All I ask is one thing. And this is… I’m asking this in particular of young people that watch. Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record its my least favorite quality. It doesn’t lead anywhere. Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard, and you’re kind, amazing things will happen. I’m telling you – Amazing things will happen. I’m telling you. It’s just true.
Gawker: CoCo’s Last Dance: “Hardest Thing I Have Ever Had to Do”
Bruce Schneier: Privacy in the Age of Persistence: We must, all of us together, start discussing this major societal change and what it means. And we must work out a way to create a future that our grandchildren will be proud of.
Nick Bilton: NYTimes: ‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web: We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.
Anil Dash: CNN: Don’t let Twitter, Facebook, Google be the only game in town: There’s no reason that organizations or individuals who want to use the Web to relay critical information have to rely on Twitter or Facebook or Google or any other giant of the technology industry in the first place. We’ve just forgotten a bit about how the Internet was supposed to work.
Roger Ebert who is living with what his fight against thyroid cancer has dealt him and how the Internet helps him connect: Nil by mouth: So that’s what’s sad about not eating. The loss of dining, not the loss of food. It may be personal, but for, unless I’m alone, it doesn’t involve dinner if it doesn’t involve talking. The food and drink I can do without easily. The jokes, gossip, laughs, arguments and shared memories I miss. Sentences beginning with the words, “Remember that time?” I ran in crowds where anyone was likely to break out in a poetry recitation at any time. Me too. But not me anymore. So yes, it’s sad. Maybe that’s why I enjoy this blog. You don’t realize it, but we’re at dinner right now. (bonus link read his piece on making out.
“People were told to read it, memorize it, and destroy it because if they were caught with it, they could be killed.” – Joe Wos on the dangers of possessing a copy of “Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story”, a comic book, in the 1960s.
You can read the comic, originally published 1956 online. It still has a message that resonates.
You can read the background on the comic book from Tom Christopher.
Check out the Metafilter Thread and links from Bleeding Cool.
That’s what Erica Sandberg says for the San Francisco Chronicle on their personal finance blog.
Watch your settings, and watch what you share.
Update: Read Write Web: The Facebook Privacy Debate: What You Need to Know
Programmable Web: Daniel Jacobson: “Content Portability: Building an API is Not Enough”
Previous entries in the series:
Programmable Web: Daniel Jacobson: Content Modularity: More Than Just Data Normalization
Programmable Web: Daniel Jacobson: COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere
You can read much more from the NPR team on their blog at Inside NPR.org. A recent post on the blog from Jason Grosman that caught my attention was “What Happens When Stuff Breaks On NPR.org”.
Related:
Justin Cormack has some thoughts on the above series, in particular on content portablility, that are worth reading.
Also related to content portability (I think – okay – maybe a stretch – but is worthy to think about), is “Dive into history, 2009 edition”: “HTML is not an output format. HTML is The Format. Not The Format Of Forever, but damn if it isn’t The Format Of The Now.”
Also Related:
AIGA: Callie Neylan: Case Study: NPR.org
I’m half way thru its 1.5 hours and it is worth it to become familiar with the technology and concepts behind it.
More on CMIS and Alfresco at cmis.alfresco.com.
danah boyd: “Facebook’s move ain’t about changes in privacy norms”
Public-ness has always been a privilege. For a long time, only a few chosen few got to be public figures. Now we’ve changed the equation and anyone can theoretically be public, can theoretically be seen by millions. So it mustn’t be a privilege anymore, eh? Not quite. There are still huge social costs to being public, social costs that geeks in Silicon Valley don’t have to account for. Not everyone gets to show up to work whenever they feel like it wearing whatever they’d like and expect a phatty paycheck. Not everyone has the opportunity to be whoever they want in public and demand that everyone else just cope. I know there are lots of folks out there who think that we should force everyone into the public so that we can create a culture where that IS the norm. Not only do I think that this is unreasonable, but I don’t think that this is truly what we want. The same Silicon Valley tycoons who want to push everyone into the public don’t want their kids to know that their teachers are sexual beings, even when their sexuality is as vanilla as it gets. Should we even begin to talk about the marginalized populations out there?
Recently, I gave a talk on the complications of visibility through social media. Power is critical in thinking through these issues. The privileged folks don’t have to worry so much about people who hold power over them observing them online. That’s the very definition of privilege. But most everyone else does. And forcing people into the public eye doesn’t dismantle the structures of privilege, the structures of power. What pisses me off is that it reinforces them. The privileged get more privileged, gaining from being exposed. And those struggling to keep their lives together are forced to create walls that are constantly torn down around them. The teacher, the abused woman, the poor kid living in the ghetto and trying to get out. How do we take them into consideration when we build systems that expose people?
Related:
Bruce Schneier: “The Eternal Value of Privacy”
Nicholas Carr: Other people’s privacy
NPR.org: Remembering MLK And The ‘Fierce Urgency Of Now’:
King spoke of a debt before he spoke of the dream. This is important to remember because it shows his focus on economic conditions and problems in America. King was concerned not only with fighting segregation and discrimination, but also with fighting poverty. During his last year he was organizing a poor people’s campaign to come to Washington, D.C.
I’m cautiously optimistic about this and am excited to see it play out. There is dire need for continued experimentation.
The strategy being discussed this go around is a Financial Times-like metered system (they call it the “frequency-model” – more at Portfolio). This would, theoretically, allow the New York Times to retain its reach and users driven to it via search, links, etc, while deriving revenue from heavy readers:
At an investor conference this fall, Nisenholtz alluded to this tension: “At the end of the day, if we don’t get this right, a lot of money falls out of the system.”
But with the painful declines in advertising brought on by last year’s financial crisis, the argument pushed by Keller and others — that online advertising might never grow big enough to sustain the paper’s high-cost, ambitious journalism — gained more weight. The view was that the Times needed to make the leap to some form of paid content and it needed to do it now. The trick would be to build a source of real revenue through online subscriptions while still being able to sell significant online advertising. The appeal of the metered model is that it charges high-volume readers while allowing casual browsers to sample articles for free, thus preserving some of the Times’ online reach.
Read all about it in New York Magazine’s “New York Times Ready to Charge Online Readers”.