BARACK OBAMA’S visit last week to the Republicans’ issues retreat in Baltimore was a pretty daring move. To envision how daring, it’s useful to take a look at this visualisation of the Senate’s social graph over the past 19 years, posted back in May by Andrew Odewahn, an information-design expert.

The icon will be used in online ads that go to users based on demographics.

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A mockup of an ad that includes the Power-I icon.

Trying to ward off regulators, the advertising industry has agreed on a standard icon — a little “i” — that it will add to most online ads that use demographics and behavioral data to tell consumers what is happening.

Jules Polonetsky, the co-chairman and director of the Future of Privacy Forum, an advocacy group that helped create the symbol, compared it to the triangle made up of three arrows that tells consumers that something is recyclable.

From this summer in the US, people will be able to tell more about how their behaviour information is being used by media and advertisers to target them by clicking on a little “i” in the corner of display ads.

My sense is that the “i” symbol will simultaneously assuage fears and broaden the debate(s) around online privacy. While many will be happier about the openness of advertisers, for the mainstream user unaware that their clickstream, social graph and search history may informing the ads they see it will represent a new and troubling aspect of web use. Expect in the short term for ad-blocking apps and privacy opt-outs to become more popular.

In the longer term though, it will all be for the best.

Ultimately a better informed, more digitally literate society will make choices about how privacy and relationship between citizens, corporations and government will work. Better that literacy raises sooner so that the dominant voices in debates that may shape legislation are not just those of the advertising and media industries. The implications for our web future are too important for that to be the case.

Last Friday I presented at the NMAlive event* on Online Engagement Demysitified event, running with the hopeful title “How Engagement Measurement Will Change the World” (see slides above).

As ever, it was a good opportunity to revisit the theme of engagement measurement and think about how we talk about it at iCrossing.

We’ve effectively spent the last four years looking at how you quantify and understand the concept of engagement. It’s only with evidence and actionable analysis that the idea of connected brands, organisations in touch and in dialogue with with their customers and stakeholders online becomes real.

This conference really got me thinking. This is the first of a few posts on the subject of engagement, I reckon…

Adam Tinworth (of @adders fame on Twitter) is head of blogging, social etc. at Reed Business Information, and one of the real pioneers of online journalism.

In this slide show he shares five of the most important things he has learned in the past few years. They are simple and compelling rules for anyone who takes their online presence seriously…

You are killing our creative industries. “Downloading costs billions,” said the Sun. “MORE than 7 million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, government advisers said today. Researchers found more than a million people using a download site in ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn worth of material.”

That’s about a tenth of our GDP. No wonder the Daily Mail was worried too: “The network had 1.3 million users sharing files online at midday on a weekday. If each of those downloaded just one file per day, this would amount to 4.73bn items being consumed for free every year.” Now I am always suspicious of this industry, because they have produced a lot of dodgy figures over the years. I also doubt that every download is lost revenue since, for example, people who download more also buy more music. I’d like more details.

This dissection of lazy journalism and careless statisticians from last June still makes for very interesting reading…

Really enjoyed this presentation from from Dan Calladine of Carat’s Next Generation media series.

I enjoyed it as a link-smorgasbord of interesting sources that fit into various digital trends.

Particularly pleased for the prompt to take a look at stories like:

• Twitter predicting the success of the movie New Moon (implies that people’s reactions on social media to movies will be as important as opening weekend box office tickets in indicating the success of films). 
• The complexity of breaking up with someone when your digital lives are inter-twined (especially when, as Dan highlights, US teens often give their partners their passwords as a token of trust). 
• Finland’s declaration that access to 1MB broadband is a human right. 
• China’s 124 million social network users across 100 platforms.

Via @chriseden