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iSchool Employer Connections Fair sponsor: BlueKai featuring Alumnus Robert Bale « UW iSchool Office of Student Services Blog

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 17:05:00 -0800

by Isaac Pattis

Name of Company: BlueKai

Location: Bellevue, WA

Name of Employee: Robert Bale

Title: Taxonomist

Position description:

At BlueKai, the classification team constructs and maintains proprietary taxonomies that are focused on identifying consumer intent in advertising. Our team also works to construct custom taxonomies with clients that are implementing our data management platform. I am involved with managing the taxonomy governance processes for our team, and I also help determine best practices for our partners.

Can you describe a typical day for you at BlueKai?

A typical day usually begins with the idea that I’ve got everything lined up to roll straight through my tasks. That is, until I get to work. There is a steady stream of tasks that might be considered rote (such as reviewing the data being sent by a provider for classification), but there is an equally rapid flow of tasks that are unexpected or are more of a troubleshooting nature (How can we better address this provider’s needs? Does taxonomy actually achieve their goals?). Sometimes the number of unexpected tasks feels daunting, but our team takes things in stride. I’d like to think that the normal day is the one where I start off working on one project, but I find myself delving into several new ones.

What three words would you use to describe the culture at BlueKai?

Smart, empowering & sharing

What is the most memorable experience or accomplishment you have had as an employee at BlueKai?

I think some of the more memorable experiences are those where I’ve demoed a mock taxonomy to a high profile client and they’ve responded by saying, “Ah, that’s what we could do there….” Sometimes they can be critical. Other times they’re enthusiastic. But, in all cases, they’re interacting with the taxonomy that I’ve had a hand in putting together for them.

What would you describe as the best part about working for BlueKai?

I think one cool aspect is that the company, while it continues to grow, is made up of people who are intelligent, savvy and very personable. I like the fact that everyone tries to connect and share information—the culture is very much based on increasing information flow through the company. This is found top-to-bottom here at BlueKai.

Any advice for current students looking to enter your field?

Take time to realize that we each have skills that can be honed whether or not you’re a “taxonomist.” We can all learn to do technical things. Still, the soft skills are equally important to hone. Don’t forget to listen to people or look for ways to improve something. This is the stuff that helps make it simpler to get into this field.

In many ways, management of information tends to boil down to being attentive to context or helping provide context. My career path to date doesn’t look like it was authored in a straight line. However, within the different industries and job titles I’ve touched, it’s all been about being attentive to detail and remembering that, in the end, it’s about exploring something that will make a practical difference for someone (or something).

While a student at UW, was there a particular class or experience that led you to explore opportunities at X Company or the overall field that X Company is in?

I really enjoyed the processes I learned while in my “Organization of Information Resources” (IMT 530) and “Metadata Design Studio” (INFX 538) courses. These were the lead-in courses that helped give me insight into taxonomy.

What is your favorite memory of the UW iSchool?

Of the many memories that I have of the iSchool, there is a series of mental snapshots I have from the Capstone experience. It’s probably cliché to call out that memory, but it’s still pretty visceral for me. I can still see us designing the poster and picking it up from the print shop. I had flashes of nervousness as we presented our talk during the event, yet felt a sense of relief when I could explain our poster to bystanders. Finally, I remember being happy when it dawned on me that our team really had accomplished what we’d set out to do.

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via ischooloss.wordpress.com

Ha. Everyone now and then, you've got to toot your own horn, eh?

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[tak-son-uh-mee] | CloudBlue

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 12:23:00 -0700

What is a “taxonomy”? And why is exceptional data classification essential to a smart marketing strategy?

By Robert Bale | Classifier, BlueKai

What is a taxonomy?

If you’re like me, every now and then you come across a term that sounds more elaborate than it really is. I think the word “taxonomy” is one such term.

Of course, it doesn’t really help that there are two related meanings for taxonomy: In one sense, taxonomy is the art and science of organizing and classifying things. In the second sense, the word refers to the outcome of such classification actions. In this post, I’ll mostly touch on the latter definition. But let’s move ahead…

So, what does that actually mean?

A taxonomy is really a basic concept. A simple definition is to say a taxonomy is one method of organizing and relating things, usually in a hierarchical manner (think trees and branches). And these things can be anything really. Maybe they’re different wines (a fairly common example in taxonomy texts), clothing items in a store or electronics products in a warehouse. Or, maybe they’re something a little more abstract, like names of book authors or a database full of movie titles.

One powerful aspect of creating a taxonomy is that the structure shows the relationships between items. Visually represented, taxonomies tend to look like inverted or sideways trees, with branches showing connections between the things you’re relating. Basically, each item gets a place on a branch somewhere in the tree and the relationships between objects are implied through the branches linking them.

Most commonly, you’ll find that the types of relationships in a taxonomy are often described as parent-child, general-to-specific, broad-to-narrow, or is-a-type-of. So, you can easily imagine taking a general category of things and adding something more specific.

Give me an example, please!

///read more at blogs.bluekai.com

Ha. I couldn't help but point to the blog post I wrote for BlueKai.
Check it out and let me know what you think!

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Try this: Announcing ObscuraCam v1 – Enhance Your Visual Privacy! | The Guardian Project

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 09:48:00 -0700

We’re very happy to announce the beta release of ObscuraCam for Android. This is the first release from the SecureSmartCam project, a partnership with WITNESS, a leading human rights video advocacy and training organization. This is the result of an open-source development cycle, comprised of multiple sprints (and branches), that took place over the last five months. This “v1″ release is just the first step towards the complete vision of the project.

The goal of the SecureSmartCam project to to design and develop a new type of smartphone camera app that makes it simple for the user to respect the visual privacy, anonymity and consent of the subjects they photograph or record, while also enhancing their own ability to control the personally identifiable data stored inside that photo or video. Also, we think an app that allows you to pixelize your friends, disguise their faces and otherwise defend their privacy just a little bit, is a lot of fun and helps raise awareness about an important issue. In this first release we have focused on ‘obscura’ by optimizing the workflow of identity obfuscation in still images. Future releases will look at ‘informa,’ the process of properly gaining and recording informed consent from subjects, while also moving to video.

Quick Download Links

For those of you who just want to get to it, head over to the Android Market to grab the latest version of the app. You can also scan the QR code to the left, and it will take you in that direction.

For those without access to the Android Market, you can get the ObscuraCam.APK file from our public builds folder. The official signed release binary is also available here. For these options, be sure to check back for updates, because the app will not auto-update itself.

The “Cameras Everywhere” Initiative

In January, WITNESS launched their Cameras Everywhere initiative, in which they ask:

As more and more people film people speaking out and taking a stand against human rights crises, how can we protect victims and witnesses and ensure informed consent as much as possible? As more and more footage circulates from human rights crises around the world, how does powerful footage reach audiences in comprehensible ways that move people to action? And how do we know how to trust that footage?

…

Critical issues to address in this realm include safety and security in the use of video; ethical questions raised by the widespread capacity to shoot and circulate human rights video; challenges around the authenticity of video and the preservation of evidence; and the need for effective documentation around the use of video in advocacy.

Through our collaboration, WITNESS has decided to move beyond just awareness, training and advocacy, and instead help design a next generation of Camera app software that is not just intended to share and capture more, but is meant to allow its operator to stop, think and be empowered to control the media they are capturing.

A Primer on Visual Privacy and Anonymity

Visual Privacy is the relationship between collection and dissemination of visual information, the public expectation of privacy, and the legal issues surrounding them. It relates particularly to the increasing presence of large-scale still- and video-camera networks in everyday life. This not only includes those surveillance-oriented networks under the control of corporations and governments, but also applies to the vast new network of citizen-controlled media capture devices such as smartphones and handheld cameras that has created a peer-to-peer, social-networking based surveillance. At the same time that these networks have exploded in size, face detection and recognition technologies have also improved considerably while policy regarding the privacy and fair use of such systems and content, as well as the rights of those imaged by such networks, are topics that are not resolved. What results is a situation in which massive amounts of media are being captured every day with little to no protection of individual rights to privacy or anonymity – something that is especially detrimental to human rights efforts.

As Sam Gregory of WITNESS points out, most contemporary discussions around anonymous communication on the Internet focus on the data protection side – for instance options for data encryption or censorship circumvention. In the case of media content, a largely unaddressed question arises: what about the rights to anonymity and privacy for those people who appear, intentionally or not, in visual recordings? Visual privacy and anonymity may sound like a contradiction in terms, but people often wish to speak out and to ‘be seen’ while at the same time concealing their face and identifying surroundings. As human rights documentation and organizing increasingly involves media capture, how are people enabled to make purposeful choices about when they speak out and what degrees of anonymity they hold onto for themselves? Conversely, people caught in the background of a video or still may be unaware that they are even being filmed in that moment and have no option to protect themselves – particularly true in mass protest settings where the wave of group solidarity may overwhelm any sense of personal privacy. For those speaking out from marginalized positions, personal safety is a very real risk.

Some examples where visual privacy and anonymity is being diluted in the name of features or security:

The persecution later faced by bystanders and people who stepped in to film or assist Neda Agha-Soltan as she lay dying during the 2009 Iranian election protests.

Facebook’s opt-out feature for auto-detection and tagging of faces

British Columbia’s privacy watchdog OKs the use of facial recognition technology to identify rioters from video and still images of Vancouver’s 2011 hockey riots.

Viewdle’s Social Camera automatically tags your friends in photos based on the social networking profile pictures they have published

While some of these examples might seem harmless, or even a useful feature for law enforcement, the main issue is that the subjects of these photos and videos are never asked if they wish to participate in them, not to mention whether they want their photo published online in the first place. The permanence of media on the Web means that any uploaded content can be poured over again and again to identify individuals – either by old-fashioned investigative techniques, but crowd-sourcing, or by face detection /recognition software.

How ObscuraCam Helps

Part of the problem currently surrounding visual privacy and anonymity is the fact that many of the tools and applications that people use on an everyday basis do not have features built in to protect privacy. As a result, everyone with a smartphone, tablet or laptop – not to mention an actual video camera! – captures raw, unedited content that exposes the identities of participants and bystanders present at sensitive events or activities.

ObscuraCam is a mobile application for Android that makes it easy for anyone to protect the identity of individuals or groups represented in their photos by building obfuscation and redaction directly into the app. It can be used on photos taken directly from the app itself, or on any photo that your mobile device has access to, including local memory card images or linked Picasa albums. By moving a usually cumbersome post-production process into the daily workflow of those capturing sensitive images, it’s our hope that visual privacy will be respected when it really matters.

Using ObscuraCam

ObscuraCam features a simple, touch-based user interface for easy manipulation and redaction of images, as well as an automated removal of identifying metadata stored in the photo itself. The following steps walk through the process of capturing and sharing an obscured photo using ObscuraCam.

From the application home page, choose to either capture a new image or choose an existing image from your existing collections. These options just launch your standard Camera and Gallery application. When the photo is imported, identifying EXIF metadata stored in the file itself, such as GPS location, camera make and model or timestamp, will be removed.

After you capture or open an image with ObscuraCam, it is automatically scanned to detect faces. Any faces detected are marked as tagged regions in an image, and the user is able to create as many additional tagged regions as they wish – either via the menu or by long-pressing the desired region. By default, tagged regions are set to be obscured via pixelation.

Once a tagged region has been created, the user can interact with that region by simply touching it to bring up a contextual menu.

Options available from the contextual tagging menu include:

Edit – select to scale and move tagged regions

Redact – select to fully redact tagged region and replace with black space

Pixelate – select to selectively obfuscate identities of persons or situations

bgPixelate – select to easily obfuscate everything BUT the tagged region

Mask – select to pin a set of ‘groucho marks’ glasses on the tagged region – not only a bit of fun, but useful for quickly defeating facial recognition schemes.

Delete – delete the current tagged region

Once you’re done selecting and obfuscating tagged regions, you can use the options from the main application menu to see a preview of the finished image, save it to your local memory, or share the picture with any application on your handset that is configured to accept images. This includes applications like Facebook, Twitter, or the default Messaging app.

Share With Us and “Save Your Face”!

As impediments of visual privacy continue to expand, help us get the word out that we can take back control over our online identities with ObscuraCam! We’ve set up a Facebook Page where you can share your creations with us, and with eachother!

Source Code & Issue Reporting

We’re big fans of open source and living in public. As consistent with all our projects, source code for the SecureSmartCam project, along with the ObscuraCam release, is available online at GitHub.

We also use GitHub to manage our development milestones and active bugs / issues. If you encounter any bugs or issues when testing out this beta build, please report them directly to us in the comments below or by filing directly on the Issues page.

via guardianproject.info

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Snippet: BBC News - Can libraries survive in a digital world?

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 11:34:00 -0700

But if all e-books were available to everyone at any time, why would anyone need to buy a book ever again? And why would anyone need to visit a library if it could be downloaded off-site?
"It's important to remember that libraries are not simply bookstores where the price-tag always reads zero," says Nora Daly, digital curator of the British Library.
"They exist to collect, sometimes create, but always preserve that knowledge, regardless of what format it is in and to help make it grow through advocating and assuring free and fruitful access to it.

The British Library offers a glimpse of what could be the library of the future

"If we understand the role of libraries in that context, then in 10 years' time they will still be providing open and trusted environments - virtually and physically - in which to share, create and grow knowledge."

via news.bbc.co.uk

An interesting read. This snippet highlights how the concept of a library is undergoing a transition. I particularly like the last quote pointing to the library as an "open and trusted environment" for knowledge creation and sharing.

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Link: The Locker Project: Why Leave Data Tracking to Others? Do It Yourself: Tech News and Analysis «

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 11:55:00 -0800

With companies looking to follow your data trail online, why not take possession of that information and find innovative uses for it yourself? That’s the question Jeremie Miller — the developer known for building the open-source protocol that powers many Instant Messaging programs — is trying to answer. Miller is building The Locker Project, an open-source effort that allows users to capture and archive their own online “data exhaust,” the term used for the crumbs of data we leave behind as we move around the web.

Using APIs and feeds, the Locker Project will pull in tweets, updates, pictures, check-ins, transactions, contacts and webpages, and will allow a user to store it on his or her own server or as part of a hosted service similar to the blog platform WordPress. Miller’s company Sing.ly will provide the support for the open-source project. Readwriteweb has a good first look at the service. The idea is an interesting one, because it will give people a repository of their online behavior, where they can see at a glance what kind of trail they’ve left online, and look for patterns inside that data. The service is one of an emerging group of companies that are aimed at helping users capture their personal data, including Statz, Greplin and Personal.com.

Where things could get really interesting, however, is that The Locker Project is looking to have developers build apps on top of the service. Those apps — with permission from users — will be able to analyze a user’s data and extract trends and other interesting information. A user could get more personalized recommendations or a better assessment of behavior or spending habits, or someone with a medical condition might get a pre-diagnosis based on the symptoms he or she been searching for information on.

It’s a compelling idea that builds on the power of data — something we’ll be talking about at our Structure Big Data Conference in New York on March 23. People are creating huge amounts of information as they move around the web, but it’s not being leveraged very well, or if it is being leveraged, it’s big companies and marketing services like Rapleaf that are taking advantage of it.

Citibank spun out a project called Bundle that takes millions of anonymous user transactions and builds recommendations based off of that for customers. But the future lies in taking in personal data and crafting highly customized services: BankSimple, a New York-based start-up, is poised to launch a next-generation banking service that takes in a user’s data and preferences and builds a personalized finance system for them. BillGuard, another start-up that just won $3 million in funding, also leverages personal banking data and uses that to build a fraud alert system.

The challenge for many of these services — including The Locker Project — is that it will take a certain amount of trust for a user to give up their data. But if users do believe that their privacy is protected, and the results will be beneficial, it could open up a lot of opportunities: When you apply big data analysis to personal data, you can surface unseen trends, correlations and patterns, and it can also bring consumers closer to marketers on their own terms. Kaliya Hamlin, the executive director of the Personal Data Ecosystem Collaborative Consortium, said recently that, rather than tracking or stalking users online, marketing and advertising companies should learn to empower users to hold on to their data, then share it with them willingly:

Giving individuals choice about where they store their personal data and who has access to it, and under what terms and conditions, grows trust. This trust is hugely valuable, because over time more and better services that combine and utilize valuable personal data can be offered. It supports new forms of advertising and marketing by enabling trusted relationships between customers and vendors that enable “relationship marketing” and opt-in, user controlled sharing of data, permissioned communications and offers, group buying, recommendations, social and viral marketing, more efficient commercial exchanges.

We’re still a ways off from something like this being mainstream, of course. Users have to get used to storing their own data, and companies will have to learn to work with consumers rather than go the easier route to track them. And the fact that Do Not Track proponents are pushing for more regulations of that kind of activity, working with consumers on a more level playing field might be the best resolution for all.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):

Big Data Marketplaces Put a Price on Finding Patterns

What IBM Does With Big Data

Why the Hoopla About Hadoop?

via gigaom.com

This is big. Data is big. The ability to capture one's data is something I've wanted to do. Looking forward to trying this out.

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Interesting snippet for information folks: Self-Service BI, SaaS, Analytics Will Dominate in 2011

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 15:31:00 -0800

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From: www.cio.com

Self-Service BI, SaaS, Analytics Will Dominate in 2011

– Jaikumar Vijayan, Computerworld

January 03, 2011
Enterprises will increasingly look for opportunities to tap self-service business intelligence systems and SaaS-based BI offerings in 2011, analysts say.

Other items that are also likely to be high on the enterprise agenda include technologies that enable businesses to do more real-time analysis of large data volumes, social media analytics and mobile BI.

A lot of these trends are already under way, but they will gain strength throughout 2011, said James Kobielus, an analyst at Forrester Research.

Self-service BI

The move toward self-service BI, for instance, has been picking up steam and will gather further momentum in 2011, Kobielus said. Increasingly, enterprises will adopt new Web-based interactive querying and reporting tools that are designed to put more data analytics capabilities into the hands of end users, he said.

The tools will give end users the ability to quickly navigate through and visualize business data, and they will allow them to generate views and reports relevant to their job functions.

Numerous vendors, including IBM, SAP, Information Builders, Tibco Software (TIBX), QlikTech and Tableau Software, already offer such tools, and adoption will accelerate as more companies try to deliver BI capabilities to nontechnical users, business analysts and others, he said.

Self-service BI tools "take the burden off IT and speed up the development of reports to a considerable degree," Kobielus said. They also make it easier for users to create personalized reports that reflect their needs better than the standardized reports developed using traditional BI approaches, he added.

SaaS BI

The increasing availability of BI tools provided on a software-as-a-service basis will also drive more self-service BI and enable wider adoption of BI usage in general, Kobielus said.

One example of a company that is taking advantage of SaaS BI is New York-based women's apparel maker Bernard Chaus Inc. The company is using a BI application to track the performance of its products at each of the high-end department store chains that sell them.

Every week, company executives sift through sales data from each department store to see how each of its SKUs are performing and determine which stores might be doing a better job of selling them. The data also is used to study which styles and designs are popular and are selling well.

That sort of analysis is vital said David Stiffman, chief operating and financial officer at Bernard Chaus. "Reading consumer response to certain styles helps influence what we will be designing in future," he said. "By analyzing and learning what sells we are able to make better decisions about what we will offer customers and how to encourage them to buy from our line."

But rather than host a BI application itself, Bernard Chaus has signed up with IBM (IBM) business partner Sky IT Group, a firm that offers SaaS BI services. Sky IT brings in data from all of the different department stores that sell Bernard Chaus apparel and then cleanses the data and makes it available to Bernard Chaus for analysis.

The approach has helped Bernard Chaus take advantage of BI tools at a substantially lower cost than the price of doing it in-house, according to Stiffman.

A slew of big and small vendors have begun rolling out such hosted SaaS offerings, and more companies will start offloading at least some of their BI applications to such vendors, Kobielus said. In many cases, SaaS BI vendors are able to "provide BI at a lower cost so companies don't need to maintain the staff or manage the footprint," internally he said.

Hadoop

In another development in the BI market, expect enterprise interest in the open-source Hadoop framework to increase significantly next year, said David Menninger, an analyst at Ventana Research.

Vendors such as IBM, Pentaho, Cloudera and Karmasphere already offer enterprise-ready Hadoop implementations, and analysts expect more vendors and more products to join the list in 2011.

The reason for the interest is Hadoop's ability to let enterprises analyze much larger volumes of data than most traditional database systems and warehouses can comfortably manage. Much of Hadoop's growing popularity also stems from its usefulness in social media analytics and text-mining applications, Menninger said.

"Hadoop is the new black. It is gaining in popularity because it supports a wide variety of analytics and [data types] that we couldn't previously analyze either because the data was too big or the analysis was too complex," Menninger said.

"Not everybody understands it yet, but Hadoop is going to have a big impact on big data infrastructures [and social media analytics,]" he said.

Open-source BI

Kobielus also expects that other vendors of open-source tools, such as Pentaho, Infobright, Jaspersoft, Talend and LucidDB, will start rising in visibility and will soon start to offer more complete BI stacks.

Pentaho, for instance, already has one of the stronger commercial Hadoop capabilities, and many of the others offer innovative technologies that are resonating with users, he said.

For instance, Bango, a Cambridge, England-based provider of mobile analytics and billing services for large content providers, started using Infobright's columnar database technology when its older SQL Server-based database began struggling to keep up with exploding data volumes.

What makes the technology appealing is its ability to support ad hoc complex queries on large data sets, without any need for any indexing, manual tuning or IT support said Tim Moss, chief data officer at Bango. "This is huge," he said.

Infobright stores metadata about data even as the data is entering the database. "This means you don't need to index the tables; it's kind of doing that automatically," he said. "With other databases, you put the data into tables and then, depending on queries, you need to add indexes to help speed up and support these queries."

Real-time analytics

Expect enterprises to pay more attention to products such as SAP's High-Performance Analytic Appliance, or HANA, that are designed to speed up data analytics, Kobielus said.

HANA uses an in-memory computing technology that allows data to be processed in a system's RAM as opposed to reading it off I/O disks. The in-memory approach enables much faster data processing and is designed to allow companies to run far more sophisticated data analytics applications than they could with conventional relational databases.

For the moment at least, such in-memory technologies are considerably more expensive than traditional disk-based products, but expect that to change as the technology matures and more people start using it, Kobielus said, adding, "BI is becoming more real-time."

In 2011, expect to see enterprises continuing to push for "all things cache, all things memory," Kobielus said. In-memory and flash-based technologies are slightly ahead of the curve, at the moment, he said, but added: "I think that will start changing in 2011 and 2012."

Emerging new search and discovery technologies from companies like Attivio and Endeca will also start making a bigger impression in enterprise environments next year.

Such tools are designed to enable companies to implement user-configurable, search-based business intelligence applications involving large volumes of structured and unstructured data.

"Search tools are getting embedded into the BI stack" and are enabling a convergence of unstructured and structured analysis, Menninger said.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld. Follow Jaikumar on Twitter at Twitter @jaivijayan, or subscribe to Jaikumar's RSS feed Vijayan RSS. His e-mail address is jvijayan@computerworld.com.

© 2010 Computerworld Inc.

via cio.com

Any thoughts or feedback on this? I think it's pretty interesting how people (including "end users") are now moving toward doing their own analytics. It'll be interesting to see what the next phase of intelligence tools brings...

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Note: Ex-Googler Helps Users Disconnect From the Social Web

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 14:20:00 -0800

Kennish released Facebook Disconnect in October and the extension quickly gained popularity, hitting the top 10 list of Google Chrome extensions. He told us that he quit his job at Google three weeks later so that he could "develop tools that make it trivial for the average user to understand and control the data they share whenever they browse or search the Web." He said that he thinks Google is "collecting more personal data than any other company" and "to fight for user privacy while working there would've been impossible."

Disconnect, similar to his earlier project, blocks a number of third-party widgets from sites like Digg, Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo, as well as de-personalizes search at the cookie level, allowing you to remain logged-in to services like iGoogle or Gmail without having your search queries attached to your Google profile.

Kennish said that, while the tool is in a primitive state, he hopes it will have a larger effect on the debate over privacy on the Web.

"Realistically, Disconnect won't have a significant direct impact on the average user's privacy -- Adblock (and I mean the whole suite) is the most successful browser extension and used by less than 1% of the Web population," said Kennish. "So government policy and what browser vendors ship natively is more important to me. I'm hoping to show a better way through software and have a butterfly effect on policy and browser implementation."

Kennish calls the "Do Not Track" method of opting-out "a bad model for defending online privacy because phones ring and get your attention, where Web bugs are invisible and go unnoticed."

Indeed, last summer one online advocacy group released a browser extension that alerts you "whenever your personal information is being sent to Google servers." The result was a near constant barrage of alarm bells - if your phone rang this often, you would go insane. Disconnect takes a less obnoxious method, showing a running tally of how many calls have been blocked in the extension's toolbar icon. Clicking on the icon also allows you to quickly allow for unblocking because, no matter our privacy talk, these tools are also useful in our online lives and not always unwanted. Kennish's point is more that the user should be allowed to opt-in, rather than needing to opt-out - an oft-heard refrain in online privacy discussions.

Kennish said that he started with blocking standard third-party social widgets "because I consider them the most dangerous third-party resources and there didn't seem to be another tool that blocks them out of the box. The prevalence of these widgets means they can report on almost all your browsing activity, which can then be linked to databases full of the social data you intentionally share."

While Disconnect may be in early stages and not have a "significant direct impact" for the average user, the tool could be useful for those concerned about how different social tools are keeping track of your browsing habits. The extension is available for both Google Chrome and RockMelt.

See Also

Shame on "Democratic" South Korea for Censoring Facebook and Twitter

Google Now Warning Surfers of Hacked Websites

Wave Technology Lives On In Google's New Shared Spaces

Here's What Happened to Delicious

via readwriteweb.com

Gonna look into this.

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Excerpt: Long Live the Web: Scientific American

Fri, 19 Nov 2010 14:34:00 -0800

The URI is the key to universality. (I originally called the naming scheme URI, for universal resource identifier; it has come to be known as URL, for uniform resource locator.) The URI allows you to follow any link, regardless of the content it leads to or who publishes that content. Links turn the Web’s content into something of greater value: an interconnected information space.

Several threats to the Web’s universality have arisen recently. Cable television companies that sell Internet connectivity are considering whether to limit their Internet users to downloading only the company’s mix of entertainment. Social-networking sites present a different kind of problem. Facebook, LinkedIn, Friendster and others typically provide value by capturing information as you enter it: your birthday, your e-mail address, your likes, and links indicating who is friends with whom and who is in which photograph. The sites assemble these bits of data into brilliant databases and reuse the information to provide value-added service—but only within their sites. Once you enter your data into one of these services, you cannot easily use them on another site. Each site is a silo, walled off from the others. Yes, your site’s pages are on the Web, but your data are not. You can access a Web page about a list of people you have created in one site, but you cannot send that list, or items from it, to another site.

The isolation occurs because each piece of information does not have a URI. Connections among data exist only within a site. So the more you enter, the more you become locked in. Your social-networking site becomes a central platform—a closed silo of content, and one that does not give you full control over your information in it. The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the Web becomes fragmented, and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space.

via scientificamerican.com

So, Tim Berners-Lee's got an article coming out in Scientific American discussing the state of the web. I couldn't help but read it wondering what he'd mention regarding data access and portability. While this snippet is a small representation of the overall tone of the piece, I think he does well to concisely summarize the nature of today's (and tomorrow's?) siloed information spaces. As much as I'm still trying to conceptualize what it would take to link data across silos, thus propagating serendipitous info discovery, I'd have to admit that it is a little frightening to think about how close we are to having Facebook (and others, such as Comcast) provide us with their version of "the web." AOL anyone?

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Reading: The Accidental Taxonomist

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 15:04:00 -0800

via hedden-information.com

Check this book out. While it helps to have a bit of pre-existing knowledge regarding the world of information, this book certainly takes a good stab at defining the concept and role of taxonomy. (If I'd had this a couple years back, it would have helped me disambiguate the different meanings of the term.)

Check it out.

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Excerpt: To Protect and to Project: Another Take on Digital Privacy

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 13:16:00 -0700

In a democratic society, it is thankfully easier for governments to fix limits than to enforce models of behaviour. Laws will more often say "you can't" rather than "you may." Furthermore, when the first privacy laws passed in Europe, in the 1970s and 1980s, only the rich and powerful had access to computer technology. The fissure between bare naked individuals and heavily armed organizations seemed distinct and profound.

These imbalances have endured, and preventing or correcting the abuse of personal data by organizations remains as necessary as ever. Yet something essential has changed - individuals now have powerful means at their disposal to handle and exchange information. They use these means to affirm their identity, express themselves, share, collaborate, engage, and learn.

Let us now imagine that individuals could use, to their own ends, the masses of data that organizations hold about them, whether to turn surveillance on its head or just to get to know themselves better; that at school, kids are taught not only the dangers of the Internet, but how to use it in order to construct an autonomous and socially vibrant identity, one that is recognized and appreciated by their peers; that we, and our employers, learn to recognize and share the value of the myriad of informal skills that cannot be listed on our CVs; that it will become possible to give life to several heteronymous beings, i.e. alternative, perennial, credible personas that reflect the different facets of our personalities.

What could I accomplish if I had at my disposal all the data - in some truly useful form - pertaining to the journeys and communications I have made and had in recent years? As well as my past bank card transactions, search engine queries, or detailed lists of all my local supermarket purchases? Not just to control what others do with this information, but to actually use it myself, to my own ends?

via readwriteweb.com

I find this fascinating. I've wondered about using one's own data as well. Why not? It is one thing to let other entities cross-link my data, but it's immensely interesting for me to be able to do the same thing.

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ontology browsing: structured dynamics' explorer tool

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 11:49:00 -0700

So, I was browsing around the web and came across the Structured Dynamics website. Some very nice information on semantic tools, but what caught my eye was the ontology visualization tool.

I've seen a couple other visualization concepts, but this one is nice in that it captures and demonstrates the relational info between entities. Here are a couple screen grabs that demonstrate a little perusing of the subject concept of "soccer."

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Excerpt: ZAAZ Blogs -- The Latest Thinking on Performance Marketing: The WSJ's Datapocalypse 2010

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:20:00 -0700

The WSJ's Datapocalypse 2010

By Jason Carmel | 1 Comments | Posted in in Analytics , Current Affairs , Marketing | Permalink

The Wall Street Journal has an amazing interactive piece entitled "What They Know" that focuses on the data that is collected and used for tracking and reporting by 50 of the most visited sites on the Web. Play around with it for a while- you get a sense of the massive amounts of data that popular sites such as ebay and CNN.com collect about you behind the scenes and how that data might impact your privacy online.

Unfortunately, the good people at the WSJ couldn't leave it alone with a powerful display of information. Instead of representing an informed understanding of what data companies are tracking, the risks and benefits of collecting and using that data to the end consumer, and an assessment of efforts that are or should be made to improve the system, they got all "DATAPOCALYPSE 2010" on us. Let's unpack a few issues I had from this little suitcase of drama, shall we?
Issue #1: Marketers are spying on Internet users"
This is how the author starts off the article (note the bold was their emphasis, not mine), and it's an exaggeration of the grossest order. "Spying" is not a term one should thrown around lightly. In fact, unless it is literally applied to the act of assassinating someone with an umbrella tip or swallowing something on microfilm, the only people who use the verb "spying" in this context are those who are trying to create controversy. Are marketers "spying" on you as you navigate the web? Of course not. Collecting anonymous data to inform how successfully an audience is consuming certain content is a far cry from sending someone with an accent to open up your home safe and take pictures of your offshore bank account numbers with a very, very tiny camera. Using the term "spying" when you mean "sharing aggregated web data" is from page 12 of the Fox News Handbook of Journalism, and the WSJ needs to be better than that.

Issue #2: I'm not even going to justify the graphic of the dude with the binoculars with a comment.

"Watchers?" Honestly. The WSJ makes Web Analysts and Data Miners sound as if they are video taping you in the shower.

Issue #3: Exposure Index?

The Exposure Index is the grade that the WSJ folks give to each site to inform the reader of how worried she should be about her data being traded around like prison cigarettes. The WSJ explains its methodology obliquely at best. Volume of trackers and opt-out options are interesting circumstantial factors, but they pale in comparison to an analysis of 1) what information is being shared 2) with whom 3) for what purpose, which this index appears to lack:

More tracking isn't necessarily more sensitive tracking - The fact that a site collects 200 pieces of information doesn't make that information particularly relevant or sensitive, in aggregate. There is a false assumption permeating the data as it's presented that each data tracker leads to information of equal value. Think about how patently untrue this is. Information concerning which articles I read on espn.com and how ESPN would share that information in an aggregate way, even to 100 third party advertisers is in the grand scheme of evil out there in the world fairly low on the totem pole. Compare that to the very sensitive financial data that is collected and used by PayPal, which gets a better score on the exposure rank, in part because it has significantly fewer trackers.

Define your terms - I think the infographics would be a lot more telling, and consequently a lot less sensationalist, if they included a key explaining what these 3rd party sites are that get your data and what they are doing with it. When a site shares information with Microsoft, for example, it likely has to do with the Bing! search terms used to get to the site. The trackers are not sniffing your machine to see if that copy of Outlook 2010 is registered. Similarly, "Coremetrics," will sound a lot less ominous if you know that it is a standard web tracking tool that monitors anonymous visitor behavior on site, rather than a collective of Nigerians trying to steal your daughter's college tuition.

I don't want to be misinterpreted here as saying that we shouldn't be concerned about what data is being collected about us on the Web and how it is being used. Privacy policies are impossible to understand, a lot of unnecessarily sensitive data is being collected and stored indefinitely for no discernible advantage to the end user, and, let's be frank here, businesses can't always be trusted to act in good faith when an opportunity to make a killing arises, and the only thing standing in its way are the sanctity of a few words on a web page that no one really reads anyway. I work in the industry and know full well that it needs to change. I applaud the WSJ for releasing its findings and recognizing Internet privacy as an important issue.

My concern here is that the language used by the WSJ inspires panic (check out the results of their poll) rather than conversation, and panic invariably results in knee-jerk reactions and ineffective legislation- both of which are on the way.

via blogs.zaaz.com

And, here's a little discussion of the impact of the previous post (WSJ "What They Know"). I think that Jason Carmel has some valid points here.

In general, my biggest questions regarding the analytics world is this: how are individuals supposed to inform themselves regarding these "watchers"? I mean, it makes sense to know what Coremetrics is if I work in the industry, but if I don't, how should I know what I can trust (or is minimally invasive)?

I think it would be nice for those that are concerned to have the ability to see a map of an individual site's interactions. I know there are probably tools out there that do this, but I'm thinking of something that demonstrates that, at "this point in time, your information is gathered and/or going to these N sites."

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infographic: What They Know - WSJ

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 13:57:43 -0700

via blogs.wsj.com

Lots of click-through info on this graphic. Not sure I'd like to deep-dive anything, but it's interesting to see the representation. Certainly fascinating to see all of the calls to "watchers."

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New Scientist Brainsources Its Latest Cover, While Guy Kawasaki Crowdsources His | Fast Company

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 15:51:00 -0700

Today, British magazine New Scientist announced that it has used neuromarketing in a bid to choose its latest cover. Compare and contrast with the fact that entrepreneur and VC nabob Guy Kawasaki is to harness the power of the crowd to help design the cover of his next book. So, in a nutshell, we're seeing the power of the unconscious versus the power of the people here.

But which method is going to work best on the general public?

In these quiet months of summer, when news is scarcer than an English-born ex-CEO of an oil firm, New Scientist decided to make some for itself (using nothing but 19 right-handed Englishmen, an electroencephalograph machine, a trio of potential covers, the expertise of a Berkeley-based firm called NeuroFocus, and a man-sized petri dish). Could EEG, as it is known, give the editorial team a better handle on what sort of cover design would make a future issue fly off the shelves? Being scientists (or, at least, people who write about science and its 'tists) they were skeptical. Following the experiment, held in the obligatory darkened room, they were less so.

The design that scored highest on the brainometer was the central image at the top of this page. It did so for several reasons, one of which--the red lettering--is already known to magazine bods, the others being less easily decipherable: who would have known that the word fabric is attractive to one's brain? The final test, however, will be how the magazine does at the kiosks this week--although it would have been nice to see just what decisions the 19 guinea pigs made with the electrodes off the scalp and relying solely on what they saw.

Kawasaki's gig is a different bag of spanners altogether. As well as knowing what he wants ("clean, elegant, enchanting, powerful. I don't want frilly, romantic, cute") he knows what makes a creative tick, as he's leaving color choice up to the designer, merely saying that the design has to stand out in the bookstore as well as the iBookstore. There's a carrot (although not a particularly large one) in the form of a $1,000 award, as well as the kudos of having your design chosen by Kawasaki.

Neuromarketing essentially dispenses with the services of a human at the top of the tree (although pedants will probably argue that it takes a human to decide whether to go with the method in the first place), while it still calls on someone to design a shortlist of covers in order to make the final choice. And, while former Apple staffer Kawasaki's decision to crowdsource his latest book cover is throwing the task open to the floor, Crowdspring's MO (it is the middle man between client and craftsman) the final decision on the artwork will be made by Kawasaki himself--because that's what they probably teach you at the Apple School of Business.

via fastcompany.com

Interesting aspect: neuromarketing. What happens when none of the choices are that great? ;)

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How Location Services Could Impact Health Care

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 08:48:00 -0700

How Location Services Could Impact Health Care

Some very interesting thoughts here on the intersection between LBS and HealthIT.

How Location Services Could Impact Health Care

Imagine a hospital that could respond to medical emergencies armed with real-time information about exactly where all its doctors were located. Inside the hospital, which cardio specialist is closest to the 4th floor? Outside the hospital - if an on-call physician is racing to get to a patient's side, how far away are they and when can they be expected to arrive?

From emergency to non-emergency to everyday preventative health care, location tracking technologies could make a big impact on our health and well-being in the future. While two million consumers use Foursquare today to find the best nearby coffee shops and bars, what if in the future they used it to locate the best pediatricians, emergency clinics, or even restaurants that catered to their unique health needs? Some intersection between location and health care has already begun, but what we've seen so far is likely only the beginning.

I showed my dental hygienist who else was checked-in there on Foursquare last time I went to the dentist's office and she was quite taken aback. But we consumers willingly shared our presence at and feedback about that medical facility. That's only the beginning of what's likely to happen.

If health insurance agencies track your location and charge you more for insurance, you're probably not going to appreciate that. There are some possible upsides to the intersection of location and health care, however.

For the Patient

"I would love to see HospitalCompare.com and Health and Human Services (HHS) data mashed up with mobile location apps for health care consumers," says Brian Ahier, Health IT Evangelist at Mid Columbia Medical Center in the Dalles, Oregon. "Helping me find the best pediatrican or orthopedic surgeon would be a great application. And once I'm there, I want to lodge a positive or negative complaint on the same service."

"This is all about the patient," argues Mark Scrimshire, founder of the HealthCamp movement of healthcare unconferences around the world and an employee at a large healthcare payment corporation in the US.

"The one person who is not by their computer during a medical transaction is the patient. They are in the hospital or in the pharmacy. As smartphones take off, there will be tremendous potential for really suplementing the patient and bringing them data that's relevant. Location services could recognize that you are going into a pharmacy, for example, and remind you what your prescriptions are and of anything you needed to talk to your pharmacist about regarding those prescriptions.

"When you walk into the doctor's office, your smartphone should configure your data and prompt you to transmit your health measurements from home quickly and easily, because it knows where you are. I think there's a lot of potential for augmentation of the patient to let them monitor their own health. That will happen through a wide variety of sensors and location is one important factor that will provide context for that sensor data. 'Blood pressure up? Well, he was at work again.'"

Scrimshire also sees location data being served up to Augmented Reality style apps to help patients navigate their way through the maze-like halls of big hospitals - and providing the kind of in-home tracking that would help the elderly stay in place, instead of being institutionalized.

"Putting a few thousand dollars of monitoring equipment into a home, if it prevents someone from visiting an emergency room, it pays for itself with the avoidance of one visit," he argues.

These kinds of strategies may be less far-fetched than they seem. Medical providers are already offering Google Maps of the best facilities to seek appropriate care. A University Medical Center in Holland has even built an emergency Augmented Reality display that allows you to look through your mobile phone's camera view and locate the nearest automatic external defibrillators (AEDs) located in a public place.

For the Doctor

There are already systems in place in many hospitals to track medical equipment, but what about tracking the medical professionals themselves?

Brian Ahier works in the same small Oregon town where Google recently built a big data center, The Dalles. Earlier this year Google gave the town a grant to build a free city-wide wifi network. Wifi is just one of several ways that the locations of mobile devices can be tracked.

"If there's an emergency and we need to call up all hands on deck, it would be really handy to be able to pull up a map and see where everyone is," Ahier says. "It would need to be secure, and probably for people who are on call only. It would have to be an opt-in situation by the physician."

Inside the hospital, location data could prove very useful in tracking updates from devices located in various parts of the institution as well.

"At some of the HealthCamps there have been conversations about secure Twitter-like conversations in a hospital environment, even between devices," Mark Scrimshire says.

"Imagine if every bed and device could send and recieve Twitter-like messages. Imagine if you come onto duty and you get the feed of all the updates from all the patients and devices.

"Because of the life or death nature of the industry, it doesn't move that quickly and thus hasn't adopted technology like this. 'Meaningful use' in healthcare right now is about whole-record interoperability, this would be about real-time mashing together of data feeds from different devices and building filters and context. If a patient has a device on them, where are they and how does that relate to other things you're tracking? That makes for better management of the patient. Is a health care provider doing something out of sequence? Location becomes a factor that helps to add context to all these things we could monitor."

Obstacles to the Vision

Some location technologies will likely impact health care sooner than others. There are obstacles to the kind of future that Ahier and Scrimshire describe. Ahier, for example, says that GPS signals on phones vary too much in accuracy today. And the iPhone is too proprietary for many corporations to build on top of. "Almost all the doctors have iPhones, too," he says. "Even if we give them BlackBerries, they go out and buy their own iPhones."

"Ultimately, I think we're going to need to be platform independent, even device independent," Ahier argues. "We're going to need to be able to use an Ubuntu netbook, an iPad, etc. Our EHR (electronic health records) are going to have to run on all those."

Scrimshire believes that location technology providers in healthcare will go Google's route and build HTML5 mobile web apps, which nearly every smartphone on the market will soon support.

Scrimshire believes that the bigger issues are cultural. "The whole industry is very conservative because of privacy," he says.

"HIPAA [the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996] is used as an excuse not to share, but the P is for portability. The big trap door is that we as patients can demand our data, people may want to charge us for us, but our information is our currency. We can decide when and with whom we want to share it.

"Security is going to be the issue the industry is going to through up as an excuse to not do anything. It's been a minefield to get quality data published about doctors and hospitals, it's a minefield to go through. The healthcare industry is still one where there's a lot of advantage to a lack of transparency. You don't realize you could save $200 by going down the road for the same treatment because the information isn't available.

"But some trends are coming together, in part because of the recession. Employers are putting more of the responsibility for paying for health care on the shoulders of employees, through high-deductible insurance plans, for example. When they start feeling the cost more, then they start asking questions and asking if there are other steps they can take. When the onus is put on the consumer, you'll see them demand a change in the healthcare industry. The consumer can demand their information and be more on par with the physician and make decisions. Then you'll start to see the innovators really coming into the picture."

Will location data be a major disruption of the balance of power between the various stakeholders in the healthcare industry? Will it make shopping for health services, or staying healthy, an easier casual activity for more and more people with smartphones?

Will doctors and medical devices be instrumented, tracked, analyzed and more effectively managed to reduce cost and improve the quality of care?

These visions of location-based health care may be a ways off, but they could also be fast approaching. Just today the FCC and the FDA signed an agreement to jointly develop technical standards for wireless-enabled medical devices and services. Location technology and healthcare could come together sooner than we might expect.

[link to original | source: ReadWriteWeb | published: 12 hours ago | shared via feedly]

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Excerpt: FP Tech Desk: Government lags behind on data management, survey finds

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 11:19:11 -0700

“If there is an industry that really should have its act together when it comes to information management, it is government,” Cameron Dow, vice president of marketing for SAS Canada, said in a statement.

“If information is power, I’m not too sure they have it right now.”

via business.financialpost.com

I love the last line of this excerpt.

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world cup bracket and schedule

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 16:19:00 -0700

via nationalpostsports.files.wordpress.com

Just what I needed to print and have on hand. I'm getting tired of having to peer into a computer monitor to see the schedule and some details about the teams.

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10 Laws of Productivity :: Tips :: From The 99 Percent

Wed, 09 Jun 2010 09:35:37 -0700

Here are 10 laws of productivity we’ve consistently observed among serial idea executors:

1. Break the seal of hesitation.
A bias toward action is the most common trait we’ve found across the hundreds of creative professionals and entrepreneurs we’ve interviewed. While preparing properly as you start a new project is certainly valuable, it’s also easy to lose yourself in planning (and dreaming) indefinitely. We must challenge ourselves to take action sooner rather than later. The minute that you start acting (e.g. building a physical prototype, sharing a nascent concept with your community), you start getting valuable feedback that will help refine your original idea – and move forward with a more informed perspective.

2. Start small.
When our ideas are still in our head, we tend to think big, blue sky concepts. The downside is that such thinking makes the barrier to entry – and action – quite high. To avoid “blue sky paralysis,” pare your idea down to a small, immediately executable concept. Can you trial the idea of a multi-day festival with a smaller performance series? Take an idea for a skyscraper and model it in miniature? Work out the flow of an iPhone app by sketching on paper? Once you’ve road-tested your idea on a small scale, you’ll have loads more insight on how to take it to the next level.

3. Protoype, prototype, prototype.
Trial and error is an essential part of any creative’s life. As Ze Frank says, usually when we execute an idea for the first time, it kinda sucks. The important thing is to synthesize the knowledge gained during the process to refine the idea, and create a new-and-improved version. Serial idea-makers like Jack Dorsey, Ben Kaufman, and Studio 7.5 all attest: Prototyping and iteration is key to transforming a so-so idea into a game-changing product. Rather than being discouraged by your “failures,” listen closely and learn from them. Then build a new prototype. Then do it again. Sooner or later, you’ll hit gold.
To avoid 'blue sky paralysis,' pare your idea down to a small, immediately executable concept.

4. Create simple objectives for projects, and revisit them regularly.
When working on in-depth projects, we generate lots of new ideas along the way. This can lead to a gradual expansion of the project’s goals, or “scope creep.” This insidious habit can make it impossible to ever really complete anything. The best way to avoid it is to write down a simple statement summarizing your objective at the start of each project. (If you have collaborators, make sure there is agreement about the objective.) And then – this is the part we overlook! – revisit it regularly. When scope creep starts to happen, you’ll notice.

5. Work on your project a little bit each day.
With projects that require a serious infusion of creative juice – developing a new business plan, writing a novel, or just learning a new skill – it’s incredibly important to maintain momentum. Just as when you run everyday, the exercise gets easier and easier, the same thing happens with your brain. Stimulate it regularly each day, and those juices start to flow more freely. As Jack Cheng argues in a great blog post, “Thirty Minutes A Day”: “the important thing isn’t how much you do; it’s how often you do it.”

6. Develop a routine.
Part of being able to work on your project a little bit each day is carving out the time to do so. Routines can seem boring and uninspiring, but – on the contrary – they create a foundation for sparking true insight. In his recent memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, famed Japanese author Haruki Murakami writes about how a rigorous routine – rising at 5am and going to bed at 10pm every day – is crucial to his impressive creative output. (In a side note: Alex Iskold derives a series of lessons for start-up entrepreneurs from Murakami here.)

7. Break big, long-term projects into smaller chunks or “phases.”
To help manage expectations and stay motivated for year-long or even multi-year endeavors, break each project into smaller chunks that only take a few weeks or a month to complete. The dual benefit of this approach is: (1) making the project feel more manageable, and (2) providing incremental rewards throughout the project. It’s crucial to pause periodically to take stock of what has been accomplished – even if there’s a long way to go.
With projects that require a serious infusion of creative juice, it’s incredibly important to maintain momentum.

8. Prune away superfluous meetings (and their attendees).
Few activities are more of a productivity drain than meetings. If you must meet (and this should be a big “if”), make sure everyone knows what needs to be accomplished from the outset. If people are present who don't help out with achieving that objective, let them leave. Qwest COO Teresa Taylor, recently interviewed in the NYT's Corner Office, starts her meetings with the question, "Do we all know why we're here?" and then follows with, "Does everyone need to be here?" To trim the runtime of internal meetings, you can also try the standing meeting.

9. Practice saying “No.”
Creative energy is not finite. Seasoned idea-makers know that they must guard their energy – and their focus – closely. Take author Jim Collins for example. His books Built to Last and Good to Great have sold millions of copies. His business acumen and insights are in demand. Yet, “even though Collins demands over $60,000 per speech, he gives fewer than 18 per year.” More than that and Collins wouldn’t have enough time to focus on the research and writing that yield those bestselling books. When you’re in execution mode, keep in mind that “unexpected opportunities” also mean distraction from the work at hand. Saying no is an essential part of the productivity equation.

10. Remember that rules – even productivity rules – are made to be broken.
Did we say develop a routine? This and other tips here should only be followed as long as they are working. If forward motion has become impossible with your current routine, try something else. Whether it’s taking a long distance trip, popping into the art museum, walking around the block, or talking to a perfect stranger, make sure you occasionally shake up your normal routine. Breaking habits offers new perspective and helps recharge us to head back into the fray.

via the99percent.com

I need to see lists like these to remind me that I'm not the only one who suffers from being less that productive.

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Books Come Alive with QR Codes & Data in the Cloud

Thu, 27 May 2010 13:21:57 -0700

via readwriteweb.com

Nice. I've got a qr code on my mini business card. I like the direction this is headed.

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The Facebook Privacy War: What is Personal Data? | GeekDad

Fri, 07 May 2010 12:46:17 -0700

There is a current campaign on the internet for users to not log into Facebook for a whole day on June 6th, 2010. This comes in response to the recent changes made by Facebook to their privacy settings, especially to the one leaving the default “on” instead of “off.” Basically it became quite apparent that Facebook is in fact, a business, and that your so-called “personal” data was for sale. To economists and investors, this was no surprise at all. They all expected Facebook to make a genuine attempt to make money at some point, and what better way than demographic targeted advertising?

When it came to the users though, the backlash to the recent changes and integration of Facebook across multiple sharing networks has been less than mixed. It’s been negative. There have been constant tweets and articles written about Facebook’s complete disregard for our “personal” data.

The claims are valid. Suddenly, it’s not just your friends that are viewing your updates and profile, it’s their friends, strangers and marketers - unless you change your settings. The setting changes aren’t complex, they are quite simple in fact - but the sudden notification by Facebook is what irked a lot of people. They started to worry about their “personal” data. All along though, within all the complaints and stress about “personal” data, people lost sight of a couple of realities.

First off - what is data? For the answer to that question, I turn to Loren Feldman of 1938 Media. In this video, he explains exactly what “data” is.

To sum up, data is what you put in the computer, that goes to the internet and either gets lost or sold. That is what data is. It’s inevitable and a side effect of doing business on the internet. It’s also a side effect of doing pleasure on the internet, and that is where the adjective “personal” comes in. So what exactly is “personal” on the internet? Well, that’s easy. Nothing. Not a damn thing. You may think it is, but it isn’t. That’s not just paranoia talking - someone, somewhere has access to your personal data. From the I.T. guys running the bank servers, to the advertisers buying it from your email client, to Facebook opening it up for the world to see.

Don’t even get me started on privacy. It’s the internet. Not a shrinks office. Though that’s debatable sometimes.

The inherent problem then is expectations. People expect their “personal” data to remain personal and private. This expectation is set at some point by the site they are entering their personal data into. Or, it’s a site like Linkedin, where the expectation of complete transparency is set. The thing is, as Loren mentioned in the video, no one reads the terms of service contracts. When you click the little check box and hit continue, you are agreeing to pages and pages of legalese that pretty much state you don’t have any personal data and you have absolutely no privacy on that site. They own it all. This isn’t true for every site of course, but a good majority of them.

The lesson here is that you should only put data on the internet that you are comfortable with being shared, viewed or sold by people that are not you. In this era of social media and sharing, there have been so many cases of just blatant ignorance. What do you think will happen if you put inappropriate pictures on Facebook when your boss is on your friend list? Nothing? This isn’t the era of anonymous postings in forums and BBS chat rooms anymore. We remember that, but do our kids?

In order for them to understand what privacy and personal data is when it comes to the internet, we need to understand what it is. We need to educate ourselves by reading those terms of service contracts, noting which sites are sharing and which ones aren’t as well as being vigilant as to what kind of personal data we’re so eagerly sharing with the world. We need to realize that what we think is personal or private is nothing of the sort.

Once we have that through our heads, then we won’t be pitching a fit when a social networking site changes their privacy settings to allow us more sharing options. What are your expectations about personal data and privacy on the internet? Let us know in the comments!

Follow on Twitter @cebsilver and @wiredgeekdad

Image: Flickr user dannysullivan

via wired.com

The questions I pose are these: When does "data" become valuable? Is it when you enter a few simple keystrokes, or is it when someone/something can associate those keystrokes with more data? When does "data" become content? What is the difference between user data and content?

I think the video in this article is presently in a very tongue-in-cheek manner...the topic of privacy would benefit from looking at the spectrum of "data." In the real world, the things we collect and gather move along a spectrum from data--information--knowledge--wisdom. I would suggest that data is nothing until it is given "meaning" by people (or trained machines). In other words, it becomes valuable information when you add context and can connect the dots. Data would be the bits that form a nine digit numeric string; information is the layer on top of it that allows one to reflect on your knowledge and understand that the nine digit string is a social security number. Wisdom, on the other hand, is what comes when you know not to post your SSN on the web.

For those that argue that one cannot even attempt to control "personal data" on the web, I would suggest that there is some truth to this aspect. Computers are very good with numbers and can push "our data" out to a virtually limitless web with very little degradation of the original signal. Ownership of this data is only limited by the number of places it is found.

Yes, we are all at the mercy of the TOS of every site we interact with. Yes, we should read those documents. Does that mean anyone actually knows the implications? I would also argue that many of them are written with such vague terms (e.g., "user content") that they don't always map to "real world" analogies. Yes, photos and videos map over to the content space, but where does "content" fit on the data--wisdom spectrum? Who says, "Hmm, I'm not going to tell him/her about my latest content." Furthermore, how Facebook and other services use the data/information/content is rarely negotiated with the service users.

As is common in these discussions, there are those that will say, "if you want privacy, don't put anything out there." This is true, but that approach is a blunt instrument when wielded in the current/future states of our world. Yes, we should all be aware that our "data" may be exposed, but that doesn't mean we cannot try to control the context in which "our data" are viewed.

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