His personal answer to copyright is to give away his “ebooks under a Creative Commons licence that allows non-commercial sharing.” He then attracts readers who buy hard copies. Having two books on The New York Times bestseller lists in the last two years, he says, validates his particular approach.

But his piece online at The Guardian, published today, takes on a much broader issue than how he’s perceived by others or even the idea that copy-prevention is futile. “… here’s what I do care about. I care if your plan [to stop people from copying your work over the internet or to build a business around this idea] involves using ‘digital rights management’ technologies that prohibit people from opening up and improving their own property; if your plan requires that online services censor their user submissions; if your plan involves disconnecting whole families from the internet because they are accused of infringement; if your plan involves bulk surveillance of the internet to catch infringers, if your plan requires extraordinarily complex legislation to be shoved through parliament without democratic debate; if your plan prohibits me from keeping online videos of my personal life private because you won’t be able to catch infringers if you can’t spy on every video.”

[Breathe here.]

Many of these strategies are already being employed and Doctorow enumerates several: 40,000 people in the US sued by the record industry; mandatory DRM requirements for several digital distribution channels negotiated by Sony, Apple, Audible, and others; three strikes rule in effect in France that disconnects anyone (and their family) from the internet for “unsubstantiated accusations of infringement”; efforts by Viacom to prevent Google and other companies from allowing anyone to “upload content to the internet without reviewing its copyright status in advance.” This last one seems particularly intrusive and Big Brotherly to me because what Viacom wants is for a court “to order Google to make all user-uploaded content public so that Viacom can check it doesn’t infringe copyright – it thinks that its need to look at my videos is greater than my need to, say, flag a video of my two-year-old in the bath as private and visible only to me and her grandparents.” The incredible arrogance of Viacom is that it wants to court to validate the presumption that everything posted on YouTube and similar sites violates copyrights. So, for example, if this came to pass, would a video of someone watching an NFL game on a network be a copyright violation if it included in the video the actual broadcast in the background? What if you post a video of someone dancing to music? Would the presumption be that the music was pirated? Such a ruling, Doctorow says, “would shutter every message board, Twitter, social networking service, blog, and mailing list in a second.” If he’s correct, the impact on culture, society, daily life would be immeasurable.

There’s a great deal more in the article about artists’ attempts to make money doing what they love and how he thinks they might succeed, but for me, Doctorow’s piece snapped me to attention about DRM. My eyes will no longer glaze over when I see that acronym or the words Sony, Viacom, and others. The idea that my privacy is merely a gossamer wall to be breached by private, for-profit companies who assume I am a thief is incredible and as threatening as anything I’ve ever heard.

If you are sick of hearing about it, then you may agree with Malcolm Gladwell’s perspective on Facebook members in his New Yorker article, “Small Change: Why the social revolution will not be tweeted.”: “The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.”

I tweeted about this (completely incorrect) perception that day, saying, “Gladwell: ‘The evangelists of social media…seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend’ Well, do you?” No, I did not expect answers; probably a bad rhetorical question. But fortunately later that day I found a nice quote on the No Pun Intended blog in response to Gladwell’s assertion, which I also tweeted because it expressed my personal experience with Facebook: “To M. Gladwell: ‘Nobody who actually uses Facebook…thinks a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend.’”

Now before I make you sick of me for talking about my tweeting, let me get this in. Almost no one who “actually uses” Facebook – and there are now more than 500 million active users who spend over 700 billion minutes per month on the site – confuses “Friend” with friend. And if they do, it is not because of Facebook but due to some other cause.

How do I know this? Well, I don’t, in the sense of knowledge based on proof with data, scientific inquiry, survey data, or anything else. I “know” it because I see how the 108 friends I have use it: most post irregularly, some often, some every day; some post personal info, some their location, trip plans, dinner plans; some are companies or sites that I want to follow. I use it because I like to see what other people are thinking and doing. I do get to communicate with people I never or almost never see or even talk to, including relatives. I keep up with people who have moved on to other companies, some of whom I never actually “met” because we worked in a virtual company.

As for Facebook’s ability to mobilize people to do things in the real world, a local group set up a Facebook page to announce a fundraiser for a friend who has cancer; it is sold out, not necessarily because of Facebook but Facebook sure made it easier to communicate the event and information about how to buy tickets and participate in a silent auction.

I wondered last night what my life would be like without Facebook and my first thought was “thinner.” Facebook enhances my personal life but does not substitute for real interactions with real people in real time over real beers watching real sports events or riding real motorcycles fast over real “Blue Highways” (one of my favorite books). Nothing does that for most, if not the vast majority, of people who belong to Facebook. The fact that there is a pretty widespread perception – often based on no or little real Facebook experience – that Facebook is the same thing as life for its members is disheartening to me. Right now, like it or not, detractors, approximately 7.25% of the world’s population seem to like Facebook. That data says something about its popularity but also the perception of its value.

Facebook may well be replaced someday or jump the shark. Right now, neither event is even on the horizon, despite the misperceptions of some observers about its extrinsic value.

I took away something else from this piece: how important being technologically competent is, and will continue to be, probably forever (or until the machines take over if you envision your future Terminator-style).

Here’s what Griffith says about Zipcar customers: “Our research shows that Zipcar members are highly technically savvy, reporting heavy use of computers, smartphones, social networks, and other digital devices and services.” The business succeeds because of technology and, of course, “a lot of self-reporting by customers.” Essentially, the customers make the business and they are comfortable with self-service in general, Griffith suggests, because of positive experiences over the years with self-service banking, self-service checkouts, self-service airline ticketing, and services like Netflix. Zipcar, I think, is at least as personal as the other self-service experiences they have had.

None of the “self-services,” including Zipcar, requires deep technical understanding, but they all require a level of competence (not to mention trust) with a variety of interfaces, including the iPhone, for which Zipcar has an app that does everything in the location and reservation process, including honking the horn of your rental car in the parking area to make it easy to find.

Competence is built on experience with technology, but is enabled by access to it. I don’t think lack of access to smartphones is a barrier to growth for such cool services as Zipcar, and I expect that the threshold for facility with technology is going to continue to fall over time and that all things technical will become simpler just because people want things to work right, easily, and fast with little work on their part.

But I do wonder (not worry, just wonder) whether we (I will include myself in this) whose jobs involve use and knowledge of new things technological almost as fast as they come to market have an insider’s version of the world, one that does not fit the rest of the world populated by billions who do not know or care about technically cool and useful things, but just want to survive. There are more and more groups, organizations, NGOs, governments, and individuals whose lives are dedicated to harnessing technology to reduce poverty, provide livelihoods, prevent human disasters, and more, and I tend to forget about them when the newest cool app appears for my Droid. These organizations provide both access and minimal competence that opens up technology to people in places that may not have much infrastructure to support more sophisticated uses. There are many great initiatives and endeavors by these groups; the first one I was aware of is txteagle, which gives corporations access to the 2+ billion literate mobile phone subscribers to perform tasks and gives those subscribers a chance to earn money or airtime for performing those tasks.

I did not know I was going here when I started this post and it certainly is a bit off track from the title, but it now occurs to me that technological competence is too often taken for granted by people like me because I have access. It occurs to me now that providing access to the billions without it creates the opportunity for competence, along with the opportunity for improvement; technology provides the platform.

Learmonth wonders how this online stalking may affect the Zappos brand, which has great customer loyalty. He never loaded anything into a cart, but was just browsing, yet the recommendations followed up. He warns: “If the industry is truly worried about a federally mandated ‘do not track‘ list akin to ‘do not call’ for the internet, they’re not really showing it. As ads become more persistent and more customized, consumers are going to demand one place to opt out of everything, and not to have to check boxes at Criteo, Yahoo, Google, Blue Kai or whoever else is targeting them that day.”

Coincidentally, within this past week, Wall Street Journal writers Julia Angwin and Tom Mc Ginty began a series about the increased “spying on consumers” that’s happening on the internet. Example: the chief marketing officer at Lotame Solutions Inc., a New York company, claims that via its software, which captures what people type on websites such as comments on movies or interest in parenting, it can “segment it all the way down to one person.” Lotame packages the data it collects into anonymous profiles of individuals and sells the profiles to companies seeking customers.

Angwin and Mc Ginty say online tracking files placed on individuals’ computers “represent the leading edge of a lightly regulated, emerging industry of data-gatherers who are in effect establishing a new business model for the Internet: one based on intensive surveillance of people to sell data about, and predictions of, their interests and activities, in real time.” They acknowledge that the Journal site itself installs some 60 tracking files. “Some tracking files can record a person’s keystrokes online and then transmit the text to a data-gathering company that analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person’s social connections. Other tracking files can re-spawn trackers that a person may have deleted.”

Tracking is almost universally declared in privacy policies, but tracking companies can develop profiles on individuals that are nearly “anonymous in name only”: personal profiles can include “age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.”

Angwin and Mc Ginty may not exactly be breaking new ground in the series, at least about the spying in general, and I’m sure some people are happy to get personalized ads and recommendations as they move across the internet, but, to me, they do raise an important issue: the amount of data about individuals that’s necessary to provide this “service” is growing. Let’s face it, the vast majority of people do not know much about this process or seem to care about it – yet.

My question is: Is it necessary to spy on customers to help them? Why can’t the spying companies or, better, the sites they serve disclose up front what’s going on and offer it as a service rather than do it essentially surreptitiously (hyperbole warning: find me 5 people who read or even have read, word for word, any privacy policy on any web site ever)? I think there are plenty of people who would still opt in, albeit selectively, to help them make decisions or perhaps be directed to sites that can provide information, product ratings, etc. They might even volunteer more information if they thought it would produce more accurate recommendations, etc. I have a CVS loyalty card, which I volunteered for, which tracks my purchases there and provide discounts on things I regularly buy and also accumulates discount bucks. I know what CVS knows about me, but I choose to participate. If I found they sold my data to some other companies, I might change my mind.

To paraphrase something attributed to Abraham Lincoln, you can sneak up on some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. Companies that would like to spy on all of the people all of the time in the name of commerce would be wise to beware of what they are wishing for: no one likes to feel duped, even if you can offer them shorts for $5 less.

So what happens when people make professionally damaging mistakes with social media? It seems they either are very emotional about a topic and simply forget the facts of public and permanent, or they forget that what they write can be interpreted differently than how they meant it. The process of getting what we mean to say – what we think we are thinking – into text or video is complex. Even the very best writers and speakers can forget to imagine how what they are writing or saying may sound to an audience that does not share the same context with them. In a time when there are more public words in audio, video, and text than at any time in history, and so many attentive readers, it becomes harder and harder not to make mistakes. And when made, mistakes grow the more they are chewed on.

What fascinates me is that pundits and talk-show folks and now even politicians who simply state their biases and bitterness and anger openly seem to get away with it while often well-intentioned people who misspeak or just screw up their writing or speaking are driven from their jobs and vilified with language and criticism that used to be addressed to the most vicious of criminals – people who meant to do harm.

The warning about the minefield of social media still stands but perhaps we should start accepting that mistakes will be made and that every mistake may not be a fatal character flaw. After all, that may be you – or me – who is thrown onto the Mel Gibson pile at any moment.

Specifically, I was talking about surveys about Gen Ys and the conclusions being drawn, by us and by others, about them – generalizations really, not conclusions, e.g., that Gen Ys are closer to their parents than other generations; more altruistic/less altruistic; more resistant to authority; more interested in finding their own way; and so on. My wife’s friend countered that the survey could not accurately represent some people who probably are not surveyable, e.g., the Gen Y children of illegal migrant workers in Missouri, so no conclusions about Gen Y or even generalizations about them are valid because they are not likely to reflect the views of or apply to this subset of Gen Ys who are likely not going to be reached by a survey.

My understanding of her position is that unless 100% of the people you are targeting with a survey are included, the survey data have no meaning. Okay, I admit to losing it here in that discussion and just withdrawing. There was no argument I could muster against “perfect or nothing.”

I won’t argue that surveys reveal “The Truth” (if that exists), but data from statistically valid and well constructed surveys do reveal a reality that may or may not apply to everyone but that does exist.

I also admit that it was hard for me to argue my position because I am already suspicious of how accurately Gen Y surveys actually reflect the Gen Y population. I tend to rely on anecdote – which has little validity – as a touchstone to what the surveys reveal. I have two Gen Y children so I tend to ask myself whether survey conclusions about Gen Ys work for them. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. My children are more open by far than I was about their lives, but they do not reveal everything, nor do I want them to.

All this is really a lead-in to saying that survey data – about Gen Ys or anything else – at the very least provide something to think about and consider, even if the surveys and the data are always imperfect. To simply declare that we can know nothing unless we talk to everyone is too easy and lets everyone of us off the hook when it comes to digging into the why of everything. That said, I tend to validate survey data by the organization that does the work; like everything else, some are just much better than others at this. We at nGenera will continue to survey because we are curious.

Most of roles I’ve ever had in organizations have been, on a day-to-day basis, collaborative, so, in my experience, collaboration is not something new, despite the current popular urgency around it. What seems to be the chief hang-up for organizations is that collaboration is a “soft” activity that’s hard to measure and thus hard to justify putting resources into. We at nGenera have done some good research on collaboration ROI and how to measure it, but I have a suggestion: Stop looking for new metrics and measure what’s actually going on now in your organization. Your workforce is already working together, you just aren’t paying attention to the right things.

After more years of working than I want to acknowledge (my “career” is only anecdotal data, of course), I know that the vast majority of people want to share what they know (because that is often reward enough), collaborate every day with colleagues (though they might not label it collaboration), and are more than willing to surrender some control or autonomy in the expectation that others are doing the same and the outcome is better than anything they could do alone.

I think the “data” will show that your collaboration culture only needs some room to breathe; it’s already there in many parts of your organization and one good way to show it is in stories told by the people who are doing the work. Randy Adkins, who helped get AFKN off the ground, says AFKN success “metrics” are found in the stories people tell of how working together accomplished the mission. “We survey our community owners regularly, but the best impacts result from an award program that we have in place where communities tell their ‘stories,’ many of which demonstrate significant productivity gains. While it is not possible to roll them up in an overall number, the individual facts are very compelling.”

Does this make sense to you: finding, paying attention to, and measuring the collaborative activity that’s already going on in your organization? Looking for stories of collaboration as proof of its value?

But, if you must measure, here is something I found this week, a blog post on Cisco’s site that references studies on collaboration ROI: http://tinyurl.com/37kj5ty. I have not been able to find the Salire Partners report, but the Frost & Sullivan report, sponsored by Cisco and Verizon, can be downloaded here.

Full disclosure: I posted pretty much this same message last year on the nGenera internal site. I still believe it makes sense.

The rationale for both services – protection of the organization – is logical. People can and do make mistakes, and can and do engage in deliberate attempts to damage the reputations of their employers (I consider colleges and universities employers of athletes, but that’s another discussion).

I understand that what employees are doing on their own time and on their own pages, where transgressions often occur, can be problematic, but, aside from some seriously awful anecdotes about employees’ misbehavior or mistakes, I’ve not seen data on just how much employee transgressions have actually cost employers.

Personally, I would not feel comfortable knowing that I was being watched away from work. I do not surrender my personal views or friendships or history or social life to my employer when I accept a position.

I wonder whether work at some employers is going to become too much of a risk for some people – those who value their privacy, individuality, and freedom of expression (most people, I imagine). People need and want to work, which can put employers in control when it comes to privacy. If you love your work, you may forgo some freedom at the edges of your life to continue doing it but you also get paid in return for doing something you love. That is still (and I hate this phrase now that just about everyone uses it) a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line on your privacy? Do you stop posting political views? Religious views? Opinions about sports figures? Any and all photos? Do you simply start setting up private groups on social networking sites, vetting the invited friends by asking them to “sign” your own privacy agreement?

When it comes to personal social networking activities, I believe employees should be free from spying activities, regardless of how concerned an organization says it is about loss of IP or any proprietary info on processes, new products, etc. And, while I’m at it, I would view with suspicion any company argument that it’s those Gen Ys with little fear about privacy they are afraid of; I think most Gen Ys know the difference between telling everyone what they did last weekend (which, again, is another issue entirely) and posting information on Facebook about a forthcoming product or breaching confidentiality agreements.

In my opinion, spying on employees’ social networking activities and communications reveals weaknesses in the employer, specifically in its hiring and engagement skills and processes. If an employer does not trust its employees – and this, for me, is all about trust, nothing more and nothing less, regardless of the coating an employer may put on it – it will reap the deserved rewards: lower loyalty and lower engagement, both of which affect productivity and, some research suggests, are directly correlated with lower organizational performance and even lower stock price. With the job market loosening up, monitoring personal social networking activity might even something else: losing an employee or two.

Cappelli lists the advantages of social media at and for work, and then quickly counters them:

• The lawyers will be all over every mistake by employees – “throwing up restrictions and imposing limits on the use of social media.” He mentions the, by now, old saw of risk, the inadvertent disclosure of proprietary information via social media. He fails to mention effective social media usage policies such as those at IBM and Oracle, which set clear guidelines for employees using social media. There are dozens of organizations with social media policies that, apparently, work well enough. Also, lawyers already make use of social media themselves.

• Cappelli dismisses the idea that social media are free. I agree here: they are not free because use means time and time is a cost. My response is: social media enable interactions that might never take place without them, may very well solve problems or get questions answered faster than any other means, and create enhanced engagement by improving employee relationships, particularly in global organizations. I’ve written about the USAF Knowledge Now platform’s ability to save time by enabling users to find the exact answer to a specific question and avoid recreating processes that have already been created. IBM’s platform Fringe serves, in part, as an expertise locator, and other organizations have similar platforms.
• Cappelli says it’s likely that employees will get too much information in answer to a question, making it difficult to make the right choice among solutions. To cite the Knowledge Now example again, when searching the KN database for information or advice, the top results that show up are those that have been validated through a rigorous, annual process. Essentially, the best advice shows up first. Validation is time-consuming, but the back-end results seem to make it worthwhile. There is no reason the same process cannot be applied to any internal social media platform. Clearly, reaching out to an outside network means responses are not going to be organized or validated, but I expect most employees are able to make decisions about which advice to follow after they have it if they trust the people providing it; after all, they knew too little before asked the question, so knowing more has to be better. Also, I should point out that there are good tools available now – collaborative filtering, rating systems, and trust networks that filter based on people whose opinions you value – that simplify the identification of the best answers to questions.
• Finally, Cappelli implies that the change in organizational culture required – “to make it work demands a very high level of trust and employee commitment” – is too much. His first example of why: employees may try to enrich themselves “at company expense” using social media. I would say that this has happened long before social media. I’d also say that, in my view, trust should already be part of the organizational culture? Is social media really a threat to trust, or is social media the tool that reveals how little trust really exists?

Cappelli concludes: “My guess is that we will gradually go back to something not that far from where we are now: A few jobs such as those in recruiting and sales where the focus has always been on outside relationships will use social media extensively. Other employees will occasionally ask their social network for help with work problems but will be wary of abusing outsiders.”

Some employers ban social media use, fearing the things Cappelli mentions and more. My question is: How engaged are their employees who use social media daily in their personal lives likely to be in an organization that says, “We don’t trust you and we don’t trust your judgment, common sense, and intelligence”? There is ample evidence of the power, efficacy, utility, and bottom-line results that greater employee engagement produces. My personal experience with social media is that it tends to draw employees closer to the company rather than away from it.

I know that employees’ work-time use of external social media sites and applications for non-work purposes often represents lost productivity; in my opinion, that behavior is better dealt with via policies, clearly communicated expectations, and trust than prohibition or banning or real-time monitoring of employees’ social media use.

I am not so naive to believe there is not social media abuse going on in companies. However, I don’t see a return to the good old ways – ever – because, for all the potential risks, the benefits to employees, customers, and others of the relationships formed and leveraged through social media outweigh those risks. It may take training and some trial-and-error experiences, but employees are wise enough to figure it out. That’s why you hired them.

I commented in another post that I thought Facebook members would get over the latest privacy dustup and that very few would leave. Now, I think we see why so few are concerned about the Facebook Privacy Settings Scandal: they apparently either really don’t care about their privacy when active in social networks or they don’t yet consider Facebook a public activity (if the latter is the case, they really aren’t paying attention). It may take one or more catastrophic-impact privacy events that affect millions on social networks before there are any mass departures from any of the popular ones.

Some other interesting findings from the report indicate serious differences between individuals and businesses when it comes to data privacy. While some 70% of both business and individual respondents agreed or strongly agreed that organizations have certain obligations when it comes to individuals’ data in the areas of security, disclosure, and dealing with loss of data in their possession, between 40% and 50% of the 5,500 business leaders surveyed:

• Are either unsure about or actively disagreed with giving people the right to control the type of personal information their companies collected about them or about how the companies used that information. My initial responses are “Wow!” and “I guess I am not terribly surprised.”
• Do not believe “it’s important or very important to limit the collection and sharing of sensitive personal information, protect consumer privacy rights, prevent cross-border transfers of personal information to countries with insufficient privacy laws and prevent cyber crimes against consumers and data loss or theft.” That’s stunner #1. I would hope I am not dealing with or a customer of those companies.
• Do not consider important or very important common organizational privacy practices such as “notice, consent, access, redress, security, minimization, and accuracy.” That’s stunner #2. I guess I’d better actually read those disclaimers from now on.

Accenture suggests that industry differences, cultural or regional differences, regulatory differences, and/or lack of clarity about responsibility for data protection and privacy within organizations may be at the root of the business attitudes reflected in the three bullet points.

At this point, it seems, many companies consider data on customers to be their data not the customers’ data. I admit this is a complex issue, but I think there has to be some common ground that enables companies to use the data and individuals to control it – of course, I am not sure what that is yet.

There’s much more in the report, including five key findings I’ve not really addressed here. To my knowledge, this is the first comprehensive survey on this topic that captures both the business and individual perspectives.

The uproar (if you want to call it that since it only seems to be happening among a relatively small cadre of people and organizations, NOT among the vast, vast majority of the 400+ million Facebook users) over privacy changes is dumb. The changes themselves are entirely Facebook self-centered and entirely beneficial only to Facebook, but let’s not forget: Facebook members do not own Facebook, Zuckerberg et al. do.

What, you say? You must have forgotten because it’s become such an integral if not important part of your life but you Facebook members are members, not owners; you are users, customers, etc. Are you important? Sure. Who touts Facebook’s growth more than Facebook? In the spirit of the collaborative web, Facebook should consult with you before doing drastic changes to default settings that let anyone from China to Russia to Trinidad & Tobago know you had a bad date last night or need a new laptop – and then make you fix them. But they did not and now they are going to feel your wrath as you leave en masse – to do what? Set up another, more private, more narrow network on a new site that ensures only those six people you really want to read your life get to do that?

My bet – no hedging either – is that this is another tempest in a laptop hard drive. I will be surprised if more than 100,000 people leave Facebook on May 31, Quit Facebook Day. Today, May 18, 2010, 5,335 people have committed to quitting Facebook on May 31. Folks, the people who use Facebook have gotten past this kind of mess before and will again.

Now, to get serious for a graph: Privacy is not a trivial matter. Most people do not yet begin to comprehend the risks and dangers in losing control of their personal digital identities; most probably have not even thought about having a personal digital identity. What’s more, stuff you put online is virtually permanent (barring an alien invasion that wipes out all stuff on the Net or something similar) and, with the Internet as we know it now having been around for awhile, I bet there is stuff out there I forgot I ever posted, searched for, or wrote.

If you don’t want to share stuff, don’t join Facebook. If you do, protect your privacy. Member caveo (that’s what the English-to-Latin online translator produced when I asked for “member beware”).

The much bigger questions are: What is your digital identity? Who has it? Who controls it?

Wolf’s interest in self-measurement prompted him, with colleague Kevin Kelly, to set up a website, The Quantified Self, where people can find “tools for knowing your own mind and body.” A variety of contributors, including Wolf and Kelly, write about their own experiences with self-measurement and, of course, comment on others’ postings.

I won’t re-tell individuals’ stories Wolf recounts; you can read the piece for yourself and it is absolutely worth the time to do so, probably worth re-reading.

What people learn about themselves from the data they collect – a key, of course, is to be honest and objective in the collection and reporting – is fascinating. Wolf writes: “Although they may take up tracking with a specific question in mind, they continue because they believe their numbers hold secrets that they can’t afford to ignore, including answers to questions they have not yet thought to ask.”

I found this last phrase perhaps the most memorable in the piece: “answers to questions they have not thought to ask.” The discovery of some truth in data probably makes the exercise worthwhile in and of itself; the discovery of new questions to ask generates enthusiasm for the search.

We have written quite a bit about “unbounded data” as a challenge to organizations. Although I am not sure I completely understand the phrase itself, the concept is simple: Organizations are surrounded by and suffused with data, which demands attention but creates its own set of problems. The sentence “we don’t what we don’t know” has gotten a lot of attention in organizations, in part, I think, because the idea of trying to know all of it is too daunting a task. What I take from Wolf’s piece (one of several insights and ideas it contains) is that the effort of tracking, of acquiring data, is worth it because it starts the individual (or the organization) on a path of discovery. There are few things more interesting to humans than discovery, and I’d say that the same is true for organizations.

Certainly not all discoveries are money-makers or competition-killers, but if organizations believe that discovery of new ideas and new questions is a guiding principle, it can almost ensure, by itself, that discoveries will happen.

Unbounded data is a challenge, but only overwhelming if you don’t start.

(I anticipate writing about Wolf’s article again. One post does not do it justice.)

Here is a how the site describes itself:

“What is Unvarnished?

“Unvarnished is an online resource for building, managing, and researching professional reputation, using community-contributed, professional reviews.

“Unvarnished reviews help you get the inside scoop on other business professionals, providing candid assessments of coworkers, potential hires, business partners, and more.

“By contributing Unvarnished reviews, you can share your knowledge of other professionals, giving credit where credit is due, and valuable feedback where needed.

“Lastly, your own Unvarnished profile, which you may create yourself or claim one that has been created for you, helps you take control of and build your own professional reputation. Get recognition for your accomplishments and actively manage your career growth.”

Here are a couple of phrases that jumped off the “About” page for me (emphasis added):

• “To help reviewers be honest and candid in their reviews, Unvarnished obscures the identity of review authors. This lets reviewers share their true, nuanced opinions without fear of repercussions.” (I have to wonder how nuanced anonymous reviews will be.)
• “An Unvarnished profile can be created either by an individual for themselves or, alternatively, by an individual for another professional, in order to review them.” (The ability for an anonymous person to set up a profile of a colleague or former colleague to contribute a review seems disingenuous. If I have something positive to say about a colleague, I’d want to put it on LinkedIn or another public site with my name attached so the other person would benefit.)

Unvarnished presents itself as a way “professionals can take control of and build their professional reputation. Profile owners can manage and build their reputation, by receiving notifications of new reviews, requesting reviews from trusted colleagues, adding resume details, and responding to reviews.”

IMO: It sounds a bit like LinkedIn, with a dark side: the potential for bullying and retaliation. I cannot see a reason why I’d want to set up a new profile for myself for anyone to “review” me anonymously. I cannot see a why a reputable potential employer would trust anonymous reviews, good or bad or in-between, more than reviews by people willing to give their names. Other reviews of the site can be found here, here, here, and here, but there seem to be dozens.

Unvarnished does have a Reviewer Authority scoring mechanism: “the quality of an individual revewer’s (sic) submissions, as rated by other Unvarnished users, contributes to a Reviewer Authority score, a badge for which is attached to each review by a given reviewer.” Personally, I don’t see why anonymous reviewers’ ratings of one another can create an “authority” score. How can one establish credibility as an anonymous reviewer?

Unvarnished, to me, is an inevitability of social media. It seems only logical that someone would formalize the process of anonymous “reviewing” of colleagues, present and former, for business. And my guess is, like morals, this kind of entrepreneurial approach to making a business out of bad manners cannot be legislated away. I can’t say how it will turn out, who will use it – I am not a likely user regardless of whether I might get trashed or praised there – and whether employers will tap into the unsubstantiated and anonymous reviews to make employment decisions. Most bad ideas for online sites die from lack of attention or nourishment – i.e., no traffic. But gossip (that’s what I think this will turn into) tends to have a strong pull.

My first take: People may feel forced to check up on themselves. Employers may feel tempted to see whether what they saw and heard from candidates with their own eyes and ears is accurate, but then that says more about their own skill at hiring than about the candidate.

I wonder whether writing this will prompt someone to open a profile for me. Guess that tells you more about me than Unvarnished, huh?

This one is worth it: “What is the value of your brand?” by Uwe Hook, co-founder and CEO of BatesHook. He makes so much sense so often, I just kept nodding my head. The essence for me is this: A company’s values motivate, energize, engage, and reward the people that work there. A mismatch of an employee’s and the company’s values make work “work.” People who do something they love every day are not working; they are living. I particularly like these thoughts from Uwe:

“After the multitude of bubbles have burst, shareholder value and making money for the sake of money doesn’t feel that good anymore. And consumers are craving institutions that care and give back. This and the age of product parity lead to an avalanche of brands that suddenly care, that support businesses in making positive change, try to rebrand themselves as green or just transform communities around the world (right after they almost destroyed the whole financial system).

“Most of this comes across as advertising, not as a commitment. Because it’s not rooted in real values, we are starting to deal with caring parity: Suddenly everybody cares for the wrong reason. (emphasis mine) Consumers want us to care, let’s care. Brands purely jumping on the caring bandwagon are missing out on a huge opportunity: Stand for something. Have values. And express yourself as an organization based on these values.”

I can’t help but think of the swarming now to social media by companies not really committed to the value of the relationship with the customer. I read an interesting interview with Magic Johnson, head of Magic Johnson Enterprises, in Knowledge @ Emory. This quote from Johnson stuck with me: “You have to know your customer and you have to speak to that customer every day.” Social media are an excellent way to accomplish this, but, when customers get the sense they are being used or sold to more than listened to, social media are also an excellent way to turn conversations into sales pitches and turn customers and prospects into former customers and disinterested prospects. Johnson’s Magic Johnson Enterprises web site repeats a mantra for the company on the home page: “We Are The Communities We Serve.” The first part of the message is clear; the last word is the message. If social media serve the customer, the company wins.

Noted: danah boyd, in her address to open SXSW this month, related the following story: “I met a teen whose abusive father was recently released from jail. Recognizing that a restraining order would not be enough protection, the teen and her mother moved thousands of miles away. As the teen began making friends in her new school, she begged for a Facebook account. Her mother caved and both the daughter and mother worked to make the account as private as possible; neither of them wanted to face the consequences of being found. In December, when Facebook changed its [default] privacy settings [to Everyone], this teen and her mother didn’t realize what the change in privacy settings meant until someone else pointed them out after the fact. Is putting her at-risk an acceptable bi-product of Facebook’s changes?” Facebook has 400 million-plus apparently satisfied users; it would be devastating to two of them if, unintentionally, the impact of the change in privacy policy had not been communicated to them.

Noted: Although this is, I imagine, precisely what Facebook is intended to do, I recently heard from someone in one of my classes when I was a middle school teacher some 39 years ago. (Gasps are acceptable.) We connected by phone and during a two-hour conversation, we caught each other up on our lives since then and on families and I heard a bit about some other people in the class. This example probably does not really belong under the title On Unintended Consequences, but I include it because it certainly was unintended from my perspective – but thoroughly enjoyable.

I only bring these unrelated examples up for one reason, and that’s to remind myself and perhaps you that for all the intentionally positive consequences of technology such as social networking, online banking, and blogging, etc., there are also unforeseen, unpredictable impacts. Online banking, for example, means I never have to enter the bank for anything, which also means I am a virtual customer as far as the bank is concerned. I live in a very small town so I do know the current bank official, but I see her no more than once a year and most often to replace a lost ATM card. If I wanted to borrow money, I might have a much harder time because, frankly, they do not know me. My wife knows all the people in her bank because she is a regular, physically present customer.

We recently refinanced our house, and, until closing, I never met or saw anyone I dealt with. Nearly everything was handled by email or cell phone or landline. But I really enjoyed the closing because a very nice, personable, and knowledgeable woman came to our home and walked us through it. She put a face on the transaction.

I think the one thing people really want in an online relationship, whether they are friends, friends of friends, one-time customers, or long-term customers is trust, and that is very hard to build virtually and very easily and quickly lost. One mistake – such as a misspelled name or inaccurate transaction – can diminish or terminate the relationship. For all the convenience, choice, and selection that online buying and selling create, the magic is that trust occurs at all. That it does – far more often than not – says something about people’s openness and about companies’ diligence and cleverness at establishing virtual relationships that matter.

If only there were tools to find out which employees are susceptible to phishing and other scams that masquerade as legitimate email?

There are such tools including at least one product that lets IT send fake phishing emails to employees to test their awareness of and adherence to IT policies. Such products enable IT to find out who the security weak links are among employees.

Security breaches of the humongous kind get very bad press and agitate people and government regulators, but many smaller and unpublicized potential intrusions are foiled everyday; criminals and others test the security of companies, governments, and individuals all the time.

So what is my point? Call me incredibly naïve, but the effects of outing the weak security links among employees may not all be positive. For IT, testing individual employees for security awareness can help close holes in security. For the employees who fail and even those who do not, the fact of testing can remind all employees of IT policies and of the consequences of opening email from unknown sources or clicking on links. It will make them more skeptical, which is probably a good thing when it comes to corporate network security.

It also may have other effects. It may make them resentful of IT for duping them, may harm morale and affect engagement, and may, in particular, turn off younger employees, who may well post their disaffection on social network sites, or Twitter or even via text messaging, which can make it very hard for the company to find out. Recent research by Accenture among Millennials – the Gen Ys in your workforce – reveals that 45% of employed Millennials use social networking sites at work and about half say they have accessed “online collaborative tools, online applications, and open source technologies” from free public sites at work when the tools provided by the employer are either inadequate or missing. Furthermore, 66% of Millennial employees say they do not abide by corporate IT policies, some because they are unaware of those policies, some because they claim the policies are either not published or too complex. They clearly have a very different attitude towards security than other employees.

I am not advocating that IT tune its policies to the wants and desires of Millennials, or that it stop testing for security holes, but rather that it be aware of the consequences of surreptitiously checking up on specific employees. Testing security all the time is important; testing individual employees for compliance may be counterproductive, especially among the youngest employees.

What’s your view?

Someone in the group mentioned how it would be great to be able to filter information from individuals, so that you only received from any person what you found most helpful or useful from that person. Makes sense to just use each person’s skill or knowledge strength to enhance your own. So, if you had Facebook-like connections with lots of people, you could selectively receive information about trends in mobile marketing from someone whose focus is mobile marketing. I see this as a kind of best of the best relationship approach: You get your colleagues’ best and they get yours.

But, when I thought about this approach, it struck me that it was actually anti-collaborative. A few byproducts of this approach came to mind, none of which I liked. Deciding who you want to listen to about specific topics – essentially, getting only insights and information that you think this person is best at – means you never hear from anyone else, never hear anything but what you want to hear, and you only hear one person’s views on a given topic. Taken to an extreme, I see this as exclusionary, not collaborative.

When I interviewed Randy Adkins, former Director of The Center of Excellence for Knowledge Management at the United States Department of Defense, he told me that the idea for a people search feature in the Air Force’s highly regarded knowledge management platform, Knowledge Now, originated in what he described as an unlikely place: the Air Force Audit Agency, the unit that senior leaders in the Air Force rely on to understand problems and develop solutions. The Audit Agency was having trouble locating the best people to dig deep into a specific problem and prepare solutions. With 900 auditors, knowing exactly who knew what or who was most knowledgeable about a specific weapon system or organizational process was almost impossible. Each auditor’s previous experience was invisible to the Auditor General (AG), which meant problem-solving was more complex than it needed to be. Taking advantage of the wealth of experience in the division was a high priority for the AG. “If you need to audit an F-16 supply support issue, is there anybody else out there that has had F-16 experience or supply support experience that we can put on that audit?” Adkins commented. “It benefits everybody because you have a more informed auditor, so when you are being audited, the chances of getting a more insightful person to help solve that problem is increased dramatically with People Search.”

So, yes, a collaborative platform should have a feature that exposes everyone’s strengths and skills to everyone else. But what I am getting at is this: Even with an expertise identification system, such as one based on people tagging, you never know where great ideas are going to come from. Filtering is great but if it closes off the possibilities of surprise and even creative thinking, it’s going to result in more isolation than sharing. The possibility of insights and ideas from unlikely places, it seems to me, would be minimalized if people filtered their connections to the extent that they saw individuals in a narrow way, as having useful information on just one topic. If collaboration platform software does anything well, it has to expose lots of people to lots of other people across the enterprise. It should increase the opportunity for surprise, not narrow it.

The group’s approach starts with facilitating partnerships and maintaining “a network of technology volunteers to respond to specific needs.” Included in its professionals’ network are developers, specialists, communicators, first responders, and project managers, but also “people who just want to help.” Everyone who volunteers usually gets to work on projects that align with their specific talents and interests, but, when dozens of people gathered in Boston on January 23 for a CrisisCamp event for Haiti, a group who intended to create software to identify Twitter messages sent from Haitian refugees did not have all the right programming tools and dived in to work on a non-technical task.

At CrisisCamps, people brainstorm and develop ideas. Special camps tend to address an individual event or create problem-specific tools. CrisisCamps often happen in several locations at once; camps for Haiti, for example, happened on January 30 in New York, Chicago, Montreal, Washington, DC, London, Toronto, and Mountain View, CA, and are scheduled for February 6 in Ottowa, Calgary, London, Pittsburgh, and Kansas City.

Because the next crisis is around the corner, at so-called Hack-a-Thon events, Crisis Commons volunteers prepare for future critical needs by developing new tools. The group’s web site explains: “We’re about responding to specific requests and needs. But we’re also about supporting just good ideas. Before a CrisisCamp, organizers reach out to responder organizations – governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and others – seeking requests for technological supports. We organize into teams to support those requests. But we also develop around things that are just good ideas.” All tools are open-source.

The group has a blog for updates on camp activities and outcomes and uses a wiki (http://wiki.Crisis Commons.org/wiki/Main_Page) for project and volunteer coordination. Anyone who wants to organize a CrisisCamp starts by by filling out a form with basic personal information, background information about skills and interests, and the purpose of the camp. Crisis Commons sets a limit of just one camp per city per day to ensure all local resources are located in one place for maximum impact.

Some of the projects already completed include:

• GPS maps of Haiti, along with instructions for downloading the maps into a Garmin navigators. The maps are available at OpenStreetMap.org. Haiti Crisis Map (http://haiticrisismap.org/) includes multiple overlays that show, for example, destroyed buildings and refugee camps and satellite images from multiple sources that is used for tracing in Open Street Map.
• A Haitian Creole-to-English translator for the iPhone
• An alpha version of We Have We Need Exchange (http://wehaveweneed.org), a site for relief organizations to post immediate needs so donors can respond quickly. Categories of need include food, fuel, medical, shelter, telecom, transport, volunteers, and other.

The impact of Crisis Commons’ CrisisCamp events on participants can be profound. Co-founder of Crisis Commons, Noel Dickover described the work he’s doing in the Haiti camps as “more important than anything I’ve ever done in my life.” Thom Goodsell, a software developer at Humedica Inc. in Boston, who participated in the Boston CrisisCamp on January 23, explains the value of Crisis Commons this way: “No one here is going to save a life directly. What we are going to do is build infrastructure to help them do their jobs better.”

Crisis Commons benefits from the desire of people to help in concrete ways in events where they cannot participate on the ground. Social network technology makes it possible to assemble people with and without technical skills to make real differences in virtual ways. Crisis Commons is an example of the potential for good that’s often overlooked or invisible on a day-to-day basis when people think about social media and the Internet, which are often derided as trivial and time-wasters.

“Or tell that girl in the car next to you that you think she’s hot?” Sure, but I was 20.

“Tell that guy his brake lights are out or the owner of the parked car that he sucks for taking up two spots?” Yup.

Now I can do all these things in public, with CarPong, “a social network that lets you send messages to other drivers.” Members post messages about other drivers on the Carpong site, using the other driver’s license plate to identify whom they are talking about. If the other driver is following their license plate on Carpong, he or she will receive an email alerting him of comments. Members and non-members can also see what other people are saying about them by typing in their license plate number on the site. It’s anonymous to the extent no one can see what you are writing about anyone else and, per most sites that enable conversation, only your user name and profile are visible. And, of course, it’s free.

So now I can “say” all those things I always said in the car, with the windows closed or perhaps open, at speed or stopped dead in traffic, when I’ve had a bad day, only other people can actually “hear” them now, just not necessarily in real time. (You can see messages in real time if you are using a smartphone while driving, but that is unsafe and illegal in many US states, some Canadian provinces, and many countries.)

Lots of the posts (go here) are exactly what you’d expect: criticism of other people’s driving skills. There is no shortage of bad drivers or people who are inattentive or just make mistakes. If someone saw a crime being committed – such as hit and run – and got the license plate, this might be useful, but I’d imagine they’d call the police first.

Advertisers I saw included an insurance company, Kaplan University (for criminal justice degrees), a local (to me) car dealer, local personal injury lawyers, the Nexus One, and a local law firm specializing in DWI and motor vehicle defense, which indicates that someone is seeing value in being visible on a site that is populated by drivers. If millions of people sign up and use this site, it may become a good place to site your online ad if you provide services or products to this huge population. Note: There were “250,844,644 registered passenger vehicles in the US in 2006,” according to Wikipedia, which cites the US Bureau of Traffic Statistics.

One of the founders, Tony Mastrorio, says he is trying to get towing companies to use Carpong to tell drivers when their cars have been towed and how to find them. (Might work, but why not try Twitter first?)

This looks like fun, but not much more than fun at this point. Let’s hope no one gets angry enough about what’s written about them to try to connect profile with posting. Let’s also hope no one you are writing about has a friend that’s on Carpong and can find you behind them or next to them.

Anyway, I was angry when I left: no one has posted about me.

I had a beer with my 25-year-old daughter Jen and Laura, her friend from high school, before seeing a performance of The Nutcracker in mid-December. I mentioned something about Facebook, and was surprised by their animosity toward the site. They both agree that they did not like what it is (too serious, a soapbox for self-promotion, populated by arrogant and self-absorbed Gen Ys) and missed what it was (fun and a safe way to meet people in college, a closed community). They both also did not like that it was now a place for parents – yes, me – to go. (Note: My daughter has friended me but 21-year-old son says he won’t.)

Their perspective is, of course, is easily dismissed as useless information because it is entirely anecdotal. I personally know other people in their 20s and 30s who do use it and share enormous amounts of information and photos.

And Facebook Statistics clearly don’t support the notion that it is fading in importance, even among younger people: 350 million members, each with an average of 130 friends, 8 friend requests per month, and 3 event invitations per month. Facebook crossed the 200 million member mark in April 2009, so membership has increased by 75% in some nine months or by more than 16 million members per month. Facebook has more than 101 million members in the US as of December 31, 2009, and according to CheckFacebook.com, of the 95 million US members it had as of November 3, 2009, slightly more than 50% are between the ages of 18 and 34. Facebook is growing overseas as well but numbers in any country are dwarfed by US membership, with the UK coming in a distant second with some 22.6 million members. The largest growth rates over the last 12 months are in the Philippines (2046.8% growth), Indonesia (1536.7% growth), and Thailand (1063.8% growth).

Nevertheless, there seems to be some increasing disillusionment with Facebook, though I know of no definitive trend in any age group that has been reported, other than among members 55 and older, whose ranks diminished by some 600,000 in April and May 2009. Type “Facebook sucks” into the Google rectangle and “about 19,600,000″ results show up. (This is so unscientific I won’t even make a claim about validity.) But there are also some thoughtful, reasoned articles about quitting Facebook that intrigued me:

• Carmen Joy King at Adbusters: “The amount of time I spent on Facebook had pushed me into an existential crisis. It wasn’t the time-wasting, per se, that bothered me. It was the nature of the obsession – namely self-obsession. Enough was enough. I left Facebook.”
• Virginia Heffernan of The New York Times writes about friends quitting: “If you ask around, as I did, you’ll find quitters. One person shut down her account because she disliked how nosy it made her. Another thought the scene had turned desperate. A third feared stalkers. A fourth believed his privacy was compromised. A fifth disappeared without a word.”
• Singer Lily Allen, quoted by Anita Singh at showbusiness.com: “I just had this revelation that Facebook, blogging, all those things were becoming a total addiction. I’d be with my boyfriend or my mum and they’d have just got half of me. So I put my BlackBerry, my laptop, my iPod in a box and that’s the end . . . We’ve ended up in this world of unreal communications and I don’t want that. I want real life back.”
• Hannah VanderPoel at North by Northwestern, a Northwestern University online publication: “Ultimately, my own self-prescribed hiatus from Facebook was fueled by three factors. One was to rid my life of unnecessary distraction, mostly in an attempt to finish my homework. The second was the hope of re-learning how to socialize in ways that don’t involve typing public messages to profile avatars that serve as pixeled representations of real people. Thirdly, it was the desire to regain the sense of personal privacy that I surrendered three years ago when I first created my account –- a move that I am retrospectively thankful for, given the controversy surrounding the site’s privacy policies (or lack thereof).”
• Boston University sophomore Brendan Gauthier: “I couldn’t justify the amount of time I was spending — no, wasting — on it. Why was I looking through my friend’s roommate’s girlfriend’s sorority sister’s photo albums? I didn’t even know this person, yet I could tell you what she did last weekend. . . . At what point are we willing to sacrifice real friendships for convenience? Since giving up Facebook, I’ve called my high school friends, and our conversations are much more gratifying than three words on our wall-to-wall.”

So, my questions are: Do you know people who have quit Facebook? Are you thinking about quitting yourself?

The Nexus One, made by HTC, is reportedly to be sold by Google to invited buyers only starting on January 5, 2010, Engadget believes.

Okay, this is not really about tracking snacks in the cloud. It’s about tracking snack sales in vending machines in the cloud.

Forbes magazine interviewed Mandeep Arora and Anant Agarwal, the founders of Cantaloupe Systems, Inc., a Berkeley, CA, based company whose product, seed, enables wireless transfer of sales data, machine operation, and inventory to vending company operators.

CEO Arora and CMO Agarwal, who met as undergraduates at UCLA, say when they first started looking for ways to improve the operations of vending machine companies, they found the best systems cost around $1,000 per machine. “We got lucky. Cloud computing and cellular networks were being stressed when we were in school [in the early part of this decade].” The ability to transmit data via cell networks and enable access to data online helped to dramatically cut the costs of this kind of system.

On the Cantaloupe Systems web site, the service is described as a four-step process:

• A seed wireless device is placed into vending machines, where it “harvests data from the DEX serial port of the machine.” The seeds also send and receive DEX data between vending machines, “creating a virtual cloud of data.”
• Once acquired, the data are relayed to a cell-phone enabled hub seed via an antenna. The hub relays all the information it receives from the machines to Cantaloupe Systems home base via cellular signals.
• At Cantaloupe headquarters, the information is encrypted, sorted, and stored in “robust SQL databases,” where current or historical information can be accessed online by the vending machine owners and the landlords who host the machines.
• Sales, rebate, and inventory tracking is possible. Malfunctions or even break-ins are instantly identified. Drivers who service machines can bring exactly the products they need to various sites.

The seed device enables vending machine owners to grab information in real time from every machine, and using the seed website (see below) to see business activity in real time.

Source: Cantaloupe Systems, Inc., Marketing Packet

Cantaloupe customers can receive alerts about sellouts and machine malfunctions; track cash from each machine; see real-time inventory by machine; create custom sales reports; and export data to industry-standard formats.

Cantaloupe’s web site has detailed profiles of some of its customers. Prominently displayed over their photos is evidence of the benefit the service has generated. Examples include Camelback Vending, Phoenix, AZ, which realized an 85% reduction in service calls, and P&J’s Vending, Hopkinton, MA, which placed 25% more machines per route.

Cantaloupe’s seed device costs $300 per machine and the monthly service costs $6. Cantaloupe’s devices are in 35,000 machines, generating $8.5 million in annual revenue. In 2010, Arora and Agarwal say they plan to integrate credit card readers into their system.

In 2007, Cantaloupe Systems received the Gold Value Chain Award for innovative adaptation of M2M (machine-to-machine) technology in the retail / hospitality category; that was the second time in three years the company won the award.

Conference organizers decided to display real-time tweets from the audience during Boyd’s presentation, which was thoughtful, a bit provocative, and a bit complex. It did require paying attention. Joshua Michéle Ross does a good job describing the situation and drawing some conclusions about what happened, and why and who’s responsible. Here’s how Ross described the situation: “[Boyd] had a rocky start – couldn’t see the audience (lights), couldn’t see the Twitter stream (projected behind her) and the podium made it difficult for her to see her notes. When critical comments began coming through on Twitter it began a downward spiral. The audience laughed at inappropriate moments, throwing danah off her game. The audience then fed on her increasing anxiety and so on.”

boyd, however, does something impressive and even courageous in a blog post about it: She is utterly candid in describing the experience itself, her own trepidation about public speaking, and her feelings about the experience. I strongly recommend reading her blog post, her presentation transcript, and Ross’s piece as well. It is not easy to read boyd’s post, but it is well worth that shivers of empathy you’ll likely experience.

I was not there, so I did not experience this “spectacle,” as boyd calls it, firsthand. But, based on her own and Ross’s descriptions, it’s clear to me that putting up real-time tweets from anonymous audience members during her presentation and in a setup that made it impossible for her to see what was being said (not that knowing might have helped her much) was at best short-sighted and at worst dumb.

I think it’s universally understood that “[t]he anonymity of the Internet leads people to behave differently than they do face-to-face.” eMarketer says that Euro RSCG Worldwide research “shows that nearly 43% of US Internet users feel less inhibited online, with the effect most prominent among females and users ages 25 to 54.” In the case of boyd’s spectacle,” the “anonymity of the Internet” collided with the real world, and people got to see how online catcalls, swipes, crude language, and sexist remarks can be received in person, the effects they can have.

Reading boyd’s blog probably won’t stop many people from tweeting and blogging and commenting however crudely or boldly they want; it should, though, give some people pause. What’s online stays online, perhaps forever, apologies as well of cours. boyd’s blog post has 177 comments, and they are also well worth reading (mine is in there) for the expressions of sympathy, understanding, and support she received. Some may actually be unsympathetic; I have not finished reading them all.

Social media are very cool, afford conversations and information sharing and dissemination unsurpassed perhaps in history. But, like any tool, they do not make us better people just because they exist. We are not better carpenters because we own a hammer; we are not better drivers because we own a car; we are not better thinkers because we blog or tweet or text. During her presentation, perhaps even during one of the moments of inappropriate laughter, Boyd says this: “People consume content that stimulates their mind and senses. That which angers, excites, energizes, entertains, or otherwise creates an emotional response. This is not always the ‘best’ or most informative content, but that which triggers a reaction.” And later, “There are folks who put out highly stimulating content or spread gossip to get attention. And often they succeed, creating a pretty unhealthy cycle. So we have to start asking ourselves what balance looks like and how we can move towards an environment where there are incentives for consuming healthy content that benefit individuals and society as a whole. Or, at the very least, how not to feed the trolls.” If some of the tweeters had been paying attention, they might have recognized she was talking about them.

The first piece that planted a seed of doubt about the universality of social media was “Understanding Users of Social Networks,” written by Sean Silverthorne in Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. Silverthorne discussed research by Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski on how men and women use social networks differently and how Twitter use is different from either Facebook or MySpace use. What really stuck with me was his analysis of the differences in the populations of Facebook and MySpace, specifically their geographic bases. Pikorski’s analysis of a dataset of 100,000 MySpace users shows that they live mostly in smaller cities and communities in the south and central parts of the country, including “Alabama, Arkansas, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Florida. . . not anywhere near the media hubs (except Atlanta) and far away from those elite opinion-makers in coastal urban areas.” It still boasts some 70 million members, so my conclusion is that claims that MySpace is “dead,” it seems, may be coming mostly from the media hubs where Facebook rules.

In the second piece, “a rough, unedited crib” of danah boyd‘s talk to the Personal Democracy Forum on June 30, 2009, titled “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online,” Boyd asks her audience to do her a favor during her presentation: “I want you to step away from the techno-hyperbole for just a moment and think about issues of inequality and social stratification with me. I want you to think about the ways in which technology is not equally available or equally transformative.”

boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, discusses some results of her research into differences between teenage Facebook and MySpace users and some of the reasons teens use one or the other. Boyd comments, “Choice isn’t about features of functionality. It’s about the social categories in which we live. It’s about choosing sites online that reflect ‘people like me.’ And it’s about seeing the ‘other’ site as the place where the ‘other’ people go.” She also notes the “condescending” attitude of teens who use Facebook towards teens who use MySpace: “Teens who use MySpace may lament teen Facebook users as ‘stuck-up’ or ‘goodie two-shoes’ or the ‘good kids.’ But they’re not nearly as harsh in their language as Facebook users are of those who use MySpace.”

boyd discusses some explanations for the “divide” between the two groups as well, which I won’t do justice to in this short post, but strongly recommend that you read the entire piece for those. (Note the explanatory material at the top, clarifying the audience for this talk, and keep it in mind when reading it.) Summing up some takeaways, Boyd says: “Social media does not magically eradicate inequality. Rather, it mirrors what is happening in everyday life and makes social divisions visible. What we see online is not the property of these specific sites, but the pattern of adoption and development that emerged as people embraced them. People brought their biases with them to these sites and they got baked in.”

Finally, a conversation with my friend, who’s deep into and fluent in social media and Enterprise 2.0, got into who’s left out of social media and Enterprise 2.0 – actually, I guess I am talking about Life 2.0. Do the most interested parties, who know the most about and are most invested in Life 2.0 include a broad social strata of the U.S.? My sense – I lack any data so this entire post may be dismissed – is no, they do not. (Developing such data might be an interesting research project, IMO; if anyone knows of such research, please point me to it.) My belief is that they should.

And for me, the key to getting people involved in the power and potential of Life 2.0 lies in education. The more exposure young people have to life outside their social groups and their environment, the better for them and for us. If we believe in collaboration as a good way to tap into the best of everyone, it won’t do if “everyone” is just “people like us.”