greatly. They can be very subjective and are subject to hidden cognitive biases. For example, the hunch is more a problem to be eliminated than a valuable instinct in this area.

Social media presents data about a person’s social network. This is not off limits to the hiring professional. Yet, this realm of data raises interesting questions.

Suppose that internet users were differentiated using a descriptive vector consisting of, on one side, the trail of specific information they volunteer, on another side, their various utilization modes, and, on a third side, their estimation about what their attitude is toward the dissemination of their own data.

For example, in our email discussion group we discovered some users thought their personal musings brought into the mode of a text-only dialog were basically private because it was believed it was unlikely any user with a pernicious intent would invest their time in seeking out and data mining and re-deploying the data of the dialog.

So, this vector, once the data was triangulated, could report out the often contradictory attitudes upon which the internet thrives, as a useful source of (and for,) so-called user-data.

Posed against these differentiations are the various threats and deployments, about which many users are unaware. There could be illusions extant on this other side too.

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Meanwhile…the bust of google buzz happened so quickly that it barely has had time to pass into internet legend. How quickly?

Google Inc., owner of the most-used Internet search engine, was sued over allegations its Buzz social-networking service violated the privacy rights of users of the company’s Gmail service.

Buzz, introduced by Mountain View, California-based Google in February, automatically displayed to other users the customer’s contacts pulled from Google Gmail accounts. Google has said it modified the e-mail service after customers complained.

The complaint, filed April 5 in federal court in San Jose, California, follows a letter sent to federal antitrust authorities last month by 10 members of Congress. The lawmakers urged an investigation into whether Buzz compromised users’ privacy.

“Google has publicly admitted that its Buzz program presents privacy concerns, and Google has made several waves of modifications to the program,” according to the lawsuit. The changes “do not go far enough,” and the error “already caused damage because the Buzz program disclosed private user information the moment Google launched the service.” Google Sued Over Claims Buzz Violated Privacy Rights

Hmmm, this tickles my sense of irony.

2. Their is NO VALUE with Google Buzz as I mentioned earlier. Who wants something that has already been done before? As I said, it’s FriendFeed, but worse to every degree! I feel when using the platform that it offers a very messy experience. I don’t enjoy it. There’s so much going on that I don’t want to even bother checking it. Social Tech Zone: Google Buzz At This Point Is Google Bust

It is not simple to both protect privacy and promote the development of a healthy network. Facebook was the first to prove that privacy controls can foster the growth of social networks, but as the Beacon episode and Facebook’s recent privacy changes both demonstrated, even the most experienced social media companies can go sideways when it comes to privacy. When rolling out any kind of new social media platform or application, companies should always engage in extensive, privacy-centered user testing before releasing any social networking products to the public. Leslie Harris-Buzz or Bust?

Slashdot Thread

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Elsewhere, this news hit at the same time as happened the Google Buzz rollout.

Google Ultrafast Broadband May Shake Up Fiber Market

As I like to maintain, it helps to have a sense of irony.

Cooper, S. D. 2006: Watching the watchdog: Bloggers as the fifth estate. Spokane: Marquette Books.

Levinson, P. 2009: New new media. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

O’Neil, M. 2009: Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and authority in online tribes. London & New York: Pluto Press.

Rettburg, J. W. 2008: Blogging. Cambridge & Malden: Polity Press.

I’ve recently read these four books dealing with different aspects of the web 2.0 world, the common thread through all of them being that they each either touch on or concentrate on the place of blogging in the current netspace. It’s difficult to compare them in terms of content and reliability, because they each have something to offer in terms of content, however my own point of view and personal areas of interest render at least two of them worthy of steering the gentle reader well clear of.

It is these two which I will deal with first.

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