connecting*the*dots

(photo by Majka en Thrall)

David Lazarus, San Francisco Chronicle
AT&T rewrites rules: Your data isn’t yours

AT&T has issued an updated privacy policy that takes effect Friday. The changes are significant because they appear to give the telecom giant more latitude when it comes to sharing customers’ personal data with government officials.

The new policy says that AT&T — not customers — owns customers’ confidential info and can use it “to protect its legitimate business interests, safeguard others, or respond to legal process.”

The policy also indicates that AT&T will track the viewing habits of customers of its new video service — something that cable and satellite providers are prohibited from doing.

Moreover, AT&T (formerly known as SBC) is requiring customers to agree to its updated privacy policy as a condition for service — a new move that legal experts say will reduce customers’ recourse for any future data sharing with government authorities or others.

The company’s policy overhaul follows recent reports that AT&T was one of several leading telecom providers that allowed the National Security Agency warrantless access to its voice and data networks as part of the Bush administration’s war on terror.

[…]

If you have a broadband cable connection and you’re still using AT&T, you deserve to be wire-tapped. Between Vonage and SkypeOut & Voicemail, there are enough stable VoIP choices out there to get off of the telcom infrastructure of eavesdropping.

Now, if I had no choice and had to use AT&T or Verizon as a provider, I’d be in contact (via email of course) with the Electronic Frontier Foundation today, adding my name to a class action lawsuit.

Janeé Bolden, SOHH.com
50 Cent In Talks With Apple To Produce Computer Line

“According to recent reports from Forbes, 50 Cent is currently in talks with Apple CEO Steve Jobs to produce a line of low cost computers geared toward inner-city residents.

The latest edition of Forbes magazine includes profiles of both 50 and his manager, founder of Violator Management & Records Chris Lighty who told Forbes that Steve Jobs “is setting a new standard in the music business… Let’s just say we get each other.”

[…]

Positive reaction
Inner city kids eat up 50 Cent’s sound, message and marketing mayhem, so if he can work with Apple — my platform of choice — to create an affordable computer for inner-city residents, hey, all the power to him and Apple.

Negative reaction
With the DRM aspect of iTunes, Jobs — one of my former icons — is turning out to be a control freak. For Chris Lighty, the brains behind the marketing of 50 Cent’s violent image, to say that “we get each other”… I just don’t know. I’d bet that most parents of the kids devouring 50 Cent’s image would rather that he tone down his act.

(click for entire .pdf)

Current independent broadcasting channels, production houses, distribution centers, etc. all sweat to compete with the Big 6 for advertising dollars and market reach. If they are struggling, imagine what would happen to the still-developing ecosystem of independent bloggers if net neutrality isn’t supported in the next phase of legislation on the senate floor.

As the curtain went down on Greensboro’s Child last night, it also marked the final performance at The Scene on South Elm. The space is now officially in the process of being converted into an artist’s studio / gallery.

Best of luck to Lowell and to Dale, who is moving on to teach high school math and science Carsboro, North Carolina.

I also want to thank everyone who showed up to support Andy, including local bloggers Ben Hwang, Chewie, David Hoggard, Bruce Burch and Ndesanjo Macha. Andy is now looking for distribution and to supply copies of the film to local schools. We’ll keep you in the loop with all the happenings.

Dave Winer has expanded on his “It’s the users, dummy!” statement and I couldn’t agree with him more:

There’s actually a neater solution, especially if you’ve put a piece of software on the user’s desktop to facilitate uploading and editing of the data — keep a copy of all the data on the user’s desktop, and just mirror it in your web app. There goes the problem (or is it an excuse) that your competitor would be using your CPU cycles to grab a copy of the user’s data (with the user’s permission, I should add, you need a username and password to get access, so the argument that they’re protecting against scrapers and abusers doesn’t hold water).

Following the Beyond Broadcast conference in May, Nate Aune and I began jamming on a similar concept; something we loosely called myTag.

(click for entire .pdf)

The major difference in our approach is that we’re trying to create a “piece of software” (actually, an online service) that can work across all online services, serving as a meta-data hub for all personally tagged information objects — blog posts, photography, video, audio, social bookmarking and possibly service metadata, such as Amazon tagging.

Unlike Dave’s example, we would scrape external services for newly updated, tagged objects. The goal is to centralize people’s meta-data and provide ownership of said meta-data, not to interfere with people interacting with these decentralized services. The scraping would only occur when a person accesses myTag to review their current tag universe, so the impact on external server CPU cycles would be innocuous at best.

Dave’s idea focuses specifically on the data editing and management issues that exist when users attempt to move their data across existing services:

With a local copy, the user can point any service at the data, and it can suck up a copy, and the competitor’s app would run on the user’s desktop too, using their (abundant) CPU cycles. The vendor’s server (in this case Flickr) wouldn’t even know that a copy of the data has been made, and since it’s the user’s data, that’s exactly as it should be.

Yet another reason to use rich clients. I use Flickr Uploadr, always. It’s just a bit easier to work with than the browser-based method of uploading, and that bit of easiness has proven to be worth it. Then of course the competitor has to offer a desktop tool as well. We do it with the OPML Editor. The server components, the directory browser, blog renderer, work with a copy of the data, the originals reside on the user’s machine. It also protects against a system failure, or a company failure.

I completely agree with his ownership point regarding meta-data, and his perspective of safeguarding information objects from system or company failure is extremely valid as well.

So how could we extend his concept of locally managing data (both the information object itself and its meta-data) across same-type services (flickr, zooomr, riya, etc.) to include culling meta-data across different-type services that leverage tagging (del.icio.us, YouTube, flickr, WordPress, etc.)?

See, the reason we’re sketching a thin client is because our primary goal is to enable individuals to be able to review and curate various slices of their own concept terminology — meta-data or tags — as they’ve been applied to information objects over various services and periods of time.

The way I look at it, an aggregate of tags can serve as a looking glass into the personal linguistic structure of each of us, as we make explicit choices when applying specific concept terms to our objects. As competition to flickr and YouTube enters the market, our POV’s will undoubtedly become further dispersed across the web, increasing the findability of our objects, yet conversely affecting our own understanding of our perceived output.

If we’re going to arm citizens with media tools, then we need to provide intuitive, smart representational interfaces for accessing and modeling our own strategic output. Why? Well, we need to be on-point, constantly iterating our understanding of our own perspectives and biases as we venture further into producing our own media.

Otherwise we fall into the same trappings of the mainstream media.

An example… take the limited nature of my tag cloud on this blog as an example. Click on a term, such as Greensboro, and a narrative will unfold over the period of time that you choose to explore and read. While it’s useful to understand more about my relationship with and perspective on Greensboro, the cloud doesn’t include my photos tagged with Greensboro, nor my video clips tagged with Greensboro.

Citizen media operatives need an centralized interface to access decentralized information objects. From my perspective, the value of these interfaces is huge — both to the content creators and potentially to the content consumers.

The first two scenarios I mapped out in the above sketch were for searching and browsing ones existing tag library. Any other primary scenarios jump out at you?

The day that AOL/Netscape reduces their decade-long focus on squeezing profits from dial-up deals with web newbies long enough to compete with a niche, early adopter site like Digg, is the day that online, participatory communities will have reached the ROI tipping point.

Eh-hem! That day is here.

Michael Arrington frames the move nicely:

[…]

The fact that AOL is launching the new service under the Netscape brand instead of building out a new property says how serious they are about the space. According to statistics provided by AOL, Netscape serves a whopping 811 million monthly page views - far more than Digg today.

Putting this kind of audience in front of a Digg like service could spell trouble for many sites that ultimately make it to the top of the site. A Digg or Slashdot story can send tens of thousands of visitors to a site in a matter of minutes or hours. With Netscape, this effect could be many times larger - possibly resulting in outages at sites headlining the new service.

There are a number of other notable features of the new Netscape. Story submissions can be tagged by the submitter along for easier search in the future. Every category, user and group of friends has their own RSS feed. Also, category anchors will follow up on many stories and post their own editorial content on those stories (see below)

With all of the recent moves, one has to be wondering where the participatory news space is heading:

• Newsvine is already an “all category” user-generated article space
• Digg is rumored to be expanding from a niche site to an all-encompassing domain
• Netscape is launching a full-force, broadly targeted, participatory interface into the mix

At first glance, the long-term benefits of this growing industry and competition seem to land in the laps of the end user.

In the real world, industry competition drives quality standards while the invisible hand of the market usually corrects pricing issues (except for oil and other lobbied industries, but that’s a whole other article).

If you follow similar logic within this segment of the internet economy, the domain with the most intoxicating experience design and participatory incentive programs should retain the largest share of the participatory market (and I’m not talking about the bread and circus returns of shiny AJAX widgets and karma points).

Interfaces that are primarily designed for an optimized, ad sales, click-through scheme and not unique, behavioral, user experiences, just won’t survive in the long-run. Domain competition will force top notch user-centered interaction design, reducing opportunities to implement old school, bean counting advertising schemes to piggy-back user behavior.

Even more disruptive; in order to increase sign-ups, retain customers and increase degrees of participation, one would think that revenue generated from these new user-centered, advertising paradigms will have to be efficiently shared with this new workforce of virtual attention laborors.

While it’s true that these particular industry domains are already branding the very idea of 2.0 community — essentially “soft-locking” people into committing to a domain as with neighborhoods — without certain concessions (such as revenue sharing) I’d imagine that tactic alone to be short-sighted. I mean, wouldn’t corporate abuse of our participatory nature by these enabling domains drive us to be quick to change our attachment to these particular 2.0 communities?

I have to profess, this is where my faith in the many falters.

Honestly, my “fear” is that the masses of early-adoptor geeks who are driving the emergence of this participatory economy are just as self-centered as the capitalistic drivers of the attention economy itself.

Let me rephrase and explain my thoughts more clearly.

Are we more interested in participating as authentic medic creators and information contextualizers from afar, while being left alone to receive our timely, customized, community-centered, topical information? Or do we believe in standing together as a workforce of developers of this information revolution and as personal, information contextualizers to create change in our overarching financial system itself, ensuring a greater diversity of fiscal opportunities for people living on the other side of numerous socio-economic divides?

This is where the rubber hits the road, just before the fork.

We Don’t Have To Follow The Same Path We Used To Get Here

Big business is just beginning to view participatory systems as an obvious line extension of the profit vehicles that mass production provided in the industrial age through financial capitalism. If you understand the underlying principals of the first go-around, the evolutionary patterns of the second pass make themselves quite obvious:

• In the 20th century, capitalists leveraged cookie-cutter product design, simplified mass production assembly lines, ensured low-wage labor systems and implemented hardcore, mass marketing and psychological advertising within an imbedded entertainment mass media to drive product consumption
• In the 21st century, capitalists have the advent of collaborative filtering and personalized interfaces, running on the movement, interactions and contextualization of data and perspectives of the people who use them, driving contextualized ad placement, resulting in both revenue and product consumption with much less overhead

VC’s drool over the possibilities of the attention economy, because they see exactly how to take advantage of the situation, turning passionate information junkies and connectors into ad sales generators, which is fine, because it’s in their nature.

(photo by illmatic)

The question I desperately want to ask “the masses” is do we, the designers, the developers, the content creators and authentic media generators, care about this pure, capitalistic leeching or is it truely in our nature to provide a free ride, no matter the potential for being used as residual generators of capital?

For if we do care, we — the schitzophrenic creators and consumers of this new economy — are in a unique position to take a slice of the proverbial pie, whether through better positioning in a buyer’s market or as compensated content creators in a participatory, user-generated, contextualized media system. Either way, we can completely alter the model of managed capitalism and move one-step closer to to realizing Doc Searls’ intention economy.

Let the capitalists finance the infrastructure and reap their fair, residual returns, but let the people drive the costs of the market based on our desires while sharing in the residual profits that we generate via digital forms of word of mouth advertising.

In today’s parameter-passing, unique-identifier, permalink world, both notions are completely feasible. The only question is whether or not they will take this revolutionary change lying down.

Jordan is distributing paperwork for signatures today, so The People, Yes should be well on it’s way to NC non-profit status. The federal process comes next, and believe me, that’s where Jordan will earn his pro-bono dinners and drinks. ;-)

Many thanks to the inital Board members who are joining me to try to shape this idea into a reality:

            

Once we’re more involved with the community and actually begin fundraising, I’ll most likely add a few more people to the mix… definitely one active participant from the homeless community itself.

Until then, I’m looking forward to working with this fine group of technologists, bloggers and community activists to get this puppy singing.

Stay tuned.

First, there was the machinima net neutrality PSA. Now it’s straight up, raw information:

Check out the tag archive for “net neutrality”.

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(inspired by C&L)

I’ve got one bullet left in the chamber, so this had better work.

This is a pissed-off customer rant. Proceed with caution.

To make a very long, frustrating story as short as possible, I lost every contact from my Treo 600 added over the past 5 months. There was some kind of a sync corruption that actually busted my phone — turning it off when receiving incoming calls from non-Sprint networks.

The same thing happened last December and the local Sprint store gave me a substitute 600, which worked fine until I tried to sync it this past week.

After it busted on Thursday while I tried to sync up my new contacts from last week’s Beyond Broadcast conference, I spent a good deal of time on Friday, Saturday and today in the local Sprint store, with the culmination of the first two days having me walk out of the store with a “reset” phone.

Today, I skipped the pleasantries. Within minutes I was vociferously arguing that they needed to make me happy or I was going to cut my contract. After 3 hours in the store this afternoon and speaking to what seemed to be the entire corporate ladder to approve a buyout of my contract termination fee, the store manager finally worked out a deal with me to receive a free 650 upgrade.

Fine.

But what a God awful, painful process to get there.

Even though it was obvious to everyone I spoke with that my phone kept busting/erasing data during the Palm sync process, they wanted nothing to do with my sync log sheet. Both their internal tech folk and the folk on the other end of the phone, kept recommending a reset of my phone, which had already been proved to be a useless approach. At one point, the manager started to lean towards it being a network issue or an issue with my computer… something they could do nothing about; you know, “time to go home Mr. Coon and search the web for answers”… Well, that’s when I lost it, diving into a tirade how:

• I’m locked into a two-year contract with Sprint (like the rest of the cellphone customers of the world!)
• They branded my Treo 600, so I can’t use it with another carrier (therefore I’m holding you responsible for *any* problems. Screw hunting down Treo or Palm or Mac tech support!)
• I’m standing in their brick and mortar customer touch point (and you can’t help me!? wtf!)

I couldn’t help it, I got Jersey on their asses. And that must’ve been the language they understood.

So yeah, the long-story short is that I now have a new Treo 650… and a new 2-year contract. Fuckers.

Prepare yourself for my soon-to-be-written email asking for your contact information… again.

/end rant

UPDATE: My new 650 is working like a charm. Next time Sprint folks, just give a seven year-long customer with an unfixable problem a free upgrade. It’s good business.

photo by Daveybot

Not only do I need to get my home in order (uhm, yeah, it’s now “lived in”), I need to prioritize my project work so I can get a few out the door (making myself and my partners in crime less stressed), get organized on the remaining work and figure out my capacity for taking on new projects. Why am I making this public knowledge? Because it counts as today’s blog post, of course. ;-)

Okay, so here goes nothing:

Today

• Knock out my Grandmother’s book cover design. - She going on 102 years-old, ’nuff said.
• File for LLC status of dot matrix - I have to get out of freelance transition mode.
• Submit the paperwork for non-profit status of The People, Yes - I finally have a small board of directors and officers, I just need to alert my lawyer
• Continue finishing the research deliverables for TheStreet.com - Design personas, context scenarios and then putting together the overall proposal
• Write up an identity abstract for dot matrix - The team (top secret ;) needs to respond and help shape the vision
• Write an RSS 101 post - As promised last week to the wonderful folk at Kindermusik
• Get Nick Reville the half submitted bounties - I had to give up my volunteer gig managing BountyCounty, but I’ve been behind transferring the remaining emails. Can you see why?

There’s so much more, but I’ve_got_to_focus…

  or    

Doc Searls, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and lifelong technology visionary or Mike McCurry, a life-long communication, PR and government professional?

Follow the image links and think for yourself.

(inspired by Matt Stoller)

Uncle Cliffy… couldn’t you have just waited a month or so?

Nets’ Robinson suspended for violating drug policy

Another violation of the NBA’s drug policy will prevent Clifford Robinson from playing in the remainder of the New Jersey Nets’ playoff series against the Miami Heat.

The league announced on Friday that the veteran forward has been suspended five games for violating the terms of the anti-drug program.

The suspension will begin Friday with Game Three of the Eastern Conference semifinal series between the Nets and Heat. The best-of-seven series is tied at one game apiece.

Robinson was suspended five games for violating the league’s anti-drug policy in February 2005 as a member of the Golden State Warriors. Later in the month, he was traded to the Nets for a pair of second-round picks.

Although he is 39, the 6-10 Robinson remains a solid post defender and still can score a bit.

The Nets need all the help they can get in the interior against the Heat, who have Shaquille O’Neal and Alonzo Mourning in the middle and Udonis Haslem at power forward.

In New Jersey’s eight playoff games, Robinson averaged 4.5 points and 3.3 rebounds in 24.8 minutes. He was shooting just 33 percent from the field (13-of-39), including 6-of-19 from 3-point range.

The absence of Robinson should mean more minutes for shooting forward Lamond Murray and power forward John Thomas off the bench.

Robinson started 13 of 80 games this season and averaged 6.9 points and 3.3 rebounds in 23.3 minutes. He shot 43 percent from the field, including 34 percent from the arc.

In his 17-year NBA career, Robinson has played in 1,330 games and averaged more than 14 points and four rebounds. He won the Sixth Man Award in 1993, was an All-Star in 1994 and a member of the All-Defensive Second Team in 2000 and 2002.