My Digital FootPrint

I wrote that Social filtering is deeply human at the beginning of November and I knew that there was more to the topic/ theme/ thought then but I could not find the words.  Since then I have been juggling with various ideas, these have often been driven by my necessity to justify Twitter.  Twitter (get it or not) provides a function called “follow” – you can follow who you like, and you get updates/ insite/ information/ attention from them, however, how do you turn “follow” into value. Follow has an obvious value to the person who follows the leader.  You gain free insights/ social filtering/ value/ updates.  This “Social filter” is based on trust and it is different from curators and editors who have specific agenda’s (and income requirements.) In the original post I quoted David Armano   “Often times the quality of links and information I get on Twitter is better than what I would have gotten from Google because the knowledge of the human feed is deep, ni...

My free Metro this AM carried a story about Facebook being a threat to the Internet and the register is running a similar story   http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/20/berners_lee_says_facebook_a_thret_to_web/ based on an Interview in Scientific American journal. It appears that Sir Tim Berners-Lee (read Open Web) is hitting out at all social networks for not sharing information.  "Facebook and others encourage users to enter their information ... So the more you enter, the more you become locked in,’ says Sir Tim  'The more this kind of architecture gains widespread use, the more the web becomes fragmented – and the less we enjoy a single, universal information space. The threat to Internet freedom comes from enclosing data in corporate-governed online spaces – such as ‘apps’ – instead of linking pages fluidly and allowing knowledge to transcend businesses and borders. ‘You can access an iTunes link only using Ap...

Paranoid parents and jealous girlfriends across the United States are using an intrusive Porn Stick to stalk, track and monitor online activity aka your digital footprint . http://paraben-sticks.com/porn-remover.html It's a simple thumb drive that will scan an entire computer and find any current or deleted pornographic images. Special Agent Rusty Isakson with the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force depends on the latest technology to help catch child porn predators. However, take John and Laurel Porter, who employ Paraben’s Porn Stick to routinely conduct "surprise inspections" by scanning the contents of laptops and cell phones belonging to their three children.   Now this worries me - where does trust and talking to your children sit.  End of pipe solution that is selling on FUD and not on making any change to the actual system.

I have written a number of times on dealing with death and the relationship to your digital footprint Rule 31 from my 31 new social rules for living in a digital age is about finding someone you trust to ensure that your digital estate can be managed.  Digital Estate Planning appears to be growing    AssetLock.net ,  Legacy Locker ,  Deathswitch.com  and My Webwill   aim to address the issues raised  by enabling online users to securely store online information like logins and passwords to be passed on to relations after death - however you need to tell someone and  Excel does work as a cheap alternative. On a related but different slant there is E-Tomb which is a solar powered tomb with bluetooth to enable relatives to visit your online profiles and memories after you passed away.

Brazen Careerist ( http://www.BrazenCareerist.com ), a site for career advancement, launched Network Roulette, an online speed-networking service last week. As a service it randomly matches participants with others (anyone) after answering two questions: “What are you looking for?” and “What are you providing?”  User then have up to 3 minutes to determine if the random match can help you and a wash-up dashboard then sets out follow up. Perfect for the couch potato who wants to stay playing "Call of Duty" instead of taking the time to get out see daylight and meet others.  However, it is positioned for those busy exec's (professional) who want to expand their network.  Personally, very confused as if busy that last thing I need is some random introductions. However, this is another place for your digital identity/ persona and the question I now ask with these services is; Is this value add or is this reputation destroying?

  Fridays irrational thinking - As with everything on my blog, I am addressing this thought from the standpoint of "user data," as it unlikely that, from any other rational stance, you would reach the same thought. Proposition One: Apple becomes Microsoft Steve Jobs (Apple) knows best and knows what you want. OS10 moves even further to Apple taking entire control of what you do and how you do it. It is locked down as UI/UX experience is everything, and it is good - but not for everyone. iPhone and iPad users ( and then OS10 and Apple.TV) are forced to download apps from the apps store. These pre-approved and selected apps are the only offer. Only those Apps that Apple deems non-strategic to their view of the world (how many music apps are there that integrate to iTunes?)  Like editorial control in News and print, I know better than you. I will not be biased, other than what I like. The follows (believers) are fanatical and all faults are features. Prices are high, maintaining...

  Fridays irrational thinking - As with everything on my blog, I am addressing this thought from the standpoint of "user data," as it unlikely that, from any other rational stance, you would reach the same thought. Proposition One: Apple becomes Microsoft Steve Jobs (Apple) knows best and knows what you want. OS10 moves even further to Apple taking entire control of what you do and how you do it. It is locked down as UI/UX experience is everything, and it is good - but not for everyone. iPhone and iPad users ( and then OS10 and Apple.TV) are forced to download apps from the apps store. These pre-approved and selected apps are the only offer. Only those Apps that Apple deems non-strategic to their view of the world (how many music apps are there that integrate to iTunes?)  Like editorial control in News and print, I know better than you. I will not be biased, other than what I like. The follows (believers) are fanatical and all faults are features. Prices are high, maintaining...

  Fridays irrational thinking - As with everything on my blog, I am addressing this thought from the standpoint of "user data," as it unlikely that, from any other rational stance, you would reach the same thought. Proposition One: Apple becomes Microsoft Steve Jobs (Apple) knows best and knows what you want. OS10 moves even further to Apple taking entire control of what you do and how you do it. It is locked down as UI/UX experience is everything, and it is good - but not for everyone. iPhone and iPad users ( and then OS10 and Apple.TV) are forced to download apps from the apps store. These pre-approved and selected apps are the only offer. Only those Apps that Apple deems non-strategic to their view of the world (how many music apps are there that integrate to iTunes?)  Like editorial control in News and print, I know better than you. I will not be biased, other than what I like. The follows (believers) are fanatical and all faults are features. Prices are high, maintaining...

  Fridays irrational thinking - As with everything on my blog, I am addressing this thought from the standpoint of "user data," as it unlikely that, from any other rational stance, you would reach the same thought. Proposition One: Apple becomes Microsoft Steve Jobs (Apple) knows best and knows what you want. OS10 moves even further to Apple taking entire control of what you do and how you do it. It is locked down as UI/UX experience is everything, and it is good - but not for everyone. iPhone and iPad users ( and then OS10 and Apple.TV) are forced to download apps from the apps store. These pre-approved and selected apps are the only offer. Only those Apps that Apple deems non-strategic to their view of the world (how many music apps are there that integrate to iTunes?)  Like editorial control in News and print, I know better than you. I will not be biased, other than what I like. The follows (believers) are fanatical and all faults are features. Prices are high, maintaining...

A quick image search on "visualising/ visualizing the web/internet" takes you to a practical view of what is there.    A classic example is linked here - http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/visualizing_akamai.html However, this does not really work as a visualisation or representation of the internet when taking about digital footprints -  so here is my interruption There are activities we do, we create content, we consume content and we store data.  This some call  "life streams."  Data can come from things we do, a blog post or from data attached to a photo, location ( e.g active and passive) Other data will come from the machines taking to themselves. What the internet/ web does is to take this data/ lifestream and making sense of it, create new value from the analysis. It creates a digital footprint based on what it knows about you (from what you say, from what others say and from what the data says)  The web ...

A quick image search on "visualising/ visualizing the web/internet" takes you to a practical view of what is there.    A classic example is linked here - http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/visualizing_akamai.html However, this does not really work as a visualisation or representation of the internet when taking about digital footprints -  so here is my interruption There are activities we do, we create content, we consume content and we store data.  This some call  "life streams."  Data can come from things we do, a blog post or from data attached to a photo, location ( e.g active and passive) Other data will come from the machines taking to themselves. What the internet/ web does is to take this data/ lifestream and making sense of it, create new value from the analysis. It creates a digital footprint based on what it knows about you (from what you say, from what others say and from what the data says)  The web ...

A quick image search on "visualising/ visualizing the web/internet" takes you to a practical view of what is there.    A classic example is linked here - http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/visualizing_akamai.html However, this does not really work as a visualisation or representation of the internet when taking about digital footprints -  so here is my interruption There are activities we do, we create content, we consume content and we store data.  This some call  "life streams."  Data can come from things we do, a blog post or from data attached to a photo, location ( e.g active and passive) Other data will come from the machines taking to themselves. What the internet/ web does is to take this data/ lifestream and making sense of it, create new value from the analysis. It creates a digital footprint based on what it knows about you (from what you say, from what others say and from what the data says)  The web ...

  What makes a service creepy? Dustbins with chips in that measure your rubbish? CCTV that can recognise your face and lets you know how often you visit? Finger printing or access cards for schools that then track your childs passage through school? Anonymous but personalised marketing in a shopping centre based on your location? Adaptive search that knows what you are looking for? Auto spelling correction? Email censorship that stops you sending messages? Message analysis that tells you what type of person you are and how you manage your actions/ staff? Reminders and alerts? A friend who can auto “check” you into a location on Foursquare, Facebook places etc? Lights that turn on and off as you entre a room?

Published November 10 th 2010. The full report is here It would appear that some are trying to bring to much process and method to a network relationship.

It is possible now to gather so much data but is all of it of any value?

If the principals of social media are engagement, conversation and relationship; then the justification is to determine who influences you and who you influence. As a business I can collect your data and from the analysis of your and others data work out the ‘influences’ then I should be able to use you (if you are susceptible) to spread my brand and sales messages.  Whilst this may be the new business model that is utilising your data, it is not far from original principles but the important change is this is now occurs in real-time and I can measure every part/ action/ re-action/ click of it – obviously taking into account that measuring may actually cause an effect. Marketing demands your attention however it looks like we are doing far more things at the same time.... +watching TV +browsing +IM. Therefore with the emergence of more screens (technology/ devices) to interact with all at the same time, are we now in a continual state of shared-engagement ...

It is probably easier to cross the creepy test than most people think, and the issue being damage to brand and not achieving any value. An example could be using Bluetooth to track shoppers, whilst anonymous the direct marketing targeted to your on your handset feels like an invasion/ violation.  There is probably another axis which covers off adoption/ acceptance/ knowledge.          

Following on from the previous post about Twitter - To perform a legitimate experiment, scientists must observe the results of a system in motion without influencing those results. This is not as easy as one would first think. Back in the 1920’s Werner Heisenberg developed The Uncertainty Principle as part of thinking about quantum physics.  Heisenberg determined that “both the position and momentum of a particle cannot be known simultaneously.”   The dichotomy raises the mind-boggling prospect that unless we observe an event or thing, it hasn’t really happened, that all possible futures are quantum probability functions waiting for someone to notice them - trees falling unheard in a forest. Maybe this blog never existed until search for it and Google created it as you wanted it! (Yes for those who have mastered QM I am confusing the observer effect of with the uncertainty principle. Technically the uncertainty principle has nothing to do with "o...

Following on from the previous post about Twitter - To perform a legitimate experiment, scientists must observe the results of a system in motion without influencing those results. This is not as easy as one would first think. Back in the 1920’s Werner Heisenberg developed The Uncertainty Principle as part of thinking about quantum physics.  Heisenberg determined that “both the position and momentum of a particle cannot be known simultaneously.”   The dichotomy raises the mind-boggling prospect that unless we observe an event or thing, it hasn’t really happened, that all possible futures are quantum probability functions waiting for someone to notice them - trees falling unheard in a forest. Maybe this blog never existed until search for it and Google created it as you wanted it! (Yes for those who have mastered QM I am confusing the observer effect of with the uncertainty principle. Technically the uncertainty principle has nothing to do with "o...

Following on from the previous post about Twitter - To perform a legitimate experiment, scientists must observe the results of a system in motion without influencing those results. This is not as easy as one would first think. Back in the 1920’s Werner Heisenberg developed The Uncertainty Principle as part of thinking about quantum physics.  Heisenberg determined that “both the position and momentum of a particle cannot be known simultaneously.”   The dichotomy raises the mind-boggling prospect that unless we observe an event or thing, it hasn’t really happened, that all possible futures are quantum probability functions waiting for someone to notice them - trees falling unheard in a forest. Maybe this blog never existed until search for it and Google created it as you wanted it! (Yes for those who have mastered QM I am confusing the observer effect of with the uncertainty principle. Technically the uncertainty principle has nothing to do with "o...

   

Original Article is from Fast Company “Asur and Huberman started by monitoring movie mentions in 2.9 million tweets from 1.2 million users over three months. These included 24 movies in all, ranging from Avatar to Twilight: New Moon. Then they took two different approaches, dealing with two very different performance metrics: the first weekend performance, which is largely built on buzz and the second weekend performance, which is largely built whether people actually like the movie. To predict first weekend performance, they built a computer model, which factored in two variables: the rate of tweets around the release date and the number of theaters its released in. Lo and behold, that model was 97.3% accurate in predicting opening weekend box office. By contrast, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, which has been the gold standard for opening box-office predictions, had a 96.5% accuracy. “ But what should be even more alluring to marketers: As Tech Review points out , Twi...

Harvesting the data we submit to the social web and using it to make a judgement about how “we” feel.  We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs and every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved. I wonder how it changes with the announcement of a Royal Engagement? Have a play at their web site You can buy the Book  An Almanac of Human Emotion: Sep Kamvar and Jonathn ...

If you have not looked at David Mccandless work on representing data you should, it is fabulous. The model of digital footprint is collect data, store data, analysis, create value and feedback.  This data representation is the visual representation of the output. The chart above is about breakup’s and shows the facts but not the reasons or how this changes with time.  Neither does it normalise against online activity or context such as people getting together.  The other obvious point is this only shows those who are presenting their data. One key fact about digital footprints is that increasingly your data will be put out there without you doing anything and in some cases without you knowing.  Consider the scenario where you may not have added your status, but due to a change in habit as detected by location and time, it could be inferred from your data and trends. Does the digital you know too much? The ‘So What’ question I believe is ...

Personally I take comfort that FireSheep is here as it will force web companies to upgrade their protection of your “data.”  Often debates rage about what content you post about yourself but the majority of users have little appreciation of what actually happens several layers below the user interface.  Most users have to assume that someone understands and will protect them – this is a great example of that, as the mechanics were there to protect you, but many companies did not implement them.  This is much like Privacy International who stand up for your privacy rules and regulation. FireSheep is a Firefox plugin, released as an open source and provides a simple tool, that once installed, can be used to steal cookies from any computer off the same access to unsecured Wi-Fi network. If you ‘borrow’ WiFi or access insecure WiFi in public, you will lose your FaceBook login to anyone running FireSheep.  Very dangerous if you are a stud...

Sometimes Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google “worries me” – here are some of his quotes. “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.” Atlantic “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”   CNBC interview “Every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.” Wall Street Journal “Streetview the cars we drive only once, you can just move, right?” CNN Interview “You can trust us with your data” Telegraph “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next. New York Times Interview   What this does suggest is that there are...

Sometimes Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google “worries me” – here are some of his quotes. “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.” Atlantic “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”   CNBC interview “Every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.” Wall Street Journal “Streetview the cars we drive only once, you can just move, right?” CNN Interview “You can trust us with your data” Telegraph “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions, they want Google to tell them what they should be doing next. New York Times Interview   What this does suggest is that there are...

Eric Schmidt (CEO Google ) said in an interview earlier this year that people will change their name, then retracted the comment saying it was a joke in an interview with Stephen Colbert , however a new survey from One Path, Melborne has revealed that several young people are on a name-changing spree on Facebook in order to escape their digital footprint, suggesting that the Google chief may have been on the money! The survey of more than 1000 Australians has found that 8 per cent would consider changing their name to escape their digital footprint. Un-surprisingly most of them are youngsters - 14 percent of those between 18 and 25 said they'd consider changing their name, while less than 3 per cent of those over 60 said they would. The survey was commissioned by One Path , formerly ING Australia.

I will be speaking at the DiViA-forum, an initiative of the Aalto University, Helsinki on "Digital Footprints" I will focus on - Definitions and the models for digital footprints - How to understand your customers by using their data? - What are companies globally doing at the moment? - What are the present trends and key social rules? - Personal views on what should be focused on? - Case examples - Best practices -Typical hurdles and how to overcome these   ==== DiViA-forum is an initiative of the Aalto University. The DiViA-forum is tackling issues relating to marketing and the relationships and roles between organizations and customers. We aim to bring to the DiViA-forum leading thinkers from different fields of marketing. At the moment we have 100+ organizations as DiViA members. The organizations are from different fields with sizes ranging from global players to SME. The audience for the seminar is expected to be around 300 persons con...

By the time you read this it will have all changed.   It would be more complete if it added TV and tablet as these two platforms, whilst not mobile, will become critical in decision making in next 12 months www.developereconomics.com/infographic  

As a balance to the last post about being watched - this is a good reason to track DataDyne provides free mobile phone data collection to hundreds of non-profits and other organizations working in international development and global health worldwide. Please consider  joining their mailing list   or following them on Twitter , to support this important work. Joel Selanikio, CEO and co-founder has created a technology that track outbreaks of deadly diseases. DataDyne is collecting vital health and epidemiological data from hundreds of miles away via travelling healthworkers with mobile phones. This is not my or your digital footprint - it is our digital footprint.

As a balance to the last post about being watched - this is a good reason to track DataDyne provides free mobile phone data collection to hundreds of non-profits and other organizations working in international development and global health worldwide. Please consider  joining their mailing list   or following them on Twitter , to support this important work. Joel Selanikio, CEO and co-founder has created a technology that track outbreaks of deadly diseases. DataDyne is collecting vital health and epidemiological data from hundreds of miles away via travelling healthworkers with mobile phones. This is not my or your digital footprint - it is our digital footprint.

© http://www.globecartoon.com Rule 18 – Fear, uncertainty and doubt sell – this is such a good visual image of what old media wants you to believe about those recording your data. I do believe that we should not store data (as it is a cost and liability) and therefore there is not someone looking at you and your data, they are looking at your behaviour and how you react – but this any less scary?