1)      A UK worker being fired for comments that her job was boring.

2)      Employees [...]]]> I’m tired of reading about people ‘losing privacy’ with Facebook and Twitter. People are not losing their privacy; they are losing their common sense. There was an article this morning in the paper which cited examples of ‘loss of privacy’:

1)      A UK worker being fired for comments that her job was boring.

2)      Employees in a service industry being reprimanded for posting negative comments about customers on their social sites.

3)      Causing of problems in relationships when one person makes relationship-based remarks, or when a person ‘updates their relationship status’ without approval of the other party.

Hold on, none of those are examples of losing privacy; they all made their opinion public on purpose. Everyone at one time or another is bored at work. Everyone complains about idiots they have to deal with, and everyone has relationship troubles. It isn’t the fact that those people had those thoughts; it is the fact that they consciously made the thought public. Consciously making something known to people is not losing privacy, losing privacy is something that you didn’t make known to people, becoming known to people. For example, having your private diary published, or your best friend write a tell-all book about you, or a doctor telling everyone about your genital herpes is a loss of privacy.  Standing on a box in the middle of Times Square and screaming that you have genital herpes, or handing out free copies of your sex tapes to strangers is not a loss of privacy.

If Facebook openly released all of your pictures to the general public, not just registered Facebook users or specifically your ‘friends’, then that is an invasion, but they don’t (I didn’t say can’t). In fact, they are putting in more restrictions around what can be seen.

We live in a knowledge-starved world. We put Tiger Woods on the front page because we found out he had a secret, but then scream bloody murder when someone finds out ours. We can’t have it both ways.

The sad part is that government agencies are spending millions to study Facebook for security holes, when in reality we live in a society that cares less about privacy and more about reading about our acquaintances’ lives than ever before.  If something isn’t meant to be public, don’t make it public. It is as simple of that. Posting “I’ve had a horrible day,” is enormously different than posting “I hate my boss and work is shit.”  Facebook does not require the same level of professionalism as a man in a suit in front of a microphone (but then again, even Obama called Kanye a “Jackass”), but it does require some common sense.

And you want to talk about privacy? Well how about laws that restrict who you can love/marry, in what orifice you can have sex, or upcoming flight rules that you can either be photographed in an ‘naked scanner’ machine or have your genitalia juggled before you can get on an airplane? We don’t live in a private society at all when a government can invade it like that. BTW: This is for another entry, but ‘naked scanner’ is by far the newest gross exaggerated term. Given the above two options I will gladly let a couple people stare at my colourless, featureless ‘naked’ body only to have the picture removed immediately upon exiting the scanner. It’s not like Playboy is standing behind them saying “Yep, I’ll take that one for our ‘frequent flyers’ issue.” In those pictures you are no more nude than that chick’s silhouette on a trucker’s mud flaps.

This last year 3 or 4 guys got caught for misuse of a firearm and animal cruelty because they did really stupid, depraved things to a duck during a hunting trip. They got caught, not because someone discovered the duck, but because they posted themselves on YouTube doing it. Had that not happened, the ducks would have decayed or been eaten and, assuming they wouldn’t brag about it (which is a stretch based on the video), they certainly wouldn’t have been charged.

Why haven’t we learned from this? Because we are not used to a truly global media. While screaming on top of a box in Times Square all of your dirty secrets certainly isn’t maintaining privacy, it is not the same as electronically posting something that within seconds the entire world can see… Until, of course, someone starts streaming your NYC rant. Which really poses the question, do we have any privacy anymore? If anyone can video/photograph us doing anything and YouTube it, wouldn’t you think that would make everyone more afraid than the stuff they knowingly post? It sure does for me…

Google Wave will change virtual communication. It won’t be over night, and it won’t be accepted by all, but then again Facebook was founded in 2004 [...]]]> The beta of Google Wave has started, and I begged and grovelled for an invite and a friend was gracious enough to send one over. Here are my first thoughts.

Google Wave will change virtual communication. It won’t be over night, and it won’t be accepted by all, but then again Facebook was founded in 2004 and didn’t take off until 2 years later and Twitter is just finding an audience after 3 years in obscurity.

Social Networking in the virtual world is an interesting beast. While Twitter still hasn’t found a model to make decent money, and websites that collate/sort/rate/track tweets are popping up everywhere trying to be the first to make financial gain off of Mr. Dorsey’s brainchild. Facebook went from a simple and usable interface to an ad-centric model where instead of putting your friends at the top put a series of sponsored ads, tailored for you by data mining your profile. How kind. The same can be said about MSN (sic) aka Windows Live Messenger.

Since the Web has grown into a marketer’s wet dream and consumers are demanding everything for free, there seems to be a skew on the supply and demand charts. Because of that it means the newest challenge is balancing ads and ad space alongside product. And this is where Google thrives. Whether we talk about their minimalistic search engine interface (which makes Yahoo’s and MSN’s webpages look like a a 3 year old’s finger painting from the 60′s) to the subtle scrolling ads in Gmail: Google has nailed the balance of making free products while still capitalizing on the lust of web marketers.

So what does all of this have to do with Wave changing the virtual communication landscape? Wave currently is a ad-less, persistent, collaborative, realtime, multimedia, open source communication tool. I am sure the lack of ads will end coincidentally at the same time as the beta program. But the rest of my adjectives are a huge distinction from what is currently available.

At the moment products such as WebEx and Net Meeting dominate in the web conferencing space right now. While desktop sharing is a must in our international business world, what these technologies lack is the collaborative nature of a meeting. These products allow one user to display their screens, “whiteboard” and allow a basic MSNesque like text chat. While Wave lacks the desktop sharing, the ability to, in real time, share links, sites, photos, and a variety of other “gadgets” (polls are quite interesting where people can vote on any question and the tallies are immediately updated). How would this affect taking meeting notes, minutes etc? Every try to take a poll in a group chat room or over a conference call? Think about group projects in a university setting and how much easier it would be to all make decisions from the comfort of your home, in a “secure” (more notes on this later) and 100% traceable, copyable, printable way? No more will you argue over who said they’d print off the report.

Multimedia is a huge plus. How nice is it that you can add a gadget that shows a direct map to your place while you are “chatting” about directions to your place. No more need to lose a link in an accidentally closed MSN window, or having a subject less email with a static screenshot attached.  And the small fact that it uses rich text. Now you can give your thoughts headings and highlight important words. Now when you copy and paste from one medium to another you won’ t get stupid bats flying in your post, or lose the spacing/formatting so you have alphabet soup on your screen. In the end this provides a clearer message to the people you are communicating with.(Did I mention inline spell checking?)

Persistence. This is a huge problem with the web in general. Say goodbye to losing a lengthy Facebook message after accidentally clicking “back” or closing your browser. Wave stores your details in realtime. If you hit the k button, not only does everyone see that you hit that button, but you can immediately close your browser without any “save” keystroke and it persists. Add to that that you can file your sessions, re-open, re-play or continue them at any time and this is the most persistent capability the web offers today. Another key to all of this is that you don’t have random MSN-style .rtf files saved all over your harddrive with cryptic names like “chat with John” or “sweet cyber sex”.

Another feature is the concept of “Public Waves”. This is(*ahem* will be) the ultimate combination of mIRC, Internet forums, Message boards, CraigsList and knowledge bases. Combine the entire global community speaking on any subject in a realtime fashion with the search and storage capabilities of Google. It’ll put Yahoo Questions to shame.

And finally on my “pro’s” list, open source.  Once the hardcore geeks get a hold of this (I’ve already read that the race for the first usable iPhone and Blackberry apps is on) the possibilities are endless. Put on an MSN skin that minimizes the product into a compact chat forum for just you and your friends, build it into a WebEx-like technology to combine realtime knowledge and data share with PowerPoint and desktop presentations. An infinite communication market has just been opened up!

Of course with any great technology comes the bad.  At the moment security is a huge concern. Notwithstanding the recent Google problems with security; Are corporations going to trust their internal data to Google.  I don’t know the answer to this question. But in the open source world, I am sure that someone can develop quite quickly a security model that addresses the concerns that will undoubtedly arise.

The current interface is clunky and unintuitive and forces you (practically) to be in a full screen mode. This isn’t useful for most of us in our multitasking culture. Again, open source to the rescue.

The tracking issue. Google is renowned, and routinely chastised, for gathering data. And while I still agree that tracking my searches is a help to me, is tracking every personal/professional conversation I have necessary? I haven’t read a lot on this topic yet, I hope to shortly, but I have to assume some level of data mining is occurring.  What will this do to corporate use? It would be a stumbling block I am sure for this technology to take off on that front. For the public market? Well, 300 million people use Facebook and that site is entirely about mining data.

WebEx and Net Meeting are bloated and for no good reason. They require downloads and constant updates and still tend to be prone to errors outside of the IE world. Wave has none of these problems. The slickness of Google has yet again struck.

All in all, I 100% agree with Google’s marketing of this technology that Google Wave is what “e-mail” would have been if it was invented from scratch, and not made to mimic the existing postal system we had world wide.It took almost 3 years for Gmail to open to the general public and now it boasts 150 million users, both corporate and personal. I am very excited for the next 3 years.

First lets be clear:  These guys are NOT hackers. They are not. At very best they [...]]]> Regarding the recent news of the e-mail phishing scam on Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail (and presumably others) my blood has been absolutely boiling over the horribly inaccurate, sensationalistic comments that are being published in all sorts of reputable newpapers!

First lets be clear:  These guys are NOT hackers. They are not. At very best they are clever people who realized that you can get people that are less clever to tell you things they shouldn’t. This is not new to e-mail, Facebook, corporate logins… In fact people take advantage of less clever people all the time. 3card monte in some form has existed for centuries and continues to fool people! Yesterday and today a fake Amber Alert message has been circulating the web, thousands have been fooled into propagating a false message. Tricking people is not the same as hacking. mafiaboy is a hacker. Kevin Mitnik was a hacker (although he was never malicious and wrongfully imprisoned).

The people who did this have done nothing wrong (I assume the lawyers for the above companies will disagree)… They asked for people’s passwords and the people gave them to them, I can do that right now: Please send me your passwords… In fact post them directly below this entry so that everyone can see them…. Sure they set up a fancy phishing site and sure they claimed to be someone they aren’t, but that is immoral, not malicious. Now, the people that use those passwords for malicious purposes are the ones breaking the law. Just as it is illegal for me to open your (snail) mail. (and yes, I concede these people could be one and the same, but it is important to distinguish that, which the media is not)

The problem, and I know I have beaten this to death, is that people seem to think technology is something new, and it isn’t. It is an adaptation of something. All technology is is an advancement of a previous incarnation of something else. Cell phones are an advancement of cordless phones, which are an advancement from corded phones, where were an enhancement on dial phones, which were an advancement on  the original switchhook phones, and the cycle goes back to the first person to every tie a string between two cups. The concept and basic requirement is the same in all of these cases: I have information and I want to share it with someone who isn’t within sound wave receiving distance of my voice.

And finally, the calls for “increased security” and “more education” at these companies is absolutely preposterous.  There is NO level of security or education that can prevent a person divulging personal information. How hard is it to understand “Don’t tell people your password.”? And yes, these guys used a sophisticated website to garner this information, but how is Google to prevent people from writing a webpage that looks like theirs? I mean I could mock up a Gmail page and have it be identical to it. How do you teach the mass public to make sure the website they are typing personal data into is legit? Well forward this Blog URL to 15 people and you will find out, because if you don’t you will have bad sex for the rest of your life! I mean after dozens of friends sending me hundreds of those over the past 10 years I am sure they all learned that that is a scam…

Contrary to popular belief, people do not learn from their mistakes.

Firstly, a friend and former co-worker in his late 20′s lost his battle to cancer a [...]]]> I’ve been think a lot about death lately. Before you raise your eyebrows, it isn’t a bad thing. There have just been a few things in my life lately that brought the subject up. I’ve outlined a couple below.

Firstly, a friend and former co-worker in his late 20′s lost his battle to cancer a few weeks ago. I truly hope he is in a better place now and his suffering has ended. What particularly struck me was that his Facebook page for days was appended with kind and supporting words for him and his family, this was something I hadn’t seen before.

This made me wonder about the role technology plays in death. This blog is hosted by a 3rd party company which I pay a fee to annually. Assuming my credit card isn’t cancelled immediately and my passing happened around renewal time, it is fair to say that this page could exist up to a year after me. I am fairly positive Facebook/Twitter and similar web apps have policies around dormant accounts being deleted, but again there would be a lag between my last breath and my account’s. But once gone from the servers, all my thoughts, all my pictures, everything is gone for good.

Secondly I reference a conversation between Andrew and I on our trip to India. While Andrew is a friend and we know each other well, he certainly  wouldn’t know my parents, my home town and probably couldn’t remember the company I work for. This is no slight to him at all. This is the way many friendships start, and I could same about myself in relation to him. The conversation starter was “what if something had happened to one or both of us on some dark back alley in India?”

The easy case is both of us “disappeared”, because quite frankly that would be it. My friends and family would have no idea where I was. Aside from my odd email home to give an update on recent events, I never gave addresses of hotels or any indication of future plans. Truth be told as we got on the plane to India all we knew was that we were landing in Delhi, nothing more about the rest of our journey.

I read an article once about a man whose girlfriend was on vacation in Hong Kong. She txt’d him one night saying she was going to bed and was never heard from again. He flew over to Hong Kong with conviction that in a city of 7 million he could track her down. Of course as the news usually goes, I never saw the end of the story. 

That was in a city of 7 million, Delhi has 14 million. I doubt very much that doubling the population or even halving it for that matter changes the magnitude of a search like that.

But the case that is more interesting is what if one of us had disappeared.

Back to technology.

When I was in highschool a friend passed away suddenly after being struck by lightning. His closest friends created a collage of photos, printed them on large paper in colour and gave them out in remembrance of him. This poster still hangs on my wall in my room 9 or more years later.

If I fast forward 9 years, will my colleague’s facebook page still exist? Certianly not.

Technology is a double edged sword. It has the potential to bring us together easier, we can share photos, events, news instantly around the world, but in the same regard, once the medium we use to do that sharing is obsolete we have nothing left but a memory.

If Andrew had disappeared in India, I could have used Facebook or some other technology to find his friends and family and notify them of the situation. We could then use mobile phones, email, webpages, news media etc. to get the word out. While tragic, technology would help me almost isntantly get to the people who need to know, without me having ever met those people. 

The other edge? In 30 years we won’t be able to sit with our grandkids and flip through a photo album. Assuming our harddrives/USB keys/DVD-Rs last that long, we might be able to flip through them on the some antique JPG viewer. But somehow I think this is unlikely. How many memories have you lost because of a harddrive crash? A computer virus? A lost usb key or a misplaced CD? 10 years ago it would have taken a basement flood, or a fire to destroy these things, now it is as simple as a magnetic getting too close to your MacBook or a power surge in your apartment, or a thumbdrive slipping out of your pocket.

I am not a Facebook page, a Twitter account or even this blog. These 3 things are put into an infinite equation that makes up “me”. The fact that these will outlast me, regardless of when I die is a scary thought, because that means that in theory  instead of people’s last memory of me being the last time we met for a beer or our last day of work together, it will be my last blog entry, or my last update on Twitter.

I have been in countless museums and read and seen images on papyrus, animal skins, bark, stone… These are universal and although they decay, in general they transcend time. They are hundreds and even thousands of years old. You’d be hard pressed to find something to look at files on a floppy disk these days, and this medium was still widely used just 10 years ago, and jsut plain forget about the technologies the files on those disks are stored in.

I hope I remember the times I had with my friends mentioned above 30 years from now, hell I hope I can remember my own name 30 years from now… I just don’t want to have to bet on technology to be the mechanism for my memories.

Since I stated posting blog entries I have received [...]]]> I could spend a lot of time reviewing each absurdity of this book, but alas I like to branch out more. Instead I think in my final reflection I’ll finish with why I believe Mr. Keen has this sense of reality that I do not share.

Since I stated posting blog entries I have received many comments such as “Stoss, you really think about the world in a fucked up way.” And I agree. I tend to think about things differently. I am not near arrogant enough to think my opinion is the only one, or necessarily correct. To paraphrase a quote from The Truman Show _{(highly under-rated movie)}: “We all live in the reality with which we are presented.”

About 3 months ago I went on a date with a smart, pretty, 20-something professional in the bio-medical field who lives by herself away from her family. On the surface you might think we are very similar. We are both white-collar workers, we are independent, well traveled and have the means to sustain ourselves. The topic came up as to how often we order take away. I said not that often, usually just Friday night curry or something. She gasped! “Once a week?! That is really often!”

At the time we had a quick laugh and moved on, but the above story is directly related to this book. I live in a reality where once a week takeout is not only normal, it is considered infrequent. That being said, lately I also live in a world where if I am not on 4 or 6 airplanes in a month I consider it “downtime”.

The point I am trying to make is that in Mr. Keen’s reality the Internet is the culprit for the downfall of society. I am sure he truly believes that and I wouldn’t fault him on it. In my reality the Internet is one of, if not the most important technological advances ever and has potential to propel society in directions we cannot even fathom yet.

The later part of the book has a couple themes. One is human behaviour and the other is the disadvantages to an all electronic society.

Keen blames sex addiction on the vast amount of porn on the Internet. Sex addiction? The only purpose for us to exist is for sex. Monogamy, humility, these are man-made concepts. Sex addiction is fundamental to our existence. The fact birth control, condoms, abortion were invented just helps us to not over-populate the shit out of this planet. Just think, if they diverted the attention give to the industry of preventing pregnancy to a field like cancer, how would this world be different?

Our realities did meet in a few way though. Keen talks about the information gathering on the net and the potentially disastrous effects it could have if it leaks. I agree. I find it very spooky when I log into Facebook in Germany and my ads are in German, or when I land in type in www.google.com in Switzerland and get directed to www.google.ch.

What if every search, every online purchase and every website you ever visited was somehow displayed to the world? Would you be embarrassed? Would losing the expected anonymity of the Internet be detrimental to your life?

Now the big brother view is that the Information Superhighway has CCTV cameras at every metre to watch you, track you and record your every move. The truth is that this is nothing new. Credit card companies have been data mining your information for decades to find patterns and anomalies to help them prevent credit card fraud. For the most part these measures are there to help you. It lets Google know when you search for Mustang, do you mean horse or car. It lets Amazon recommend books to you to save you searching or when you are stuck for a choice. But as I discussed earlier, all technologies have the ability to be used for nefarious purposes.

How is it different that you have a subscription to a gardening magazine and that magazine sells your address to gardening supply stores so they can send you mail, than Facebook putting up a “singles in the UK” ad on my page because I am listed as single and living in the UK?

The ironic part of all of this discussion is that at the end of bashing amateurs, saying that we can have no idea when someone isn’t a paid professional on a subject if they are telling the truth or lying, the author admits in the final pages of his book that he himself is an amateur, that this is first book and he had to rely on several others in writing it. Think about that for a bit.

Mr. Keen clearly sees the Internet as something vastly different than any previous technology. I do not. I see it as an advancement, sort of like VHS->DVD->Blue Ray.  If Keen took the time to think about this in the grand scheme of our society and not in the individual case studies (The Internet poker player who robs a bank to pay off his debt, or the German teenagers who faked a political message on YouTube etc) he would see we are no worse off at all. We have just transitioned to a new form of culture, economy and values, not destroyed them at all.

Bottom line: I am glad I read this book. I hated it page after page, but sometimes it takes something that you hate for you to reflect on why you like something.

We join the book with a new hypothesis from Mr Keen. Because some people lie on the Internet, we cannot be sure if anything is truth and therefore it is all invalid.  Solid idea. Applying this to elsewhere in the world: Because airplanes crash no one should fly, because some people [...]]]> Chapter 3 – 5:

We join the book with a new hypothesis from Mr Keen. Because some people lie on the Internet, we cannot be sure if anything is truth and therefore it is all invalid.  Solid idea. Applying this to elsewhere in the world: Because airplanes crash no one should fly, because some people kill people all people kill people…

It is also the start of what appears to be this author’s favourite way to make a point… putting several questions in a row at the end of a paragraph to make you “think” about his ideas, as opposed to proving his ideas.

Does anyone remember Bree or lonleygirl15 as she was known on the web? He uses this interesting example of a new type of entertainment as an example that: “We’re never sure if what we read or see is what it seems”. Is a videoblog of a 16 year old girl who turned out to be an 18 year old actress really the best example of falsehood that we can find? How about the current Swine Flu “epidemic”, in 1st world countries no one has even died from this “epidemic”, in fact the only deaths have been in Mexico and of the 150 possible cases, only 20 swine flu deaths have even been confirmed! But wait! The fact we are in an epidemic and should be panicking all across the world is something paid, non-amateur writers are discussing, guess I better go by my $0.02 face mask! That will guarantee my health!

The next 2 chapters were sad. Mr. Keen tells us the sad story of his favourite record store going out of business and blaming it entirely on iTunes, and illegal file sharing. The sadness of his friends who will miss the choice and wisdom of the employees and how nothing will ever be the same… You know what? GET OFF MY LAWN. Things change. The vast majority of people prefer to pick and choose their songs. And in fact, this is nothing new… remember mix tapes? Isn’t that a collection of favourite songs, akin to an iPod play list? We have simply made the transportation mode more efficient. It is sad that the we won’t have the wisdom of a music geek’s opinion on music, but hell we get Ebert’s opinion on movies every day and ignore him.

Let’s think of the radio. Here is a technology that music companies embrace, but yet isn’t that really delivering their artist’s art to billions of people for “free”? The music companies found a way to make that profitable. Keen pulls out of his ass the beautiful (and smelly) estimate of 20 billion songs being illegally downloaded in a year. Coincidentally, I this comes from the RIAA’s wonderfully amazing calculation that 40 songs are illegally downloaded for every song legally paid for on the Internet. Let’s do some math. The current belief is 24% of people in the world have some sort of internet connection. 6 billion people on the planet, therefore 1.44 billion people have internet. That means every person who has access to the internet anyhere in the world has downloaded 14 illegal songs and ~ 1/3 of a song legally. Plausible? Keen even refers to the legal download industry’s $1.1 billion a year business as “paltry”!! We live in a world where $1.1 billion is paltry? What is paltry is the number of companies to jump into this space! At $1.1bn if 3 companies each took 33% of the market they would be $400million companies. That means all 3 companies would be on Forbe’s list of the 400 most profitable companies! Hardly paltry.

None-the-less I am not condoning illegal activities, but the truth is that all technology can be copied and shared. The Internet simply provides a convenient way of doing so. As we have seen so many times before, fighting the Internet is futile. Embrace the technology and you can share your piece of a $1.1bn business space.

His next topic is of course video. Same argument really. A comment I really enjoyed was his quote: “Blockbuster [is] already hedging their bets by planning downloading services of their own”. Hedging bets?! I call that a smart CEO who is making good decisions. Give that guy a $90mil bonus!

There is a common theme in this book so far. Besides the fear-mongering, Internet is out to kill all things attitude, it is that everything is better if the person is professional at it. ie. I am no good as a writer because I don’t write as a profession. The entertainers on YouTube cannot provide good entertainment as they are not professionals. He deals in so many absolutes. I tend to believe this world isn’t absolute. I keep saying adapt to technology, but in reality I am aware this isn’t possible, and definitely isn’t a short term move. The point is that amateurs have their place in our society. Some of the best magic, juggling, entertainers I have seen were street side performers in squares and parks. That doesn’t mean they should all start websites and YouTube channels. Amateurism is a title and not an indication of skill. Let’s compare Susan Boyle to WIlliam Hung. Both of them are stars and relative amateurs, but I think that is too easy of a point to have to spell out.

Lately a phenomenon has taken off like many of the fads of the 80s we all love so much. Starting with the BBS systems in the late 70s and through the 90s we have had this intrinsic need to network with people at any distance via computer. With the web becoming more accessible, network [...]]]> Preface:

Lately a phenomenon has taken off like many of the fads of the 80s we all love so much. Starting with the BBS systems in the late 70s and through the 90s we have had this intrinsic need to network with people at any distance via computer. With the web becoming more accessible, network speeds getting faster and the advent of many advanced web technologies we have seen phases like Classmates.com, Bebo, MySpace, Facebook and we are now looking at Twitter and the even weirder Omegle where you can (advantageously?) talk to a total stranger.

An ongoing trend throughout this advancement has been the Blog. Starting as Usenet threads and advancing to Weblogs and containing everything from political updates to fart counters, there has never been an outlet for expression that has been utilized by so many people. Useful or not, they are a social medium that won’t soon disappear.

Now, I am the very first to admit that many of these are time wasters and marketing gimmicks. I am also the first to admit that many people live too much of their lives collecting MySpace friends and looking up old highschool classmates that they would never speak to in any other capacity. And finally I will admit that there are heinous and illegal uses for each of these technologies. BUT, and let me be very clear on this, that doesn’t mean that they do not have a place in the social paradigm that any individual wishes to maintain.

And this brings me to my Easter weekend trip to a bookstore to find something to enjoy on my upcoming slew of flights. In my search for Malcolm Gladwell’s new Outliers, I found a fluorescent orange cover with the caption “how blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the rest of today’s user-generated media are destroying our economy, our culture, and our values“. What a strong statement that is. Not only grouping together the 60+ million blogs as 1 entity, but comparing them to the pre-teen obsession that is MySpace and the completely different medium that YouTube boasts. Immediately Andrew Keen had grabbed my interest, as I am sure he intended to, and I decided that “the cult of the amateur” was a book I needed to read.

Now, I like to think I have an open mind. I enjoy a debate, and am always willing to try and understand why people have a certain point of view, regardless if I agree with it. And in fact Mr. Keen even reminds his readers to keep an open mind as he has been described in various media as everything from “The Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley”  to “The Martin Luther King of the Internet counterreformation”.  Intrigued yet?

You will notice I have labeled this post as ‘part 1′, I have done so for the following reason: Never in my adult life have I ever put down a non-fiction book before reading it through. I am currently on page 45, half way through the 2nd chapter and have already considered doing so. This man takes generalizations and blatantly false information and is trying to sell them as the demise of society. Since I do not want to break my streak, I vow to read this book and write about any interesting subjects I can find, positive or negative I will try and form an objective opinion to post here. Today it is mostly negative…

The Forward to Chapter 1:

Mr. Keen continually refers to all blogists as monkeys and relates blog entries/writers to “T. H. Huxley’s infinite monkey theorem”. (The theory that “If you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters they will eventually write a ‘Great American novel’”) Aside from the fact that it has been proven that Huxley did not come up with this phrase at all, blogists are in no way random and their intent is not to come up with the ‘Great American Novel’. Blogging is a medium to project thoughts, express opinions, dabble with poetry/art, offload stress, among many other things, but not on that list is any intent to write a piece of work that will be recognized by a publisher, let alone compete with Shakespeare or Fitzgerald.

He then goes on a rant about Wikipedia and how with no editors, no reporters and no expertise in reporting necessary to join: (I am quoting this as it is so preposterous)

It’s the blind leading the blind – infinite monkeys providing infinite information for infinite readers, perpetuating the cycle of misinformation and ignorance.

What?! Firstly, it is not the intent of Wikipedia to educate. Wikipedia is very clear that it is edited by anyone and no credentials are necessary. If people are misusing Wikipedia for education instead of entertainment that isn’t the fault of Wikipedia or a cause of social breakdown. In fact it is the exact opposite! Social breakdown is causing people to mistake entertainment for news. This has nothing to do with Wikipedia! Our education system has taught laziness and hasn’t updated to the new age we are in. Education has to change to support the media available. Like in my Economics class using the Internet to gather real time statistical data about the world stock markets to learn real world examples of market trends as opposed to using Wikipedia to find vague averages, or Google to find Forbes’ lists.

Mr. Keen also claims that every post on Craigslist for free is taking away paid jobs at newspapers and that every Wikipedia reader is taking away money from Brittania… Again, setting aside that I am sure most local papers won’t post a request for a hot MMF ass orgy, and Encyclopedia Brittania contains no episode guide list for Futurama, I guess my small and simple point is that the audiences aren’t the same! I am sure the Venn Diagram looks like the MasterCard logo, but the overlap is not significant enough to impact large organizations like New York Times or Grolier! The decline in the circulation of newspapers and the sale of encyclopedias is attributed to the fact that people don’t read the morning newspaper, and don’t want a bookshelf of facts from A-Z that has the weight of a locomotive! Say what you will about the fact that people work 20 hours a day, check their Blackberries non-stop and require up-to-the-second news sent via txt msg, it is where we are. Adapt to it! Utilize the technology that is here to stay, don’t complain that it is stealing from you. Yes, video killed the radio star, and DVD bitch slapped VHS, no one at Sony yelled about technology changing, they made a different product! And comedians, musicians, newsmakers are more popular and wealthy then they were!

So, did you make it through that? I apologize for the long entry.  I am sorry that I am destroying our economy, culture and values, but as long as I continue to read this book I will do my best to keep that destruction down to the minimum… oh and yes, I get the irony that I am reviewing a book whose thesis is anti-blog in a blog…

When I do this I do not turn on the 57 fluorescent lights that line our ceiling so I can sit at my desk in the very back [...]]]> Sometimes I get to work before anyone else, not because I am overly keen, but I live an 8 minute walk away… Pretty hard to blame traffic.

When I do this I do not turn on the 57 fluorescent lights that line our ceiling so I can sit at my desk in the very back of the office and work. The morning sun is usually enough light for me to find my seat and turn on my computer.

I have been doing this for 3 years and yet my coworkers are constantly surprised that I am sitting in the dark! Is it such a novelty for me to not want to bombard my eyes with blue-tinged, glowing chemicals at 8:30am?

On this note of turning lights off, recently “Earth Hour” seems to be deemed, by the media at least, a success. But really… Was this event really a success?

I was in a meeting the same day as Earth Hour occurred. We came into the room turned out the lights so that we could view the projector and held the entirety of the meeting in the darkened room. When the meeting was done, we got up to leave and the host of the meeting turned the room lights back on and closed the door to the now empty room. Why? What is our obsession with having everything lit up to its fullest potential?  I walk through cities at night and see rows of 50+ story buildings with every floor brightly shining into the night! Even if there is some one on every floor, is it necessary that every single light be on? The linked Wiki page says the TO saw a 15% decrease in electricity consumption during that hour. Now I am no expert on energy, but if all I had to do to decrease consumption by 15% was shut a light switch off for one hour, and energy is a big concern for me, can’t this be done every night of the year?!

As my former roommates know I do tend to prefer darkness, probably my inner geek coming out, but I don’t think it is this preference that makes me think that Earth Hour (note the highlight) is a ridiculous concept. It is the fact that turning off a light when a room is empty is common sense that makes me come to this conclusion! All throughout Europe they have sensors that turn off hallways lights in hotels and business when empty, and turn on lights as soon as doors open. Even our office building in England has that, and we are a small building. These are not expensive tools, and according to Earth Hour, can save 10s to 100s of MWs every hour!

Regardless, you have to admit that organizing a global project to save sporadic amounts of energy for one hour in 88 out of 195 countries is not an efficient way to tackle this problem. Declared success or not, the real problem Earth Hour was trying to address wasn’t even scratched. How can you make the smallest dent in a problem by changing your behaviour 0.01% of the time (1 hour out of an entire year). Let’s put it this way: I want to lose weight using exercise. Using the Earth Hour Methodology® I only need to exercise 1.15 minutes in a week.  Sounds good to me, but how many health experts would advocate that as a solution?

Look, I am not an environmentalist. I try to apply common sense to my daily life. Don’t throw wrappers on the ground, reuse shopping bags, use reusable containers for leftovers etc.  So before the environmentalists say I am dismissing the effectiveness of the awareness Earth Hour spread, all I am saying is: Take all the effort you put into Earth Hour; The viral Tweets and Facebook groups, the banners, the government lobbying and put that towards a longer term solution and the Earth would benefit more.

BTW: This is all assuming that the Earth benefits from this… But that is another blog entry

Google Street View has recently come under fire when trying to photograph a specific town in England.

Now the camera has been used by the public for about 100 years. Over [...]]]> As was my view in this entry of my blog, I can now provide even further proof of this ridiculous world we live in.

Google Street View has recently come under fire when trying to photograph a specific town in England.

Now the camera has been used by the public for about 100 years. Over those years there have been some drastic changes that now have evolved into digital pictures. Pictures that don’t physically exist, but that can be immediately transferred around the world. This evolved into Google Street View: The ability to see, given a postal code, an area in pictures.

Every single article I have ever read on this topic includes some form of this quote:

But it has been accused of invading people’s right to privacy. Those left embarrassed include customers filmed leaving sex shops and a man caught being sick in the street.

In fact some articles even claim that divorces have been filed, which of course seems really ridiculous…

What the people in this particular village are now discovering is the same phenomenon that I spoke to before: By making a scene you are in the end screwing yourself over. Also known as the Streisand Effect.

Google Street View is not an invasion of privacy. Why? Privacy is the ability to keep things about you private to you or a group of people. The front of your house is not a private matter. I am willing to concede that the ability to view a streamlined picture of an entire street could be used for evil, but in the same token so can phone books! Millions of telemarketers use phone books to call you every single day. All a phone book is is a collection of every phone number alphabetically for a town. All Street View is is a collection of house fronts for a village in the order they appear on the street!

All technologies have the ability to be used for undesirable purposes. Do you think it is a coincidence that when you are listed as single on Facebook ads for singles in your area appear in the toolbar? No! This site is data mining what you upload to try and entice you to buy something. 20 years ago a company would spend millions on researching people to figure out who was single, what age range some one was in, what their favourite movies are, and now we are voluntarily typing that data into an international database!? For Christ’s sake there are marketing people who have wet dreams about this sort of thing!

CCTV is all over the UK. I am on camera every single day. There are people everyday being caught coming out of sex shops, vomiting in the streets and yet someone taking a static, let me repeat, STATIC photo of your house is an invasion of privacy? Are you kidding me? I walk past houses everyday, I see though the front windows and sometimes see a family having dinner, sometimes see the tv on. Is it really private knowledge that people eat dinner and watch tv? Hell, a friend once told me she was coming home from work and her neighbour had the blinds open watching hardcore porn!

The bottom line here is that irrationality and un-education about a technology or a cause makes the situation worse. If all these people did was read Google’s Policy, they could perfectly quietly ask to not have their pictures on the site, and Google will comply as several hundred people have done and no one would have known. (Coincidentally, just as you can do with the phone book)

Unfortunately my house is not on Google Street View, so I cannot show you my lovely flat and let you invade my “privacy”.