You’ll have seen this word flying about recently and it’s time for some explanations. Err… don’t you mean ‘publically’? ['publicly' if you're American] No. Well, in some ways, yes, I do. Let me explain. In the past, there has been an assumption that privacy was the default state of human existence. It was only when you, someone or [...]
January 11, 2010
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is reported as having changed his mind about privacy. The recent set of changes to the site’s T&Cs in December – which rendered members’ names, profile picture, gender, network, fan pages and friends visible to the world unless they explicitly changed their settings – merely reflects societal norms, Zuckerberg says. People [...]
December 9, 2009
I am always suspicious of Internet ‘experts’ who pay homage to the digital natives idea. The idea that young people are not only generationally different from me, but also are psychologically different. Perhaps it’s my age. Being over-40, I react badly to anything that suggests that I’m not long from the care home. But I also [...]
December 8, 2009
Life just got better. At the end of last week, Google announced that its personalised search had now become available to ‘signed-out’ users. What does that mean? Well, personalised search means that Google uses its history of what you have searched for before to provide more relevant results for subsequent search queries. It records everything you’ve searched [...]
December 4, 2009
I mentioned this a couple of posts back. Delete discusses ‘The Virtues of Forgetting in the Digital Age’. Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend but the RSA has – as always – made the audio of the talk available to everyone. See the link below for details. Google remembers everything we’ve searched for and when. Potentially humiliating content [...]
October 7, 2009
We have no idea, do we, of where this stuff will be in the future? “The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.” That’s what Omar Khayyam wrote. But it‘s rubbish, [...]
March 24, 2009
I spent the day today at the Wealth of Networks II conference, the agenda of which was set out as the next-generation of the Internet. It was a good event and the organisers managed to bring together some top-rate speakers in a great venue with rock-solid internet, for once. And it was free – yay for [...]
November 21, 2008
I have five free tickets for the NMK Behavioural Targeting event, next Tuesday evening. We’ll be looking at the likes of Phorm, Specific Media and so forth and the opportunities they hold for advertisers and publishers, and also the threat to privacy that they may or may not represent. Leave a comment to get one of [...]
November 19, 2008
1. Send it to everyone you know. 2. Make a Google Maps mash-up out of the data. Much of socialmedialand was rubbing its hands with glee this morning at the news that the British National Party’s membership list had been leaked on the Internet and was freely available for anyone to download. A lot of people were [...]
December 5, 2006
…is Who 2.0. That’s according to an interview with Tim O’Reilly, the man who popularised Web 2.0. On Basque news site eitb24, he said that he thinks: …certain kinds of databases are going to become really big and really useful. We are just in the early stages, digital identity doesn’t really work yet. But that will, [...]
November 9, 2006
Online privacy and reputation is going to be big business over the next few years. The last couple of weeks have seen the beta launch of both London’s Garlik and US-based Reputation Defender. Both of these subscription services offer to scour the web for you, find every trace of your name and optionally attempt to [...]
November 1, 2006
Nice interview on Techcrunch about Vox, the new social network/blog platform from SixApart. I have to confess that I didn’t really see the point of Vox when it first appeared, given the existence of all the other social networks out there. SixApart’s Andrew Anker explains: More importantly to Vox, we believe there is very little out [...]
February 1, 2010