Video game journalism has only recently taken on ‘real’ journalism. For the first decade or so it would have been difficult to distinguish journalistic organs from industry PR publications, the only thing journalistic about early magazines like PC Gamer being numerical reviews. Rarely was in-depth journalism part of the equation. In the last decade however, with the rise of the internet and the ease of independent publication, game journalism has become a real thing. All the standard forms of journalism we see in politics, finance, local and the rest are now rising tasks for games journalists.

While things are changing, the field of game journalism faces three major challenges:

1. Video games journalism spawned from a mostly non-journalistic magazine industry which was completely dependent on the video game industry to formally recognize them and deliver to them review materials (the games themselves).
2. Video games journalism has grown to gangly adulthood in an age where everything about journalism is in complete flux due to changing advertising methods and the new options given by the internet.
3. The young journalists leading the genre have come of age in a time when we increasingly do not trust the old journalists, but when we don’t trust the entire methodology of journalism. For good reason too, as various scandals, misguided attempts to find advertising dollars, and plain old human idiocy have shown the entire journalism establishment to be untrustworthy.

In journalism, games journalism is our canary in the coal mine. That’s why anyone who calls themselves a journalist should pay attention to the recent controversy around the Games Media Awards.

What you should read first:

• One of the copies of EuroGamer’s original article about the ethical problems with the Games Media Awards: A Table of Doritos.
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s John Walker’s blog post titled “An Utter Disgrace” – about the ethical issues of the GMAs, the proper response of misrepresented journalists, UK libel laws, and the ethics of journalism.
• The conversation between Cameron Kunzelman (who I do not know) and Ethan Gach, a journalist who I worked with at Nightmare Mode, about the topic, which made me think enough about it to write the post. (Here’s my contribution.)
• The excellent Leigh Alexander’s Gamasutra post on video game culture’s identity crisis.
• A Rock, Paper, Shotgun story about how the games industry tries to buy journalists’ ethics.
• Additional historical context: The Gerstmann controversy, in which Gamespot allegedly fired an editor for publishing a bad review of a game sponsoring the site. Penny-arcade. | Shacknews. | Valleywag.

At the crux of video game journalism’s ethics conflict lies what I think of as “The Access Paradox.”

The Access Paradox:

With modern technology, it is increasingly easy for anyone to get information out themselves, rather than depending on journalistic publications. This means that any given information source is can more seriously weigh publishing information or news themselves rather than give access to a journalist who may not respond favorably. This creates a paradox for journalists where they must consider criticism or boosting of a source against a level of continued access that may make or break their careers.

The access paradox is something that is very much a focus of college journalism, and I saw frequently both working in the field and in the excellent reporting done by folks who cover it. However, it exists all over journalism and no where more prominently than in gaming journalism. Why is this issue so significant in games journalism? Because no where else is the hand quite so close to the mouth. A games journalist who has been denied access to review copies of games is not going to go very far. Not only that, but the community is still pretty small. Games journalists, PR folk, and developers are a relatively close-knit group compared to other journalists and their subjects and mediators.

This closeness between subject and reporter brings on an even heavier version of the access paradox. Just like I saw in college journalism, the pressure to be favorable to a subject is even greater when being negative can result in not only professional, but also personal ostracism.

The pressure of the access paradox is something that most reporters are probably not even conscious of, but it sits there and even on a subconscious level it can change our behavior. That pressure grows every day as industry self-publication grows in both opportunity and effectiveness.

The real threat to the professional journalist isn’t the ad-buy, but the CCO, a C-suite position of rising popularity, it stands for Chief Content Officer. It’s a position for a company interested in running their own ‘journalism’ outlets. Note the quote marks. Even the most well-intentioned company cannot create an internal newsroom that stands free of bias, not when they are paying the journalists to report on the industry signing their paychecks.

So what’s the solution?

The inevitable push-back against distrusted journalism has come as the internet makes history more open. It has become ever more difficult for journalists to claim a lack of bias when college op-eds and Facebook posts start showing up in the internet’s archives. So, we push to rethink what makes a journalist.

Leading this push? NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen. Rosen has formulated terms to help us think about ‘journalism as it is’. He talks about journalists’ claim to The View from Nowhere, and how it is completely and irrevocably flawed. His solution: for journalists to be transparent about their biases. His solution is a good one and journalists are beginning to look at transparency as the new objectivity. This is great, because transparency allows us to escape the flawed myth of non-bias and avoid the church of the savvy.

But! When reality smacks us across the mouth, it turns out not to work. Why? Because transparency can’t be the new objectivity as long as some journalists pretend to either or both. The Access Paradox teaches us that as long as one journalist is has fallen to boosting a source to preserve professional credentials then there is a conduit for the industry to go to while blocking the truly transparent out.

If the gaming industry can buy one journalist, why bother with allowing access to another?

As long as this is true, transparency is a flawed solution. It is far too much effort to force transparency on journalists who don’t subscribe to it (or even those who pretend do, but only partially do so) and trying to do so is ethically questionable.

My stance supporting transparency has long been on the record. That said, the greater my experience, the more I see that transparency can’t stand alone.

Perhaps, in political journalism, where they’ve become used to giving journalists access, transparency is all you need. But in growing journalism fields like games journalism, the subject isn’t used to allowing access. The result:

This club, this weird club of pals and buddies that make up a fair proportion of games media, needs to be broken up somehow. They have a powerful bond, though – held together by the pressures of playing to the same audience. Games publishers and games press sources are all trying to keep you happy, and it’s much easier to do that if they work together. Publishers are well aware that some of you go crazy if a new AAA title gets a crappy review score on a website, and they use that knowledge to keep the boat from rocking. Everyone has a nice easy ride if the review scores stay decent and the content of the games are never challenged. Websites get their exclusives. Ad revenue keeps rolling in. The information is controlled. Everyone stays friendly. It’s a steady flow of Mountain Dew pouring from the hills of the money men, down through the fingers of the weary journos, down into your mouths. At some point you will have to stop drinking that stuff and demand something better.

-Originally from Eurogamer.

In the modern day, when everyone has access to the audience, our ethics as journalists are only measured against the expectations of the lowest denominator. For games journalists that means that our ethical considerations are measured against the PR people who work for the industry. Transparency turned against us. After all, the PR people are perfectly transparent. We know who they work for. They have total access. But the journalists who want that same level of access are forced into the access paradox of journalism, that to get and maintain access may require bad journalism.

This may only be a serious issue in games journalism right now, but it won’t stay in games journalism. As it becomes easier and more effective for journalistic subjects to whip up their own news instead of working with reporters, the pressure of the access paradox is going to grow and eventually anyone who lays claim to the title of journalist is going to find their ethics pitted against their access and there may not be a good way to save both their ethics and their jobs. 

EDIT: Boing Boing reports “Game writer out of a job after libel complaint.”

About a year ago, I wrote an article about how to archive Twitter chats using the then popular and perfectly functional WhatTheHashtag. Later on the site was suddenly shut down and the service discontinued. Since then, I’ve stumbled from tool to tool, trying to find an equally optimal solution that would allow me to generate HTML containing Tweets and post them on my blog (independent from any other platform) with the greatest amount of speed possible.

No single product was as quick, effective or independent as WhatTheHashtag was. So, I finally got fed up and decided that I’d try to build one myself. I started with Web Journalist Chat (#wjchat), a weekly Twitter chat for journalists because they had the nicest archive I’d seen thus far. I contacted the chat-runner Robert Hernandez, who directed me to Kim Bui, who emailed me the code they used, created by Daniel Thorogood.

When I saw that the code was all pretty understandable by my standards, I decided I could alter it into a WordPress plugin. An associate at George Mason University gave me the idea to make it a shortcode. Thus was the Twitter Search Shortcode born. Here’s a direct download link to the WordPress plugin.

[tooltip content="I was thinking of you when I built this!" url="" ]My potential users[/tooltip]

• Conference attendees: Much to the dismay of my followers, I tend to use my Twitter as a note-taking tool during conferences, mapping everything I write on to a hashtag. However,  after 7 days, this becomes pretty much impossible to find. So I need a place to store all those tweets for future reference.
• Academics and journalists: Major events are going on, history is forming before our eyes in 140 character chunks. While tools like Storify allow us to capture this to a degree, often too much manual labor is involved to make it practical. Additionally, any Storify content (as I recently discovered to my supreme annoyance) is stored remotely. I needed to automate this process and store it on my own terms.
• Community managers, event managers, PR folk, etc…: We do a ton of work to organize a community around something like a hashtag, a phrase or URL. Sometimes we need to report that information to the higher-ups. It would be nice to show them what people are talking about and have a document to reference for times further in the future than 7 days.

What it needed to do:

• Retrieve as many Tweets as possible and store them on my server.
• Output those tweets as HTML that could be displayed as a story.
• Order them for reading (reverse datetime format).
• Not have to muck about in code every time I wanted to store a different query.

Thankfully, it appears that the current version of the plugin can do all that and more!

The current (0.6) version of the plugin works! Here’s how:

1. You enter the appropriate information, including the search term, into a self-contained shortcode.
2. Then, when you first load the page or post you placed the shortcode on, it will query up to 1500 tweets and return them to your website.
3. The plugin will then spit those tweets out as formatted HTML and display them in your post.
4. The plugin will then store that HTML in a post-meta field associated with that particular post.
5. On any future loads of the post, the shortcode’s script will detect that there cached data in the unique post-meta field associated with the plugin and will not attempt to query Twitter again.
6. All Twitter posts are using a built-in stylesheet.

The options you have when using the plugin:

Image via CrunchBase

You can download the plugin from my GitHub at the twitter-search-shortcode repository. Currently, there is a folder in there called “testing” and it contains a couple of scripts meant to run as stand-alone files on a server or local server to test out parts of the code. You can use it if you want to mess around with the script and see how it works.

The readme file designates some of the current issues. You can see there and at the repository’s issues page what are the current features and bugs I’m working on for the plugin.

If you know the answers or [tooltip content="(especially how to convert datestamps)" url="" ]have solutions[/tooltip] to any of the problems in my code, please tell me by posting here, on the issue, or dedicating a fix to the github.

If you’d like to fork it or reuse the code elsewhere, feel free to do, as long as you give credit to everyone involved, including myself.

If you use this plugin and encounter any issues please inform me. Either here, on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, or in an issue post on GitHub.

Thank you!

For this year’s conference, I presented one workshop with Michele Boyet and three sessions on my own.

For convenience, here are all the presentations I gave. All are under a creative commons attribution 3.0 licence, so feel free to remix, reuse and copy, as long as you give credit to me as the original author.

Brand Me: Using Social Media to Brand Yourself and Your Newsroom

The first is the from the workshop. I can’t take full credit for this as part of it is built by Michele. The presentation was followed by workshopping with student media groups on their social media presences.

What is Search Engine Optimization and Where Does it Live? A Crash Course for Journalists

A slight update to a presentation I gave last year, this session was very well attended by students interested in learning the basics of SEO.

A Search Engine Optimized Presentation on Search Engine Optimization

The third presentation targets students and faculty interested in advancing to the advanced-beginner / intermediate stage of knowledge in SEO. For the first time, I built the presentation using reveal.js, which was a lot of fun. The only downside was the code was difficult to see on a projector, so hopefully I’ll be able to fix that for next time.

Since the presentation was a website, I was able to optimize the presentation itself (thus the name) and hopefully interested students will take a look at the code and get some tips.

While the presentation is full of important tips, here are a few highlights. Press down to explore each topic.

• Using advanced search operators.
• Learn how to speed up your site.
• Structuring internal navigational links.
• An explanation of what’s going on with XML Sitemaps.
• Understanding and fixing Canonicalization.
• Free tools for finding and testing keywords.
• Understanding Google’s META tags for journalists.

Research to Release: Using the Free Web to Create Better Journalism

The last presentation went over 50 of the tools from this doc in 50 minutes and how journalists could use them to improve and promote their reporting.

Related articles

• Want To Save Journalism? Start At The Bottom (readwriteweb.com)

Even what we consider very creative works stand on the back of significant remixing.

The concept of remixes is nothing new, but the legal attacks that have abounded in recent years are. The derision remixes now receive from mainstream media could cause a dangerous stagnation for inventors, producers and content creators of all stripes.

Ferguson is not the first person to discuss the deep flaws in ‘copywrong,’ but the videos he’s produced are easily digestible and approachable by any audience.  They are required reading for any media literacy or civics class.

Here’s the latest video, the fourth and final part of ‘Everything is a Remix.’ If you haven’t seen the series, the rest of the videos are below.

Part 4 of Everything is a Remix: System Failure

Start from the beginning:

Part 1: The Song Remains the Same

Part 2: Remix Inc.

Part 2.5: KILL BILL

Part 3: The Elements of Creativity

Part 3.5: THE MATRIX

The movement has spawned all sorts of interesting storytelling events; an overwhelming amount of live citizen coverage in a way I really haven’t seen before; and an unprecedented use of technology for reporting. However, I think one element is far more successful than others in [tooltip content="As they say on CNN." url="" ]crafting the movement’s narrative[/tooltip]. That is the Tumbler site “We Are the 99 Percent.”

I recently discovered Occupationalist, a fascinating site dedicated to pulling in all coverage (and self-reporting) in and about the Occupy movement. I think it is notable that they put a photo feed of the posts on “We Are the 99 Percent” at the top of the page. These photos and the stories within are certainly far more affecting then all the people standing outside in the world.

The Tumblog is so effective because each post is self-reported and has a story of which we are clearly only seeing the tip. After all there is only so much you can fit in one photo. The real emotional impact is the implication that there are whole lives behind each page, ones that are bound in solidarity and possibly unhappiness, fear, poverty and more.

Within the world of journalism there have been a number of articles about why OWS is getting relatively little coverage and why, in general, journalists don’t like to cover protests. I think a big part of it is because the physical protests, out there in the parks and squares and where ever else, don’t have the type of clear narrative that news people like. However, more than that, the mainstream media can’t figure out how to effectively turn the OWS story into a story about people, which is exactly what “We Are the 99 Percent” has succeeded in doing.

Beyond that, “We Are the 99 Percent” is the most significant crowd-sourced reporting project I’ve ever seen. As I was writing this post, the Tumblog hit 200 pages, which comes to a total of 3,000 individual posts. That’s in slightly under 2 months.

Whatever you feel about the movement, whether you agree or disagree, whether you think they are doing the right thing or not, you need to go to “We Are the 99 Percent” and just read a few pages deep worth of posts.

These photos make it clear that there are real people out there and some are really suffering. Even a few minutes of reading can bring the realization that they are our fellow human beings and need help, somehow. Whatever your politics, you can’t help feeling sympathetic and perhaps a little sad.

That’s the story.

Related articles

• JOSEPH STIGLITZ: Occupy Wall Street Doesn’t Need An Agenda (project-syndicate.org)
• Marketwatch Reporter says: “Occupy Wall Street is 99% Dead” (occupy-stories.com)
• William Bradley: Ocupado (huffingtonpost.com)
• Occupy Wall Street Gets Its Own Social Aggregator (mashable.com)
• The Making of Occupationalist.org (thedenveregotist.com)
• Dear Occupy Wall Street: You Are Not The 99 Percent! (hustleknockin.com)

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oy-2E4YQpU[/youtube]

I mean, that’s only one of the many trailers I’ve watched and it alone gets me more excited to play the game than all the Brewmasters in Pandaria.

There are games I’ve gotten really excited about, but for an MMO to get my attention it has to do something special. Star Trek Online caught me for months because I love starship combat and the Star Trek universe (and Spock was in it).

Star Wars The Old Republic is so attractive for entirely different reasons, ones that have nothing to do with the Star Wars universe. BioWare games are well written and their implementations of Star Wars mythology into gameplay (most particularly in the Knights of The Old Republic series) tends towards novel and clever. It helps that it is almost always well-written.

On the well-written side of things, it seems like SWTOR is likely to be the most impressive yet. BioWare has reportedly written novels of content for the game. Then there is their fascinating implementation of companion characters.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqxa5O7UpWY[/youtube]

Really interesting right?

I’ve already pre-ordered the game. Anyone else out there going to be online with me on 12/20/11?

Related articles

• BioWare Showcases New SW: The Old Republic Warzone: The Voidstar (pinkbananaworld.com)
• ‘Star Wars: The Old Republic’ Collector’s Edition Gets Unboxed (gamerant.com)
• Is KOTOR 2 destined to be forgotten by Star Wars: The Old Republic? (biobreak.wordpress.com)
• Backstabbing galore: Daniel Erickson talks about the Sith Inquisitor’s story (massively.joystiq.com)

Website headers (or the [tooltip content="Perhaps the most popular alternate term for the header area. " url="" ]banner area[/tooltip]) seems considered sacrosanct. It’s one of the most visible parts of a page, often the first thing participants see, and is valuable ad space. However, the area is often free of information and rarely contains links to content. There’s a better way to build your website.

Let’s look at a few high-profile websites with [tooltip content="And I know I'm among the guilty with the header on this site. Working on it." url="" ]underused headers[/tooltip].

Or you can skip to the 6 simple rules for a better website header.

Author’s note: thumbnails generated dynamically. 

CNN.com‘s only prominent item is a search bar. There are a few understated links to TV content and a sign-in.

Then there’s the New York Times, who has left their header’s content entirely up to advertisers.

Next up is the LA Times, who at least have the date and time in their header, if not much else.

You’d think the more internet savvy The Daily What might have taken back the header space, but it seems not. At least it has links to other Cheezburger sites on top.

Who uses their header space well?

Let’s first look at Wonkette, which puts a great rotating featured story area in their header.

Smashing Magazine has shrunk the header and uses it to promote their own content in hard-cover format, which is half-way to an ad, but I’ll give it to them.

Gawker Media blogs like Kotaku have practically eliminated the header.

Seth Godin’s blog has gotten rid of the header entirely, you jump right into the content.

Creating a better header and why.

If you want to make money on your site, you should probably put an ad in the header. That doesn’t mean it has to [tooltip content="Like Fast Company's website." url="http://www.fastcompany.com" ]take up the entire space[/tooltip]. A good header can have room for both an ad and, at least, some pointers to content.

The best of the above options is actually Wonkette (surprising, I know). The idea is to put a dynamic graphic and text content into your header.

Why?

Eyetracking studies show that when people look at a webpage they often scan it in an “F” shape.

They don’t scan the entire page. The most significant concentrations come at your first few paragraphs of content and your header. The study shows that this is less likely to happen if the header is just a solid graphic. So break your header up into a set of elements. This is also a great argument against sliders that take up the entire width of a page.

As you can see in the image at the right, participants may also avoid areas of the header above a sidebar.

It’s useful have links to content, with accompanying graphic elements like post thumbnails, in the header. Better to have them towards the left than the right (unless your site is for an audience that reads right to left), especially if you can avoid putting them over a sidebar.

6 simple rules for a better website header.

1. Break up your header into elements separated with [tooltip content="Or whatever your background color might be." url="" ]white space[/tooltip]. Nothing but your navigation should the entire width of the page.
2. People are more likely to look at the entire length of your header than your third paragraph, so take advantage of their attention by using the whole space.
3. Feature content in your header with a graphic element, like a post thumbnail, but keep it simple.
4. Don’t place header content you want people to use over a sidebar.
5. The further left you can place elements without violating rule 4, the better.
6. Don’t waste space above the fold by making the header too tall.

Image by laihiu via Flickr

Amazon’s $80 Kindle could close the gap in access to information technology and provide the good experience without the bad.

When I’m involved in discussions about using new media and technology in education the inevitable rejoinder is ‘What about the digital divide?” It’s great if you make the ultimate teaching tool for the iPad, but what about the 50% of the class without iPads? This problem is even more significant outside of the classroom and the solutions are no easier to discover.

Technologists like to talk about the uniting power of technology, how it brings free speech, frees society and solves problems through communication. Unfortunately this is all for naught if people can’t access digital technology or the internet.

If we want to get the revolution started we need to get technology in the hands of those least likely to have it. The technology we should get into their hands is the new Kindle.

To put this in context: From 1997 to 2007 internet users averaged out to 62 per 100 inhabitants in the developed world and 22 per 100 in the developing world. Globally it averaged to 17 internet users per 100 people.  If new technology is how we are going to remake the world, that’s a lot of people without access. Especially considering the significant gap between developed and developing countries.

I can think of two significant attempts to combat the digital divide. The Grameen Bank is one, though microloans are a sort of oblique way to come at it and combating digital divide is more after-effect than purpose. More relevant is the One Laptop Per Child project (1LPC). The 1LPC project focuses on empowering those with money to donate a rugged $100 laptop to those who would otherwise not have any access. Both are great projects and both have found some success.

Though both have reached out to the US, neither of these projects are really targeted at the issue of the digital divide that exists in developed countries (like ours). Nor have either made a truly significant dent in the divide.

What’s needed to make a real bridge across the digital divide? Why profit motive of course.

It’s nice to think about successful charity, but the cold reality of the situation is that money really does make the world go round.

Which is why Amazon is the solution. The company already takes losses on the sale of each Kindle model which they make up in book sales and, more recently, on-device advertising. Larger losses in exchange for significant audience growth is clearly something that would sell to their C-suite.

Looking at the $79 version, cheaper than a $100 laptop, the Kindle itself  is a pretty remarkable digital device and has everything that’s needed to bridge the divide.

• Wi-fi enabled basic internet access
• A long battery life (one month!) useful to those without constant easy access to power
• Access to over a million books, many of which are free or educational.
• The new software even allows Kindle users to take books out of a library for free.
• The books that are for sale are often (over 800,000 of them) less expensive than your average ring-tone.
• It is readable and works well outside.
• It’s very portable and simple to use.

On top of that, Amazon could have serious incentive to ship out to non-US countries or even to provide free or discounted devices to the poor here in the US, as they would be able to make a profit off the Kindles’ advertisement sales and book purchases. Even more useful is the Kindle Keyboard 3G, which has free access to 3G internet all over the world.

Imagine an Amazon donation effort or even an Amazon-backed organization along the lines of One Laptop per Child. We could bring corporate interests together with humanitarian needs and find a real, sustainable, solution to the digital divide.

The gap between those who can easily access the future and those who cannot is significant and is a weighty problem. The Kindle is the solution.

Related articles

• The digital divide is costing America 32 billion dollars a year via the Digital Exclusion infographic (socialwayne.com)
• Digital Inequality (fionaspringer.wordpress.com)
• India unveils cheapest tablet computer (ft.com)
• Digital Citizenship and Digital Divide (daniellehall02.wordpress.com)
• E-books pose problem for the underside of the digital divide (teleread.com)
• Who’s Responsible for the Digital Divide? The Answer May Surprise You! | TechSoup for Libraries (techsoupforlibraries.org)
• Carnival of Journalism: Hack your life with the Kindle, After the Deadline and more (hacktext.com)
• Announcing P2 for Kindle! A WordPress theme for notes and collaboration (hacktext.com)
• eBooks’ greatest obstacle is that they function like books (hacktext.com)
• Why the Kindle is my Swiss Army knife (hacktext.com)

Image via Wikipedia

For the fifth time at Mason, I have delivered a D’var Torah, an interpretation of the Torah, to the High Holidays congregation at the university Hillel service. This year I spoke on the eve of Rosh Hashanah and my topic, relevantly enough to this blog, was the power of storytelling and why it is important that we all do it. You can read the entire piece at my Nodality and I am excerpting a chunk here.

Tonight is the beginning of Rosh Hashanah, which literally translates to ‘head of the year.’ It’s the first day, One Tishrei, of the new Jewish Year 5772. The Rabbis teach us that Rosh Hashanah is the anniversary of the creation of man and woman.

Isn’t that sort of odd?

There were six days of creation (and one day of rest) in the first week of the world. We are not starting at the beginning of this biblical week, nor really at the end. Instead we start our calendar, and every new year, at the anniversary of day 6, the creation of man. Why day six? Is it because humanity might, perhaps, be a bit egotistical?

I think there is more to it then that.

Is there something else that makes day 6 special? In Genesis, chapter two, we receive the second version of the creation story. God has created Adam but, before creating Eve, Adonai has a task for the first man. God brings forth every beast and bird He has created and presents them to Adam. The Torah states that God “brought them to the man to see what he would call each one and whatever the man called each living creature, that remained its name.” (Verse 19).

 

Read the rest at: The power in our stories. Rosh Hashanah D’var Torah for 5772.

Since the beginning of the social media revolution, the structure of the sites we use inspires a fire-and-forget philosophy towards creating content. This is especially true on Twitter, where you can’t even reach past a week into your personal archive without direct links to each update. Facebook had the same issue. Though the content we create on social media platforms exists forever, our inability to reach it led to a certain way of thought. One that is pretty detrimental to users. Facebook’s new Timeline feature, set to go live across all accounts in a week, will change that forever.

Facebook's new Timeline feature.

You won’t understand until you use Timeline just how transparent it is. It shows you every element of your social media life on Facebook from the day you began. All data that was there before, but not easy to get to. People are going to freak out. Not because of the new design, but because they will suddenly realize that everything they’ve said, done, joined or otherwise broadcast on Facebook is there, clear as day, available for anyone with a few minutes of curiosity to see.

People update their profiles and accounts without a real thought towards the long-term consequences of what they put up on the public internet. They figure that because they couldn’t find the content, no one else will. As a result they post things that, perhaps, they shouldn’t.

This is a problem.

Just because services like Twitter and Foursquare lack the functionality for the average user to access and see their lifetime of content doesn’t mean it isn’t accessible. It doesn’t mean that others can’t access it, perhaps the very people you wouldn’t want accessing your social updates. The fact that others can access our information while we can’t, the lack of transparency with these services, is a very bad thing.

By opening access of your information to you (and anyone else) Facebook is going to upset a lot of people because suddenly everyone will easily be able to find everything you’ve done online. That’s good. They should freak out. It’s always been like this (and not just on Facebook) and the average user didn’t realize it.

Facebook revolutionized the way we use the internet when they convinced people to use their real names and pictures to represent themselves online. Now they are confronting people with just how it always worked. I suspect that we’ll see a similar enormous shift in people’s behavior online as a result.

This is the internet you signed up for. It’s not creepy, it’s how social media has always been. Only, no one told you until now.

Welcome to reality.

Related articles

• You realize Timelines are COMPLETELY replacing Facebook profiles? (thenextweb.com)
• Facebook Announces Timelines and Improvements to Open Graph (hubspot.com)
• First Look: Facebook’s New Timeline Design (readwriteweb.com)
• Facebook Timeline: Here’s What It Looks Like [VIDEO] (mashable.com)
• Twitter is buzzing about Timelines and Zuckerberg after Facebook’s F8 conference (thenextweb.com)
• @ F8: Facebook Unveils New Class Of Social Apps And Redesigned ‘Timeline’ (paidcontent.org)
• How to Get and Activate Timeline on Facebook (netwidz.com)
• Facebook: Timeline is coming – whether you like it or not (gigaom.com)
• Facebook’s Timeline: Cool or Creepy? (onemanandhisblog.com)
• Facebook’s New ‘Timeline’: Your Life Story (techland.time.com)