I’m listening and watching with fascination to Keith Scovell‘s Shopper Power videos. In these Keith describes progress being made in a VRM direction by retailers and their upstream suppliers, detailing efforts made by Starbucks, Hallmark, CVS, Tesco/Homeplus, Frito-Lay, Reese’s and other companies — all recognizing that customers’ range of control over interactions in retail environments is increasing dramatically, and will increase a great deal more. I haven’t watched all of Keith’s videos yet, but I’m taking notes as I do, and I recommend that…
Identity
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Most Topular Stories
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Toward a new symbiosis between Demand and Supply
ProjectVRM23 Jan 2012 | 12:44 pm -
Can we help AT&T solve its mobile data problem?
Doc Searls's blog17 Jan 2012 | 1:45 pmI'm in midtown Manhattan, connected to the Net over my hotel's slow but costly wi-fi connection. Normally when I'm traveling — at least here in the U.S. — I avoid lame hotel connections by using AT&T's cellular data system, usually through my iPhone's "personal hotspot." more>> -
Live blogging Politics of the Internet
Doc Searls Weblog25 Jan 2012 | 2:30 pmSo I’m at Micah Sifry’s Politics of the Internet class at the Kennedy School, and risk live-blogging it (taxing my multitasking abilities…) Some questions in the midst of dialog between Micah (@Mlsif) and the class (#pol-int)… Was there a $trillion “internet dividend” over the old phone system, and was it a cost to the old system? Did the Internet have to happen? Is the IETF‘s “rough consensus and running code” still a prevailing ethos, or methodology? Is it an accident that the rough consensus above is so similar to the #Occupy methods? -
The secret life of your personal data
Digital ID Coach14 Jan 2012 | 12:46 amMaria Popova at Brain Pickings wrote about this great 3 minute video by Michael Rigley, a graphic design student. Rigley says about his video: Information technology has become a ubiquitous presence. By visualizing the processes that underlie our interactions with this technology we can trace what happens to the information we feed into the network. In fact, the level of surveillance is profound, and the lack of transparency and personal control is not about inspiring “consumer” trust. Powerful entities have long deciding what information is appropriate for the masses. We may not… -
The new Google is Creepier then ever.
Identity Woman25 Jan 2012 | 8:54 pmThe Washington Post has an article today that talks about what google is doing as of today:Google’s no-opt-out privacy changes and the end of the anonymous InternetGoogle announced Tuesday its plans to integrate data from all its services with your profile for logged-in Google+ users.She makes this assertion in the early part of the article.The Internet, nowadays, is overwhelmingly dominated by fora in which you hang out as your actual self. Facebook. Twitter. And now, Google. While I understand her assertion that the net is "dominated" by these fora. There are two assumptions one is that…
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ProjectVRM
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Toward a new symbiosis between Demand and Supply
23 Jan 2012 | 12:44 pmI’m listening and watching with fascination to Keith Scovell‘s Shopper Power videos. In these Keith describes progress being made in a VRM direction by retailers and their upstream suppliers, detailing efforts made by Starbucks, Hallmark, CVS, Tesco/Homeplus, Frito-Lay, Reese’s and other companies — all recognizing that customers’ range of control over interactions in retail environments is increasing dramatically, and will increase a great deal more. I haven’t watched all of Keith’s videos yet, but I’m taking notes as I do, and I recommend that… -
SOPA and Customer Commons
18 Jan 2012 | 11:01 amImagine that Customer Commons had been created a year ago. To guide that imagining, here is the copy that matters from the placeholder page: Customer Commons is about us. We are a community of customers. We are funded only by customers. We serve the interests and aspirations of customers. We are the 100% Customer Commons is the successor organization to ProjectVRM. Think of ProjectVRM as the launch pad and rocket for getting VRM development and research into orbit — and of Customer Commons as the rest of the universe. So the future is wide open. SOPA, however, is about enclosing… -
Customers are personal, cont’d
17 Jan 2012 | 3:06 pmThere are so many excellent comments and questions following my last post, Consumers are social, Customers are personal, that I decided it would make more sense to address them in a new post than in comments under that one. So here goes. Joshua Marsh, the CEO of Conversocial, writes, I’m interested in your comment that social media is only semi-personal – could you expand on that point? I think what you could be getting at is the current lack of tie up between social identity and customer records, which is a challenge (but one that can be overcome), and one we are working on. Or do you… -
Consumers are social, Customers are personal
14 Jan 2012 | 10:03 amSocial media are a partial and temporary solution at best to a pair of linked problems that are essentially personal: dysfunctional customer relationship management on the vendor’s side; and minimal vendor relationship management on the customer’s side. In the absence of solutions to both problems, vendors still see customers as consumers, and that too is a problem that hasn’t yet come to a head, because we still don’t fully grok the difference between consumers and customers. As a result, we think social media looks like a the good answer rather than a better… -
Occupying the Internet
2 Jan 2012 | 4:54 amAs he so often does, Dave Winer nails it, this time with The Un-Internet. Some pull-quotes: At issue is this: Control. For whatever reason, the people who run the tech companies want it. But eventually the users take it. Either the companies learn how to take the lead from their users, or they will be sidelined. Unless the laws of technology are repealed, and I don’t think laws like that can be repealed. It’s the Internet vs the Un-Internet. And the Internet, it seems, always prevails. The Internet is each and all of us. It is no more reducible to the companies that try to control…
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Doc Searls's blog
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Can we help AT&T solve its mobile data problem?
17 Jan 2012 | 1:45 pmI'm in midtown Manhattan, connected to the Net over my hotel's slow but costly wi-fi connection. Normally when I'm traveling — at least here in the U.S. — I avoid lame hotel connections by using AT&T's cellular data system, usually through my iPhone's "personal hotspot." more>> -
The Near-Death of Blog Search
11 Nov 2011 | 10:13 amThe first blog search engine was PubSub in 2002. It was inventive and strange in some ways (and took some getting used to); but it was fast and did a good job of searching through syndicated postings, mostly from blogs — at least until blog spam became an epidemic that nearly killed the whole category a couple years later. more>> -
GandhiCon 4.x
9 Sep 2011 | 10:44 amSearches for the word "linux" have been trending downward since early 2004, according to Google. Searches in mid-2011 are about a quarter of what they were in early 2004. On the other hand, searches for "android" more than doubled those for "linux" by mid-2011. So, what should we make of that? more>> -
A Way off the Ranch
7 Sep 2011 | 8:00 amAs entities on the Web, we have devolved. Client-server has become calf-cow. The client—that's you—is the calf, and the Web site is the cow. What you get from the cow is milk and cookies. The milk is what you go to the site for. The cookies are what the site gives to you, mostly for its own business purposes, chief among which is tracking you like an animal. more>> -
What do you plan for your $99.99 HP TouchPad?
21 Aug 2011 | 3:19 pmSo BestBuy is having a fire sale on HP TouchPads, which HP is discontinuing, along with it's entire more>>
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Doc Searls Weblog
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Live blogging Politics of the Internet
25 Jan 2012 | 2:30 pmSo I’m at Micah Sifry’s Politics of the Internet class at the Kennedy School, and risk live-blogging it (taxing my multitasking abilities…) Some questions in the midst of dialog between Micah (@Mlsif) and the class (#pol-int)… Was there a $trillion “internet dividend” over the old phone system, and was it a cost to the old system? Did the Internet have to happen? Is the IETF‘s “rough consensus and running code” still a prevailing ethos, or methodology? Is it an accident that the rough consensus above is so similar to the #Occupy methods? -
Surf’s up! Look north
24 Jan 2012 | 4:44 pmAccording to this… … the Aurora is on. The Kp Index has hit 5, and a geomagnetic storm is on. Here’s today’s SpaceWeather on the matter. Follow the links there. Bear in mind that the aurora are curtains of light up to a thousand miles high. So if the auroral oval is pushed down over southern Canada (which these storms tend to do), it should still be visible far south across the United States. Current links: Northern Lights over the UK metofficenews.wordpress.com) An Easy Guide To Observing Aurora mbcalyn.wordpress.com) Epic Geomagnetic Storm Erupts :… -
2025 in 2012
23 Jan 2012 | 6:07 pmMarcel Bullinga is a Dutch futurist and author of Welcome to the Future Cloud. Today I got pointed on Twitter to a Q&A with Bullinga by Aaron Saenz at SingularityHub. Interesting stuff. An excerpt: SH: Welcome to the Future Cloud seems to be very supportive of intellectual property (IP) rights and digital rights managements (DRM). Are IP and DRM necessary to the development of a healthy future? MB: Yes and no. The trend is twofold. We will have ironclad ways to protect our data, our virtual sources and our identities. We will wrap our virtual belongings with what I call a Cloud Seal. A… -
PR’s problems, 20 years later
22 Jan 2012 | 10:37 pmI was near the end of my career as a PR guy when I wrote the essay below for the January 1992 issue of Upside. Since then Upside has been erased. Some bits of it still persist on the Internet Archive, but nothing before 1996. But I did save my own draft of the piece, and put it up here, back in the mid-90s, where it has remained all but invisible. So I thought it would be fun to surface it now on the blog, on the 20th anniversary of its original publication. Here goes: THE PROBLEM WITH PR Toward a world beyond press releases and bogus news By Doc Searls There is no Pulitzer Prize for… -
Can’t lose, in a way
22 Jan 2012 | 4:34 pmI grew up in New Jersey and New York, rooting for the Giants. (And, in the Namath era, the Jets too.) Then, after 20 years in North Carolina (mostly as a college basketball fan), I lived in the Bay Area for 25 years, and rooted for the 49ers there. One daughter lives in the Bay Area, and most of my wife’s huge family lives in the Bay Area, and most of them are hard-core for the Niners. We were out there a week ago and got some great hang time watching the Niners beat the Saints. However, I’ve worked and lived in New England for five and a half years now, and have been rooting for…
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Digital ID Coach
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The secret life of your personal data
14 Jan 2012 | 12:46 amMaria Popova at Brain Pickings wrote about this great 3 minute video by Michael Rigley, a graphic design student. Rigley says about his video: Information technology has become a ubiquitous presence. By visualizing the processes that underlie our interactions with this technology we can trace what happens to the information we feed into the network. In fact, the level of surveillance is profound, and the lack of transparency and personal control is not about inspiring “consumer” trust. Powerful entities have long deciding what information is appropriate for the masses. We may not… -
PII 2011: Owning Online Identity: Consumer-Managed Data
15 Nov 2011 | 7:37 pmFatemeh Khatibloo, Forrester Research moderates panel with Jason Cavnar, Singly, Todd Cullen, Acxiom, Shane Green, Personal, and Mary Hodder, Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium. Fatemeh: why do consumers care? Jason: consumers have a sense of things being out of control. Todd: clients desperately looking for meaningful way to interact with consumers. On supply side, it’s new territory. Huge demand on marketer’s side. Shane: at core, we realize that who has access to our data shapes our experience, access, opportunities. Value: there’s a blindspot about what data is worth in… -
PII 2011: Personal Identity Management
15 Nov 2011 | 7:01 pmForrester analyst Fatemeh Khatibloo asked if people had made available their report Making Leaders Successful Every Day. Report is available from Personal. She talks about car buying process as an example: start with personal RFP-type offer, receive offers that are customized to our concerns. Our interactions with dealers lead to purchase of a car. (Related: see ISWG’s Car Buying Engagement Model.) Five key concepts that brands and companies need to do to engage: Respect my data, respect me Security of infrastructure, governance Transparency Data portability Economy, including penalties… -
PII 2011: Startup Spotlight: OneId
15 Nov 2011 | 6:28 pmLots of problems managing registration and authorization account. Various threats compromise computers. Need for better management tools that are easy to use and secure. Here’s a OneID demo video that shows more. More » Related posts:PII 2011: Startup Spotlight: Disconnect PII 2011: Mapping the PII Market: Players, Regulators, Stakeholders PII 2011: Implementing a Privacy Program -
PII 2011: Startup Spotlight: Disconnect
15 Nov 2011 | 6:17 pmBrian Kennish and Casey Oppenheim of Disconnect on this session. They’re a privacy start-up making simple tools to help manage data. Brian worked at DoubleClick, Google. Casey worked as (criminal?) investigator in Manhattan, lawyer about privacy. History of company: article on Facebook leaking vast private data store. Created a browser plug-in expecting small group, ended up with many users in 2 weeks. Study about how much data social networking companies collect (lots! wow.). Same thing with ad companies: “anonymous” may not be so. (Note: look for Brian’s talk at…
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Identity Woman
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The new Google is Creepier then ever.
25 Jan 2012 | 8:54 pmThe Washington Post has an article today that talks about what google is doing as of today:Google’s no-opt-out privacy changes and the end of the anonymous InternetGoogle announced Tuesday its plans to integrate data from all its services with your profile for logged-in Google+ users.She makes this assertion in the early part of the article.The Internet, nowadays, is overwhelmingly dominated by fora in which you hang out as your actual self. Facebook. Twitter. And now, Google. While I understand her assertion that the net is "dominated" by these fora. There are two assumptions one is that… -
The new Google+ Names process
23 Jan 2012 | 11:11 pmToday people were tweeting/writing about the new google+ names policies. Well. I just went through it and it involves many screens and an appeal into the Kafkaesqe googleplex that takes up to 3 days before they approve your name request. I think they should to this to EVERY user cause how do I know your name "is" David Smith...it just doesn't trigger their dictionaries prompting inquiry into the legitimacy of your name...Ok but I digress...lets see how this works.First you are discouraged from changing your name and limited to the frequency you can do so. You have to click "change name" to… -
The Carrier IQ "world" vs. a Personal Data Ecosystem future
2 Dec 2011 | 2:33 amRead Write Web's Marshak Kirkpatrick just posted a great article outlining the issues with the Carrier IQ issues that have surfaced. It also includes an extensive quote from me about how data has value and it needs to be accessed in ways that are in alignement with people. -
Recent Activity Pt 4: Europe Week 1
27 Nov 2011 | 6:35 pmWeek one in Europe was busy. The day I arrived Esther picked me up and we headed to Qiy's offices where i got to run into John Harrison who I last saw a year ago at IIW Europe. He is organizing a consortium to go in for FP-7 money (80 million) put out for projects around Identity in the European Union.Wednesday was Nov 9th Identity.Next convened by Robert was great bringing people together from across Europe. 1/2 the day was a regular conference and 1/2 the day was an UnConference that I helped facilitate. I ran a session about personal data and we had a good conversation. I also learned… -
Recent Activity Pt 2: Canada & Boston
27 Nov 2011 | 5:43 pmImmediately following IIW (post here). I headed to Canada to speak at the International Women in Digital Media Summit.The iWDMS brings together professionals from traditional and digital media communities, as well as educational/research institutions from around the world. With high level keynotes, cross-sector dialogue, expert panelists, controversial debates and structured networking, the Summit will promote knowledge-sharing, and will explore innovation, skills gaps, policy and research in digital media--including gaming, mobile, and social media--and the impacts on and advancements by…
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Matt Flynn's Identity Management Blog
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Access Governance Continuum
22 Jan 2012 | 12:09 pmI've been pretty focused recently on Access Governance and specifically how large organizations can get their arms around the problem of access as it relates to unstructured data (mostly file systems and SharePoint). Most of the people I speak to who have responsibility for answering the related tough questions are simply overwhelmed by the sheer size and complexity of the challenge. It led me to consider that there are a different set of tasks I'd recommend to those people than I might to someone who has a somewhat more mature access governance program. So, I started documenting an Access… -
Identity Solutions and Unstructured Data
11 Nov 2011 | 3:33 pmBeing in the space for so long, I'm always looking for ways to provide new, interesting functionality. To date, identity (IAM) solutions have no insight into the usage of unstructured data. And it would be really cool if they did. IAM vendors have only recently begun thinking about unstructured data at all. Some have the ability to look across file system permissions and perhaps include rights information in reports along with basic user and group data. I don't think any do a great job of including a view across file system, Sharepoint, SQL Server, and Exchange Public Folders. But regardless… -
The Most Powerful Voices in Security
14 Sep 2011 | 2:18 pmIt's been almost a week since SYS-CON Media's Jim Kaskade included me in their list of the 100 Most Powerful Voices in Security. Since then, as you might imagine, it's been an absolute media circus for me. People are calling and emailing to ask my advice and there are young security analysts camped outside my home. But, I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that it's not a list of the most knowledgeable practitioners of security. This is essentially acknowledgement of having a "powerful voice". Growing up, people phrased it differently as "you've got a big mouth". Levity aside, I… -
Mobile Apps for Health
19 Aug 2011 | 9:46 amJennifer Flynn (same family) who is a health field professional has a bog called Health & Productivity Thinker where she posted yesterday on Mobile Apps for Health. She asks "what type of app would you want to use for your health?" As a security professional, I'm very interested in the answer. As an industry, we spend a lot of time focused on information privacy and health information is among the most talked about types. Health organizations spend a fortune on personal health information protection (perhaps primarily in an effort to comply with HIPAA). Johns Hopkins and similar… -
FireFox Sync: Ease of Use and Security Implications
29 Jul 2011 | 2:33 pmAlthough, I most often cover business-related identity issues, this post is going to focus on an issue for home users (that also applies to business). In the past, I wrote about the differences between Web SSO and ESSO. And I recently wrote about Mozilla's BrowserID which is focused on home users but is more closely aligned to Web SSO than today's topic. I've used a variety of browsers over the years from Netscape 2 and IE 3 through today's versions of Chrome and FireFox. Although it was considered uncool by many, I primarily used IE for a number of years. But today, I almost exclusively use…
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Racingsnake - Robin Wilton's Esoterica
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Time for a rant...
27 Jan 2012 | 12:42 pm... about some really irritating developments in TV advertising.I apoplogise in advance, but I think some of these peeves have been simmering for a while now, and it would be healthier all round if I can permit myself a little vent. There are two advertising trends at the moment which are really starting to grate.The first is when the advertiser treats us like imbeciles, incapable of logical thought. Two examples:1 - the dishwasher tablet which is sold on the premise that, if you don't use it, filth accumulates in your dishwasher's plumbing tubes and is then swilled around your cutlery and… -
Un-bricking a System76 Starling netbook
9 Jun 2011 | 12:16 pmIn case it may be of help to someone else in the same situation...I have a System76 Starling netbook, which until this week was running Ubuntu 9 (Karmic Koala). That's the release it came factory-installed with, and as long as it was getting patched and updated, I was sticking with the "ain't broke, don't fix" principle. Previous experience has taught me that the tiniest tweak to an otherwise working Linux system can lock you into a death-spiral of dependencies, upgrades, super-dependencies and so on, until you have no option but to press on because you can't retreat.However, when the system… -
EU cookie regulations and consent
31 May 2011 | 5:05 amAs you are probably aware, a revision to the EU's e-Privacy Directive was recently transposed into UK law as the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2011, or PECR. PECR means that, as of May 26th 2011, UK websites are required to obtain users' informed consent before tracking their online behaviour through means such as cookies.Well-meaning though this legislation may be, there are a number of practical issues with its implementation. As it has never been my intent to invade, subvert or otherwise compromise your privacy, this post is a brief indication of some of those issues,… -
Marking Commissioner Malmström's homework
3 Feb 2011 | 6:12 amJulian Huppert MP has broken new ground today (as far as I'm aware) by "crowd-sourcing" views on the newly-announced proposal for an EU Directive on Attacks Against Information Systems.Having looked at the press release, my first impression of the Directive is that it is seriously unbalanced and needs to be substantially re-worked. As my teachers used (frequently, I'm afraid) to write on my prep: "Adequate as far as it goes, but I need to see more."I don't deny that botnets and the like represent a potential threat to computing infrastructures, and thereby indirectly to interests such as… -
Privacy of emails
27 Jan 2011 | 2:57 pmBy coincidence, the theme of the previous blog post (expectations of privacy in correspondence, electronic or otherwise) also crops up in an article by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian today. Jenkins' piece is actually about media ethics, but it's prompted by the renewed media feeding frenzy over a now slightly dusty scandal... revelations that the News Of The World had been hacking into the voicemails of people who they thought might thus provide juicy material for the presses.At one point, Jenkins notes, the Crown Prosecution Service (i.e. the agency responsible for prosecuting alleged…
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"vendor relationship management" blogs - Google Blog Search
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[Outsource:59253] Job Requirement - SAP Test Manager at NYC, NY
27 Jan 2012 | 9:46 amVendor Relationship Management experience and interaction with stake holder skills and 'Onsite-offshore': delivery model highly desirable. • Strong communications skills and Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger. -
Vendor Relationship Manager - EU Headquarters - Dublin, Ireland ...
25 Jan 2012 | 4:10 amLead regular business reviews and any vendor relationship management activities. * Oversee workforce planning and budgeting activities in coordination with internal teams and provide reporting on operational metrics for -
Find Jobs Online - StaffEx™ Employment Portal & Social Network ...
21 Jan 2012 | 6:00 pmproduct or group of products from product definition through production and release (ie Product Lifecycle Management); Selects, develops, and evaluates personnel to ensure the efficient operation of the function; Supports clinical/healthcare vendor relationship management activities; Keeps pulse of industry for significant trends; Understands needs Dashboard Find Jobs Post Resumes Search Resumes Post Jobs chat forum blogs articles news employers Sign In -
The Only Lasting Competitive Advantage Is Extreme Trust | Fast ...
19 Jan 2012 | 5:48 amFC Expert Blog. The Only Lasting Competitive Advantage Is Extreme Trust. BY FC Expert Blogger Don Peppers Thu Jan 19, 2012. This blog is written by a member of our expert blogging community and expresses that expert's views alone. management,” Searls maintains that the real endgame for ubiquitous, inexpensive interactivity will be consumers managing their relationships with the vendors they buy from, a process he dubs "VRM,” for “vendor relationship management.” -
When everybody is a CIO - Computerworld Blogs
19 Jan 2012 | 5:00 amAnd IT typically received a reasonable amount of assistance in its vendor relationship management from the folks in purchasing and procurement. But, as both the number and the intensity of IT's vendor relationships keep
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Bug Blogger
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2011 in Review
16 Jan 2012 | 8:18 pmCES always marks a point of reflection for me – a time to look back at the prior year and see how we measured up. It was at CES 2008 that we officially launched Bug Labs and won the CNET “Best of Show Award for Emerging Technology”. It was a heady week. It’s hard to beat that performance. But it’s always fun to go back. When I look back over 2011 and review our accomplishments, I feel good about how far we’ve come. We felt the sky was the limit four years ago and we still feel that way. Open source hardware and the Eric von Hippel’s… -
Social Machines
18 Oct 2011 | 9:10 amIf you’re like me, you start to reflexively roll your eyes when you see some new, previously unmolested noun get saddled with the term “social”. We have social everything these days. And the trend doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. The reason I think, though it doesn’t lessen the annoyance factor, is that the term does convey a new type of meaning, a new way of gauging the value of something, usually in relation to something else. It’s one thing to say it’s “connected”. It’s something different (better?) when you describe… -
The Open Hardware Summit is alive!
22 Aug 2011 | 10:25 pmIt is time to get your tickets and check out the lineup of speakers this year, featuring some of the biggest game-changers in Open Hardware history. Bug Labs is proud to be a catalyst in this revolutionary movement. TICKETS Please, purchase your tickets here: http://ohs2011-eorg.eventbrite.com/ Tickets include breakfast, lunch, snack time, cocktails, plus an amazing goodie bag from our fabulous sponsors. The goodie bag will also include one (1) complimentary Maker Faire ticket. More about tickets and accommodations on the Attend page. This year we’ve created an overflow space in the… -
Machine2Cloud
18 Aug 2011 | 10:35 pmI have a deep seated ambivalence for the term “M2M”. I see it as an anachronism, too rooted in the past to be useful to us now. But today everyone is using it to describe all kinds of markets/technologies. Between the term’s history and the current hype I can’t help but think it’s confusing the heck out of everyone (including me). So I conjured up the term “Machine2Cloud” (M2C!) while thinking about decent alternatives though I’m not suggesting it’s much better. But at least it has in its make up the components of what I think… -
Mobile M2M is the Next Wave for Mobile Enterprise
10 Aug 2011 | 4:02 pmA few years ago I started a company called Antenna Software. For those of you old enough to remember, the Mobile Internet was going-to-be-huge in 2000… Eleven years later it’s now starting to live up to that promise and Antenna has benefitted from the upswell. Antenna focuses on what’s called the Mobile Enterprise, a market category that is roughly comprised of mobile professionals (sales, service, etc) using smart phones, tablets and other wirelessly connected devices to conduct business, securely, in the field. The revolution was started by the RIM Blackberry + email…
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confused of calcutta
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Numbers of Mass Distraction: Part 2
19 Jan 2012 | 1:40 pmSome years ago, incensed by the jiggery-pokery of the “copyright industries”, I wrote a post seeking to expose the way they went about making the most outrageous claims when it came to the volume of illegal downloads prevalent. I described them as Numbers of Mass Distraction. It is clear that recent events surrounding SOPA do not represent the end of the war waged by the copyright industries; at most it’s a skirmish they will concede, albeit very grudgingly, as lost. Judging from the experiences we faced in the UK with The Digital Economy Bill (I covered some of those… -
The joy of writing about things that don’t matter
17 Jan 2012 | 5:32 pm….because sometimes they do matter. I’ve been fascinated by what people share, when they share it and how they share it for some time now. And for even longer, I’ve been thinking about why we share what we share. [Those of you who’re interested may want to read some of my earlier posts. Why We Share: A sideways look at privacy and Musing About Sharing And Privacy are two that come immediately to mind. Take this post. The trigger for my writing it was StumbleUpon (I’m a fan!), who wrote to me saying they thought I’d like a particular set of sites. One of… -
Thinking about learning. And SOPA and PIPA and stuff like that
14 Jan 2012 | 10:15 amI love being human. And I love human beings. I’m constantly amazed by human ingenuity. How our brains appear to work. How we construct mental models of things. How we observe, imitate, learn. How we repeat that cycle to augment learning. How, once we learn something, we show the capability to extend that learning in new ways. How we share what we do, how we use feedback loops from the people around us to adjust, to improve, to refine. To learn. I read somewhere that human children spend the most dependent on their parents and guardians, when compared to the offspring of other creatures. -
More on know-how and know-why versus know-what
9 Jan 2012 | 5:48 pmThanks for all your comments and tweets re my earlier post. Some of you solved the “unGoogleAble” question. Others commented on what they’d been doing with the Prime Numbers in Arithmetical Progression question. And a number of you engaged in conversation with me across a variety of platforms. It helps me think. And learn. For which I’m grateful. I hope it’s been of some use to some of you. I want to touch upon a few of the answers and comments, to see if that helps me articulate where I was going more effectively. First, Nicole Simon’s question. -
Musing gently about filter bubbles and trends
9 Jan 2012 | 12:55 pmHere’s what’s trending on Twitter right now: And here are the top stories on Google News: Here’s what the BBC News site has at top billing: I tried to even the field. So the twitter trends were set to “Global”, I finally overrode Google’s very irritating attempts to point me towards google.co.uk rather than google.com, and I left the BBC News homepage untouched. Zero connection between Twitter and Google, even though technically soccer stories made in on to both. One story in common between Google and BBC News. Just something to bear in mind. There’s…
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Dynamist Blog
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FIRE and "Firefly" Save Free Speech
21 Jan 2012 | 4:45 pmI rarely post here any more (see me on Google+, Facebook, and @vpostrel on Twitter), but this video on one of FIRE's most ridiculous cases ever is too good not to share. It makes an eloquent case for FIRE's work--and... -
Recent Work: From Light Bulbs to Hollywood Costumes
24 Jun 2011 | 12:46 pmWhen David Shipley first talked to me about becoming a columnist for Bloomberg View, I asked him which of my many interests he wanted me to write about: economics? policy? design? culture? He basically replied "everything." Hence, my most recent... -
Oprah's Middlebrow Market
27 May 2011 | 3:12 amIn my first column for Bloomberg View, where I'll be appearing every other Friday, I compare "The Oprah Winfrey Show" to two other media phenomena that also debuted in 1986: Spy magazine and the American Girl line of dolls and... -
Where to Find Me
25 Apr 2011 | 12:14 amYou can follow me on Twitter at @vpostrel and @deepglamour and on Facebook. I edit and contribute to a now-occasional group blog at DeepGlamour.net. I have ended my WSJ column and will be writing for Bloomberg View when it debuts... -
Jeff Greason on Dynamism and Space
25 Apr 2011 | 12:11 am
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joeandrieu.com
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Kindle files to my iPad (Gutenberg eBooks)
15 Jan 2012 | 4:19 pmHow do you get a book at Project Gutenberg into your iPad Kindle app? It’s easy. Go to Gutenberg on your iPad and download the “Kindle” .mobi file. It’ll automatically open in the Kindle app. Yay. Don’t worry about instructions for how to get a .mobi file to your iPad Kindle. It’s a bit of a chore. But as long as you have a URL for the .mobi file, just use the Safari browser to download it directly. One you open it, it will be in your Kindle bookshelf until you delete it. Works like a charm. -
Playing in the Treehouse
10 Nov 2011 | 4:35 pmFor the last few months, I’ve been helping a friend find a good way to learn HTML. She’s an experienced professional designer… in fact her website designs were winning awards as far back as 1994. But she finally realized that because she never learned the brick and mortar work underlying the web, she was hampered in building breakthrough designs. As the web moves more and more to interactive, real-time mash ups that is becoming even more true. Unfortunately, the vast majority of options we considered were either way too expensive (like returning to Art Center to take a traditional… -
Towards a node.js Auto-Tweeter
9 Nov 2011 | 2:18 pmI’ve been intrigued by node.js as a platform for highly-scalable server applications written in javascript and finally found a super simple application I wanted to try with it: an auto-tweeter that would let me schedule future tweets to my own account. I’m organizing a pub crawl for Repeal Day and I want a flight of tweets to go out during the crawl… without me or my partners having to do it manually. I mentioned this to my buddies at Santa Barbara Hacker Space and we made it a collaborative project. I’ll miss this week’s WebTech Wednesday session, but perhaps a write up… -
Trust Me… Things Change.
22 Apr 2011 | 3:24 amTrust is complicated. But for some reason, online trust mechanisms assume it is outrageously simple. For example, firewalls imply that once you’re in the network, you’re trusted. It’s baked into the framing of the problem. Similarly, Trust Frameworks assume that once you are in the Framework, you’re trusted (although you could build a framework that is dynamic). Even a user directed approach like Facebook Connect assumes that once you click “allow”, you trust that website to use your information appropriately, essentially forever… even if you revoke… -
Fourth Parties are agents. Third Parties aren’t necessarily.
13 Apr 2011 | 2:16 pmFourth Parties is a powerful, but sometimes confusing term. In fact, I think Doc recently mischaracterized it in a recent post to the ProjectVRM mailing list. Normally, I wouldn’t nitpick about this, but there are two key domains where this is vital and I’m knee deep in both: contracts and platforms. Doc said: Like, is the customer always the first party and the vendor the second party? Well, no. So, some clarification. First and second parties are like the first and second person voices in speech. The person speaking is the first person, and uses the first person voice (I, me,…
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Kicking and SCREAMING
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New issues for the new year
1 Jan 2012 | 1:27 pmIt's been a while since the ideas bouncing around in my head were directly related to any of the topics in courses I was teaching. Coincidentally, that intersection is occurring in the coming (Spring 2012) semester. I am teaching at Austin Peay State University in the School of Technology & Public Management Criminal Justice - Homeland Security. Towards the end of the last semester, I learned of an opportunity to supplement my endeavors with technology for the students, and applied for supplemental funds to get quite a few iPads, iPods, and related accessories. Here's the summary:… -
define disjuncture
3 Sep 2011 | 12:43 pmYou know it's the right time to learn when there's disjuncture: The optimal “zone”— when time seems to STOP When our repertoire is no longer able to cope with our situation . . Tension with our environment Establishes a foundation for real learning. Jarvis, P. (2006). Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Human Learning. New York: Routledge. This blog was produced and directed by Carter F. Smith. -
Personal Managerial Philosophy
11 Apr 2011 | 4:15 pmPersonal Managerial PhilosophyA managerial philosophy serves as the framework for one’s implementation and operational strategy. The philosophy used by the leader is not a theory that worked for someone else. It is not the plan that is implemented, though it serves as the foundation for the plan. A managerial philosophy does not change based on the operation or the number of people involved in the operation. Managerial philosophies are consistent, recognizable, and unique to the individual. My personal managerial philosophy includes a focus on leadership, from the front, surrounded by…
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Media Influencer
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Daily links 01/26/2012
26 Jan 2012 | 6:34 amGoogle Shut-Downs & the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day brilliant post about a sad development tags: google API needlebase postrank web tools Needlebase was one of the most accessible of a class of tools that made data magic available to non developers. Magic. There is too much information on the web for the human mind to understand it all, of course. The ability to draw sets of it together, to extract and sort it, and thus to discover new qualities about that which is described with the data, is humbling, it is a thing of contemporary existential beauty. Julian Assange: The… -
Daily links 01/24/2012
24 Jan 2012 | 6:33 amNew Assange TV Series tags: assange TV government privacy secrets wikileaks Supreme Court Court Rejects Willy-Nilly GPS Tracking | Threat Level | Wired.com tags: tracking gps legal government police privacy court warrant What does your mobile phone usage say about your credit-worthiness? – Boston.com Oh boy, missing the point on so many levels… here’s one of them: “What about privacy? The Cignifi technology looks at account information without needing it to be linked to individuals. And a consumer’s identity isn’t revealed to the financial services provider… -
Daily links 01/23/2012
23 Jan 2012 | 6:33 amTricorder – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia tags: research data analysis science tricoder self-hacking Walter De Brouwer tags: research siliconvalley data analysis labs science self-hacking tricoder Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. -
Daily links 01/22/2012
22 Jan 2012 | 6:33 amDot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker’s 1903 lulz – New Scientist tags: hacking telegraph marconi wireless technology Social search, at what cost? | memeburn tags: social search personaldata data google+ Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. -
Daily links 01/19/2012
19 Jan 2012 | 6:33 amWant More Stickiness? Users Logging In Through Social Networks Spend 50% More Time On Site | TechCrunch tags: users logging social social networks time techcrunch Why SOPA Is Dangerous tags: sopa law freedom Web internet government legal USA Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
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Dave Winer's "Scripting News" weblog
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Ask not what the Internet...
27 Jan 2012 | 11:06 amOn Twitter, with its 140-character limit, there's little focus to the discussion about the new filitering they just announced. Here are some of my comments, in bullet form, hopefully to add some more substance to the discussion.. 1. We don't know very much about what they're doing, and it's not clear that we ever will. 2. The examples they cite, laws in France and Germany that prohibit pro-Nazi speech, are somewhat reasonable. But I suspect this will be used in the future to prevent leaks of information they don't want leaked. If Twitter-like tech is the new world stage, and I think it is,… -
EC2 for Poets in 2012
25 Jan 2012 | 6:08 pmThree years ago, I wrote a tutorial called EC2 for Poets that made it relatively easy for a technically proficient user to set up a Windows server in Amazon EC2. A few hundred people tried it, and were able to get servers running. They could install apps, and run web apps that they then could access from home or on the road. Having your own server "up there" can be pretty cool, makes a lot of things possible that otherwise would be hard. For example you can run a personal river of news. That's what I do on one of my EC2 instances. Not only for myself but for a few friends at universities and… -
What could Nancy Pelosi know?
25 Jan 2012 | 8:59 amI know the Repubs like to demonize Nancy Pelosi, but I really like her. Check out this exchange with John King at CNN. Fascinating. What does she know? Some possibilities... 1. Newt is secretly a Democrat. 2. Newt is secretly a woman. 3. Newt secretly slept with Nancy P. 4. Newt is secretly Osama bin Laden's long lost brother. 5. New paid no taxes until he was 45 years old. 6. Instead of fighting in Vietnam, he signed up for the Khmer Rouge. He's Prince Sihanouk's long lost brother. 7. He was part of the Bay of Pigs invasion. In fact the bay was named after him. He's Fidel Castro's long lost… -
Ideas for movie moguls
25 Jan 2012 | 8:35 amPresident Obama asks that we suggest ways for the movie industry to control the Internet that we might not find so objectionable. Nat Torkington tells an old joke in a new context. It's a good one. God already gave the movie industry the Internet and it's been shown you can make many billions of dollars selling things there. So why not sell movies too? I think the President asks the wrong question. What can the movie industry do to freshen up their product in the age of technology to make it more fun and interesting for their customers. Rather than try to destroy the new playground, how about… -
Can we buy your search engine?
24 Jan 2012 | 9:08 amIn yesterday's piece about wanting an exit from Google, I mentioned that I might use DuckDuckGo, but had reservations because it's "another Fred Wilson company." Fred, who is a very cheerful dude (no sarcasm) responded with evangelism, which is what I like about Fred. Of course he can handle criticism, even when it's as vaguely defined as the bit in my blog post. Come right back with a great product pitch. I wouldn't expect any less. Even though I know Fred personally, he has a bigger presence in the tech world. Like it or not he now is the leading tech VC. He occupies a slot that John Doerr…
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The Casablanca Weblog
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2012 - The year of humility
15 Jan 2012 | 9:58 pmI've been away from work for a little while (hopefully not much longer!), which is always a good way to get some perspective on things. As our industry continues to evolve and emerge, I thought I'd make a (non-Mayan) prediction on one of the main ways the digital world will change in 2012.The web offers bountiful opportunities for companies when seen as a service medium. And it's staggering how many companies out there still don't understand this - or at least, don't reflect this in their service levels. And this is at a time when the near ubiquitous presence of social media amplifies and… -
The Open Road
1 Dec 2011 | 8:30 pmIt's now four weeks since we left the UK, and it's been every bit as brilliant as we'd hoped. It's been quite interesting comparing our trip to Ivanka's, which in turn is a bit like the trip we took in 2003-04. While those trips allow(ed) plenty of room for serendipity and adventure, ours is a bit more regimented. Such is life when travelling with small children, especially one with a few minor health issues - knowing well in advance where we'll be staying each night allows us to find things the kids'll like to do, and ensure they get a good night's sleep, making it a more fun and relaxing… -
A lasting legacy
6 Oct 2011 | 9:31 amA few days ago, there was an interesting article in The American comparing Steve Jobs to Thomas Edison. The gist is that Jobs' legacy doesn't measure up to Edison's - mainly because people are generally unaware of how much Edison achieved in his lifetime (it was a lot).Putting to one side the fact we're not comparing apples with apples, if you'll pardon the pun, I think we're still a long way from realising the extent of Jobs' impact. You can see it far, far beyond Apple's product line. By setting the bar so high, he's forced the entire technology market to change the way they design their… -
Leaving on a jet plane
26 Aug 2011 | 10:08 amWhen my wife and I were doing a round-the-world trip in 2003/04, we lived in Sydney for 10 months - and fell in love with the place. So much so that we've decided to move back and spend some more time there; we've spent the last two years trying to get a visa, and I'm happy to say they're letting us in! We'll be leaving on 15th October all being well, doing some travelling en route, and we'll arrive down under mid-December. We'll start off living in a borough called Cammeray, nicely located between the main harbour and middle harbour (map). No jobs lined up yet, but the intention is to start… -
Prototyping in code
27 Jul 2011 | 9:47 amI've just written a post for The Team blog on this subject, but given that my personal blog has a more web design-savvy audience I'll do an abridged version here. If this version doesn't make sense, you know where to look!We hosted the inaugural UX Bootcamp last week, organised by Leisa Reichelt. The subject was ‘Prototyping in Code’. I'll assume for sake of brevity that readers know what prototyping is and why it's important.But why use working code for prototypes? There are a few potential reasons: With experience, and a set of good templates, it's possible to create and amend a…
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The Social Customer Manifesto
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Social Engagement Journey Video
15 Jan 2012 | 1:39 pmCheck out this fun little video on the Social Engagement Journey that our team in Seattle just put together. -
Social Business 2012 Presentation
29 Nov 2011 | 4:08 pmI’ll be speaking about social business strategy at the ASAE Technology Conference and Expo CIO Summit next week in Washington, DC. There are three key components to the conversation. 1) The Social Engagement Journey The Journey is the recognizable progression of social engagement capabilities that a large enterprise goes through on its way to becoming a social businesses. 2) The Relationship Progression While the “purchase funnel” has been well understood for years, there is a comparative dearth of conversation around how business relationships progress over time. A… -
This Week’s Social Business Jam
11 Nov 2011 | 12:48 pmA number of luminaries participated on this week’s W3C Social Business Jam, including Doc Searls (pictured), Alex “Sandy” Pentland and the inventor of the web itself, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. A jam is “an online conversation among leaders in business, government and technology about the current state of social business, the future role that social technologies can play in improving the bottom line, and how social technology should evolve in order to support business objectives.” There were a number of deep conversations, which generated over 1,100 posts on the… -
Google+ Launches Brand Pages
7 Nov 2011 | 5:58 amThe big news today is that Google+ has finally announced their long-awaited brand pages with a blog post here. The top line, from Google: For businesses and brands, Google+ pages help you connect with the customers and fans who love you. Not only can they recommend you with a +1, or add you to a circle to listen long-term. They can actually spend time with your team, face-to-face-to-face. All you need to do is start sharing, and you'll soon find the super fans and loyal customers that want to say hello. A number of pages are already available (see below), but any organization… -
Steve Jobs Tribute in Bloomberg Businessweek Magazine
8 Oct 2011 | 4:53 pmNormally, Businessweek comes on Friday. For some reason this week, the magazine showed up today instead. I didn’t think much of it when I walked out to the driveway, actually. There it was, folded up in its weatherproof bag, just like usual. I brought it inside and opened it up, and saw that they featured a tribute to Steve Jobs on the cover. It was spare and gorgeously typeset, with nothing but the title of the magazine, the iconic photo of the salt-and-pepper Jobs, and “Steve Jobs 1955-2011.” (link) I opened up the magazine and started to flip through it, and was…
