I’ve been at times transfixed, horrified, depressed, inspired, and astounded by the information streaming out of Iran.  Following the active cloud of conversation regarding the Iranian election via Twitter, I’ve been reminded once again of how powerfully the web changes the ways in which we as communities experience events in real time.  Only now can a group of physically scattered people experience history together, blending real time reports from ground zero of a revolution with distant analysis and global reactions.  These recent events reminded me of a TED video that I wanted to share.  The projects Jonathan Harris demonstrates in this video are not comparable in urgency to the situation overseas.  But Harris’ work evokes the same unique emotional connection we feel with far-flung individuals through the modern miracle of the modem.  I hope you find his projects interesting and inspiring:

You can also download this video to iTunes (MP4 file) by clicking here (”Save Link As” on Windows).

• TED Talks: Dan Barber
• TED Talks: Dave Eggers
• Stop Creating for a Moment and Enjoy? We’re Fine, Thanks
• Set the ‘Fox on Fire
• Lala: Send Your Music To The Cloud

This is a very effective video argument for New Urbanism (HT: The Daily Dish):

I find this vision compelling: walkable communities, condensed necessities like grocery stores, schools, workplaces, and churches, large public parks and recreation spaces, and conserved natural areas.  But it’s silly to have a conversation about New Urbanism or neighborhood revitalization as if it’s an intrinsically and universally beneficial trend.  The fact is, I’m drawn to this vision because I’m exactly the demographic that stands to benefit from it: white, middle/upper-middle class, well educated.  Part of the creative economy and able to work essentially anywhere there’s a wireless connection.  Lover of overpriced “artisan” sandwiches and ratios of coffee products and steamed milk.  I own a Kindle for crying out loud.

The uncomfortable assumption underlying so many of these New Urban dream-scapes is that what would make for a REALLY great community would be an exclusive bunch of people like…well…me.  And that’s crap.

As much as I like to think otherwise, I’m a boring cliche.  I’m a product of privilege (more of the “great public schools” variety than the “trust fund” variety, but I digress) and will have the luxury to find parks for my hypothetical future children to play in, take bike rides on greenways, and work from various coffee shops whenever I need a change of scenery.  New Urbanism seems well-equipped to satisfy that lifestyle but, frankly, I’m not worried about people like me.

Because walking to work can’t just be the accepted ideal for those of us who set out daily to work in a brightly-lit office or take our laptop to the village green.  The checkout clerks at the grocery store, the teachers in those great public schools, and the folks waiting tables at the neighborhood restaurant all must be a part of this vision.  But thinking about those folks (not to mention the factory workers and farmers who are presumably at the margins of this type of scenario…theoretically manufacturing wind turbines and growing organic spinach) brings up all sorts of difficult questions about affordable housing and the costs of living in trendy, clean, sustainable communities.

So here’s my challenge to New Urbanists: prove that your ideal communities can be inclusive of all people.   Show me a plan that includes affordable housing between the coffee shop and the grocery store.  Factor in the carbon footprint (not to mention actual costs) of low wage earning commuters who can’t afford to live in newly-remodeled trendy lofts.

Some of this admirable, inclusive work is taking place, but I think it merits a larger role in the conversation about green building, sustainable communities, and New Urbanism.

• Suburban Life In Perspective
• It’s Not About the Technology, and This Isn’t the Jetsons
• Sustainable Diets [Guest Post]
• Density, Congestion, and Car Culture
• The Birth Of BLUE (Long Live Green)

• Kudos to the Mint team for developing a strong personal finance blog to serve their users (and attract new users).  This post on “Investing 101: Common Stock Quote Metrics Defined” is perfect: straightforward and useful.

• I’m intrigued by KeyRingThing, a service that allows  you to combine frequent shopper/loyalty program cards (currently in my wallet: Harris Teeter VIC card, CVS ExtraCare card, and Barnes and Noble Member card) into a single credit card-sized page.  My current system is less than ideal: cutting cards down into just the essentials (barcodes) and stuffing the shards of cards in my wallet.  I might try KeyRingThing instead.  Do you carry loyalty cards?  Which do you use regularly?  Would combining them be worth $2.97?  (HT: LifeHacker)

• Sean at Tactical Philanthropy drew my attention to a new magazine for social enterprise.  It’s called Beyond Profit, and you can flip through the inaugural issue online here.

• This “a day in the life of brand recognition” is a fascinating exercise: documenting brands you encounter throughout a typical day.  (HT: Kottke)

• I’m a sucker for anything with a headline like “In Defense of Liberal Arts,” and this post by Lane Wallace (guest blogging in Andrew Sullivan’s absence) is no exception.  I love this thought in particular:

Yes, the U.S. needs technical expertise to keep pace, economically and technologically. But we also need innovators and entrepreneurs creating break-through concepts and businesses. And while knowledge in an area is important, I’d argue that the most important trait a pioneering entrepreneur needs is the confidence to buck convention; to believe he or she is right, despite what all the experts say.

• I like the instinct behind these ideas for transforming the 1,900+ auto dealerships set to close into greener spaces for business, community, or even nature.  As always, the dream vision for many of these spaces is likely prohibitively expensive; nevertheless, it’s neat to think about how these soon-to-be empty lots could be more than abandoned blights on the edge of a cities and towns.  I’d like to see other creative ideas for how to use the existing (albeit hastily-constructed) structures.

• Astronauts have performed minor miracles all week repairing the Hubble space telescope for the last time.  Unsurprisingly, some incredible images have emerged:

Image courtesy of NASA.  On a related note, it makes me really happy to imagine the astronauts floating around their living area watching the new Star Trek movie.

• Questioning Things: Vol. VI
• Social Entrepreneurship at Council on Foundations
• The Liberal Arts Graduate in a Specialized World
• Satellite Challenge #4
• White Spaces and the Road to Ambient Intelligence

I’m a huge fan of Dave Eggers’ books.  While some folks thought A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was a bit indulgent, I loved (nearly) every word.  I enjoyed You Shall Know Our Velocity! even more, and found What Is the What to be heartbreaking and sincere.

What I find most  interesting about Eggers is how his commitment to the written word extends beyond his own works, or the magazine he publishes, to include a heartfelt and effective social enterprise geared toward helping young people find their voices and receive one-on-one tutelage in writing.  His nonprofits (the first of which was 826 Valencia in San Francisco) serve as a fun and unintimidating setting for after school tutoring and creative inspiration.  His deceptiely simple idea–that a network of writers and freelancers with flexible schedules could engage young students in an authentic and helpful way after school hours–is making a huge difference in the lives of kids in cities across the country.  I encourage you to watch the inspiring video below in which Eggers describes his philosophy and the quirky model of 826 Valencia.  It involves pirates and superheroes, but I won’t give any more away:

You can also download this video to iTunes (MP4 file) by clicking here (”Save Link As” on Windows).

• TED Talks: Jonathan Harris
• TED Talks: Dan Barber
• Schoolhouse Blog?
• Mea Culpa: Facebook Chat Is, In Fact, Useless
• New to Me in ‘08: Web Services and Software

Heard an interview on NPR this afternoon with the guy who created Legacy Locker.  Basically, he was trying to secure the on-line identity of his deceased grandmother, but it was essentially impossible.  Which begs the question: what happens to your on-line identity once you die?

So this guy developed a small business where they basically keep all of your on-line information (log-ins, passwords, etc.), and your instructions for how to deal with your on-line identity once you’re gone (give it to a specific person/specific people, destroy it, etc.).  According to the interview, they currently have 1,000 customers, and they’ve only been operating for about a month.  I could see this thing taking off.

More on CNET and TechCrunch.

Jarred pondered many of the issues Legacy Locker aims to resolve in his post Passing On Your Cloud.

• Passing On Your Cloud
• On(line) and Off Again
• Round-Up: What’s So Special About Blogging?
• Is FriendFeed Doomed?: Jarred Guest Posts at SarahInTampa.com
• The Human Side of Newspapers

Dan Barber is a chef and restauranteur who visited a truly amazing farm in Spain that raises geese for fois gras in a shockingly humane and natural way.  The portrait Barber paints of the Spanish farmer is remarkable, and the amount of care that goes into raising these animals stands in astounding contrast to commercially-produced fois gras, beef, pork, poultry, corn, or soy.  It’s neat to watch a clear lover of food discuss a revelation about the production of ingredients and what it means to learn from nature.

You can also download this video to iTunes (MP4 file) by clicking here (”Save Link As” on Windows).

We’d love to hear your reactions in the comments.  In particular, I’m curious to know: is this destined to remain an inspirational micro-scale anecdote, or are there lessons in this story that could meaningfully impact our food systems at large?

• TED Talks: Dave Eggers
• TED Talks: Jonathan Harris
• Sunday Cooking…With the Internet
• Sustainable Diets [Guest Post]
• The Overlooked Ground Zero for Sea Level Rise

Back in January, I got into a debate with some work colleagues over the status of political science as a “true” scientific discipline.  Though I think one or two were playing devil’s advocate, the consensus seemed to be that political science was not worthy of the second half of its name.  I argued (and do believe), however, that it is indeed a valid science.

To be honest, I can’t remember my friends’ specific arguments (we may or may not have been sitting in a hot tub in the mountains and a few drinks in — thus making the debate fairly comical to begin with).  I’ll be sure to let them know I’ve blogged about it so they can correct, clarify, or elaborate on their arguments in the comments.  As I remember it, though, their main contention was that because political science is the study of human behavior, and because observations of human behavior cannot reliably be generalized and retested to form a consistent theory or law, the study of politics cannot be classified as a science in the same vein as physics, chemistry, or the other “natural” sciences.  It’s simply too flaky.

At Davidson (where Taylor and I went for undergrad and both majored in political science), there is a huge division among the department faculty on this point.  Currently, every political science major is required to take “Methods and Statistics in Political Science,” a course that is almost uniformly dreaded.  “I’m majoring in a social science precisely because I suck at math”, they complain.  “When will I ever use this again?”  The science and math wannabes that we are, Taylor and I loved it, and ended up working with our professor one summer on a quantitative study of how congressmen shape their political messaging.

The fear of the course stems mostly from a failure by the faculty to execute any kind of positive PR, because really, it’s not that bad and not that hard.  Anyone who is smart enough to get into Davidson can handle it.  The first half of the course doesn’t deal with a single number, formula, or regression model, but rather shows how to take a question of politics and attack it using the scientific method.  Delineate the specific question, form a hypothesis, decide what the variables are, and propose a way to run an experiment.  Not hard, right?  The second half is certainly more difficult because it delves into the quantitative realm using computer-aided regressions; but really, it’s nothing impossible and the professors are not only ready, but eager to help them understand and succeed.

In an article called “The Lamentable State of Science Education in Political Science” (sorry, I can’t find a free version online besides on the Davidson course page *cough* first linked reading *cough*), Kim Hill from Texas A&M University asserts that research political scientists

seek scientific explanations for observable, natural phenomena. [...] Ours is inherently a natural science – with no concern for supernatural, paranormal, or otherwise other-worldly matters.  Any college graduate today who does not understand the scientific character of the social sciences is as ignorant as one who confuses astronomy and astrology or chemistry and alchemy.

She further notes that it is widely accepted that, as a relatively young discipline, political science is “essentially identical to the mature physical sciences at equivalent stages in their development.”  Indeed, “it is the rare major policy decision of the U.S. government, General Motors, the Ford Foundation, or any other comparable entity that is made without notable recourse to social science argument and evidence.”  Hill soberly laments that “ours is the only scientific discipline I know that essentially fails to educate its undergraduate students in its primary concerns. [...] Indeed, they are as skeptical about that matter when they graduate as when they matriculate.”

The seeds of this skepticism are fairly obvious and wholly understandable.  Studying human behavior and systems is inherently unpredictable.  It is seemingly impossible to control precisely for variables, and difficult to measure results or even come up with the right units of measurement.  The laboratory of political science is the whole world and its recorded history; experiments can be costly, time consuming, and sometimes one-and-you’re-done opportunities (we can’t recreate the 2004 U.S. presidential election to measure “that one thing we forgot to measure”).  And perhaps most interestingly, the subjects of scientific political study are… us.  And not only our decisions, but often our preferences, our passions, and our opinions.  These things are flimsy, indefinite, and trigger our biases.  Studying politics scientifically and objectively requires a temporary suspension of our beliefs.

By no means do I argue that any study of politics is or should be scientific.  It is entirely possible to study politics in other ways (and indeed, I’d argue that a considerable portion of political science courses are not really political science courses).  Perhaps this is why many colleges and universities call the major “government” or “politics”.  There’s nothing wrong with this at all.  My argument, rather, is that almost anything can be studied scientifically.  Literature.  Art.  Music.  Basketball.  History.  Cooking.  I’m not arguing that political science is a robust scientific discipline that has a great track record of discovering any kind of Truth, or any consistently verifiable Law of Human Behavior.  But sciences are not defined by the number or importance of the truths they elicit.  Science is not a conclusion.  Science is an approach.

Problem.  Hypothesis.  Variables.  Experiments.  Results.  Conclusion.  Boom, you’re done.  Your results don’t have to prove your hypothesis true — they rarely do.  Your experiment could have been a complete failure — you forgot to control for an important variable; you discovered you were asking the wrong question; you realize that you cannot extrapolate anything from your data; etc.  So what?  Happens in chemistry labs around the world every single day.  You haven’t failed to apply science.  You’ve learned something.  You plug the holes, change your models, and you try again.

The newest issue of Wired — guest edited by J.J. Abrams and dedicated to the idea of “mystery” — leads with an excellent piece by Brian Greene, a physicist and author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos. Greene writes (sorry, it’s not online yet…):

To the vast majority, science is solely about answers — the material that’s sandwiched between the covers of their textbooks. It’s understandable.  For the most part, we teach science as if it were a technical trade: Learn these facts about cells.  Memorize these equations describing motion.  Balance these reactions that underlie oxidation.  And then demonstrate competence by passing an exam.  With this lopsided focus on the end points of research, the scientific explorations themselves receive the most minimal attention.

But science is the journey.  Science is about immersing ourselves in piercing uncertainty while struggling with the deepest of mysteries.  It is the ultimate adventure. [...] Einstein captured it best when he wrote, “the years of anxious searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express.”  That’s what science is about”

Who would dare preclude the social sciences from this quest?  What nobler or more righteous use of the scientific method than to better understand humans, how we interact with each other politically, how we construct our institutions, how we achieve efficiencies and better serve our societies’ needs… or how we manipulate these systems to exploit others and consolidate absolute power?  In these times of partisan polarization, global poverty and hunger, financial uncertainty, and environmental meltdown, we need every model of analysis we can get our hands on.

And now, a word from Randy Newman:

Comic used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of xkcd.com.

• Will The Personalized Web Filter Out Diversity?
• Death of the Humanities? A response to Stanley Fish [Guest Post]
• Party Foul: Facebook and “Political Views”
• People Send Us Things, Part I: The World Wide Web Foundation
• Measure for Measure: Assessing Human Aptitudes and Abilities

David Roberts at Grist offers a great primer on power grids, including the important distinction between a wide grid: “a new high-voltage backbone, with lines spanning the length and breadth of the country, able to carry electricity from anywhere it’s generated to anywhere it’s needed” and a smart grid: a transmission system that allows for distibuted production (think rooftop solar panels) and is capable of adjusting in real time to compensate for heavy usage, increased production, etc.  This is a recommended read to get a basic grasp of what David describes as two key power grid issues:

[O]ne grid issue is getting more power (transmission lines to new places) and one is using power more efficiently(smarter distributions systems). The politics around those two issues are quite different

Related, also courtesy of David: here’s a list of articles on my to-read list related to smart grids.

Jason Calacanis sent a long and thoughtful email about the ways in which anonymity online can be harmful to the extent that it erodes our empathy for other people. Jason goes so far as to call this trend a “disease”–”Internet Aspergers Syndrome”:

This disease affects people when their communication moves to digital, and the emotional cues of face-to-face interaction–including tone, facial expression and the so called “blush response”–are lost.

In this syndrome, the afflicted stops seeing the humanity in other people. They view individuals as objects, not individuals. The focus on repetitive behaviors–checking email, blogging, [and] twittering…–combines with an inability to feel empathy and connect with people.

This is a provocative thought, and it does seem to me that the next big trend online (web 3.0?) will be authenticated identities driving the social media we’ve taken for granted.  Calacanis mentions that social networks in South Korea require a social security number to sign up.  There will inevitably be a tension between the norms that have developed in the web’s infancy and the changes that will be necessary to combat what is moving from a medium where goodwill and trust could be taken for granted toward an anything-goes medium where accountability is virtually (pun intended) nonexistent.  How we choose to make that shift–requiring social security numbers, for instance, might be a bit invasive by American standards–is unclear, but I think many of us are starting to feel fatigue with unaccountable spammers and trolls ruining the web for everyone else.

I’ve come across a fair amount of criticism recently of URL-shortening services (like tinyURL, bit.ly, Digg, others).  As TechCrunch explains:

Nobody really likes [URL shorteners], but they are a necessary evil. How else are you going to share links on Twitter without having the URL take up half the message?

The criticisms focus on a number of issues:

1. URL shorteners obscure links, which opens unsuspecting users to spam attacks;
2. shorteners, to quote the founder of del.icio.us, “add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system” and slow the web;
3. some shorteners, like Digg, deny direct traffic to sites by using a frame instead of directing clicks to the original material (Facebook users will find this familiar, since shared items are framed in a similar fashion);
4. all shortened links are dependent on the continued existence of the proponderance of shortener start-ups AND the perpetuity of their terms of service (in other words, the guarantee that your tinyURL will not be reassigned or disappear)

I worry about the Digg/Facebook model gaining traction, since “link juice” for original material is what feeds the web’s content producers.  But I think in the future you’ll see more of this type of functionality: an interim landing page where visitors will see a full URL before continuing to the source material.  If content aggregators (I’m looking at you, Digg) can add value by previewing pages and layering social rankings or other features, this could be a win-win-win proposition: People clicking shortened links are protected from spam; the URL shortening service has an opportunity to advertise and lure visitors to other material; the content provider receives a direct traffic boost.

That’s all for now, though I should be blogging regularly again next week.

• Sorry for the Down Time Folks; This Blog Lives!
• Making Twitter Work for the Masses
• Untwisting Twitter
• It’s The Technology, Stupid!
• Defending Social Media

An interesting man named Tom Edwards stopped by Google today to give a talk about “Geocultural Intelligence and Global Business”.  A geographer and designer by training, he spent thirteen years at Microsoft as a Geopolitical Strategist, vetting products before they launched to be sure that they would not raise any ill feelings — or outright outrage — among foreign governments or other constituencies.  He’s since gone on to found Englobe, a consultancy that expands his work to a broader platform.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’ll give you a few examples that he shared with us.  Did you know, for example, that Windows 95 was temporarily prevented from being sold in India because the borders of the Kashmir region were not drawn to the government’s liking in the time zone settings (yes, that tiny 1.5×4″ map!)?  Or that several video games have been recalled from, delayed, or outright canceled in some countries because their soundtracks included chanted prayers from the Qu’ran, or because they featured radioactive two-headed Brahman cows that were… edible during gameplay?  Or that Turkey blocks a majority of YouTube traffic in its borders because of videos critical of Ataturk?

At Englobe, Tom’s adapted the idea of “geopolitical” to “geocultural“, and for good reason.  Samuel Huntington proposed back in the 1990s that the powderkegs of the post-Cold War era would not explode primarily over traditional political or military disputes, but rather over cultural and religious conflicts.  It’s certainly hard to argue that this hypothesis is not well on its way to proving true.  This shifting dynamic is not limited to the realm of geopolitics, however.  In the business world, too, we increasingly see the importance of national boundaries fading as so many diverse markets begin to merge into a truly global one.  While governments will still often be the official agents for expressing concern or taking action regarding geocultural issues, the issue goes much beyond the political realm.

I don’t want to rehash Tom’s talk or dive too deep into the details, but I wanted to toss out a thought, which I also posed to him in a question at the end of the talk.  To many people — and especially to developers themselves — video games are not just products.  To them (and me), video games are also an art.  Those who develop the elaborate narratives, painstakingly model the characters, precisely design the environments, labor over how the characters will move and how the user will interact with and feel a part of the virtual world they create — these people, to a certain extent, are artists.

Yes, video games form a mammoth entertainment industry.  But unlike musicians or writers or painters, video game developers can’t just set up a studio in their garage to achieve the pinnacle of their art.  They require complicated tools and training to reach the levels they want, and those things cost money.  Furthermore, the distribution of their work is tightly controlled by the console manufacturers, since video games require access to console APIs (remember this post?) to work at all.   Among the media of art, theirs is perhaps one of the most constrained in terms of access and resources.

If you’ll go so far as to agree with me that video games could be considered partially a form of art, then what a curious art it is, right?  Pictures, films, books — these are all principally observatory arts, and participatory strictly in the sense that your mind takes you away to that place that the artist is guiding you.  Video games, on the other hands, are participatory by nature.  While a general narrative and cast of characters are pre-defined for you, you get to not only decide on, but to actually create and execute the steps that lead you to that conclusion.  In that sense, the user becomes an artist his or herself.  Video games certainly focus on the audiovisual and narrative aesthetics, but it is often the art of interaction that makes or breaks the game.

Of course, it’s also this art of interaction that makes video games a highly controversial medium.  By making the experience so interactive or compelling that it seems like reality, video games developers are often accused of encouraging or enabling video game-like behavior outside the medium (two words: school shootings).  Further, because the developers determine the content of the game and the rules by which players can make their interactive decisions, they can potentially abuse that power and direct or encourage certain types of in-game behavior or sentiment, which can replicate itself outside the game.  An example of this might be (I’m making this up) giving a user extra points for running over bystanders in a driving game.

I asked Tom how the dynamic of creative license and freedom of artistic expression played out with the growing emphasis and action on geocultural sensitivity in corporations, and he signaled that these developers indeed felt that their creative license was being constrained, if not violated.  Certainly, in most cases, their intent was neither to offend nor make any kind of political or religious statement.  But part of what makes art special is that it is allowed to be edgy, provocative, and even controversial.  By being limited to corporate studios that have to (rightfully) play CYA in order to preserve their business, developers feel they are being robbed of their basic artistic freedoms.

So my question is, whither this art and its creators?  For the immediate future, they seem trapped.  Will they be forever constrained to corporate patrons who dampen their ability to express themselves as they wish?  Or will there be some video game developers revolution or renaissance, where they break out of their commercial chains and find away to create as they see fit?  Silly questions to some, but there are some folks out there in America and elsewhere who feel that their art is being censored to some degree.  And that’s some serious stuff.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of HVX Silverstar.

• Art From Above
• Just a Little Light Gym Reading
• Mashups and Conversational Media
• Breaking: Davidson Sends Students to Big Game In Detroit For Free
• Movie Review: Helvetica

What happens to your online presence when your physical one is no longer?  Intrigued, I visited their Facebook pages.  My mind was racing.  “What’s going to happen to all these wall comments that were accumulated over the years?  What about the comments people left for him on his Thanksgiving photos?  Who decides when it is time to close this account?  What’s the procedure?  Does it all just disappear?”

I’ll understand if you perceive these to be insensitive and petty questions in the face of such a tragic subject, and perhaps for the present times it is indeed a little irrelevant.  But if you are paying even the smallest bit of attention to what is happening in technology, you are certainly aware of two things.  First, more and more of your personal “effects” — e-mail, photos, documents, music — are being turned into 1’s and 0’s and kept online.  Second, the tiny actions we take online (like leaving comments or clicking the “like” button on a Facebook news feed item) are little pieces of a larger online narrative that, in a sense, journal our lives for us.  If determining the fate of this data once we’re gone is not a crucial question to address right now, it certainly will be in the next two to three years.

Take your personal e-mail, for example.  E-mail has succeeded letter writing as a principal form of communication among most people of my generation.  My grandmother has letters from my grandfather when he was fighting in Guam, and I wouldn’t doubt that my parents have a few keepers stashed in a shoebox somewhere.  But most of the written missives that are important to me are either archived somewhere in my Gmail account, or stashed in a folder of PDF’d e-mails that I saved from my old college e-mail account.

Touching emails from friends in far away places, notes of encouragement or praise from professors, love letters sent to old girlfriends, my first e-mail back from Google telling me they wanted to interview me… if I were to die today, what would be the fate of these messages?  Would they sit in my account for a year or two until it was deactivated due to inactivity, eventually deleted to make way for more messages among the living?  Would someone know to go into my computer and save that PDF file?  Would I have been prescient enough to stash my password somewhere for my survivors to find it, or to include instructions in a will or elsewhere detailing if (and unto whom) I wanted that data to be bequeathed?

E-mail is the most pressing example, but in the coming years there will be more.  What about my photos?  What about my data from the del.icio.us bookmarking system, an equivalent to a drawer full of newspaper clippings?  What if I was the only writer of this blog and the sole owner of its content, the domain name, the hosting space, etc?  What if I had a private blog that acted as my journal?  The day is coming when the web will no longer be a duplicate or backup of the content on our computers.  Quite the opposite: on that day, our hard drives will be caches or backups for our web-based data.  If you think it’s slightly unnerving that your entire music, photo, and document collection are one drink spill away from destruction, wait until all that stuff is actually stored hundreds of miles away from you.

As more and more of our creativity, our work product… in short, our “stuff” becomes digital by its very nature, it’s going to be important for us to think about a plan for preserving and passing it on to our loved ones.  The tricky thing is that the web is littered with our digital footprints, and in many cases we’ve changed boots for every site we’ve visited.  If I were to sit you down with a pad of paper away from your computer, could you list every site that you belonged to along with your username and password?  Could you even name ten of them without referring to your bookmarks, or checking your browser history, or relying on those convenient auto-fill functions that take care of your security info for you?

The good news is that there is a movement across the industry to help consolidate our identities and our data.  Fancy things like Google Account Authentication API, Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect, OAuth, OpenID, FriendFeed are all trying to help you either connect the dots you’ve left across the web, or to help you suck those dots into one central point of aggregation.  But that’s only half the battle.  The other half is making sure that people think about what they want kept (and what they want deleted) when they’re gone… and that they’ve told the right people and written the right instructions for their wishes to be properly executed by their survivors.

None of this is meant to suggest that your data is not secure, of course — I do work for a cloud computing company, after all!  And a lot of the burden is on the companies like Google to provide the right tools and procedures to let you make these decisions.  But you also have a burden to be the master of your domain and the planner of its fate, and your domain is becoming more and more digital by the second.

It’s questions like these that make me excited about technology.  The more useful and innovative something is, the more riddled with legal and even philosophical puzzles it generally tends to be.  And in this age of wildfire innovation, the puzzles just keep on coming.

Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Salinas Photography.

• Passing On Your Cloud Pt. 2
• Stop Creating for a Moment and Enjoy? We’re Fine, Thanks
• Lala: Send Your Music To The Cloud
• Breaking: Facebook, Plaxo, and Google Endorse Data Portability
• Spokeo, or Spooky-o?