In @AshleighGardner’s session about reading/social media/location I proposed that Foursquare comes up just short of perfect by not letting me check into content in a meaningful way. I can say I’m at Jimmie Simpson Park but how do I tell you I’m there on a bench reading the latest issue of The Believer? And how do I find where other readers of the same magazine, or even the same issue, settled down to read? Conversely, how do I know what’s being read in my vicinity? In the age of the ebook, how will anyone know that I’m reading frickin’ Pynchon?
When will the crowdsourced catalogue of LibraryThing be overlaid on the crowdsourced map of Foursquare?
@NicholeMcgill asked why anyone would do this. Took me a couple days to formulate an answer. It’s the same one I give to doubters of Foursquare and Twitter: wait until 3 of your friends are doing it then see how you feel.
Further thoughts from @RJWheaton in an old (*sigh*: they’re all old, these days) post from Datachondria.
Your browsing history can be used to tell a lot of things about you. We are just beginning to see a raft of applications that leverage your history to provide a better web experience. One firefox add-on that I have just stumbled across is Wikipedia Diver 4.o. It tracks the research you have been doing on Wikipedia and gives you a granular info viz of your history. (http://thejit.org/)
Do you know what a MAC address is? Me neither. But until today my home wifi network was configured to filter for it. Basically, this meant that a mere password wouldn’t grant you access to the network. A password was required, yes, but that alone was not sufficient.
Laptop, desktop, Blackberry, visiting iPhone — without providing your MAC address you weren’t getting onto our network. And if you did cough up the digits we had to take the time to add it to the list of allowed addresses on our router.
Yesterday we bought an Airport Express and when setup proved to be more smug than plug-and-play we ditched MAC filtering, just to see. That did it. Music started flowing and we haven’t turned MAC filtering back on, leaving our network open to anyone who can input the password. And I’m so glad.
When I bought the Airport I wasn’t just buying a wireless access point. I was buying a party where the music sounds evenly awesome throughout the house. That was the image I had in mind: it was our housewarming from January, except instead of me struggling to patch my PC into the stereo I had music running throughout the house and it was easy I was happy.
When we have people over we want them to be happy, and as good hosts we want to offer them all that they’re comfortable accepting. What kind of a host would I be if, when they picked up their wireless device to show me the latest app I’ve asked them about or to google a point of trivia under debate, I required them to use precious megabytes from their 3G data plan when I’ve got a perfectly good wifi network that’s always on? Naturally, the thing to do would be to offer the network password alongside hors d’oeuvres and a glass of wine.
But with MAC filtering engaged it was like we were ready to accommodate any request as long as it was accompanied by a detailed recipe and permitted time for procurement and preparation.
Choices about devices and how you configure them aren’t just about personal use anymore. As our devices travel longer distances with us in our pockets, representing increasing value as software upgrades keep their functionality growing, we’re going to need to think about how to make them play nice when they meet other devices in other pockets. Which means first establishing a baseline for “nice”.
Is it possible that if we had guests over tomorrow and didn’t offer them free wifi we’d be regarded as stand-offish people? Probably not, but that’s how I’d feel looking across the dining room table at a person I’ve defined in practical terms as both friend and threat to network security. And maybe that would translate into some gesture or remark my wife or I would make (probably me), and maybe in the end I would come off as aloof.
So we’re open. Irreversibly. Which is how these things go, isn’t it?
For you non-hosers, that’s probably a bit hard to take in. Piracy? Canada? We’re supposed to be the nice upstairs neighbours who take in your mail when you’re away. The boring friend that you bring along on pub night so you look more attractive by comparison. We have a nice personality! But you should know that despite all outward appearances, lurking beneath every sensible Hudson’s Bay cardigan and reindeer sweater beats the rapacious heart of a pirate!
So you’ve got to take what we say with a grain of sea-splashed salt, especially when we’re talking about ourselves.
For example, when the Conference Board of Canada (aka. Pirates R Us) released a report damning us all as pirates and offering suggestions on how we might reform our rapscallion ways that something had to be amiss. A pirate, after all, doesn’t just come clean. As it turns out, much to the relief of every DRM-picking Canuck worth his white earbuds, the report was itself was plagiarized from a prior report released by an American lobby group representing copyright holders.
When tech companies handed their keys to their creditors at the end of the boom in 2000, some left behind heaps of customer records in filing cabinets and on harddrives . The accountants turned out the lights. The keepers of those files, network and account managers, had long been fired. That data went to the dumpsters or was scavenged by furniture trolls.
Fast forward to the current recession. Sure companies will go bankrupt. Some may be equally negligent guarding your personal information, but more likely your credit card number, address, and content will be hoovered-up by some larger acquiring company. The content created at Pownce is now Six Apart’s responsibility. The info at Napster is being sucked into the databases of Best Buy — yes the Napster! Elsewhere, Google Notebooks are going dark.
The powerless, to compensate for their condition, often feel the need to strike out. That is not what this is. It’s not alarmist. It’s not a call for an internet user’s bill-of-rights. It is just an observation that on the second go-around with web-company closures, the implied social contract that exists in cities — where it is OK to have cars drive by you at highspeed and have you not fear for your life — is now in effect with data and personal information on the net.
Here you’ll find a diverse crowd holding an open conversation — with each other and with the void — about data, technology, information, and the way we live now.
You’ll find us writing as users, consumers, participants, citizens, parents — not as industry insiders or high-window theorists. Although from time to time we’ll probably do that too.
We’ll talk about the exciting implications of a new technology for day-to-day living — and the frustrating holes in the user experience. We’ll write about things that individuals, businesses, governments, and organizations do with data: the things they do well, the things they could do better, and the things they fail to do at all. About the things that could improve our lives in ways trivial and superficial or ways vast and life-changing.
We’ll be asking questions about the implications and complications of technology for personal living, social conduct, and public society. The fears and anxieties that new technologies provoke. The implications for our physical day-to-day lives and for the digital manifestations of self that we use to represent ourselves. How will this help me find my keys? How will this help me structure my personal finances, stay in touch with my friends, discover new music, and avoid the kid who stalked me in high school? What does this mean for how I communicate, or how I make decisions about my work? Does this change the way I think about etiquette, public policy, and whether Nirvana really were a good band? (They were not.) [Yes they were. - ed.]
The relationship between our lives — personal and communal — and the technologies we use is a two-way process, a constant conversation. We’ll be recording some of the dialogue and choosing the soundtrack. Datachondria. Better living through data. Better data through living.
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