Ideas
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Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing
Let’s start with Facebook’s Surveillance Machine, by Zeynep Tufekci in last Monday’s New York Times. Among other things (all correct), Zeynep explains that “Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.” Irony Continue reading
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Data is the New Love
Personal data, that is. Because it’s good to give away—but only if you mean it. And it’s bad to take it, even it seems to be there for the taking. I bring this up because a quarter million pages (so far) on the Web say “data is the new oil.” That’s because a massive personal data Continue reading
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How the personal data extraction industry ends
Who Owns the Internet? — What Big Tech’s Monopoly Powers Mean for our Culture is Elizabeth Kolbert‘s review in The New Yorker of several books, one of which I’ve read: Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things—How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. The main takeaway for me, to both Elizabeth’s piece and Jon’s Continue reading
adtech, advertising, Business, data, Ideas, infrastructure, Internet, Law, marketing, News, Technology, VRM -
The Daily Tab for 2017_06_06
Required viewing: A Good American, a documentary on Bill Binney and the NSA by @FriedrichMoser. IMHO, this is the real Snowden movie. And I say that with full respect for Snowden. Please watch it. (Disclosure: I have spent quality time with both Bill and Fritz, and believe in both.) Bonus dude: @KirkWiebe, also ex-NSA and a colleague of Bill’s. Continue reading
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Have we passed peak phone?
I shot this picture with my phone on the subway last night, while no less absorbed in my personal rectangle than everyone else on the subway (and I do mean everyone) was with theirs. I don’t know what the other passengers were doing on their rectangles, though it’s not hard to guess. In my case it was Continue reading
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The Internet deserves its proper noun
The NYTimes says the Mandarins of language are demoting the Internet to a common noun. It is to be just “internet” from now on. Reasons: Thomas Kent, The A.P.’s standards editor, said the change mirrored the way the word was used in dictionaries, newspapers, tech publications and everyday life. In our view, it’s become wholly generic, like ‘electricity Continue reading
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Toward an ethics of influence
This event is now in the past and can be seen in its entirety here. Stop now and go to TimeWellSpent.io, where @TristanHarris, the guy on the left above, has produced and gathered much wisdom about a subject most of us think little about and all of us cannot value more: our time. Both of us Continue reading
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The Giant Zero
The world of distance Fort Lee is the New Jersey town where my father grew up. It’s at the west end of the George Washington Bridge, which he also helped build. At the other end is Manhattan. Even though Fort Lee and Manhattan are only a mile apart, it has always been a toll call Continue reading
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Moron the IQ myth (pun intended)
On Quora an anonymous somebody asked, My IQ is 131. Can I get into MIT? Yeah, it’s easy to call that a dumb question. But it’s the kind of question you get from somebody trapped in a caste system that cries out for a larger perspective, such as this one: Anyway, here’s my answer: You Continue reading
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What everything isn’t
We know shit. I mean, in respect to the Everything that surrounds us, and the culture in which we are pickled from start to finish, what we know rounds to nothing and is, with the provisional exception of the subjects and people we study and love, incomplete and therefore somewhere between questionable and wrong. But Continue reading
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What should we call the selling of our digital body parts?
In a provocative OuiShareFest talk titled You Are the Product, Aral Balkan says this: I think we are at the point where we have to ask ourselves the very uncomfortable question: What do we call the business of selling everything else about you, that makes you who you are, apart from your physical body? And why, if this Continue reading
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What’s the best way customer love can help a brand?
In “Cool Influencers With Big Followings Get Picky About Their Endorsements,” Sydney Ember of the NY Times writes, The more brands that use influencers for marketing campaigns on social platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Instagram, the less impact each influencer has. At the same time, many influencers, who once jumped at the opportunity to endorse Continue reading
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We can all make TV. Now what?
Look where Meerkat and Periscope point. I mean, historically. They vector toward a future where anybody anywhere can send live video out to the glowing rectangles of the world. If you’ve looked at the output of either, several things become clear about their inevitable evolutionary path: Mobile phone/data systems will get their gears stripped, in both Continue reading
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The most important event, ever
IIW XX, the 20th Internet Identity Workshop, comes at a critical inflection point in the history of VRM: Vendor Relationship Management, the only business movement working toward giving you both independence from the silos and walled gardens of the world; and better means for engaging with every business in the world — your way, rather Continue reading
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Maybe wallets can’t be apps
Danese Cooper (@DivaDanese) asks via tweet, Wallet App (and 1-button pay) as “compelling demo” apparently works equally well 4 BitCoin as 4 PayPal. @dsearls opinion? #BitcoinSummit Sounds cool, but I don’t know which wallet app she’s talking about. There are many. In my opinion, however, they all come up short because they aren’t really wallets. Continue reading
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Is perfectly personalized advertising perfectly creepy?
The uncanny valley is where you find likenesses of live humans that are just real enough to be creepy. On a graph it looks like this: So I was thinking about how this looks for advertising that wants to get perfectly personal. You know: advertising that comes from systems that know you better than you Continue reading
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Why EULAs suck for the Internet of Things
I’ve been asked how EULAs — End User License Agreements — might affect the Internet of Things, now becoming better known as the IoT. Good question. The topic is hot: Development, however, is another story. There we are headed straight into a log-jam that Phil Windley calls the Compuserve of Things. In the 80’s and early ’90s, Compuserve was Continue reading
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It’s Indie Time
Aral Balkan is doing a bang-up job getting Indie rolling as an adjectival meme. He’s doing it with his Indie Phone, Indie Tech Manifesto and a talk titled Free is a Lie. To put the Indie movement in context, it helps to realize that it’s been on the tech road at least since 1964, when Paul Baran, one of the Internet’s Continue reading
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Earth to Mozilla: Come back home
In her blog post explaining the Brendan Eich resignation, Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, writes, “We know why people are hurt and angry, and they are right: it’s because we haven’t stayed true to ourselves.” In Mozilla is Human, Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Foundation, adds, “What we also need to do is start a process Continue reading