raving lunacy - oxymorons for the 21st century

Privacy or Not
The internet is not a friendly place. What you do in the privacy of your own home vaporizes the moment you go online. Imagine walking out of your house naked, having a flashing billboard over your head spewing out every private thought you have. You get tracked, sliced, diced, spun dry, and become a demographic, that anybody with a checkbook and an ad campaign can pick up for a song.

Every site, click, comment, posting and purchase gets sucked up into someone’s data bucket. Without notice, discussion, or acknowledgment. Websites value your privacy right up to the point there is a buck in selling this information. They are called ‘partners’ and ‘third party managers’. They like to say they serve you, like a kindly domestic bringing you a drink at the end of the day, when in reality, they are more like a group of home invaders, force feeding you with a fire hose.

Blocking Ads, rejecting cookies, using an anonymiser, are steps you need to take to try to take your privacy back. Understand that these are active steps you must take. The default is walking around naked with a billboard.

Behavioral Targeting
BT is the catch phrase used by marketeers that all of the above mentioned privacy stripping activities are lumped in an attempt to obscure its purpose. Not unlike tying a brick to your penis, as a Natural Male Enhancement Method. Both of which hold an almost fatal attraction for segments of the population. Never mind, people do weird shit.

From a marketing standpoint the internet is a target rich environment.
The invention and expansion of the internet is really the best thing that has happened to companies since the first advertisement rolled off a printing press. Global Reach, extremely low publication and distribution, open 24/7, and qualified sales leads, when done properly.

The number of companies that do it well is extremely small in relationship to the number of commercial sites out here. Companies realizing that their websites suck, turn to what they know, which is plastering ads on other sites, driven by the evangelists and fundamentalists of Marketing. They in turn do what they know, which is to place ads on sites and with companies who live by advertiser support. The first casualties are the newspapers and magazines, whose dead tree publications are being decimated by the online world.

VRM
VRM aka Vendor Relationship Management is the latest attempt by Doc Searls to bitchslap companies into realizing what Peer to Peer means. The problem that I have been wrestling with for months is that VRM has at its core, the idea that we have to be receptive to companies and their advertisers. Without this principle there is no management required. This is just as disingenuous as the Opt Out method, which is the new black in privacy, or so they would have you believe.

The US Congress is learning about Behavioral Targeting from the companies that are doing it. Letting the inmates run the asylum comes to mind.

No surprise as having a Presidential candidate who doesn’t use computers, a congress critter who describes the web as tubes, and others who don’t answer email, and think that the internet is something that kids use.

From this article Legislators Apparently Unaware of Adblock Plus, TrackMeNot, comes this Money Shot;

Google wrote in its letter to the Committee. “To ensure the continuation and proliferation of responsible behavioral targeting practices, we are supportive of efforts to establish strong self-regulatory principles for online advertising that involves the collection of user data for the purpose of creating behavioral and demographic profiles.”
Source: Google’s Letter to the Energy Committee[PDF]

Think about that.

Data Data Data….
Folks want it, folks want to hide it, Folks get shocked other folks have it.

One of the inconvenient truths about internet life is to get data from point A to point B, both of them have to be defined. Your computer needs an address to receive it, their computer needs an address to send it. How it gets from A to B is another story, involving other computers, routers, and wires. Folks count this stuff.

In the beginning these things were counted strictly to be sure that you got what you were looking for, and the computers that were pitching and catching were working. Then folks discovered that you could add things to web pages(cookies, clear gifs, webbugs) to get more data that you could sell to other folks, who are waiting with checkbooks and engorged flesh.

Data Data Data….
Some folks were not content with merely using other folks data, but began to build whole sites under various guises(friends networks, social networks, ‘blah’ spaces and ‘brrt’ books, Sharecroppers and Social Gillnetters) to deliberately mine this information, under the meme of User Generated Content, to sell things. !!Connect with your Friends while we shove ads up your nose!!

Google is the latest data baron to have the villagers with their pitchforks and torches storming the gates, screaming about their data. It is not yours, get over it. Because if you are crying about it, your vision is too blurry to do anything about it.

A large part of the perception problem is that the majority of us are self funded, by spending our own money and time to put out our thoughts, and are happy when folks stop by, whereas there are lot of sites that are built strictly with other peoples money, who understand what whoredom is about, or are refugees from ad supported media companies and have been institutionalized by it, and willingly flash their wares.

There are whole categories of sites dedicated to becoming pixel bitches, usually revolving around buying the “Secrets” guidebooks from the pimps of these sites. (note:I am a whore too, not a very good one however, the sidebars contain ads and other things, neither of them producing enough revenue to buy that gold lame’ frock that you are desperately waiting for me to model:) Plus I try not to talk about stuff I know nothing about. It irritates my 5 readers)

Data Data Data….
The past few weeks has had folks crying for data from various government organizations. Some are beating the transparency drum, some have been bleating about the legislative process needing a sunlight bath, and some just want to wallow in the underbelly of the data sewers.
As if government information is anymore reliable despite the fact we are footing the bill.

But in the interest of promoting the availability of data for all those folks, I present;
The Federal Reserve Board News Feeds Page
You can watch the US Banking System crash and burn from the convenience of your computer.
hat tip to Paul Kedrosky for finding this jewel.

With the Google Viacom lawsuit requiring a massive data give away, folks are beginning to wake up to the lack of privacy and the lengths that companies and websites are using to track your online activity.

Here is a list of a few programs that cost you nothing more than the download time.

Firefox for browsing. Much better and faster than IE. An order of magnatude better privacy settings. Thunderbird for email. It is your email. If you want to have some other company reading your mail and inserting advertising and clear gifs and tracking cookies, by all means get your ass sold down the river to every advertiser with a checkbook. AVG for anti virus. AdBlock Plus to eliminate website ads, third party tracking cookies, and other tracking. Easylist for AdBlock Plus Tor for anonymous surfing. This slows down your surfing as bit but it is worth the wait if you want to have any sort of privacy.

It is almost impossible to control your entire internet footprint. but you can decide who you want to share with.

Dear Jim,
Let me call you Jim as we are kind of informal out here. You can call me alan. We are just folks out here.

(Be advised that my comments and opinions are here are mine, and are directed to you as the Vice President; Director of Strategic Planning, and are not personal attacks.)

The internet lives by the hyperlink. Think about that for a moment. Every bit of information available on the web in any format that you can see on your computer or hand held device has a hyperlinkable address. Without the hyperlink, we would not be having this discussion. That fact alone should let you know that once information hits the web, you no longer have any sort of control over its usage..

I am one of the many people who feel that you are wrong in your use of the DMCA. I thought that I had covered my thoughts sufficiently in my two previous postings.

The Death Rattle of the Associated Press
The Associated Press, Fair Use, Copyright, and the rest of us.

However a story at the New York Times website has compelled my to write again. We will get to that in a few moments. First some background.

Recent events have catapulted you and the organization you work for, the Associated Press, into a highly visible position on the world wide web. Right now this is not a good thing. You have become the news. As your members will tell you, becoming the news compromises your ability to represent the news.

At issue is your organization’s filing a DMCA notice against Rodgers Cadenhead and the Drudge Retort website for Copyright Infringement. This is like using a thermonuclear weapon to clean leaves off your driveway.

The funniest thing here is the way it was done. They cut and pasted, (which may be either scrupulous attention to detail, lazy, or a gigantic infringment as most corporations, most notably in the news and entertainment industries would have the world believe) headlines and excerpts of the articles, providing a Hyperlink to the original story, which gives credit to the source, does provide an accurate, true, and correct quote of the source material.
You should be happy. Everybody else likes links.
These conventions such as Quote, Attribution, Credit and Byline, have been adopted from the news business because they are an elegant and fair method of establishing authorship, exchanging information, giving credit, and work to eliminate confusion between what was said, and what is being debated, or commented upon. So not every thing the news business is doing is bad.

This is pretty much the way most folks point to material for commentary. Also, in the case of weblogs, allows readers to read the materials we used to form our opinions and either agree with us or tell us we are full of crap.There really is no malice or a gigantic conspiracy on the part of the millions of folks who publish on the web. It is hard to get any group of any size moving in the same direction. Herding cats is easier.
You have succeeded however.
As you are discovering, folks out here are opposed to your action. The backlash that you are currently feeling is only the tip of the electronic iceberg. What the folks on the Drudge Retort site did was Fair Use as I have come to understand and use it.
Attempting to tell millions of bloggers how and what they can do especially regarding Fair Use and Freedom of Speech is doomed.

I don’t feel that you are fully understanding the arena that you are playing in. While you were using teletypes to broadcast your ‘content’ to your 1500 members, we were building a network unlike anything the world has seen, with over 100 Million members worldwide. I may be low on the figure on our end. Maybe you should have stuck with the teletypes.

The internet is an expanding series of computers, using open protocols, to exchange information. The visible portion you are seeing is the world wide web. It is a messy place filled with words, sounds, pictures and video. We are no longer passive consumers of filtered, homogenized, spoonfed, broadcasted information. We are creators, producers, and commenter’s of information, news, and opinion.
The internet is not just a cheap pipe for you to service your membership with your output.

You have two problems to overcome.

The first problem is your business model. You collect news and information, from individual reporters, homogenize it, stripping individual credit, rewriting it, and then sell it back to your members requiring your AP byline. Which in the days before the web was a cost effective model for smaller newspapers to inform their readers about world and local events.

However with the vast amount of individual reporting on events that can be uploaded to the web in moments, the ability to hyperlink that information, so that reader/viewership numbers far outstrip any dead tree or broadcast numbers you could possibly hope for, makes your relevance problematical. The most significant fact to understand is the vast majority is created on those computers by individuals. This material is known in the news industry by the pejorative term “user generated content.”
It is not a question of veracity or professionalism, it is a question of speed, and depth.

The second problem is attempting to control its dissemination once it shows up on the web. The current boycott postings should give you an inkling of just how fast folks can spread the word.

As you can see by the postings that are the subject of this lunacy, the speed at which things can be linked and discussed should make your nose bleed and your head hurt. Right now these folks are just boycotting AP Bylined stories. What should strike terror into your heart is when they expand it to include your 1500 members. Your members are already gasping for air, as their revenue streams are drying up, circulation is diminishing, and folks are getting their news from thousand of alternative news outlets. As more and more newspapers on the web open themselves up to reader contributions, your role will diminish.
Cheaper too, as most of us do not count ‘value’ in dollars and cents.

Now to your latest faux pas.
In a story on the New York Times website titled:
The Associated Press to Set Guidelines for Using Its Articles in Blogs
there were number of quotes that you made that require commentary:

According to the story:

After that, however, the news association convened a meeting of its executives at which it decided to suspend its efforts to challenge blogs until it creates a more thoughtful standard.
“We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this,” Mr. Kennedy said.

Gee Jim! that horse has not only left the barn but has traveled around the world. Any ’standard’ you create is going to be problematic as your organization has no business or right to define Fair Use, for anyone you do not have a contractual relationship with, whom if I am close to correct, has the ability to post the entire thing, which is what you are selling. That being said, your thinking that you are going to release ‘thoughtful standards’ that will apply to the individuals on the web is disengeous, arrogant, and doomed to failure.

Right now like the movie Untraceable, you are hanging upside down above the roto tiller, but there is no pole to save you as more and more folks log on and the cable continues its inexorable downward path.

You then went on to say:

“As content creators, we firmly believe that everything we create, from video footage all the way down to a structured headline, is creative content that has value,” he said.

Since you are charging for it, it had better. Your job depends on that. And getting your members to believe that and keep those checks coming. However, that value is not measured in dollars and cents
out here. Today it may be ‘hot news’, but tomorrow it will line bird cages or wrap fish.
Also from the story is this:

One important legal test of whether an excerpt exceeds fair use is if it causes financial harm to the copyright owner.

You have already been paid for it at least once. It will be real hard to make a case for financial harm on that basis alone, irregardless of what percentage of a piece turns out to cross the Fair Use threshold, which at this point in time is decided on a case by case basis, requiring court action. Good Luck with that.

The final comment in the story attributed to you:

“We are not trying to sue bloggers,” Mr. Kennedy said. “That would be the rough equivalent of suing grandma and the kids for stealing music. That is not what we are trying to do.”

Actually, Jim you are. At the very least you are implying that we are thieves with your current interpretation of Fair Use, just like the RIAA and the MPAA.

So you can either step back and re-examine your policy, or you can hire a bunch of lawyers. Because we will hold bake sales, yard sales and tip jars, to fight this.

Your electronic pen pal
alan herrell - the head lemur

P.S. You need to double Irene Keselman’s salary, because anybody who can pull a rabbit like “Hot News Missapropriation” out of a hat, will get snatched up by some Intellectual Property Law Firm inside of 6 months tops.

Being able to assert your identity online is problematical on good days and impossible on most. Having the ability to create and confirm your online identity is a subject close to what little heart I have. Getting your computer hacked and having someone using your identity from your email server to cause pain to you and others is not a thing you want to have happen. Believe me, it is next to impossible to track these folks down. Just check your spam folder.

There are a lot of really bright folks working on online ID projects to create a framework that will allow you to create, confirm, and manage your online identity. There is a new player on the horizon that may provide a method for a secure verifiable online identity system.
DomainKeys Identified Mail DKIM
While this is an email project, when you think about it, email is probably the most significant communication used. Having folks I communicate with able to confirm that it is me, and conversely being able to confirm your identity, is a very good thing. This is something to keep your eyes on.

Facebook’s Beacon Advertising scheme is even more creepy than I envisioned.

Advertising By Stalking! In the new world of Social Gillnetting, you are not only exposed to a bunch of folks whose primary goal in life is to get 5000 friends faster than Scoble, but your online shopping is now a matter of public record.

Hey Look! Bill just bought a Father Sebastian 14” butt plug!!

The fact that Facebook is stalking your every move, slicing and dicing every click and letter you post, and selling you to every advertiser and marketeer with a checkbook, is your just desserts for not reading the fucking manual. The cost of participation on the web is so close to zero, that joining these sharecropper networks is a sign that you are just plain boring. Hell they give away blogs. You can be your own beacon.

Electronic Serial Rape
No does not mean No in the brave new world of electronic advertising.
You really want it, you were just fooling when you tried to say no. You were asking for it, or you wouldn’t be strutting around here. Sound familiar? Since you did it for one, you are going to do it for everybody else.

Privacy and Social Networking is an oxymoron. What part of the web being accessible to everybody with a connection did you miss?

Does your ass hurt yet? It will.

Now that the Web is a teenager, and it is trying new things, forming relationships, clubs, and stirring up shit everywhere, Business as Usual, left the building and found their cars covered with toilet paper and graffiti. Entire Manifestos in less than 140 characters. Retreating back into the castle, they have decided that a new paradigm is needed. After years of viewing with horror the unfettered, undisciplined, self directed explosion of personal publishing, they are returning with a vengeance.

Armed with whitewash, tinfoil, and a desperate desire to recapture and reeducate, they are returning with the latest PR Crisis Management, Message shapers and crying Trust, Transparency, and Triple Cents Off Coupons, they arrive to do battle.

Here are a few of the more interesting tidbits in this arena:

Exhibit #1

The Role of Trusted Human Editors In Filtering The Web

By using journalists and serious bloggers as a proxy for trust, Publish2 aims to solve the scalability problem that Scoble raises in Part III of his video, by creating a scalable mechanism for identifying the RIGHT people, i.e. people who are trusted and people who are GOOD at filtering the web. We’re going to seed Publish2 with trusted, skilled human editors and then let THEM decide who else to trust.
Source Scott Karp Publishing 2.0

Exhibit #2

Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years

The only reason you’ll watch these two videos is because you trust me to add value to your lives and not sell links.
Source: Robert Scoble

Exhibit #3

In the Cut and Paste Era, Traffic Happens Elsewhere

In the very near future portals including iGoogle, My Yahoo and Netvibes as well as social networks will be able to easily inhale the smallest pieces of content from across the web. Don’t wait. Start now to make everything on your website embeddable. Traffic is becoming something that happens elsewhere, not just on your site.
Source Steve Rubel

Trust is not equal to Quality or Quantity. Trust is something else.
Having 4000 ‘friends’ is neither a demonstration of trust or validity on any level.
Aggregation is not the get smart quick scheme that these folks think.

But it is so much fun to watch!!!

Folks say that the (insert latest name here) is the greatest thing since sliced bread, growing faster than flesh eating disease, and not joining right now, will consign us to the ghetto and cheap seat sections of the web.

Folks say that (insert latest name here) you can share thoughts, photos, tunes, professional and personal information, opinions, and that you can meet new people.

The (insert latest name here) Social Network says, in return for joining our Social Network, you will let us borrow a little of your space for a few messages from our sponsors. They will be tasteful and relevant, semi-unobtrusive. Or as much as any computer generated algorithm can perform. They say they will insure your privacy by not allowing anyone in who has not agreed to a laundry list of terms and conditions, any access to their network. The exception to this are the advertisers. They will also at their sole discretion determine what you may or not say, display, discuss or the language you use.

Consider that Your Social Network requires an astonishing amount of personal information from the get go, before you become a member. Once you become a member, you quickly discover that the only sharing going on is in the network. Your information, contacts, likes, and your subgroups such as the Ostrich Society Navel Gazers Who Also Happen To Be Left Handed From Two Parent Middle Class Families are not portable. They are set in the electronic concrete of a Madison Avenue Potemkin Village.

So in return for becoming a member of (insert latest name here), you believe that you are in a comfortable little nest of like minded individuals, whose dreams, aspirations, and goals are being brought to a higher plane of commonality by people you think are friends.

Commonality is the operative word here as these networks without exception over time spiral down to the lowest common denominator that supports advertising, which is the true meaning of Web 2.0.

Social Network creators are not donating their time or talent, for your benefit. Remember the part; borrow a little of your space for a few messages from our sponsors? Yeah, at the end of the day in your network, it’s all about the money. There is nothing inherently evil about this arraignment, as we all trade money for stuff in one way or another.

At most, you may belong to a Social Network that boasts having 2 million members. These numbers are suspect for a couple of reasons. Over time, every one of these networks stabilize as folks move on, the direction changes, or the herd moves on to the Next (insert latest name here) Social Network. You never see these folks say their numbers are going down. They count registrations and keep adding. They never do any subtraction when folks leave. It’s all about the revenue. Web 2.0.

My Social Network is the Internet. We have 3-400 million members. For a few bucks, a computer and a connection to the internet I can do everything that your network does, without a nanny, without having my work overseen by folks who have overt and occult agendas and are being overseen by folks with checkbooks whose sole purpose in life is getting you to buy stuff.

My site is about me. I can share thoughts, photos, professional and personal information, opinions, and I can meet new people. I can even attempt to sell you stuff. Attempt as I still have a day job. I can also have discussions here. Unlike your little network, there are almost no requirements to say hello. I am not put off by bad language as such as jackass and the dreaded f-bomb are among some of my favorite descriptors. If you don’t like me, there is no requirement for you to return. If I don’t like you, I will return the favor.

It is dangerous out here. Bad and evil shit can happen to you. Folks drive by, litter, call you names, disagree with you, spam you, and will spend amazing amounts of time explaining what an idiot you are. Trust me. I have a closet full of t-shirts. Be advised that I am a cranky fellow, who doesn’t suffer fools at all. But you probably knew that.
Yet at the end of the day, this is the most exciting place on earth. Where else can you discover things, people, places, meet and talk with folks from places you will never go to? Really, how cool is that?

Over the last week , I discovered Three Outstanding Women who should be noted and engaged.

Latanya Sweeney is the head of the Data Privacy Lab at Carnegie Mellon University. There is an article over at Scientific American, that is worth the time. She is working on Digital Identity issues from a slightly perspective than the Digital Identity Gang.

Karen Coyle is a librarian and a consultant in the area of digital libraries. She is one of the people that will help us to catalog all the crap we are posting, as well as the stuff that is sitting in library stacks.

Pamela Samuelson is a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley with a joint appointment in the School of Information Management and Systems and the School of Law.

She recently posted :Preliminary Thoughts on Copyright Reform (pdf)
which should go a long way toward opening a dialog to Reboot Copyright.

If you post, publish, or are concerned about Copyright, you really need to download this paper.

I have been advocating to roll back Copyright way back to 14 years, instead of the crap which currently is nothing more than a Corporate Welfare Program for Publishers, Music Companies, and Movie Studios.

I would like to get three women in a room, let them talk and sit in the corner and listen.