According to Eli Pariser, a cofounder and former Executive Director of MoveOn.org, data aggregators like Google have started using increasingly sophisticated filters to decide what information we consume online.

Trouble is, these new levels of data-personalization, along with the growth of social networks that we use to self-aggregate, are threatening to hamper civic engagement. The filtering, Pariser told those attending the Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan earlier this month, is starting to keep us from being exposed to a surge of new information and ideas — and chiefly, viewpoints that may differ from our own.

For example, Pariser says, Google now uses 57 different personalization filters to customize what we see on the Web, even if we aren’t logged in. That makes it harder for us to see news and information that Google’s algorithms suggest might bore us or upset us. And that’s not all, says Pariser. Often, these “filter bubbles” keep information from us without our specific permission — and worse, without our knowledge.

[Google isn't the only culprit. Facebook also customizes content, using information on the links people click to tailor the news that appears in their personal feeds. Pariser, a progressive, says he has tried hard to add conservative friends to his own Facebook feed but their links and feeds keep getting blocked by Facebook's personalization algorithms.]

“What you see on your screen may be different from what the person sitting next to you sees during a similar Google search,” Pariser told the gathering of more than 600 social change advocates, social entrepreneurs and open-government activists. “…We really need to get away from that silly idea that (computer) code doesn’t care about anything.”

Data-filtering isn’t new, of course. But these new filter bubbles differ from what we’ve seen before, and in three key ways, Pariser says. First, the degree of personalization is higher. You’re no longer simply being grouped with a bunch of people who read The Nation. Now you’re alone in your bubble. Second, filter bubbles are invisible. You don’t realize they exist; you can’t see them. And third? You don’t choose them. They choose you.

“As the face of curation of what we see and consume online changes from a person to a machine, we need to start questioning the values of these filtering devices and get the power back to make these decisions for ourselves,” Pariser says. “The filter bubble may be good for consumers but it’s bad for democracy.”

Other assertions made by presenters:

* There is racial segregation on the Web, even in trending topics on Twitter. According to data visualization experts Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, the thousands of hashtags being used to collate and segment different conversations by topic also may be keeping many people out of the short-messaging site’s most popular and/or important conversations. Example: Two of the top-trending topics over the recent Memorial Day weekend — #cookout and #oilspill — were starkly segmented along racial lines. Viegas said the #cookout conversation was attended mostly by blacks and #oilspill, mostly by whites during the same period. “Hashtags are the bumper stickers of the 21st Century,” said Wattenberg. Added Viegas: “On many topics, it’s a heterogeneous crowd, but there’s a whole other chunk of topics where race divides people. We need to be aware that even online, we can be immersing ourselves in conversations that are segregated in ways that might be worrisome.”

* We are not using the social media tools we have to solve problems so much as we are using them to socialize with like-minded people about these problems. It’s time to get more active offline, said Clay Johnson, the director of Sunlight Labs and co-founder of the online political strategy firm, Blue State Digital. Social entrepreneurs and activists need to focus less on using social media to build email lists and focus more on getting people active offline solving social problems, he said. He cited the online social network, Momsrising.org, as a good example of a social network that is highly engaged in civics, using government data on health, education and economic trends to create a “Moms Score” to help catalyze offline protests and social change.

* We must work harder to break out of these self-imposed (or machine-imposed) comfort zones if we’re to affect social change. “We are too focused on climbing the hierarchy ladder in our workplaces and social networks online, and not focused enough on dismantling these hierarchies, which is where the true power lies,” said Deanna Zandt, a social media consultant and author of Share This! a new book about social networking. “We’re living like fish right now,” she said. “We don’t know we’re wet. We’re taking our perception that the Net is a wonderful meritocracy but that’s not true. We need to interrupt this pattern of thinking immediately.” Zandt urged conferees to shatter their comfort zones to start making the Net a more hospitable place for civic engagement. “We have to work harder at civic engagement online,” she said. Zandt, who is white, shared her own experience of finding herself in an unexpected discussion on Twitter about race in America after she spoke out against an action last summer by Philadelphia’s Valley Club to ban black children from swimming in its pool. “This was completely outrageous, I got really angry about it and signed petitions and all of that, but what was more interesting was what happened in the days following that,” Zandt said. “People started sharing on Twitter about the first time they’d been discriminated against as children and this blew me away. I wouldn’t have found myself in a group of people of color, sharing stories about discrimination without Twitter” and without “stepping out.”

* We must stop enabling the status quo. John Perry Barlow, the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a 20-year-old nonprofit digital rights advocacy group, told the gathering that he stands by his earlier statement, made many years ago, that “the Internet is the most powerful event since the capture of fire.” Barlow said there is massive power in the hands of individuals, thanks to the Web, but this is power that destabilizes the status quo and can cut both ways, for better and worse. Most people still don’t know how to use this Web power to organize and affect social change. But they are learning, he said. “We have to stop expecting the government to shower us with things it can no longer deliver,” he said, “and start running this country and our institutions (including companies) the same way the Internet is run, from the edges.”

* We must stop assuming that civic engagement will occur online on its own. James Fishkin, the director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, said the best way to boost public deliberation online is to create it. Fishkin says that the current way we “self-select” our social networks online has led to only the most extreme views being heard by one group or another. He suggested a five-step “Deliberative Polling” methodology to start creating issues circles, which first gets all stakeholders together from all sides of an argument to agree to a set of detailed survey questions that will help frame a debate around issues where civic engagement is most needed. Second, select 500 people who represent specific groups across viewpoints to participate. Third, send them the survey. Fourth, assemble them in small groups and facilitate discussion and deliberation, either online or in person. Fifth and last, survey the participants again to see if their opinions have changed as a result of that engagement.

* The Net can be a force for civic engagement, especially in societies around the world where there has been none before. Ethan Zuckerman — a social media expert, blogger, founder of Tripod.com, a Web hosting enterprise, and co-founder of Global Voices, an internationally crowd-sourced news site — said the Net “really changes things in the long-term by creating a new public space, one that in most closed societies around the world is not available any other way.”

What do you think? Does the surge of online social networks and corporate use of Net filters to segment consumers of their products make it harder for people to engage with one another — in or out of the workplace? Let us hear from you.

In January, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg declared the age of privacy to be over. A month earlier, Google Chief Eric Schmidt expressed a similar sentiment. Add Scott McNealy’s and Larry Ellison’s comments from a few years earlier, and you’ve got a whole lot of tech CEOs proclaiming the death of privacy — especially when it comes to young people.

It’s just not true. People, including the younger generation, still care about privacy. Yes, they’re far more public on the Internet than their parents: writing personal details on Facebook, posting embarrassing photos on Flickr and having intimate conversations on Twitter. But they take steps to protect their privacy and vociferously complain when they feel it violated. They’re not technically sophisticated about privacy and make mistakes all the time, but that’s mostly the fault of companies and Web sites that try to manipulate them for financial gain.

To the older generation, privacy is about secrecy. And, as the Supreme Court said, once something is no longer secret, it’s no longer private. But that’s not how privacy works, and it’s not how the younger generation thinks about it. Privacy is about control. When your health records are sold to a pharmaceutical company without your permission; when a social-networking site changes your privacy settings to make what used to be visible only to your friends visible to everyone; when the NSA eavesdrops on everyone’s e-mail conversations — your loss of control over that information is the issue. We may not mind sharing our personal lives and thoughts, but we want to control how, where and with whom. A privacy failure is a control failure.

People’s relationship with privacy is socially complicated. Salience matters: People are more likely to protect their privacy if they’re thinking about it, and less likely to if they’re thinking about something else. Social-networking sites know this, constantly reminding people about how much fun it is to share photos and comments and conversations while downplaying the privacy risks. Some sites go even further, deliberately hiding information about how little control — and privacy — users have over their data. We all give up our privacy when we’re not thinking about it.

Group behavior matters; we’re more likely to expose personal information when our peers are doing it. We object more to losing privacy than we value its return once it’s gone. Even if we don’t have control over our data, an illusion of control reassures us. And we are poor judges of risk. All sorts of academic research backs up these findings.

Here’s the problem: The very companies whose CEOs eulogize privacy make their money by controlling vast amounts of their users’ information. Whether through targeted advertising, cross-selling or simply convincing their users to spend more time on their site and sign up their friends, more information shared in more ways, more publicly means more profits. This means these companies are motivated to continually ratchet down the privacy of their services, while at the same time pronouncing privacy erosions as inevitable and giving users the illusion of control.

You can see these forces in play with Google’s launch of Buzz. Buzz is a Twitter-like chatting service, and when Google launched it in February, the defaults were set so people would follow the people they corresponded with frequently in Gmail, with the list publicly available. Yes, users could change these options, but — and Google knew this — changing options is hard and most people accept the defaults, especially when they’re trying out something new. People were upset that their previously private e-mail contacts list was suddenly public. A Federal Trade Commission commissioner even threatened penalties. And though Google changed its defaults, resentment remained.

Facebook tried a similar control grab when it changed people’s default privacy settings last December to make them more public. While users could, in theory, keep their previous settings, it took an effort. Many people just wanted to chat with their friends and clicked through the new defaults without realizing it.

Facebook has a history of this sort of thing. In 2006 it introduced News Feeds, which changed the way people viewed information about their friends. There was no true privacy change in that users could not see more information than before; the change was in control — or arguably, just in the illusion of control. Still, there was a large uproar. And Facebook is doing it again; last month, the company announced new privacy changes that will make it easier for it to collect location data on users and sell that data to third parties.

With all this privacy erosion, those CEOs may actually be right — but only because they’re working to kill privacy. On the Internet, our privacy options are limited to the options those companies give us and how easy they are to find. We have Gmail and Facebook accounts because that’s where we socialize these days, and it’s hard — especially for the younger generation — to opt out. As long as privacy isn’t salient, and as long as these companies are allowed to forcibly change social norms by limiting options, people will increasingly get used to less and less privacy. There’s no malice on anyone’s part here; it’s just market forces in action. If we believe privacy is a social good, something necessary for democracy, liberty and human dignity, then we can’t rely on market forces to maintain it. Broad legislation protecting personal privacy by giving people control over their personal data is the only solution.

This essay originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Zuckerberg on privacy: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/11/facebook-privacy

Schmidt on privacy: http://gawker.com/5419271/google-ceo-secrets-are-for-filthy-people

McNealy on privacy: http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/1999/01/17538

Ellison on privacy: http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/oct2001/nf2001104_7412.htm

Danah Boyd on privacy and younger people: http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html

The Supreme Court on privacy and secrecy: http://www.rbs2.com/privacy.htm

Privacy and salience: http://www.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/homepage/2009/1209/W_SP_NudgingPrivacy.pdf or http://tinyurl.com/yfm4jh9

Social networking sites downplaying privacy concerns: http://www.schneier.com/essay-278.html

Sites that make misleading privacy claims: http://www.schneier.com/essay-276.html

Humans are a poor judge of risk: http://www.schneier.com/essay-162.html

Academic research on how people make privacy decisions: http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~acquisti/economics-privacy.htm

Google’s Buzz:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31322_3-10451428-256.html
http://www.businessinsider.com/warning-google-buzz-has-a-huge-privacy-flaw-2010-2 or http://tinyurl.com/ydqq8ql
http://finapps.forbes.com/finapps/jsp/finance/compinfo/CIAtAGlance.jsp?tkr=GOOG or http://tinyurl.com/fuoxw
http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2010/02/12/whats-the-buzz-about-studying-user-reactions/ or http://tinyurl.com/yh8weef
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9172079/FTC_member_rips_privacy_efforts_by_Google_Facebook or http://tinyurl.com/y8szb2j

Facebook’s privacy problems:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/12/facebooks-new-privacy-changes-good-bad-and-ugly or http://tinyurl.com/yffmwmn

Facebook News Feeds:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2207967130
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2208288769

Facebook’s latest privacy changes:
http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=376904492130

The value of privacy:
http://www.schneier.com/essay-114.html

Privacy legislation:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/02/a_model_regime.html

Google responds:
http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/12/privacy-facebook-gmail-technology-security-google.html or http://tinyurl.com/ydvwpva

Another essay on the topic:
http://www.secureconsulting.net/2009/05/the_new_school_of_privacy.html

When Google introduced Buzz — its answer to Facebook and Twitter — it hoped to get the service off to a fast start. New users of Buzz, which was added to Gmail on Tuesday, found themselves with a ready-made network of friends automatically selected by the company based on the people that each user communicated with most frequently through Google’s e-mail and chat services.

As well, if you connected to Buzz via iPhones or other mobile devices, your location could be broadcast to those people whom Google had decided should know where you were, who were emailing, and what you were saying.

As Miguel Helft in the NYTimes said: “E-mail, it turns out, can hold many secrets, from the names of personal physicians and illicit lovers to the identities of whistle-blowers and antigovernment activists.”

Evgeny Morozov wrote in a blog post for Foreign Policy, “If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my Internet geek squads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government.”

Harriet Jacobs, a psuedonym for a woman who writes about violence against women, succintly writes on her blog that the people she receives email from most often include her ex-husband, his friends, and abusive comments. This, she writes, “is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to me….My privacy concerns are not trite. They are linked to my actual physical safety.”

Harriet is not the only one who has to worry, and for Google to suddenly decide to monetize gmail by sharing gmail user’s data with a spectrum of un-approved users, certainly seems like a step away from “do no evil”.

Buzz is an “opt-out” service. In other words, your data, if you use gmail, was automatically disclosed to everyone with whom you’ve emailed more than once or twice.  The  people at Google just assume you want to be part of their new world where “[i]f you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

What distressed me most is that Google made Buzz automatic. It was folded into Gmail, assimilated your contacts and email history, and created these first social connections without ever asking permission. If you had ever created a Google Profile (an innocuous webpage that might collect comments you left on Maps or links to your LinkedIn profile), then Google went a step further — it published these social connections in a place accessible to the world. And even if you had not yourself created a Google Profile, your social connections could still be exposed on the other person’s Google Profile.

Don’t like it? The burden was on you to track all this down and make the privacy changes you wanted. Even if you did that, it wasn’t clear that it was even possible to truly “turn off buzz.” Flipping the switch at the bottom of Gmail didn’t work. Who knows how many people have been misled by that. (Google now acknowledges this on one of its support pages. All that switch does is “remove the Buzz label from your Gmail account,” or in other words, hide it within Gmail.)

Even after clicking “turn off buzz”, your Buzz connections persisted, they were still shown on your profile, and Buzz was still active (as you could readily see from a mobile client, such as an iPhone).

Yesterday’s slight modifications by Google make clear that this was indeed their design. Yesterday afternoon, Google released a statement.They did not back away from their business plan — they still make Buzz automatic and create these connections for you. Their response is, in essence, to blame you for not having figured out how to tweak these engineering settings yourself.

In particular, they point out that it’s possible to manually go through and block particular followers. But, to take one example, they do not mention the data leakage, in which these followers get access to information about your other social contacts before you block them. They also don’t mention that each Google-automated follower has to be blocked individually, which for journalists, attorneys, or anyone else with a large contact list that is concerned about client privacy, can take a significant amount of time.

Google did not ask your permission for this repurposing of your personal email information, it did not ask your permission to share it, and is not asking for your forgiveness now.

Imagine if Facebook had done this. Imagine they bought a major email provider, folded all of its users into their social network, and prepopulated lots of connections based on who they had emailed the most frequently.

Okay, now imagine that Facebook had placed a button on the email client page that said “turn Facebook off.” And that the button did not actually do what it said. Users and the press would be calling for Facebook’s head.

How to really turn off buzz

If the “turn off buzz” link at the bottom of Gmail isn’t the right way to actually turn the service off, what is?

Buried within its support pages, Google offers a three-step procedure you can follow to actually disable Buzz. Follow these steps in order, or it doesn’t work at all. The first step, contrary to what you might expect if you were not a Google engineer, is not to click “turn off buzz.”

1. First, you delete your google profile. You don’t hide it or change the name. You have to delete it completely. This doesn’t destroy your overall google account, but it does limit some of your functions. Here’s how to delete your profile.  (For those of us that never opted into having a profile, there is still some question as to what is being shown in other people’s feeds, or how to manage privacy settings.)
2. You have to go into buzz and manually delete your connections, including blocking everyone who is following you already. Depending on how many people Google automatically added, this could take a while.
3. Now it’s safe to go back to Gmail and click “turn off buzz.”

Even if Google ever changes their mind, and gives users an easy way to protect their data and their client’s data, this remains a massive violation of user trust on Google’s part. This sharing of personal information never should have been opt-out.

This is a huge shift in how Gmail uses our data. If this is Google’s method of dealing with our previously private data in the future, how many of us will really feel good about trusting our documents to Google Docs? Or our photos to Picasa?

Google has broken the trust, and taken the first public step towards evil. With millions and millions of user’s and their accompanying data, the question becomes, do they step back, or is there a greater evil coming?

All photo-sharing websites publish licensing information. But a newcomer in the image search universe makes it incredibly easy to use the photo with the due attribution.

Sprixi is a free image search engine. Using Sprixi is just a three step process – Search, Choose and Use. Sprixi sorts all images into topics. You can browse the topics in graphics or text using the Browse link placed right at the foot of the page.

Enter your search query and Sprixi takes over. What you get is a double framed window with the images on one scrollable pane. Choose any image from the results and view it in larger dimensions on the View pane.

The View pane provides usage and credit information about the image with a rollover of the mouse.

Usefulness – Sprixi learns and tries to sort all images by usefulness i.e. relevancy. Images are rated according to use, downloads, the ratings added from the yes/maybe/no buttons etc. Images are weighted more by the ratings given by registered users. Images can also be flagged for inappropriateness.

Image Size – Touch the bar chart like colored indicators and you can choose a specific size.

About this image provides complete information on the creator and the license.

The last step is to select your choice image and click on the corner placed Use tab. Sprixi gives you two options for fair use -

The Image with credit option comes with the attribution inked in fine print while the Image without credit asks you to manually provide that link. A Copy button makes it easy to copy-paste the image attribution link.

Look at the same images below to note the difference between the two options.

The image with the assigned license (the first option) is useful for cases where the image credit source is not explicitly mentioned. Images which are smaller in size may need an explicit credit link.

How Does Sprixi Source The Images?

Sprixi uses the Flickr API (but the service is not officially endorsed by Flickr). According to the FAQ, Sprixi is presently sourcing images from its own collection, Flickr and OpenClipArt. It also has a leaning towards public domain and commercial-friendly Creative Commons licenses.

Image search is no longer about Google and Bing. Services like Sprixi are re-working the usual with their unusual take. As I mentioned before, getting an image online is easy – what’s overlooked is giving the creator his or her rightful reward. Sprixi makes it a more deliberate affair.

Sprixi seems to be a win for both content creators who need images, and image creators who want a larger audience.

Media Literacy: Making Sense Of New Technologies And Media by George Siemens

More Scientists Treat Experiments As a Team Sport

Wall Street Journal (motto: we have never met a URL we cannot complicate) looks at the trend for More Scientists Treat Experiments as a Team Sport. I do not think team is the right term.

If you have spent time in higher education, you are likely aware that the only team that exists is between a prof and the students involved in her research interests. Higher education research is a highly individualistic endeavour (note, for example, the “ Principal Investigator” status on grants). It would be more accurate to say that scientists now treat experiments as networked.

From the article:

“Around the world, scientists are cutting across boundaries of place, organization and technical specialty to conduct ever more ambitious experiments. Inspired by such cooperative enterprises as Linux and Wikipedia, they are encouraging creative collaborations through networks of blogs, wikis, shared databases and crowd-sourcing. Once a mostly solitary endeavour, science in the 21st century has become a team sport. Research collaborations are larger, more common, more widely cited and more influential than ever, management studies show.“

New Tools For Personal Learning

If you would like to get up to speed fairly quickly with the state of Stephen Downes‘ thinking on education, technology, and learning, have a listen to his presentation on New Tools for Personal Learning – slides and audio are available.

I am surprised at the resiliency of concepts (complexity, ecology, mesh networks, connectivism, etc) that the edutech network has been fleshing out over the last decade. To me, it is an indication that we are moving in the right direction…

Grading 2.0: Evaluation In The Digital Age

HASTAC is running a series of forums related to education / media / society. A current topic – Grading 2.0: Evaluation in the Digital Age – is being actively discussed.

The introduction to the discussion states:

“As the educational and cultural climate changes in response to new technologies for creating and sharing information, educators have begun to ask if the current framework for assessing student work, standardized testing, and grading is incompatible with the way these students should be learning and the skills they need to acquire to compete in the information age.“

Grading is a waste of time. We only do it in schools and universities. It is a sorting technique, not truly an evaluation technique. Iterative and formative feedback is what is really required for learning. This is achieved through active engagement with and contribution to networks of learners.

On a side note, William Farish is credited with creating “grading“ in the first place… and it is a recent addition to education.

How did educators evaluate competency before grading? Sustained participation and engagement with networks of learners and educators. But, of course, the authors of the HASTAC post are not trying to do away with grading (as I would suggest we should). They are trying to use technology to make grading more “modern” or “in line” with society’s needs today. I think that is exactly the wrong way to go about it. Question the model, do not modernize it.

Connecting With Others…

During our LearnTrends conference last week, I experimented with the Cormier Live Slides method. Dave would say I went a bit soft – I had an established structure for the slides, instead of free flowing. However, it did generate a fair bit of discussion and contributions from the audience.

Kristina offers comments and reactions from her experience as a participant in the session. As Tony Karrer states, it is about learning from others in the room.

Danah Boyd, Back Channel, Tocqueville

I have been reading a combination of Tocqueville and the Federalist papers over the last few weeks. I am fully convinced that these two documents need to be recast in terms of the web.

While I am a huge fan of openness, personal choice, democracy, and rights of individuals, a brief run through YouTube comments or a typical Twitter conversation calls into question the ideal that humanity aspires to the greater good.

In order for democracy to flourish, appropriate constraints are required. Danah Boyd shares her painful experience in using a back channel during a conference. I posted on a similar back channel issue recently, arguing that speakers need to accept the reality that audiences now speak back. However, effective feedback should not be mob-like… and it certainly should be respectful.

Originally written by George Siemens for elearnspace and first published on November 27th, 2009 in his newsletter eLearning Resources and News.

About George Siemens

From late 2009, George Siemens holds a position at the the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute in Athabasca University. He was former Associate Director in the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba. George blogs at www.elearnspace.org where he shares his vision on the educational landscape and the impact that media technologies have on the educational system. George Siemens is also the author of Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age and the book “ Knowing Knowledge” where he developes a learning theory called connectivism which uses a network as the central metaphor for learning and focuses on knowledge as a way to making connections.

Nielsen’s research states that 18% of time spent online is spent on social networking sites and services. At first glance, this seems a bit high – especially considering the figure is 3x’s greater than last year.

However, if accurate, it provides strong support to the reports claim that

“This growth suggests a wholesale change in the way the Internet is used… While video and text content remain central to the Web experience – the desire of online consumers to connect, communicate and share is increasingly driving the medium’s growth“.

More info is available here.

Social Search

Google just announced Social Search. The service helps you “to find publicly available content from your social circle“.

Google slurps information on your social circle from three sources: Google Reader subscriptions, Google Profiles, and Google chat (GMail). They use the term “surfacing” connections to describe not only adding your friends, but one additional degree: your friend’s friends.

Hmmm…that “do no evil” thing…the ground under that statement is starting to look a little shaky now that google has become an OED verb.

The Web In 5 Years: More of Now

Speaking of Google…Interesting thoughts from Eric Schmidt – CEO, Google – on the web in five years.

It is interesting to note that we are seeing increased consolidation of ideas and concepts around the future of technology and the web.

Schmidt’s comments do not provide anything new. It is a laundry list of topics and predictions that most people who are involved in technology fields are already familiar with:

• Real-time web,
• greater bandwidth,
• user-generated information,
• power / authority shifts due to amateur content,
• growth of Chinese language online, etc.

What’s tragic about this list is that nothing in it seems revolutionary.  Five years ago, the web intelligencia was atwitter (heh) with the buzz of the possibilities of the social web.  And a lot of that possibility has become reality.

But what has also come about is the death of the information revolution, and the birth of concept normalization.  This time, the revolution will be monetized.

Go Grandpa!

By now, I think the view of innate generational differences in technology use has been sufficiently debunked (see Mark Bullen’s Netgenskeptic site).

NY Times highlights the appeal of technology among the elderly:

“Some of the highest growth rates in broadband use are happening among the elderly. The Pew Research Center found that broadband use for those 65 and older increased from 19 percent in May 2008 to 30 percent in April 2009. Since 2005, broadband use has tripled in that group.“

Communicating Complexity

I adore, simply adore Indexed – a site that uses simple visuals to communicate complex relationships and interactions.

For example: The relationship between information and confusion. The simplicity of the approach somewhat hides the impact. We live life in flows, but we are remembered by artifacts. A blog post, a paper, or an image are artifacts.

Given the abundance of information that washes across our mind on a daily basis, an image can have greater impact than a well-reasoned scientific paper. Connections, associations, and relationships can often be better communicated visually than with text.

Falling of The Cliff

When change happens in a networked environment, it is rapid. We have seen it in the financial markets, music industry, TV (YouTube), and, perhaps at it is most pronounced, the newspaper industry.

For example, consider these results from major publications in the US. The average weekday circulation of the nearly 400 daily papers that reported sales slid 10.6% to 30.4 million from April to September compared with the same six-month period in 2008, the Audit Bureau of Circulations said Monday. That was bigger than the 7.1% decline recorded during the previous six-month period.

Only one had increased circulation – others had enormous drops – up to 25% in a six month period. Hierarchical organizations are simply not designed to adapt to change at this pace.  The question then becomes, how do they adapt before they become extinct?

The project founders say “The BookServer is a growing open architecture for vending and lending digital books over the Internet. Built on open catalog and open book formats, the BookServer model allows a wide network of publishers, booksellers, libraries, and even authors to make their catalogs of books available directly to readers through their laptops, phones, netbooks, or dedicated reading devices. BookServer facilitates pay transactions, borrowing books from libraries, and downloading free, publicly accessible books.”

The project’s goal is to create an open web of books where anyone can publish their books and make their content available via search. It allows publishers to set their own prices, going around companies like Amazon and Google, who have tried to demand price points that are often untenable and have kept some products off the e-reader market.

It avoids the DRM that have plagued readers like the Kindle.  DRM has kept many people away from purchasing books they “don’t own”.  It seems ridiculous that I can lend a hardback to my friend, but I can’t let him read a Kindle book that I’ve purchased, unless I give him my Kindle.

So far, only a few booksellers have partnered with the BookServer system including Feedbooks, O’Reilly, Adobe, and the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project, but I think moving forward, we can expect a lot more publishers to see the groundbreaking change happening with this project.

From the Calais Blog:

The DocumentCloud initiative – winner of this year’s largest grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation – has lined up some two dozen partners, everyone from Thomson Reuters, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, to the ACLU National Security Project, The National Security Archive, the Center for Investigative Reporting and many more.

DocumentCloud is a unique online resource – found at http://www.documentcloud.org – that will provide public access to news reporters’ original source materials. It will debut in a beta version by the end of this year.

Source: OpenCalais

See Also: DocumentCloud adds impressive list of investigative-journalism outfits (via Nieman Journalism Lab)

Imagine being able to search across the New York Times’ cache of records on Guantánamo Bay detainees, the ACLU’s unrivaled set of documents on detention policy, Jane Mayer’s source material for her coverage of the CIA in The New Yorker, and The Washington Post’s valuable contributions to all of the above. That’s the promise of DocumentCloud…

Today [9/24] they’re also announcing an official partnership with OpenCalais, the powerful Thomson Reuters product that turns text into meaningful data. (For instance, it can distinguish between Poland, the country, and Poland, Maine, or group references to Guantánamo and Gitmo.) Material submitted to Document Cloud will be run through optical-character-recognition software, then OpenCalais and potentially other applications, with the goal of wringing as much value from them as possible.

Here’s a list of DocumentCloud Members (so far):

ACLU National Security Project, Arizona Republic, The Atlantic, Center for Democracy and Technology / OpenCRS, Centre for Investigative Journalism (City University London), Center for Investigative Reporting / California Watch, Center for Public Integrity, Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, Gotham Gazette, The Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, The National Security Archive, The New York Times, New Yorker, MinnPost, MSNBC, Mother Jones, PBS NewsHour, ProPublica, St. Petersburg Times, Sunlight Foundation, Talking Points Memo, Voice of San Diego, Washington Post, WNYC

From the FAQ:

What is it?

DocumentCloud will be software, a Web site, and a set of open standards that will make original source documents easy to find, share, read and collaborate on, anywhere on the Web. Think of it as a card catalog for primary source documents. It will accelerate the work of those doing investigations — whether reporters, bloggers or others.

Who can use it?

Once documents have been added to DocumentCloud, anyone will be able to find and share them. Users will be able to search for documents by things like date, topic, person, location, etc. and will be able to do “document dives” — collaboratively examining large sets of documents.

Stay Current With the Project via the DocumentCloud Blog