The Future of Reputation, gossip, rumor and privacy on the internet Daniel J. Solove 2007

Review , Minorca 2008

Overall a good book, but this is a speed read. For me personally well balanced and good issues raised. Downside too US centric, too much about the law and too little about the complex inter-relationships.

Overall the book left me with a number of questions the most important one being “at what point does reporting on (shamming) the norm breakers make it acceptable that more people will break the norm, seeing the shame as tolerable to gain the benefit.”

The basic premises (which I agree with which is why I read it) is that the Internet model provides a broadcast, available and permanent record. The ability to forget, forgive, ignore, wash away, remove or bury has gone.

Throughout the book I picked up five core themes

• Change (why this is an important topic)
• Judgements (where and how is reputation created)
  
• Trust (the components of reputation)
• Context (how reputation can be destroyed and responses)
• Law (the balances and checks for democracy)

Solove makes some good points about how to move forward and as these are the key values of the book, I’ll leave you to buy it and read them. However his middle ground approach does not really encompass Scott McNealy views on privacy as of “get over it”

I would like to have seen developed a model about the complex inter-working relationships between the creation of norms, culture, shaming, correction, law and rights (including free speech)

It made me think however how much I enjoy story telling. Imagine that great wheeze that you recall how you climbed Everest in bare foot with your best mate after a good night out. In truth this was something you read as you were camping in the Alps. Today you can tell the story, which indeed improves with time and becomes more embellished ( a true story). However, someone else will soon be able to look on the Web and see that it was not you and there is no truth in your story. Will this indelible web world be the end of great story telling? However, I hope my mind map helps present the scope of the book, what it does not show is the over-emphasis on law that is prevalent in the book.

The Future of the Internet (and how to stop it) Jonathan Zittrain

Review, Minorca 2008

The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain, cyberlaw Professor at Oxford is a difficult book to read and not for the faith hearted, on the same lines as ‘The wealth of Networks’ by Yochai Benkler. Personally, a very well written book and as with other books written by top rating academics, every sentence is well balanced and has a thought linked to it. This is no speed read. However, overall the book left me rather numb, as it is a heavy read, and there is not one single impression you walk away with. The best one liner summary I can give is “leave the internet alone and it will continue to develop faster than those trying to stop it.” Zittrain develops an argument to protect the “generativity” of the Internet but warns of its own powers and the anxieties of regulators to step in, believing they have seen it all before.

The book has three parts. The first part is a historically-motivated discussion of generativity. The second part develops the ideas of generativity. The third part is Zittrain’s own opinions on cyberlaw based on part 1 and 2.

From my perspective I had the following thoughts as I read the text:-

• News is never complete. News is only news because it is new. The focus of the book is about generativity. This theory is based on something always being new, most at the generation of the users. However, new does not necessarily mean new. This blog is new, but there are already lots of very good reviews. Even this review will not complete the story. Generativity assume unstable and new, is human culture unstable and new, are they mutually exclusive?
• Picture vs Image. This is the difference between the exact fact and the overall impression. A picture has colour and depth and can provide lots of detail, depending on the focus. An image is like a poor quality black and white picture held at arms length in poor light. There are topics Zittrain loves and has some of the best pictures in the gallery, others especially mobile, reputation, metadata and content where Zittrain prefers the Image as it can be tethered to his story.
• “shadow IT” The issue that a corporate faces. Corporate IT likes the tethered control, so the users bypass the solution with their own IT. This was not explored – shame.
• Where is the edge of the network. This is a critical issues, and is never even mentioned.
• Mobile and the implications of always on (collecting data). This is my favourite topic “mobile Web 2.0”. Whilst I do see Web 2.0 as read/write there is as aspect of mobile that provides the tags’ (attention, location, time, who) to the write. This metadata I would agree is where the next battle is and much of this book focuses on the read/write aspects of content only. However, his one comment about ownership of this data is the users, suggest to me that there could be more coming.

However like big brother – here are my best bits….

page	quote
4	The value is derived from steeling people’s attention
31	Another fundamental assumption, reflected repeatedly in various Internet design decision that tilted towards simplicity, is about trust
53	Hacking a machine to steal and exploit any personal data within is currently labour-intensive; credit card numbers can be found more easily ….
57	Consumers will increasingly abandon the PC from these alternatives, or they will demand that the PC itself be appliances
58	Next-generation video game consoles are not the only appliances vying for a chunk of the PC domain. With a handful of exceptions, mobile phones are in the same category.
59	Problems with generative PC platforms can this propel people away from PC’s and toward information appliances controlled by their makers. Eliminate the PC from many dens and living rooms, and we eliminate the test best and distribution pint of new, useful software from any corner of the globe. Recall the fundamental difference between a PC and an information appliance; the PC can run code from anywhere, written by anyone, while the information appliance remains tethered to it maker’s desires, offering a more consistent and focussed user experience at the expense of flexibility and innovation.
63	Good summary remarks
70	Much of the book’s argument rests on the notion of generativity, which is defined as: …a system’s capacity to produce unanticipated change through unfiltered contributions from broad and varied audiences. The Internet, PC and Facebook are generative,. The iPhone, TiVo and SaaS-based Web 2.0 sites are not.
71	What makes something Generative? There are five principal factors at work: (1) how extensively a system or technology leverages a set of possible tasks; (2) how well it can be adapted to a range of tasks; (3) how easily new contributors can maser it; (4) how accessible it is to those ready and able to build on it; and (5) how transferable any change are to others – including (and perhaps especially) non-experts.
77	Free software satisfies Richards Stallmans benchmark “four freedoms”; freedom to run the program, freedom to study how it works, freedom to change it, and freedom to share the results with the public at large
82	Tim Wu has shown that when wireless telephone carriers exercise control over the endpoint mobile phones that their subscribers may use, those phones will have undesirable features and they are not easy fro third parties to improve
84	.. that in order for large organisations to become more innovative, they must adopt a more “ambidextrous organisation form” to provide a buffer between exploitation and exploration.
90	Generativity , then, is a parent of invention, and an open network connecting generative devices makes the fruits of invention easy to share if the inventor is so inclined.
97	First among the injured are the publishing industries who IP value is premised on maintaining scarcity, if not fine-grained control, over the creative working in which they have been granted some exclusive rights.
98	For others, the impact of a generative system may not be just a fight between the upstarts and incumbents, but a struggle between control and anarchy
99	One holder of a mobile phone camera can irrevocably compromise someone else’s privacy.
100	A failure solve generative problems at the technical layer will result in outcomes that allow for unwanted control at the content and social layers
101	People now have the opportunity to respond to these problems by moving away from the PC and toward more centrally controlled –tethered” – information appliances like mobile phones, video games consoles, TiVos, ipods, iPhones and Blackberries.
102	…even if they realise that a more reliable system would inevitably be less functional. A shift to tethered appliances and locked-down PC’s will have a ripple effect on long-standing cyber law problems. Many of which are tugs-of-wars between individuals with a real or perceived injury from online activity and those who wish to operate as freely as possible in cyberspace.
106	They are tethered because it is easy for their vendors to change them from afar, long after the devices have left the warehouses and showrooms. These tethered appliances receive remote updates from the manufacturer, but they generally are not configured to allow anyone else to tinker with them – to invent new features and distribute them to other owners who would not know how to program the boxes themselves.
106	Applications become contingent: rented instead of owned, even if one pays up from for them, since they are subject to instantaneous revision.
109	Tethered appliances have the capacity to relay information about their uses back to the manufacturer.
123	“a grid of 400 million open PC’s is not less generative than a grid of 400 million open PCs and 500 million locked-down TiVos. Users might shift some of their activities to tethered appliance in response to the security threats.
125	It is a mistake to think of the web browser as the apex of the PC’s evolution, especially as new peer-to-peer applications show that the PCs can be used to ease network traffic congestion and to allow people directly to interact in new ways.
	The law of 1 vs the law of many, security vs freedom
128	A larger lesson has to do with the traffic expert’s claim about law and human behaviour: the more we are regulated, the more was may choose to hew only and exactly to the regulation or, more precisely, to what we can get away with when the regulation is not perfectly enforced…. This observation is less about the difference between rules and standards than it is abut the source of mandates; some may come from a process that a person views as alien, while other arise from a process in which the person takes an active part.
134	Postel’s Law a rule f thumb written by one of the internet’s founders to describe a philosophy of Internet protocol development: “be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.”
144	Wikipedia shows, if perhaps only for a fleeting moment under particularly fortuitous circumstances, that the inverse is also true; the fewer the number of prescription, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility escalates
150	This is easier said than done, because our familiar toolkits for handling problems are not particularly attuned to maintaining generativity.
151	Recall that the IETF’s report acknowledged the incident’s seriousness and sought to forestall future viruses not though better engineering but by recommending better community ethics and policing.
154	And with only a handful of networks that people watched in prime time, the definitions of what was worthy of prime time ended up a devastatingly rough aggregation of preferences
155	In an effort to satisfy the desire for safety with full lockdown, PC’s could be designed to pretend to be more than one machine, capable of cycling from one split personality to the next.
156	There could be a spectrum of virtual PC’s on one unit
162	So why not place legal blame one each product maker and let them sort it out?
163	To the extent that PC OSes do control what programs can run on them, the law should hold OS developers responsible for problems that arise, just as TiVo and mobile phone manufacturers take responsibility for issues that arise with their controlled technologies.
165	Gated communities offer a modicum of safety and stability to residents as well as a manager to complain to when something does wrong.. but these moated paradises become prisons. Their confinement is less obvious, because what they block is not escape but generative possibility; the ability of outsiders to offer code and service to users, and the corresponding opportunity to users and produces to influence the future without a regulator’s permission.
	http://www.herdict.org/NetworkHealthAbout.jsp?_sourcePage=%2FHerdometer.jsp
168	The ongoing success of enterprise like Wikipedia suggests that social problems can be met first with social solutions – aided by powerful technical tools – rather than by resorting to law.
173	Failing that, law might intrude to regulate not the wrongdoers but those private parties who have stepped up first to help stop the wrongdoers. This is because accumulation of power in third parties to stop the problems arising from the generative pattern may be seen as both necessary and worrisome – it takes a network endpoint famously configurable by its owner and transforms it into a network middle point subject to only nominal control by its owner.
194	The internet future may be brighter if technology permit easier identification of internet users combined with legal processes, and perhaps technical limitation, to ensure that such identification occurs only when good cause exists.
195	We must figure out how to inspire people to act humanely in digital environments that today do not facilitate the appreciative smiles and “thank yous” present in the physical world.
214	On the web everyone will be famous to 15 people
216	Cheap processors, networks and sensors enable a new form of beneficial information flow as citizen reporters can provide footage and frontline analysis of newsworthy events as they happen.
220	Increasingly, difficult-to-shed indicators of our identity will be recorded and captured as we go about our daily lives and enter into routine transactions. The more our identity is associated with our daily actions, the greater opportunities other will have to offer judgements about those actions.
221	Further, these data bases are ours.
225	It is data as service, and insofar as it leaves too much control with the data’s originator, it suffers from many of the drawbacks of software as service (chapter5). For the purposes of privacy, we do not need such a radical reworking of the copy and paste culture of the web. Rather, we need ways for people to signal whether they would like to remain associated with the data that they place on the Web, and to be consulted about ususal uses
245	Any comprehensive redesign of the Internet at this late stage would draw the attention of regulators and other parties who will push for ways to prevent abuse before it can even happen. Instead, we must piecemeal refine and temper the PC and the Net so that they can continue to serve as engines of innovation and contribution while mitigating the most pressing concerns of those harmed by them.

The WHAT principle and the WHO effect

original post may 2007

This blog focuses on where value is being created. As professionals and industry leaders we understand that market development through the integration of mobile, TV and web creates possibilities and complexity. Whilst it is evident that new interactive and customer engaging services can be created, without the enormous development costs of pre-Internet days; where our limited resources should be focused is still a significant concern. Balancing risk and reward is as much an executive skill today as at any time in corporate history.

With the attention of the world press, Apple has launched the iPhone, however, the iphone doesn’t create additional value for the device and telecoms market. Apple sells devices at the expense of Nokia and Motorola, AT&T acquires additional subscribers from competitors by forced churn, but these activities don’t grow the market. Apple and its global telecom partners hope that through personalization, the newly acquired customers will not churn again, therefore retaining value for themselves through the introduction of a new device (and its children); but no new incremental market value has been created.

The WHAT principle

The focus of today’s services is personalization – the making of your user experience, creating value from the reduction in churn and incremental service revenue, assuming that any incremental margin is not eroded by competitive pressures. The focus on personalization is, to AMF Ventures understanding, a focus on WHAT:– what you as a user want to do; what service you want; what is needed now. The sole benefactor is the individual, but does this create any value? The assumption is that personalization provides focus, and that this focus leads to the ability to deliver engaging and personalized services including advertising. This advertising being derived from the same advertising budgets, which is now redirected from other display channels. Therefore does personalization actually create any new value and will it actually grow the overall spend of the entire market?

Commentators, consultants and media sellers will provide convincing evidence to back their own propositions and the purpose of this Viewpoint is not to debate the personalization opportunity but to introduce the WHO effect. Whilst personalization will increase value for the provider; assuming that there is value for the user, it does not itself create new value for the entire converged industries. However mobile personalization could create value, if the focus is on WHO and not WHAT!

The WHO effect

Personalization has been about the WHAT principle. This has focused on a single customer: ‘you’. The WHO effect is the multiplier. The focus shifts from WHAT, to orientate on WHO you are doing something with. In simple terms when you go for dinner, who are you with? When you are in a business meeting or seminar, who are you with? When you are at a concert, in school, or on holiday – who are you with? The opportunity is that these ‘WHO’s’ are gravitating toward and enjoying the same experiences as ‘you’. The additional profiles of those who you are with, can combine to create a new and incremental market value!

Consider the advertising issue created through personalization, it reaches you – one person in two billion. The world is divided into two billion personalized worlds, only relevant to one person at any given time, and each person with an unequal bite of the advertising spend! The WHO effect would suggest that as you are enjoying something with others, even though it is outside of their personalized preference, it is possible that it would be worth providing information on products and services to the group. The WHO effect is the electronic ‘word of mouth’. It assumes and depends on the fact that we adopt at different rates and some not at all. These issues provide the limitation to personalization and the WHAT principle, but opportunity to the WHO effect.

This WHO effect is not open to the traditional broadcast, TV and entertainment companies, although they are the traditional home of the display advertising budgets. This service could be offered by Web companies, however as your profile and personalization has a dependency on your web access time, it could be difficult. The major benefactor of the WHO effect will be mobile companies as the mobile device becomes the platform to collect data, interrupt the connection and deliver the value.

The opportunity to exploit the WHO effect is not open to companies who want to ‘control’ the user experience and developer environment such as Apple, they can only enjoy the WHAT principle. Open mobile platforms, open access services and developers who services work across all devices will be able to exploit the WHO effect. The multiplier value of mobile is not in knowing WHAT you are doing (location and attention), but WHO you are doing it with; surely the outcome is WHO Google buys and not WHAT!

Does this develop ‘Mobile Web 2.0’ thinking and debate ?

We-Think – Charles Leadbeater

We-Think – Charles Leadbeater

Mass innovation not mass production

Holiday book number 5 – Minorca 2008 (this is a repost as the original blog platform was taken off line)

From the inside of the cover ….

“You are what you share. That is the ethic of the world being created by YouTube and MySpace, Wikipedia and Facebook. We-Think is a rallying call for the shared power of the web to make society more open and egalitarian.

We-Think reports on an unparalleled ware of collaborative creativity as people from California to China devise ways to work together that are more democratic, productive and creative. This guide to the new culture of mass participation and innovation is a book like no other, it started first online through a unique experiment in collaborative creatitiy involving hundreds of people across the globe.

The generation growing up with the web will not be content to remain spectators. They want to be players and this is their slogan “We-Think therefore we are”

http://www.wethinkthebook.net/home.aspx

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiP79vYsfbo

A very good book for those who are thinking outside of the Box. I like the approach and the story. Leadbeater develops the idea that diverse groups are better than smart, narrow or opinionated groups. Diverse group lead to innovation and the reason for corporate failure is that they like everyone to be the same. Hence corporate life is about dull problems and not very exciting solutions. Collaboration is the opposite. However we should not get to excited as our new collaborative world has as many dangers for us as the one we currently have.

Leadbeater develops the idea (as I did in mobile web 2.0 www.futuretext.com ) that Maslow pyramid is about how we gain identity and what value there is in this. I liked his ideas about current obsession with occupation and job titles are not good for us. Relationships and share interests will drive us over the next hill.

There is not a massive take away from the book, but it did provide some good reference as to why I am reading and thinking like I do currently. This has helped me to structure some very clear views on thouhgs on some projects that I was struggling with so – many thanks. My slogan “I create, I share therefore I am someone”

Here are my best bits

Page	Quote
72	Scott Page, a professor of complex systems at the university of Michigan, used sophisticated computer models to find that groups with diverse skills and outlooks came up with smart solutions more often that groups of very clear people who shred the same outlook and skills.
77	The kind of problem-solving that comes only from intense collaboration. In the worm project, the researches started by meeting in the coffee room at Brenner’s laboratory. In We-Think, crowds need meeting places, neutral spaces for creative conversation, moderated to allow the free flow of ideas. This is why, at their heart, these projects have open discussion forums and wikis, bulletin boards and community councils, or simple journals lie Lean’s Engine Reporter and the Worm Breeder’s Gazette, so that people can come together in a way that allows one plus one to equal twelve many times over
96	Henry Ford created a model of mass production; Linus Torvalds and his ilk are creating a way to organise mass innovation. All of this is encouraging large companies to shift towards more collaborative , networked approaches to innovation to share costs and multiply their source of ideas.
141	We-Think really will pave the way for more We Make.
193	You cannot feed a hungry child with MP3 files. Those with strong social networks use the web to strengthen them further.
229	As societies get riches and more of the basic needs for food, clothing, housing, warmth and security are met, people will become increasingly interested in the psychological dimensions of well-being. It is vital to our psychological well-being that we are held in high esteem, valued and recognised for what we do. Our identities – what we are good at and what matters to us – depend on the recognition of other people. In the past, certainly in the rich work, many people acquired a sense of identity from their position in a bounded local community. In the 20th century, occupation and position in an organisational hierarchy often provided the key. Now, people increasingly get a sense of identity from the relationships they form and the interests they share with others. The web matters not least because by allowing people to participate and share, it also give them a route to recognition, if only through the comments posted in response to a blog, a rating as a trader on eBay, the point acquired as a game player, or the incorporations of software they have written into the source code. People are drawn to share, not only to air their ideas, but in the hope their contributions will eb recognised by a community of their peers.
230	Recognition cannot bought and sold on the market - at least not the kind of recognition that counts. We win the recognition that counts from impartial, external sources, usually communities of our peers. These communities meet a basic human need that will get stronger as we become materially richer.' Ideas are animated when they are shared, and people are driven to share because recognition and regard can be reliably earned only from communities, networks, clans, families, religious groups, movements that are not animated by money.
231	Groups are wise, clever and smart only when they are made up of independent people who are capable of thinking for-themselves-and armed with diverse skills and points of view. Feeding this development will be a fundamental change in our economic culture: over the next two or three decades, people will start to play quite different roles, seeing themselves increasingly as participants and contributors, as well as workers and consumers
232	Participation will, however, mean quite different things in different settings. More companies and brands, politicians and celebrities will try to incorporate their consumers as fans and followers, recruiting celebrants. They will participate, but more in the way a congregation does in a church service. It would be naive to imagine that a new way of organising ourselves will necessarily be exclusively positive. There will be downsides, possibly very significant ones - while industrial mass production massively increased productivity and brought cheaper goods within the reach of most people, it had also been accompanied by alienation and strife at work, industrial accidents, ravaged landscapes and environmental despoliation on a vast scale
233	As we have seen, critics are already warning us to worry about a whole slew of possible disadvantages: the erosion of professional authority and knowledge; the loss of individuality in a morass of social networking; the eradication of spaces for reflection as a result of our being constantly connected; and the degradation of friendship when relationships are mediated by technology. There are no central gatekeepers to control access to the Internet
234	In their different ways, all the web's critics converge on a single worry it makes the world more unreliable, threatening and out of control. Whatever the limitations of top-down, industrial-era institutions, at least the world they created was relatively orderly and people knew where they stood
235	First, those who have top-down control will fight to retain it, even as power threatens to, seep away from them.
238	Mass production came of age during the fight against Fascism in the Second World War.-We-Think might come of age in the fight against global warming, because finding alternative ways to generate energy, use resources and cope with rising sea-levels will require collective innovation on an immense scale
239	We-Think offers a different possible story, one of trust and collaboration built on liberal and enlightenment traditions of peer collaboration in pursuit of better ideas, arbitrated on the basis of evidence rather than ideology.