This is an incredible opportunity but one that certainly carries some risk as well. Let’s see if we can leverage the tidal wave of data coming while protecting our personal privacy as well!

In case you’re not familiar with this concept, here’s a great primer video from IBM, one of the primary vendors in the Internet of Things market. Following that, you’ll find a podcast I recorded a few minutes ago while waiting for a bus home. Below that you’ll see the beginnings of a mind map on the topic. I’m doing some interviews and thinking this through for what I hope will be an important post on ReadWriteWeb soon. Your thoughts are more than welcome – they are humbly requested.

Intro to Internet of Things

My Thoughts So Far

Direct download
Randy Robertson left me a Cinch comment (on Cinch) suggesting that the medical industry could be a good model to learn from regarding patient data privacy. Sounds good.

In Mindmap Form

If I wanted to be a pro tech blogger, here’s what I’d do. Heck, here’s what I did.

The short version of this story is: blog awesomely like a pro news blogger would, and the opportunities are out there for you to become a pro news blogger.

Not so long ago, I was working at a convenience store, selling candy, soda, beer and lottery tickets. I had just graduated with an undergrad degree in political science and I discovered the world of blogging, RSS, etc. in the last few months I was in school. My plan was to do consulting for nonprofit organizations about how to use these new tools for research and promotion, but I had to pay the bills – thus the convenience store gig. Maybe you have a better job than that now – but I still think this is good advice.

I started a blog and wrote about the things I was learning. Here’s the first post I ever wrote. I broke the post-page template one day and decided to move off Blogger, but here’s my first month’s archives if you’re curious.

I read other tech blogs, posted the smartest comments I could and linked to their posts in my posts. Then I went to an industry event and met some people. Barb Dybwad and Marnie Webb, now at Mashable and Netsquared, were the two people I connected with best at that very first event. We all knew each other from blogs and comments already. (Remind me to tell you the story sometime about that trip to SF. It involves an alarm clock, hitchhiking several rides through a rainstorm, a missed flight and a race to see danah boyd for the first time.)

In blogging I tried to add unique value to conversations and I tried to do a good job at important little projects I started. Both Barb and Marnie ended up hiring me to write for them at Netsquared and at AOL’s Social Software Weblog, within just a few months of our having met face to face. Once I had both those gigs, I quit the day job at the convenience store.

The months between were filled with early morning and late night learning, hard work and hustle. My mother-in-law now says she thought I was crazy, waking up so early in the morning to blog, but she agrees that it worked out pretty well.

Once I got those two jobs, the Social Software Weblog one was where I had the best opportunity for visibility in the larger tech blogging world. The pay there was miserable, it was something like $4 or $5 per post, I don’t remember. I worked that job as hard as I could, though, writing 3 to 5 posts a day. I also had another job writing as a subcontractor for an international currency speculation blog, writing 6 posts about currency speculation every weekday before 9am PST. That was nuts. So I was writing about 10 posts a day, of various lengths and about different topics, at three different places.

I tried to always improve my work while I was doing that. One of the things I learned would give me an important advantage was subscribing to the RSS feeds of key company blogs (Google, YouTube, Technorati back then) by instant messaging and SMS. I used a service called Zaptxt. That way whenever a big company blog would update, I’d get a link sent to me within about 15 minutes. That meant I could write it up before anyone else, as I don’t think many if any competitors were using such a system. (Most everyone among top tech news bloggers does today, I think.)

One day Michael Arrington from TechCrunch called me up and said “you keep beating me to news stories – I want you to come write for me.” It was a very, very small operation at that time. I think I was the first paid writer there. It was awesome and I learned a whole lot. It was a very competitive place.

Now I’m co-editor of the smaller but more tech/less business focused, more thoughtful, sweeter-smelling and more modest blog ReadWriteWeb and I’m looking to hire a killer evening news writer.

Figure out some tricks. Write some blog posts that get attention (in a good way). Leave comments on ReadWriteWeb that make us say “wow, that’s one smart cookie right there.” @ me on Twitter. Be a part of our community.

Break some news. Do some great writing. Show us what you’ve got and make sure we see it out there on the web.

Some people are doing that, to some degree. But the web is making publishing easier by far than it’s ever been in history. Trackbacks, replies and other social media mechanisms make developing connections with people easier than ever.

Tech news blogging is one of the most awesome jobs in the world. It doesn’t pay fabulously when you first start, but seize opportunity by the horns on a very regular basis and there’s plenty of opportunity for advancement. I bought a beautiful house in Portland, Oregon last year. I know that I have been able to do this in large part because I was raised white, male, middle class and heterosexual – I was raised to believe I could make something of myself, that I am at core (original sin notwithstanding, thanks) good and right. Not every one has that privilege.

If you are fortunate enough to be a fast thinker, a good writer, have low cost of living expenses and some free hours each day to strike out into a new adventure – then opportunity is right there waiting for you. Just reach out and grab it. I know you’re out there – lots of you.

Other places I’ve been active lately include Cinch mobile podcasting and on Formspring, where you can ask me any question you like!

And finally of course I am co-editor of ReadWriteWeb.com, in case you didn’t know that!

I have been trying to wrap my head around it so I can write about what it means for developers and non-developing end users. This deserves the blogging equivalent of a song, belted out with clear notes and a catchy melody. I’ve got librarians asking me to write about this, on Twitter, and when librarians call – a writer must answer.

I’m reaching out to some of the smartest people I know to get their thoughts about this, and consider yourselves among that group. I would love for you to share any quotable thoughts you have about Annotations in comments here. I will fold your best thoughts into the song I sing while I travel from village to outpost, singing to tell the tale about the epic development Twitter is about to attempt.

OK so really I’ll just blog about it from my bedroom office, but hopefully a lot of people will read it, so please share your thoughts below and make ‘em good! Thanks!

What got me excited is just that this is a topic I think is fascinating. I’ll tell you frankly: I think in big data there lies a lot of hidden patterns that represent both opportunities for action and for reflection. At RWW we’re working on trying to find ways to mine data to find news first (we’ve got some interesting methods employed already) and personally, I think the world is an awfully unfair mess and I’m hoping that data analysis will help illuminate some of the hows and the whys. Like the way that real estate redlining was exposed back in the day by cross referencing census data around racial demographics and housing loan data. That illuminated systematic discrimination against black families in applying for home loans in certain parts of town. So too I think we’ll find a lot of undeniable proof of injustices and clues for how we might deal with them in big data today.

How about you? Are you interested in Big Data? Where does your interest come from?

Related: Check out Ta-Nehisi Coate’s critical analysis of one of the most prominent recent examples of social media data analyzed. I’m still reading it, myself.

Marshall Kirkpatrick is the lead writer at ReadWriteWeb, one of the top technology news blogs on the internet and syndicated daily online by the New York Times. Marshall has established himself as one of the web’s leading voices on bleeding edge technology thanks to his ability to find signal buried in real-time noise – primarily through the use of innovative research systems built for crowdsourced data mining and first mover’s advantage. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife, two dogs, two cats and three chickens.

This is from Urtak and looks a lot like Hunch. I think it’s a pretty compelling user experience. Poll creation is pretty weak, but easy. Let me know what you think and I’ll tell you what I think of it once we’re on the other side.

Checking in at the admin side, I now see that I can’t even find my poll to check results. Oh well, I sure like the idea anyway.

It’s messy, I can’t figure out why it’s cutting off the first few words of my first sentence above.

Just kidding, no song. I totally should write a song about it, though. If this system works well over time maybe I will do a little warbling about it after all. Thoughts?

• Locationmeme is some good writing about the hot trend of social software based on location. See also Checkin Blog.
• The Next Web is an up-and-coming tech news blog, a competitor to ReadWriteWeb. These guys are really, really fast on a story. Hopefully once they’ve made all the more of a name for themselves for speed, they’ll settle into writing more about what they think about the web. They’re certainly right in the thick of things online.
• Mixergry is an awesome series of video interviews with entrepreneurs who have interesting stories.
• Augmented Planet is all about Augmented Reality. I’m a big Games Alfresco reader, but Augmented Planet is looking like a regular must-read as well. See also Tish Shute’s Ugotrade.
• Finally, these might not be blogs but they are some of my favorite news sources of daily information. Two iPhone apps that I’m just in love with. The app for Newser offers a great summary of top news stories. It makes really efficient reading. And my absolute #1 top new favorite? Etsy Addict!

Yup, those are my (roughly) 5 favorite new blogs. How about you? Anything you’ve discovered lately that is becoming a must-read?

So just for the record, here’s the rough transcript I posted last month of Zuckerberg’s literal comments, followed by my justification for why I’ve summarized them as I have.

“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’
“And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

“We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

Here’s why I believe he was saying, in those vague but important words, that the age of privacy is over.

Zuckerberg did say that the era of privacy is over, he just said it one step away from literally and directly. He said this: our new privacy stance (X) is based on where we think the world is today and if we were to launch the site anew today, then that policy (X) is how we would have launched it.

What is X? It is a policy wherein your profile photo, friends list and most importantly fan page subscriptions are irrevocably public and a variety of other types of user data are now by default public. He doesn’t say “the era of privacy is over” directly, he says “our new privacy policies reflect the way the world is today” – but the phrase “our new privacy policy” equals: no more privacy about some things and public by default on others.

It is a fundamentally more public position on privacy and one that Facebook team members have told me point-blank on a press phone call – yes, they are hoping to move people towards being more public and less private.

So let me know, am I mischaracterizing things? I don’t think I am. I don’t think I’m putting words into anyone’s mouth, I think I’m doing journalistic work interpreting the meaning behind public utterances regarding a topic I’ve been paying close attention to for a good while.

I wrote 40 articles last month on ReadWriteWeb and these are the ten that I’d be most disappointed about seeing just roll down the stream to be forgotten about. I hope you find a few you missed but enjoy a second chance to check out.

Yeah, a bunch of them are about privacy on Facebook. But there are a number that aren’t about that at all!

Welcome to the Age of Robot Reporters

One hour ago, three emergency vehicles responded to a report of an unconscious person at the world headquarters of Nike Inc. in Portland, Oregon. How do I know? An automated form-pumping robot from startup company Nozzl Media told me.

Facebook’s 1st CTO Launches His Next Company (Screen Shots)

Adam D’Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company’s first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora. Built by D’Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself “A continually improving collection of questions and answers.”

How Chris Messina Got a Job at Google

Chris Messina grew up in New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state. As a high-schooler in the early 90′s he held his school’s website hostage after being suspended for running an ad on it for a controversial gay rights group. Now Chris is nearing 30, today was his 29th birthday, and he just announced that he’s taken a job at one of the biggest, most powerful corporations in the world.

Why Facebook is Wrong: Privacy is Still Important

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience this weekend that the world has changed, that it’s become more public and less private, and that the controversial new default and permanent settings reflect how the site would work if he were to create it today. Not everyone agrees with his move and its justification.

PowerOne: This iPhone App Builds iPhone Apps

Elia Freedman used to have it made. He was a mobile app developer in the days of the Palm Pilot and he scored bundling deals that got his sophisticated calculator software into the hands of more than 15 million people. Differentiating his product from competitors “wasn’t something we had to deal with for years,” he says, because of the favored position his app got in pre-loaded bundles.

Now those days are gone.

The Facebook Privacy Debate: What You Need to Know

Facebook changed the world by helping 350 million people publish their thoughts, feelings, comments, photos, videos and shared links much more easily than ever before. It’s the King of social networking.

The network grew with a big promise of privacy at the center of what it offered: your information was by default visible only to people you approved as friends. In December that changed, in a fundamental way. We offer below a summary of the changes that were made and key highlights from the debate that’s raging around the world about privacy, public information and Facebook. Given the role that Facebook plays in so many of our lives, this is high-stakes stuff.

Why is Google Afraid of Facebook? Because Social Networking Could Soon Pass Search

It’s often said these days that Google and Facebook are major rivals, but how could that be if one is in search and the other, social networking? Traffic analyst firm Hitwise provided one very clear clue tonight when it published new numbers for web user activity in Australia. For perhaps the first time ever, social networking sites have surpassed the traffic search engines receive, Hitwise says. There is reason to question the company’s categorization of web traffic, but the trend is worth examining none the less.

The Era of Location-as-Platform Has Arrived

The mobile location “check-in” is fast becoming the hot new status message type online. It was only a matter of time until “where you are” became a platform to build added value on top of just like “who you know” has on social networking sites like Facebook.

Canadian newspaper chain Metro announced today that it has launched a deal with location-based social network Foursquare that will deliver location-specific editorial content from the paper’s website to users’ phones when they check-in near a spot Metro has written about before. The potential for services like this is huge.

Westboro Baptist Church to Picket Twitter Headquarters

The Westboro Baptist Church, home of the best known anti-gay protest organization in the US, led by Pastor Fred Phelps, has a new target for its public outcry. This Thursday afternoon the organization will be picketing outside the San Francisco headquarters of Twitter.

Privacy, Facebook and the Future of the Internet

Today is the 3rd annual international Data Privacy Day and a whole bunch of companies are listed on the organization’s website as participants. Google, Microsoft, even Walmart. Facebook is not listed as a participant and has stirred up a lot of controversy with changes to its privacy policy lately.

Thanks for checking those out. I hope you’ll come join me over on ReadWriteWeb where I write every day and every day try to write something I can be proud of.

Note that I’ve reproduced an email below and at least one commenter has told me I was out of line to do so. I disagree. I think the email is very straight-forward, from a public official and ok to run with a question about whether the assessment of mine it is challenging is correct or not. No big deal, I think. I’m going to think about it some more, though.

Hi Marshall,

I wanted to reach out to you regarding your piece on Data.gov.

Below is a blog post from WH.gov from Vivek Kundra that includes the latest information about the number of data sets available on Data.gov – 168,000.

Your piece incorrectly states that Data.gov has less than 1,000 data sets.

Your story also mentions “critics” of Data.gov who pointed that “it was filled with relatively non-controversial data sets”—if you are interested in representing both sides of the story I’d be happy to put you in touch with some folks.

Below is the link to Vivek’s blog post:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/01/21/they-gave-us-beatles-we-gave-then-datagov

Please let me know if you have any additional questions.

Jean B. Weinberg
Deputy Press Secretary
White House Office of Management and Budget

Here’s my response. It’s not buttoned-up and respectful, I suppose – but we’re all bloggers now, right?

Hi Jean, thanks for the email. Here’s my take on it: data.gov has 969
records of “machine readable, platform-independent datasets.” It also
has aprox 167k geodata records, almost all maps. That’s a convenient
way to say there are 168k datasets, but a big map dump doesn’t seem
that compelling to me. Maybe I’m wrong – but when I see the UK site
sharing data sets like soldier suicides and number of abortions, that
makes a big dump of geological maps on the US site seem anemic. I’d
be happy to talk to someone who feels otherwise, though. Please do
connect me with someone I can speak to about this. I’ve been very
critical of data.gov since it launched and would be happy to be
persuaded to feel otherwise.

Thanks for sending me that link to Mr. Kundra’s blog post by the way.
I think I’ll write a post in response and see if my readers see it the
way I do. I must say, I found his post rather shocking in tone.
Claiming that the UK is following the US’s lead when the UK is working
with Tim Berners-Lee who brought us the World Wide Web and has the
very forward-looking semantic web paradigm in its sights – that
doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

best,

Marshall Kirkpatrick
VP of Content Development and Lead Blogger
ReadWriteWeb

In reality, I imagine that the truth is somewhere in the middle. Maps are hardly worthless and the US Geological Survey data that dominates data.gov isn’t just maps. It mostly is, though, and my point is that data.gov is disappointing so far. What do you think? Am I being unfair? Should I change my perception and coverage of data.gov? I know I’m not the only person who feels critical, but I thought I’d run this numbers discussion past some more people to get some more perspective.

Click and drag this little puppy right here —> Real-time search

Highlight a word or phrase on any page and then click that button, or just click it freestyle and enter a query. Then you’ll see the freshest search results on the internet, per Google, including new web pages, Twitter messages and sometime soon posts from Identica, Facebook and more.

You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to delete all my bookmarks from Chrome, go set them up in the order I want them in Firefox and re-import them. How silly.

Interested in leveraging the real-time web for your business? Check out the research report I just spent the last 3 months writing on the topic.

Yelp’s argument is that advertisers get to put an ad, a positive review of their choice, on the top of their pages – and that confuses people. They are also very pro-active about deleting reviews they suspect may be fake.

I know people get confused about online advertising. How else would Google be making so many billions of dollars? In clinical tests people are unable to identify paid vs. natural search results. When asked “how could it be made clearer?” they say things like “put them on the side of the page, put the word ‘sponsored’ near them or put them in a colored box.” All things that Google does in fact do. People just don’t notice.

It’s an unprovable, un-disproval allegation ultimately. Would it be crazy for Yelp to do something that would so damage their credibility? It would if it could be proven. It might not if it couldn’t be proven.

For now I’ll just appreciate the positive and negative reviews I see on Yelp and I’ll check the review history of people I see posting there. And sometimes I’ll just make up my own mind after patronizing businesses.

I’d love to see Consumer Reports do a comparative review of Yelp, CitySearch and others. I told Yelp that, too.

So far the only thing I’ve put into the reader is the OPML file of hundreds of women tech bloggers put together by Anne Zelenka almost three years ago! (Check out that post if you want to see how cutely naive my writing about OPML was just 3 years ago!) That’s my wife with me on the right, not Anne Zelenka.

That’s cool, but I’d love it if for my birthday you, my friends, would send me OPML files of blogs on certain topics. Something cool. I don’t need a file of the top blogs writing about the Semantic Web, I already have that. I don’t need a file of the best blogs on youth marketing, I already have that and am not sure how I feel about it.

This shouldn’t be too hard to do, if you’re unfamiliar. Just put a collection of feeds into a folder in any RSS reader and then export. Open it up in a text editor and cut out all the parts outside of that folder. Then send it to me! Or you could drop RSS feeds in this tool, publish, copy and paste into a text editor and send it to me via marshall@marshallk.com

It would be so awesome if, for my birthday, a few people sent me really awesome OPML files. It’s a curated collection of dynamic sources – a gift that really keeps on giving!

Update: It’s working! People are sending me awesome collections of blogs on things like Activity Streams data standards, web design, crafts and more. Thank you so much!!

Do this for me and I’ll build you a really awesome TweepML group for your birthday when the time comes.

What do you think? Think anyone will actually do it and send me one?? We’ll see! Even if no one does, I still got married and bought a house this year – so no big deal!

• Real-time data collection is letting scientists find colleagues, related and recommended research in a matter of hours, instead of months or years, using software from a UK company called Mendeley. Mendeley is like iTunes or Last.fm for scientific research, the company even has the founder of Last.fm on its team. There will be someone from Mendeley at the Summit, too.
• Warner Brothers uses an Adobe AIR app they built to track traffic on artists’ websites, media mentions and more, in real time. Catching data spikes in real time allows them to turn on a dime with marketing and product strategies.
• The RedCross national headquarters (and I’m sure a lot of local offices) use real-time systems to monitor breaking news about disasters around the world and co-ordinate volunteers. Work that used to take weeks is now done in minutes or hours – that means saved lives. Many people at RedCross HQ are subscribers to Breaking News Online, a fascinating service founded by a teenager in the Netherlands and now run by a small, distributed team of scrappy reporters around the world.

All of those organizations are working hard at building even faster systems. Real time doesn’t just let them do things they were already doing faster – it makes entirely new kinds of work possible. That’s what Bret Slatkin, co-creator of real-time protocoal PubSubHubbub says: engineers should build their real-time systems to scale into entirely new use-cases that can’t even be foreseen yet.

This is really exciting, important stuff. I hope you’ll join us at the Real-Time Web Summit to discuss it. If you can’t make it, selected sessions will be live-streamed as well.

OPML was originally developed by Dave Winer. As was the OPML Editor I’m using on my desktop to do my work. OPML is most commonly used to export bundles of RSS feeds, blogs or podcasts but it doesn’t have to be limited to “just” those kinds of information. RSS is of course something that Winer was also key in the creation of, as was podcasting (he created the enclosure tag that carries MP3 or other files in feeds) and RSS Aggregators (he wrote one ten years ago). Blogging too. That’s all pretty damn incredible. Now Dave’s working on real-time, microblogging and a new RSS reader called River2.

Why am I writing a blog post about Dave Winer’s work over the years? Just because I was appreciating it again when it was so easy for me to buy that iPhone app for outlining and work with it on my desktop as well. Dave’s a controversial guy, and that’s probably an understatement, but he’s my friend. When I realized that, once again, it was in large part the fruit of his work that I was benefiting from when exporting those outlines – it made me want to make a blog post about it. Thanks for all the work you’ve done over the years, Dave. It’s really made a big difference in my life and work.

There is no question in my mind that my consulting, at least, is extremely valuable and non-obvious. Check out the page of feedback I’ve received. Below is one example of a valuable project I’ve done for a client.

I worked with Sun Microsystems last year to build a blog search dashboard tracking the most recent and most-discussed blog posts concerning a list of their products, during the Java One conference. People loved it and only an outside person with my experience and skills would have built it. It was social media consulting that wasn’t obvious or just about “join the conversation.” Here’s an in-depth explanation of exactly how I did it.

Then I did an audit of the company’s huge network of blogs, their wikis, their podcast portal and developer forums. I researched their competitors’ work in those areas and interviewed specialists in each of those fields who looked through the Sun sites with me. I gave a rapid-fire presentation to an executive team that blew the minds of some very serious and capable people.

They brought me back five times to work on different projects there, sent me 20% of my income for last year and invited me to meet and interview my childhood hero Neil Young when he spoke at an event.

So is social media consulting just a joke? Not in my world, it’s not. My contact info is in the right-hand sidebar, if you’re interested in getting in touch.