Brittany Creamer
Brittany will be entering her Senior year at the University of Texas. She is majoring in Public Relations and Business Foundations, and is part of the nGenera Intern team in Austin. She is currently working on developing training materials for nGenera’s Collaboration Suite of products and is a Facebook evangelist within the company. Before coming to nGenera, Brittany worked as a program assistant for an Austin non-profit offering free computer classes and technology training to low income individuals.
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August 15th, 2008, 12:09pm
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If you have ever fancied yourself as something of an amateur inventor or designer but never seemed to have the resources to make your vision a reality, your day may have finally arrived.
Shapeways, a new internet-based 3-D printing service, offers rapid prototyping at an affordable price. Send in your digital design file and Shapeways will ship your polymer prototype in less than ten days and won’t charge you an arm and a leg. According to Shapeways, most orders cost between $50 and $150. Shapeway’s proprietary software ensures the design can be built and tweaks small errors in the design before production. Amazingly, Shapeway’s advanced printers can build objects with moveable parts and the clincher is that the price isn’t determined by complexity, but rather by the amount of polymer required.
3-D printing’s uses are virtually unlimited. Small businesses and startups can order prototypes for potential customers, artists can have a new medium with which to play, friends can create their own unique gifts to give, and prosumers can whip up a redesign for a company.
In an age when Starbucks’ die-hard caffeine addicts spend hours combing mystarbucksidea.com for ways to improve a business in which they have no professional stake in, it’s not a stretch to see similarly devoted customers producing actual mock ups of improved products for a favorite brand. But will it really catch on?
Cornell University engineer Hod Lipson thinks so. He told MIT’s Technology Review that he thinks people will eventually have these printers at home.
Could the democratization of 3-D printing technology be for prosumerism what the Gutenberg press was for literacy?
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August 5th, 2008, 03:28pm
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I will be the first to admit that I am something of a Facebook stalker. Although it sounds creepy, it just means that I have kept up with friends’ lives via Facebook. Some Facebook stalkers take it to a whole new level, browsing strangers’ profiles within their networks. I do not do that.
I say all of this to preface the fact that I am not really a stalker even though I just spent the last hour on criminalsearches.com, where anyone can enter in someone’s name and get a whole list of criminal offenses ( if any) for free. Most criminal records are public information and anyone can search individual state databases for free. The cool thing about CriminalSearches is that it aggregates all of these disjointed databases and delivers a more comprehensive result with much less time and effort. Launched just last month, CriminalSearches is garnering serious attention.
So what did I turn up in an hour’s time? I found my black sheep cousin and all six of his quite impressive drug and alcohol convictions. I even found an old high school teacher (who was fired the year after I graduated) who now has a conviction for assault. Nice.
In my last blog I pondered my personal brand and how to manage my information. While I am fortunate—or maybe just law abiding—enough to not have any dubious offenses tarnishing my online identity, there are likely thousands more who find themselves struggling to move past a youthful indiscretion or other similarly embarrassing-but-not-as-bad-as-it-sounds offense in a society that highly stigmatizes criminal activity.
In theory, a judge decides how much time and effort it will cost a convict to repay their debt to society. After that period is over, the ex-convict’s debt is considered paid and the ex-convict moves on with their life. But now, with such data so readily available, a convict’s debt to society will now be decided by the court of public opinion for better or worse.
CriminalSearches may become a powerful law enforcement tool. One blog about CriminalSearches describes how a family researched the criminal record of the person suspected of killing their son. The blogger claims that the site’s alias information helped investigators find missing records that put the suspect behind bars.
While that may be a rare case, it benefits society to be able to thoroughly screen people they come in contact with and in whom they place their trust. While some people may be upset to find themselves listed as a criminal for a traffic offense, others will highly value this information when hiring drivers and nannies and babysitters. Parents could even look up their kids’ friends’ parents to see if they are safe drivers and trustworthy people before letting their kids hop in the backseat or attend a sleepover.
But there is a fine balance between society’s right to know and the individual’s right to move on with their lives. How will society adapt to such pervasive and powerful information in an increasingly voyeuristic world?
In any case, better look yourself up and see what dirt there is on you. It’s all a part of curating that ever-expanding online identity. If you find incorrect information, such as a ticket that was supposed to be dismissed or expunged, contact the authority that issued the citation and clean up your image. It’s the only one you get.
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July 31st, 2008, 05:33pm
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If each person is their own brand, like my marketing professor says they are, then your online identity is a large, integral part of that brand. But how do you manage all of the content, yours or otherwise, that becomes attached to your name?
Take, for example, the other Brittany Creamer. She’s a blonde basketball player in a state several hundreds of miles north of the unathletic, brunette me. I was a little surprised, when logging in to Facebook one day a couple of years ago, to see pictures posted of me with blonde hair surrounded by foreign faces. Although quickly untagging these pictures resolved my mini identity crisis, how do you prevent and manage larger, more serious cases of mistaken identity?
Blogger Esther Dyson suggests the idea of curating your online identity in her blog in MIT’s Technology Review. She raises thought provoking questions about new complexities of personal identities that are less than private-say when your information is hosted on a platform or stored in a database. While she concluded that less vague and abstract user agreements and privacy settings are the quickest fix, I’m still a little skeptical. More specific user agreements could solve disputes about ads tailored to your interests, but I’m not sure how they could help manage user-generated content.
I use stringent limited profile settings on Facebook to prevent my colleagues from seeing my less-than-professional side. My work friends can’t see my wall (no offense!) because I can’t control what my friends post. With Facebook’s redesign, though, a person’s wall is now the page a viewer lands on when they click through to see that person’s profile. The content I created about myself is hidden in secondary tabs. So much for creating your own Facebook persona, now your friends do it for you. So what do my poor work friends see when they land on my new profile? My tight privacy settings now result in my profile looking like a barren desert. My solution? Well, I don’t have one yet. But I’m working on it.
My plan of last resort, should it come to that, will be to generate a fake identity and start all over. It only takes a click of the mouse.
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July 25th, 2008, 06:07pm
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The other day I found myself perusing the New York Times like I’m apt to do anytime I need a few minutes to de-focus and relax. The third most emailed article of the day, “If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone,” caught my eye. “Hmm,” I think to myself. “That sounds collaborative. I’ll check it out.” Low and behold, the article is about InnoCentive, an innovation intermediary that brings together external experts to solve companies’ R&D problems.
Innocentive, founded in 2001, has grown nearly 30 percent since September of last year from 115,000 members to 145,000. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams talk about InnoCentive in the Ideagoras chapter of Wikinomics, so it’s no surprise that it’s making waves. What interests me, though, is that this article was the third most emailed article of the day. And just to clarify, it’s the overall most popular, not the just science section. Imagine all of those people reading about ideagoras! Maybe I just get a little too excited to see Wikinomics in the mainstream media, and maybe I’m forgetting who reads the New York Times. But wikinomics is infectious, and I clearly have the bug.
More interestingly though, according to the NYT article, is that the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Sen. John McCain, has “proposed that the government offer $300 million to whoever invents a battery compact enough, powerful enough and cheap enough to replace fossil fuels.” Maybe he’s a little technologically-challenged, but at least it seems he’s ready to collaborate. If the government embraces McCain’s proposal, perhaps we will see a solution sought on yet2.com or Innocentive. Perhaps even you can be a part of that solution.
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July 17th, 2008, 04:50pm
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The same problems that plagued 1.0 resources like phone books and encyclopedias still plague even the best of their 2.0 successors. These legacy issues mainly regard reliability as it pertains to accuracy. After a phone book is published and distributed, it is instantly out-of-date as phone numbers are disconnected and addresses changed. Unfortunately, this is an issue developers have yet to circumvent.
As documented in The New York Times’ article about Urbanspoons, a free Apple iPhone application that helps users “find restaurants by neighborhood, cuisine or price,” reality may be quite different from what Urbanspoons tells you. The writer’s Urbanspoons search led him to a restaurant that had been closed for six months, yet it still appeared highly recommended in the application. Inconvenient at worst, Urbanspoons’ inaccuracy is easily forgotten over a glass of wine at a restaurant that is actually still open for business.
On a more sinister level, outdated materials can be damaging to one’s (or one’s neighborhood, and by extension, their property value) reputation. Take, for example, rottenneighbor.com, “the first real estate search engine of its kind allowing you to rate and review good and bad neighbors before and after you move so you can make a smart real estate decision.” From the get-go, many users walk a fine line between honest, albeit negative, reviews and pure defamation. So what happens to reviews of neighbors after they move? The reviews stay with the location, so the new neighbor moving in will turn up in a search as a bad neighbor. And some of these reviews are quite unsavory, think “cat killer.” In a search of my neighborhood, I found a review of a man who was a resident of an apartment in 1999. While it is highly unlikely either party still lives in the building, the building will turn up, nine years later, as the home of a “freaky porn addict and nudist.”
Users of online directory resources should beware of outdated reviews and content. It’s common sense, but that shiny new iPhone may cloud better judgment. In the meantime, I will continue posting reviews of all of my least favorite neighbors and take reviews of others with a grain of salt. You never know, they may or may not still be there.
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July 10th, 2008, 01:59am
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I’m going to come right out and say it: people can get a little obsessive sometimes. And premium cable movie network Showtime has wisely decided to harness the power of their shows’ loyal fans by allowing users to create the content of their shows’ sites.
Showtime launched the first “Fan Wikis” about a year ago, and has since added pages for each of its shows. Since that time, pages have grown from basic content such as user-created cast bios and episode guides to complete guides of, well, everything related to the show.
Tudors’ fans maintain wikis from everything from costume design to a complete list of Tudor executions. Weed’s fans meticulously study characters’ wardrobes and post where to buy the exact article of clothing online. And it’s not a rogue few participating, either. The L Word wiki boasts more than 7,000 members.
Participation is simple. All a fan must do is register with Wetpaint and then check out what tasks are listed on the wiki To-Do list.
I haven’t decided what I think is more genius: Showtime outsourcing website content development to volunteers, or enabling fans to create fan sites on the actual Showtime site, keeping precious traffic right where they want it.
Showtime’s Fan Wikis are powered by Wetpaint, which describes itself as a place where “you can create websites that mix all the best features of wikis, blogs, forums and social networks into a rich, user-generated community based around the whatever-it-is that rocks your socks off.” The company announced May 19 it had raised $25 million to “accelerate the company’s growth.” According to TechCrunch, Wetpaint has now raised more than $40 million in all. On Wednesday, Wetpaint announced that more than 1million free social Wetpaint pages had been created since July 2006.
I’d like to see how Ben Letalik would grade Showtime in his weekly Wikinomics report card. Fan wikis combined with The Tudor’s multi-platform campaign launch of Season 2 (Showtime aired the entire season premiere for free on more than 60 sites, including Netflix and MSN) are very good examples of openness and sharing.
I started watching The Tudors (and subscribed to Showtime) after watching the Season 2 premiere on Netflix for free. I fell for Showtime’s 2.0 marketing plan hook, line, and sinker. Will Showtime’s innovative strategies and social networking features help it get an edge on long-time enemy (and market leader) HBO?
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July 2nd, 2008, 04:34pm
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Prosumerism is everywhere. From the oft-told example of Lego’s build-your-own sets to Starbucks’ customer co-creation website, My Starbucks Idea, prosumerism is turning up all over the place: your kids’ toy box, your cup holder, and now, your Word document.
Word processing individuals no longer need be confined by the fonts available within their software or even by fonts available for download online. Don’t like what you see? Build your own font.
FontStruct, which describes itself as “a free font-building tool brought to you by the world’s leading retailer of digital type FontShop,” lets users sign up, download their software, and build fonts by “construct[ing] geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks.”
Don’t have the time or creative inspiration to create your own? Browse other users’ fonts, which are available for download for free (if the creator feels generous with the rights). Or, for $250, FontShop will create a font based on your own handwriting, which you then own the rights to. On top of it all, FontStruct aficionados have built a tight community where they rate each others’ fonts and discuss all things font and beyond.
FontStruct seems to be gaining momentum. It’s been chatted up here, here and here. There are some legitimately cool fonts available to download for free, but I don’t think I will be making my own anytime soon since it looks pretty time-intensive. As the explosion in prosumerism provides lazy consumers like myself endless choices, I think I will leave the labor up to someone else and pick something someone else spent hours creating.
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June 27th, 2008, 04:52pm
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Not since the 1999 hit American Pie have I heard the word “sex” and “apple pie” in the same sentence. That is, until the New York Times ran What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer on Tuesday.
According to defense attorney Lawrence Walter’s evidence presented in a deposition in pornographic Web site case, more people in Pensacola, Fla. Google “orgy” than “apple pie.” Why is Walters comparing porn to apple pie? Because apple pie is wholesome, nostalgic, and All-American. For Walters, apple pie represents traditional values in America and this data proves that more people are interested in sex than pie. Read More »
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June 18th, 2008, 03:46pm
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Today’s New York Times features an article about the most serious social networking site, LinkedIn. The article describes what could be a dramatic shift for social networking sites as a whole: the professional networking site will expand its current product offerings by launching new fee-based services geared toward companies to generate revenue. This departure from the industry standard revenue generator, advertising, may lead other sites to copy its strategy.
LinkedIn already offers several fee-based services, like premium accounts and a talent acquisition tool. What is different, however, about many of their new products, is that they may change the community’s identity and betray its members who may not want their company to have access to every nook and cranny of their professional life. LinkedIn seems to be walking a fine line between abusing its users’ privacy and being able to make money off of peoples’ information. Read More »
