1. How do we get the attention from the people for our platform? The noise on the information highway is loud and it makes signal difficult to hear. As Clay Shirky analyses, the 80/20 Rule is also applicable to the web: roughly speaking, 20 % of all blogs account for 80 % of all the traffic. The web is a system where people have the free choice to read anything they want. To find the information that is useful for them, they look what are the preferences of people they trust – friends, family, colleagues or other important persons.
2. How do we get the users continuously engaged?

The answer for the first question is a combination of a deliberate social media strategy and advertising. For answering the second one I feel that more and more platforms use game mechanics to tackle the problem. There are numerous examples who use badges, reputation points or prediction markets: Manorlabs, Microsoft’s Townhall, Vencorps, the location based service Foursquare and many more.

Empire Avenue

I recently stumbled onto another site that uses game mechanics: Empire Avenue (EA). This site determines the social influence of a person in a web. The EA nuance is a virtual stock exchange market. People can buy and sell share of users, earn badges and dividends from their virtual investments. The price of your shares is mostly determined by your activity on twitter, facebook, flickr and blogs. Therefore you have to connect your social media accounts with EA. The higher the social media activity, the higher the prices of your shares will rise.

I tried the site out and it sparked my interest. My share price is now 12.864 eaves (the name of the virtual money), which indicates according to the EA blog, that I am an average social media user. Adriel Hampton, who dedicated a blog to game mechanics writes, that people use the site for “networking, for fun, to make money or a combination of those.” This statement makes sense and I will use Malone’s Genome Model to qualify it.

First, it is fun. I love the being active on the site. I am curious if my share prices rise. Which leads to the next motivation: Glory. I want to achieve a high share price, to gain the reputation as an “exceptional social media user.” And of course, money is a motivation. On the one hand, users can earn virtual money and buy upgrades. On the other hand, users and businesses can monetize their network (for example by better targeted advertising or connecting to key influencers).

Should EA gain a critical mass of users (If Obama joins EA they probably have a breakthrough), it will add another feature to the advertising market. Businesses and persons can “buy and sell advertisements with the cost of those advertisements likely based on a players influence.” As we look for the preferences of other people to determine our buying decisions, this seems like a powerful tool.

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.

In some cases, there may be benefits such as using an iPhone for interactive kid’s games, or using cell phones to keep track of older children on-the-go. In other cases, the activities raise new issues and question about appropriateness such as creating digital identities for children the moment they are born, or using Google and other online sites to diagnose children and chronicle their development. The New York Times last week published an article titled “R U Here Mom?” or “The Risks of Parenting While Plugged In” for the online edition. The article profiles work done by child development researchers looking at how parental addiction to technology affects communication with children and early childhood learning. Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self has done extensive research on the topic for over five years, including 300 interviews. As quoted in the NYT article, she says:

“Over and over, kids raised the same three examples of feeling hurt and not wanting to show it when their mom or dad would be on their devices instead of paying attention to them: at meals, during pickup after either school or an extracurricular activity, and during sports events.

There’s something that’s so engrossing about the kind of interactions people do with screens that they wall out the world. I’ve talked to children who try to get their parents to stop texting while driving and they get resistance, ‘Oh, just one, just one more quick one, honey.’ It’s like ‘one more drink.’ ”

(Additional insights can be found in the comments section of the article where Dr. Turkle is very active.)

The NYT article also profiles an informal test conducted by Dr. Dana Suskind from the University of Chicago which looked at the effect of smart phone use on verbal interactions between parents and children. In most case, verbal communication dropped when devices were present. This is an important indicator because verbal communication is seen as a key indicator of how well children develop language skills and vocabulary.

Source: New York Times, June 9, 2010

As we look to the future generation of parents, the trend is a bit troubling. And, lest I get accused of throwing rocks at glass houses, I will admit my own faults as well: While certainly not the worst offender, I count myself among those guilty parents that sometimes tune-out to technology.

My last post was about social media addiction and highlighted how young people, as well as older people exhibit signs of technology addiction, including messaging during meals (49% for those under 25), while in the bathroom (24%), or even during sex (11%). “While feeding my child,” “while my child plays,” or “while taking a child to daycare” were not options in the Retrevo survey, but I’m sure there would be a substantial percentage of those people as well. I would also expect the numbers to get higher in the future. A recent report from Pew Internet and American Life Project found that one-in-three American teens sends in excess of 100 text messages per day (more than 3,000 per month). The typical (median) teen sends and receives about 50 text messages a day (30 per day for boys and 80 per day for girls), although the average (mean) is much higher at 112 messages per day. A quarter of all American teens ages 16-17 text while driving. And while texting is certainly the worst offender with respect to device-immersion, other activities are also contributing to teen technology use for communication versus face-to-face communication.

 Do we expect this type of device-oriented behaviour to stop in adulthood? Or, left unchecked, will it simply get worse with added work-related responsibilities (i.e. the “Crackberry” trap) and the proliferation of screens, communication channels, entertainment gadgets, and social media?

 What are the signs of addiction? According to Mayo Clinic, “As your drug use increases, you may find that it becomes increasingly difficult to go without the drug. Stopping may cause intense cravings and make you feel physically ill (withdrawal symptoms).” I’m guessing that includes ‘taking’ fist thing in the morning, or even in the middle of the night.

In fact, nGenera’s Net Generation study from a couple of years ago backs up what the Retrevo study is implying. We asked teenagers to depict visually how they would feel if technology was taken away from them for a month. The results are what you might expect. If not addicted, young people (and I imagine people of all ages) are certainly dependent on technology for entertainment, inclusion, belonging, and sense-making:

In a related study on parenting and social media, Retrevo finds that the vast majority of parents—over 70%—allow their kids to text during family meals. Personally, this is a problem for me, but then again I came from a generation of kids that was told to ignore the phone (the corded one attached to the wall) during mealtime and ask to be excused from the table after dinner. Still, if you think social media addiction is bad now, this type of behaviour means it’s probably just going to get worse from here on in.

For more stats and info-graphics, check out Retrevo Gadgetology and Retrevo Pulse.

The bigger fear, I fear, is a much larger can of worms. This is why I was delighted to see Tim O’Reilly’s weekend post, Putting Online Privacy in Perspective. While O’Reilly’s post itself is largely quotes from search engine expert Danny Sullivan commenting on a WSJ article, it hits on a core issue that is often left below the surface when we’re openly discussing privacy: facebook is only one company that’s collecting data on our activities, there are many others, collecting and crunching data on many other (often ‘private’) activities. One example, as Sullivan explored:

My credit card company knows everything I’ve purchased, which is a pretty personal trail. That doesn’t get “anonymized” after 9 months or 18 months. I have no idea at all what happens to it. I can’t, like at Google, push a button and make it go poof, either. I don’t think I have any rights over it at all.

Credit card companies aren’t the only organizations with access to tons and tons of data about us. Our cellphone service providers know where we are and who we’re calling and texting, and our IM providers keep our conversations for a few weeks. Even in-game behaviors in videogames can be tracked. While a lot of this data collection is justifiable to improve the customer experience, it can all just as easily be used for any number of other purposes.

I think that this is where we need to focus our public dialog about privacy and control. Facebook’s data collection is just one symptom of the direction where society as a whole is moving: to the mass collection, aggregation, and cross referencing of consumer data so that organizations can better understand, target, and market to each and every one of us. From the perspective of the the enterprises, this is where we want to go, and more technology and instrumentation means more, better data. Speaking for myself, as a consumer and citizen, it’s not where I want things to end up. This is a discussion that we need to have.

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.)

(Click for the full/interactive chart, it should make far more sense than the clip above)

I conducted a highly informal and unscientific poll of the nGenera Insight staff here in the Toronto office. Fully 3/4 of our facebook-using colleagues have stripped their profile of information because of these privacy policy changes and tech blunders, and in some cases have chosen to walk away from the site entirely.

With each iterative change it seems like facebook inches closer to a user pain-point that drives users away from the site for good. What do you expect it would take you to walk away from the site?

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.

These approaches give us new data, but require that we change how we go about doing things, usually making everything transaction based–where the transaction is constructed in such a way that a computer or sensor can understand what’s going on. This doesn’t really need to be the case anymore–computers are getting to the point where they’re smart enough to start understanding what we’re doing without being with us all the time.

Some of the big technologies that I’ve been looking into are video content analysis (VCA), facial recognition, and emotion detection–with the latter two arguably being under the umbrella of  VCA. If you walk down the street it’s hard to go a block or two without seeing a video camera keeping tabs on the ebbs and flows of people, and the camera density skyrockets when you head into a store or mall or most any private venue. If we let computers tap into the raw information generated by these surveillance infrastructures, some pretty cool/scary stuff can happen.

Consider walking into a retail store: if you’re in the field of view of multiple cameras, your position in 3D space can be tracked (PDF) and a map of where you walk around the store can be plotted. If you look at a display kiosk and smile or frown, a relatively low-resolution camera can understand your emotional reaction, and add it to the “profile” of you that seem to like or dislike. Finally, when checking out at the cash register, you’re in a prime position for facial recognition software to grab and understand a snapshot of your face (so that you can be recognized more easily next time), and link your purchasing behavior/history (and your credit/debit number) to your customer file.

When all this information is aggregated, simply going to the store to buy some milk turns into an activity that can be broken down and understood. By linking together technologies, companies with retail locations will soon be able to understand the exact paths that customers take through their stores, how often those customers come back, and whether or not they seem to be enjoying the trip–all without changing the customer-facing experience at all.

The scenario above is, so far as I know, currently hypothetical–but based on current, existing technology. You can let your imagination run wild coming up with ways to generate and link data about what people are doing, where they’re going, and what they’re saying. As consumers, we’re going to be seeing a shift where our identity is used to identify, segment, and target us like never before–and is done so as a byproduct of just leaving the house. There’s great promise for the enterprise, but great cause for concern (but also arguably great benefit) for the customer.

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.

nGenera is a major, national sponsor of CoSN. If you have followed the work of Don and frequent collaborator Anthony Williams, you recognize this as consistent with their coverage of education as a key topic of their writing and nGenera’s research. And while I agree with Don and Anthony, that the tools and (in many cases) the conditions are in place for dramatic improvement to take place in the public education system for many a country, my personal opinion for the U.S. is gloomier, in that I think we are in for a decade of frustration.

Maybe I’m a little tired from a week of 18-20 hour days and running my Starbucks card through too many Venti bold cups of coffee. But, the state of public education in our country seems to be awash in contradictions, opposites, and (as the cliché goes) “left hands not knowing what the right hands are doing.”

For instance, on the one hand, it seems that most people understand the transformative potential for IT in learning. We are witness to it literally before our eyes on a daily basis, as my colleague Denis Hancock made the case so well in his post Wednesday, on the subject of the impact of iPhone apps on his daughter’s learning. Yet, on the other hand, few school districts include the CTO at the cabinet level (in other words, as a member of the senior executive team directly reporting to the superintendent) in the district’s leadership.

Part of the issue, which CoSN is working to change, is that the CTOs themselves are not well prepared to be effective at that senior leadership position. Many lack the business vision and strategic leadership skills to operate as effective change agents and equal partners in the running of the district with the other leaders. Thus, an important objective for CoSN’s members and staff is to promote the adoption of an Essential Skills Framework for CTOs, advocating that there is the profession itself can do a better job to equip its members, preparing them to be more effective leaders.

To take a different issue, on the one hand, there was a nearly universal cry for the need for standard approaches to web 2.0 content production, assessment, and platform deployment. Yet, on the other hand, in a panel that closed the morning portion of an international symposium day at the CoSN conference, it was ironic (to me anyhow) that the five speakers – from ePals, Taking IT Global, IEARN-USA, NASA’s GLOBE program, and European Schoolnet – presented their web 2.0 platforms for about 10 minutes each, in succession, but yet by my hearing completely missed the opportunity to address how they were working together.

In every case, each one seemed to be busily building communities of millions of users, thousands of pieces of content, with hundreds of schools and or regions involved. However, except in the case of the European Schoolnet, which is a partnership of multiple European education ministries, there was practically no mention of how any of the presenters were striving towards cross-promotion, standardization, or (god forbid) merger of operations and mission from two into one, or three into two, etc.

On the one hand, you have the President and Secretary of Education setting ambitious and merit-worthy goals of achieving an increase to a college graduation rate of 60% by the year 2020, from our present level of approximately 40%. This means, from the federal perspective, a real focus needs to be on what we can do to impact the success of kids at the 4^th grade level and above, starting now. Yet, on the other hand, data from regional groups like the E3 Alliance in Texas and others shows that frequently the point of greatest leverage is young children and getting them “school ready” by the time they get to kindergarten.

Lastly, the final day of the CoSN conference was billed as an advocacy day, where we spent the morning hearing about the legislative funding priorities for Education, from CoSN and three other education-related partners: ISTE, SETDA, and SIIA. On the one hand, the associations had the data and talking points clearly showing how critical education is to the success of the nation and how important some of the funding streams are to national goals.

Yet, on the other hand, the panel of congressional staffers who spoke to the audience of 100 or so software and CTO/CIO leaders convened to advocate to their various state delegations of senators and congressmen and women were extremely bearish on the chances of the education priorities getting much attention in 2010, due to other pressing U.S. national priorities such as healthcare reform, job creation, and of course, inflexible military and social entitlement program commitments.

It’s like the comment that a senior federal technology official from an agency (not the Department of Education) made to me, on my last day in the city this week, about the especially challenging position for a change agent in the government. He used the example of the military and recounted that it was about 100 years ago that the U.S. Navy determined they would no longer build ships out of wood…that all future vessels must be built using metal.

Without that specific and irreversible requirement – which had an impact, no doubt, of enormous consequences to supply chains, inventories, jobs, and countless other transition costs – one can just imagine that 50, 60, 70 years later, we might still have been building and launching new ships made of wood. The problem, he said, is that in some domains – and I would venture that education is one of them – it’s very hard to recognize the wooden ships.

What do we do in the meantime, given that the status quo isn’t an acceptable option?  That’s where I think the government is at least trying to apply the principles of social entrepreneurship and innovation, with the reauthorization of “No Child Left Behind,” now more benignly named the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (or ESEA), and the “Race to the Top” program.  It’s also where I think we must see more public/private partnerships emerge.  Experimentation must be encouraged and real consequences have got to be at stake for communities, ultimately producing quantifiable, economic value like we describe in the Nexus Economics theme in nGenera’s 2010 research agenda.

So, if you’ve got a “wooden ship” that you want to sink and, more specifically, an education innovation that you want to promote, then tell us about it.  Or better yet, tell us AND tell the Department of Education, through its new Innovation website.  Let’s prevent a decade of frustration in public education.

Given the questions I’ve received about it, that I’ve worked with Don Tapscott et al on a number of things around “growing up digital”, and just general parental concern, I’ve spent a lot of time watching (and helping) my daughter use  it, and thinking about how it might impact how she learns. In general, I think it’s an extremely positive thing – and while much of the stuff I mention below might seem rather simple and obvious (particularly to other iPhone users), I believe they are worthy of discussion – and might point towards how education itself should change in the future.

Obviously, part of the story is that she is going to grow up in a digital world – and being comfortable with technology is going to help in that regard. But that’s not the first thing I focus on. What I tend to hear from skeptics is that they don’t want their kids “playing virtual games” – they’d rather have them building their skills and imagination with real world stuff- building blocks, puzzles, etc. My response is that obviously I want my daughter doing that too – but I find that the touch-screen interface on the iPhone actually helps her in this regard.

The most obvious example of this is what she’s chosen as her favorite app – ShapeBuilder. When I downloaded it however many months ago, she was at a point where she was good at basic puzzles (i.e. put the circle in the circle, etc.), but was having trouble with the harder ones (i.e. trying to get six contoured pieces into place to create something). And of course, since each puzzle costs a fair bit of money, she had relatively limited selection. Shapebuilder has many puzzles, and cost a buck or two – but that is only part of the story here.

She took to Shapebuilder like a duck to water. On the right hand side of the screen, there is an outline of an image, “broken” up into the many pieces that compose it. On the left are the pieces. Importantly, none of them rotate – they just need to be slid into place- which makes it a tad easier than real-world equivalents. And it doesn’t appear she has to get them in exactly the right place – get them close, and they “pop” in (and stay there – also important). When all the pieces get in their proper places, the outline instantly transforms into a “real” picture of something (say, a cow), and the word for it appears (and is said). She can then go onto the next one – and there are many of them.

In turn, I see it as a middle step between the basic “real” puzzles, and the slightly harder ones – she learns important parts of puzzle building I can now see her apply to real ones, in a game she finds very entertaining, with tons of variety, that cost me next to nothing, and doesn’t require clean-up (score!).

That’s just one example, but I think it’s an important one. Here’s her other favorite “games” (and if anyone would like to recommend some new ones, I’m all ears):

First Words Deluxe. Shares some similar properties with ShapeBuilder, but for words. She picks a category, and at the top there is a word, with boxes for each letter (with the actual letter shaded in behind). The letters to make the word – i.e. ” p p y u p” for puppy are below. Each time she touches one, the game says the letter, and when she slides it close to the right spot it stays there. Once the word is formed, the game spells out the word, then says it, an there’s a bit of animation around an image associated with it. In my mind, that has to help her learn words – and to spell. Think it was $1.99, which I’m considering a good investment.

The Toddler Teasers series. I’ve just downloaded a few more of these, but she’s been playing the “shapes” one for awhile. A bunch of shapes appear on the screen, the game says (and has written down) something like “touch the star”. If she touches the wrong one, it vanishes. When she gets it right, the game cheers, the shape flies around, and you go onto the next one. Every 4 or so, she earns a “sticker”, she can put on her sticker page. Again, I think it’s fair to say this helps her learn shapes and words in a fun way (though I didn’t think so at first. After a while, she was always getting them wrong. But then I realized it wasn’t random – she was always picking the right one last. Then one day I noticed when she picks which color to use for play-doh, she does it through a process of elimination – i.e. “not blue! not green! not pink! YELLLLLOWWWW! – and she does the same on the game). $0.99 each I think.

Memory Pro (free). Very simple – classic game of memory. 12 tiles (in the small version), 6 animals, match them up. Again, hard to see how playing this many times can’t help with improving memory and matching skills – and it’s a clear case of where not having the “set-up” time helps (she’ll play this more than the equivalent using “real” matching tiles, which she’s also getting much better at… because of the game, in my opinion).

Five monkeys. One of her favorite songs (I’ve probably sang it to her 500 times by now), but on the iPhone. I find this cool because it has three variations of the song (country, rock, and pop) to help show different musical styles; she has control of it (the monkeys only fall off the bed when she touches them); and there are a variety of other ways she can interact with it (stop/ go button, making the cat run out of the room, etc.). Again, it doesn’t mean I don’t sing it to her anymore – but it seems like a nice addition to that.

Sneezies Light. So it actually took her awhile to learn to stick to her own page, and I’d downloaded this to test and she “stole it”. Less obvious educational value, but I do think there’s some there. The basic idea is there’s a bunch of little critters on the screen. Touch one, it sneezes and blows up – and if the sneeze touches another critter, it does the same, etc. Goal is to make as many disappear as possible. She loves it – and the cause and effect, coupled with learning some patience around waiting for them to get close together, seems useful.

There are more, but I’ll end it there today. In short, I’m amazed when I watch my daughter use the iPhone, and really think it’s helping her learn many important things – particularly as the touch screen interface lies somewhere between the real and “traditional” virtual worlds. In total, I think I’ve invested about $10 in all the apps for her combined – or less than almost any single toy out there. And as she grows, I see so much more potential – such as downloading stories to be read in a language I can’t personally speak, but we want her to learn. Every time I look at that device, I think of different ways it could improve her education in a variety of ways.

And of course, partially since I can’t yet be 100% confident that she won’t “accidently” hit the phone button and call some of daddy’s colleagues, I’m close to her – watching, helping, talking about what she’s doing – the entire time, which most parents would agree is what matters the most.

When we study prosumers, one of the reoccurring themes is how to create incentives to get people to contribute their valuable time to an initiative. Increasingly, consumers are challenging the notion that the Internet is recruiting ground for free labor that will willingly engage with your brand, contribute ideas, and co-innovate with you—consumers want some sort of value in exchange for their time. Contrary to what is being proclaimed in popular social media echo chambers, most consumers actually don’t want to co-create with companies; the vast majority of Internet users are happy to be passive consumers and observers, with only a small fraction opting for prosumerism.

This brings be to the main point of this blog post, which is the notion of playbor. I first came across the term—a combination of ‘play’ and ‘labor’—on the Web site for a conference on digital labor hosted by The New School in New York. The Internet as Playground and Factory notes that, “Today, communication is a mode of social production facilitated by new capitalist imperatives and it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between play, consumption and production, life and work, labor and non-labor.” The simple idea driving the playbor discussion: What happens when we collapse the often conflicting interests of work, personal ambitions, and entertainment into a single activity?

We already see examples of this happening on the Web. Consider Google’s Image Labeler, which creates a game out of the legitimate task of tagging and creating metadata for Web images. A less contentious example is Free Rice, which hosts a word game and has sponsors donate 10 grains of rice to the World Food Programme for every right answer submitted by players.

Recently, my colleague Jeff DeChambeau wrote a case study about the dating site OKCupid. Unlike eHarmony and other dating sites where the company determines the question set used for matching couples, OKCupid relies on questions submitted by its users. The notion that the users know best about what characteristics make a suitable mate makes sense. Why this is novel from a playbor perspective is that users, through actions that are apparently self-serving, are also contributing to the growth of the site and the effectiveness of its proprietary matching algorithms. What’s more, the actions of users create value for the company in the form of new data and analytic possibilities (for fun examples, see how OKCupid number crunchers use member data to determine what makes a good profile picture, or why dating an older woman might make sense).

For enterprises, these examples raise the question: How can we make work more interesting, more curious, and more playful so that users willingly play to create value? How can we align incentives in a way that lets us harness free labor? What is the appropriate division of labor across a diverse and fluid ecosystem that includes customers, prospects, partners, and competitors?

There are troubling consequences as well. How can consumers be sure of the authenticity of their experiences? Child labor is a discouraged practice, but what about video games that could be designed so that game-play elements actually contribute to the production of a commercial product like a new chip, program, or piece of software? As our environments become highly-instrumented with and capture data from our activities, how are users compensated for, or even made aware of the commercial value of their data? What does it mean for the broader economy when waged and unwaged labor collapse and are often indistinguishable? What does it mean for society when we debase the notion of pure, innocent play? The Internet as Playground and Factory has a great Vimeo page with clips from leading thinkers that are considering and debating these and other issues that arise from playbor. It’s a lot to digest, but this is a great starting point for people interested in the topic form a social studies perspective.

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?

While the site shows where people are now, not where their homes are, clever criminals could scan for location-updating users and filter their results by context. “Drinking wine by the fireplace” is likely something said at home, as is “at my home office doing some work.” With a base-collection of tweets like those tied to geotagged locations, a criminal could easily create a database that maps who is away from home right now, how far away they are, and in the case of fervent tweeters, what speed and direction they’re traveling in. By putting all of this information on a map, and filtering to see only people who are on vacation, enterprising burglars could plot an optimized route through a neighborhood going after only the houses that are currently empty. Pretty great risk-mitigation strategy for criminals!

At the footer of each page on the PleaseRobMe site is the friendly explanation that “[its] intention is not, and never has been, to have people burglarized.” I believe them completely, but their point is well made. Technologies like geolocation and status updates might appear simple, but they’re part of a complex and elaborately tracked ecosystem of technology, one that’s not easily understood or teased apart into core pieces. Hopefully PleaseRobMe catches some attention and brings to light that showing whether or not you’re a candidate for burglary or not is a possible consequence of not carefully using modern social technology. I wish the PleaseRobMe team luck, as the lesson is much better learned here and now than later when even more sensitive information is accidentally or carelessly shared, and the stakes rise further.

A recent article by Nate Anderson in Ars Technica highlights professor Mayer-Schönberger book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. The message: “Technology has now made ‘remembering’ the default approach to information, and in doing so, threatens to make ‘forgetfulness’ obsolete.” This is not only a profound change from 20 years ago, it can also be detrimental to our ability to think and analyze information. The article goes on to say: “Selective forgetfulness is a boon to humanity; it keeps us from drowning in our own recorded data. It allows us to sift and sort, then to think at a higher level of abstraction instead of wallowing in detail.”

But, this may all soon change.  Perhaps, computers can learn to forget too.

Researchers led by doctoral candidate Roxana Geambasu, at the University of Washington in Seattle are working on project called Vanish. The idea is to encapsulate data such as e-mails, selected text in messages, or documents that are sent over the Internet. The system would create corresponding keys for decapsulation that are widely available online, but that would deteriorate over time so that the data in readable form would only be available for a certain period of time. The overview page of the Vanish project states, “We strongly believe that realizing Vanish’s vision would represent a significant step toward achieving privacy in today’s unforgetful age.” Mayer-Schönberger suggests a similar solution that uses metadata to tag data objects with expiration dates and cites the work of Lawrence Lessig who has proposed a broader approach to combine policy and software to force privacy compliance.

nGenera’s research project Leading in an Age of Unbounded Data is looking at new sources of data available to the enterprise and how these will lead to new insights, opportunities, and challenges, as well as change enterprise processes and decision-making. One of the assumptions we make is that data will continue to grow and companies, through analytics, will develop a type of ‘sixth sense’ or situational awareness about the organization thanks to information captured from across the business ecosystem. We have already found that the growth of personal information and digital identity data will lead to rich digital profiles containing social graph information. These rich profiles present opportunities to better engage with customers and employees, improve customization, and facilitate knowledge management by anticipating user needs and connecting them to relevant people and information.

Projects like Vanish force us to think about data, not as an asset with an indefinite lifespan, but rather as something that depreciates over time, just like physical assets do. This would effectively reduce the amount of data that we need to manage and improve signal-to-noise ratio as more important facts and information would be retained while less significant information would be deleted. By eliminating the perfect memory of computers, we might also feel less pressure to maintain digital facades and manicure our online profiles. Additionally, the idea of adding expiration dates and metadata to data could accelerate the shift in power away from marketer towards consumer as it would allow individuals to dictate what personal data is used, who has access, for how long, and for what purpose.

But, self-destructing data would also diminish the value of many of the ‘big data’ opportunities that we talk about such as using large data sets to infer the truth about various situations, and using sentiment analysis to mine online customer comments and status updates for market research and product insights. It would confound companies and marketers that store petabytes of information to generate longitudinal trends and rely on usage data to drive Web analytics and build reputation and ratings, as well as improve information management through technologies such as collaborative filtering (e.g. the technology used by Amazon to recommend books to you based on the activity of people with similar behaviors). By collectively deleting our less-than-favorable digital trails, would we also be doing a disservice to future generations of anthropologists that could benefit from a complete digital history and behavior map—both good, bad, and questionable actions—of their ancestors?

The idea that all data should live on forever is a relatively new concept that many people have already taken for granted. In general, I think enterprises, governments, and individuals would benefit from more discussion on the topic instead of seeing it as a foregone conclusion. The idea of having an information lifecycle for all data is a powerful one. Personally, I would welcome more initiatives such as those by the Vanish team and professor Mayer-Schönberger that broach the topic and reintroduce a little forgetfulness into our digital lives.

For fifteen years, we’ve been arguing that the digital revolution will challenge many fundamental aspects of the university. We have not been alone. In 1997, none other than Peter Drucker predicted that big university campuses would be “relics” within thirty years.

Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge — both as a container and as a global platform for knowledge exchange between people — and as a new generation of students requires a very different model of higher education. The transformation of the university is not just a good idea; It is an imperative, and evidence is mounting that the consequences of further delay may be dire.

Read the full essay here.

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.

It’s all part of the Open Government Directive mandated by the Office of Management and Budget, in a memo dated December 8, 2009. The Directive is a direct result of the work begun by the White House, under the auspices of an Open Government Initiative, in the early days of the Obama Administration. (We’re pleased, by the way, that Beth Noveck, a collaborator with Don and the Wikinomics team in recent years, has had such an important role leading the Initiative from inside the White House…congratulations Beth!)

I encourage you to read the Directive. It’s the antithesis of the kinds of 1,000-page government documents that get joked about on the late night TV programs. Instead, it is eleven pages long and has clear, unequivocal language such as “The three principles of transparency, participation, and collaboration form the cornerstone of an open government.”

So, what can you expect in two to three weeks? Well, the first deadline in the directive actually already passed last week. To wit: “Within 45 days, each agency shall identify and publish online in an open format at least three high-value data sets and register those data sets via Data.gov. These must be data sets not previously available online or in a downloadable format.” We discussed Data.gov and some of the terrific work going on in open source development of apps to tap into those rich data sets in my multi-part review of the inaugural O’Reilly Gov 2.0 Summit last year.

But, what you can expect by early February is that each agency will have created an “Open Government Webpage” to serve as its gateway for agency activities related to the Open Government Directive. This is the place where each agency will provide information about its plans and solicit and receive input about its future. For the solicitation of citizen input, expect an already well-tested web 2.0 tool, like Ideascale, to power the process.

We’ll provide more updates in the coming weeks.  And, keep an eye on our partner website, The Collaboration Project, at the National Academy, for insightful policy updates on open government progress as well.  But, in the meantime, get in there and make your voice heard!

Twitter and Facebook specifically are proving to be valuable tools for organizations soliciting donations. One of the more popular options ties together the huge adoption of social networking tools with everyone’s favorite communication device, your cell phone. The Red Cross developed a text option, so when the word “Haiti” is sent to a specific number, $10 is donated to the Haitian relief effort. The $10 charge shows up on your cell phone bill, so no need to worry about exchanging credit card information, or even visiting a web site. As one of my colleague’s posted “it’s easy peasy!” Within my relatively small network I’ve already seen the message about this option posted on no less than 100 status updates or Twitter posts. Last night The American Red Cross posted this on its Facebook page:

American Red Cross is confirming that you have donated $5 million by texting “Haiti” to 90999. You are amazing.

Pretty impressive for less than 2 full days work!

Of course, as with most outreach efforts there are always losers out there looking to make a quick buck with donation scams. On Wednesday the FBI actually released a fraud alert about donation scams.  Unfortunately social media tools become an attractive option for these criminals given the speed at which communications can reach critical mass. Thankfully the channel also allows for the revealing of frauds relatively quickly as well. I’ve seen a few posts pointing people to places where they can find lists of legitimate charities. This includes sites like –  the washingtonpost.com, NBC’s Boston affiliate WHDH, and most other local television news sites.

I could go on about the lessons that other organizations could learn from The Red Cross and other’s use of social media channels. However, today I think it’s more appropriate for us all to pause for just a minute, count our blessings and send thoughts and prayers to all of the families affected by the Haiti earthquake.

Instead of resolving to do more this year, I’m aiming to do less. To slow down….Not to slack off at work, mind you…This mindset–to fight information overload and to focus–is quite prevalent right now.

Patricia also mentions a colleague who has gone on a technology diet and made a resolution to stay offline from 8pm to 8am every day. WOW! To my colleagues and friends that send emails at midnight, could you do that? Even just a few days a week?

This reformed behavior helps her digest her information overload, she says. “It’s the difference between snacking on information and sitting down to a meal.”

Personally, I love this idea! At a time where many believe, myself included, that we need to know everything the second it happens, and respond to messages as soon as they hit our Blackberry, would the world really fall apart if we waited just a bit? I understand that certain people can argue that their positions require this, President Obama would fall into this group, however for most professionals I think it is entirely reasonable to give yourself a break from screen time. Being available 24/7 is for convenience stores not people!

The good news is that the responsibility to change this falls to the individual. Of course, the bad news is also that the responsibility to change this falls to the individual. I know that I am guilty of setting quick response expectations.  I have often been praised for my rapid turnaround time and “efficient” work style, but does that have to mean answering messages at all hours of the night? I specifically remember turning around a brief research study overnight for a VP’s 8am client meeting. I was just coming off maternity leave, was up every couple hours anyway, so why not check email at 11pm? Wrong! The urgent request was there, I answered. It made me a hero for the day, but that needs to be the exception rather than the rule. The only way to make it so is for me and others like me, I know you’re out there, to shut down and reboot on a consistent basis.

Interestingly during a conversation with my Manager yesterday he congratulated me for staying offline during the holiday. While I did still check email, I did not respond to anything until I returned, actually following what I had written in my Out of Office message. Go figure! I started this resolution before the New Year even began!

Speaking of rebooting, another interesting note that Patricia brings up is Ariana Huffington and editor in chief of Glamour , Cindi Leive’s Sleep Challenge 2010. They have suggested that woman vow to sleep more this year. We all know the health consequences from lack of sleep, but woman still tend to be the most sleep-deprived individuals, specifically working single women and working moms.

…in order for women to get ahead in this country, we’re all going to have to lie down and take a nap….Rob yourself of sleep, and you’ll find you never function at your personal best. Work decisions, relationship challenges, any life situation that requires you to know your own mind — they all require the judgment, problem-solving and creativity that only a rested brain is capable of and are all handled best when you bring to them the creativity and judgment that are enhanced by sleep.

OK, if these super-busy and powerful women can do it, so can I. So, 2010, I am putting it in writing. This year I will aim for less screen time, more sleep time, hopefully leading to a  more productive and balanced life. Oh, and I’d like to lose those last 10 lbs too.

Well you sure watched that quickly! For those who are busy and those who skimmed, Suarez’s argument breaks down roughly like this:

Our world is full of robots. They’re not machine assembly line robots, nor are they wheeling around shouting “Danger Will Robinson.” Instead, they’re small bits of software that each do one thing, and do it very well. The history of computing has taught us that thinking machines are good at doing things quickly and doing them over and over, and that’s generally what these bots (short for robots) do; they perform their tasks relentlessly and single-mindedly.

At first, these bots were used to augment the abilities of humans and allow them to have greater responsibility and reach, but increasingly they are replacing people themselves, often in positions that typically made decisions that affect other people. An example that Suarez uses is bots that review credit history data to decide whether or not a given person is approved for a loan: some time ago some person made the decision that people fitting x criteria would be approved, while people meeting y criteria would not. The bot then implements this decision across all records that are sent its way, and in many cases, the repercussions of its decision  has livelihood-impacting results on the lives of the credit applicant.

Bots thrive on the Internet, as they’re not penalized for not having physical, motile bodies online. As more and more of our society has machines embedded in it, there will be more and more information generated for these bots to scour and analyze. In 2010 here at nGenera Insight, two of our main research topics–Pervasive Personal Identity and the Digital Identity Revolution, and Managing in the Age of Unbounded data–are issues that can exist only because of the efforts of software robots. It’s a big issue in our minds, but for Suarez it’s even bigger, and we need to have a serious discussion about the role that these automated, unflinching, and increasingly empowered pieces of software have in our lives and society.

It’s been a couple of days now since I first watched the video, and I’ve been rolling the argument back and forth a bit looking for problems with it: I haven’t come up with much at all. There’s great potential for good to be done with the information collected by these bots, and from the analysis and distillations they perform, but as it stands, the design of the world’s information infrastructure (that is, the internet and the devices that are constantly added to it) give end users/consumers/citizens very little control over their own information and the information collected about them. Suarez is right that we need to have an open and frank discussion about these elements, but I think first we need to really define the space and make sure we’re all on the same page.

In my mind there are two approaches that companies seem to be taking to generate recommendations and help users navigate various types of information: trust networks and collective intelligence. Trust networks are based on your social graph (i.e. your online relationships) and therefore use your friends to help recommend content. Facebook Connect is a popular method of leveraging trust networks by porting your contacts into other applications (or other applications to your contacts). Collective intelligence, on the other hand, is a much more data-driven method of rating and recommendation.

The Twitter vs. Facebook debate provides another example of the relative merit of these two approaches. People often lump both social networks together because they both have status updates that detail the minutia of our everyday lives. But how these services are used is very different. Twitter is a platform for weak ties (i.e. more suited to collective intelligence) where Facebook is a platform for strong ties (i.e. by definition, a trust network). As Denis Hancock notes, “Facebook if for people I’d actually let into my house.” My Twitter contacts, on the other hand, are dominated by people I have never met and will likely never meet.

The important point is that both types of platforms are useful. While Facebook lets me keep in touch with friends and organize social events, on Twitter I find all kinds of interesting links to articles that I never would have found by polling my friends. Similarly, Twitter is a valuable platform from a market research standpoint because companies with the appropriate listening tools in place can now mine the collective opinions of millions of customers, prospects, and influencers. The argument that Twitter is a waste of time because, “why would I care what everyone is doing at every moment of the day” is valid, but the emergent trends and memes resulting from ‘what everyone is doing at every moment of the day’ can be extremely valuable.

This brings me to an interesting article I read on TechCrunch a few days ago: Location’s social paradox, which states that the main problem with location services is, “The more people you follow on them, the less useful the service is.” This is essentially recognizing the fact that for certain services—particularly those where you give up your physical location—the exclusivity of your close network of friends trumps the benefit gained from having access to many individuals. As such, most of the recent offerings (such as Foresquare and U.K.-based Rummble) rely on trust network – login and we’ll tell you what your friends are up to and what they recommend. In these cases, I would agree with MG Siegler from Tech Crunch who suggest the more friends you have on this type of network, the less useful it can be.

However, the potential to use these same services for collective intelligence applications is huge. For example, when you are considering a particular restaurant for dinner, you would be remiss to only consider the opinions of the few friends in your network that have been there. More powerful would be real-time access to the aggregated reviews of as many patrons as possible. Similarly, when driving on the highway, it may not be terribly useful to know that three of your friends are on the same highway, but it might be extremely useful to understand the traffic patterns of all the other cars on the road via the GPS signals from anonymous drivers’ cell phones. In short, social network applications that incorporate elements from both trust networks and collective intelligence (perhaps with the ability to toggle between the two or shut one off based on context) will be most valuable.